A week ago, the wood and stone house in the wheat field was occupied by a young man named Enoch King. Just like everyone else in the Yellow Plains, he was Gifted. Specifically, he had the ability to trap people in paper. They would take on the appearance of a rough sketch of themselves, and while they couldn't see, hear, move, feel, smell, taste, or speak, they were still conscious. No one in the Plains dared to ask Enoch if he still had anyone trapped with his Gift out of fear of it being used on them.
Fortunately, no one was subjected to that terrible fate. While he was very blunt and disliked speaking, Enoch got along fairly with everyone on the farmland. He would join them for meals, help out with work in the Plains, and it was his job to hunt and gather food in the woods surrounding the Yellow Plains.
But one day, something happened.
While Enoch was known to mostly keep to himself, it wasn't like him to be unseen for an entire day. When Claire went to his house to check on him, he was gone.
"Now, you'd think that we wouldn't rest until we found a clue of where he'd run off to, but that wasn't the case," James said. "The next day, it was as if everyone has completely forgotten Enoch even existed."
"Suspicious," Sophia noted after sipping some tea James made.
"Exactly," James said. "But that didn't apply to me. Enoch's sudden disappearance irked me out enough to take on the case myself. Guess everyone else didn't like that, though, 'cause they ended up shutting me out from their fun 'lil micro-society."
"So that's why we didn't see you at the dinner last night!" Lucas exclaimed.
"Yup. That's also why I didn't know that you guys moved in here."
"So you just didn't question the person sleeping on the couch when you came in here?" Sophia asked.
"To be honest, you were just so small, I didn't see you."
Sophia pouted and sat back in her chair beside Lucas. On Lucas' other side, Jalen was jotting down notes using a black piece of paper James pulled out of the floorboards. "Small culprit?" was the latest thing written.
"We don't know that for sure," Lucas told him.
"At this point of the investigation, we need to consider every possibility."
Lucas shrugged and turned his attention back to the papers strewn across the table in front of them. "So these are all random notes written by Enoch before he disappeared?"
"Some of them. I took other papers back with me already, but I think someone destroyed a handful of his notes," James explained.
"Some evidence possibly destroyed," Jalen wrote. Then, out loud, he asked, "Was there anything of interest in what he wrote? Or said?"
"Yes, actually," James replied. "Early on during the week he disappeared, Enoch spoke to me, claiming that he spotted a golden wolf at the edge of the forest. He said that he saw it from the window over there the night before."
James pointed towards the only window in the room. Sophia, being the closest to it, looked out at the crater-like holes dotting the perfect field of wheat. At the edge of the field and surrounding the entirety of the Yellow Plains was the same forest Sophia, Lucas, and Jalen spent a night in.
"Do you think he went missing because he went into the woods to find the wolf?" Sophia asked.
"Maybe, but he never brought up the wolf again in his journal entries after he told me about it."
Lucas stood up. "He must have found something more interesting than a golden wolf in those woods! Let's go check it out."
✦✧✧✧✧✦
"Sunday
"I saw a golden wolf at the edge of the forest last night. Or this morning. We don't have clocks here. It was weird, though.
"Even though James lives next door, he didn't see it. Maybe I was just imagining things. Either way, it was interesting enough to write about. I might try to find it in the forest tomorrow while gathering food."
Jalen tugged on Lucas' sleeve to maneuver him away from a tree as he moved onto the next entry.
"Monday
"���������died? ����������������������spawn�����������?������wolf killed����������. Weird."
Weirdly enough, the next entry had most of what was written crossed out to the point you couldn't understand anything. Lucas looked over at James, hoping he would notice his confused expression.
"I don't know either," James said while pushing away a tree branch.
"Tuesday
"Started digging holes
to see if
not much "
Thus time, half of the page was ripped off diagonally.
"Oh, so that was him," Lucas murmured to himself.
The next page looked like it had been completely drenched in water at some point, and now that it was dry, it was folded and crinkled up strangely. The wager caused the ink to bleed out into an assortment of fun figures and shapes. There was something that looked like a balloon. At the top left, Lucas saw a cute bear. There was even something that looked like a rabies-infected rat gnawing away at a human heart.
But when it came to deciphering Enoch's words? Lucas could only read "Gift", "A���e", and "Cbare". Or, maybe that said "Claire". Wednesday must have been an interesting day since it seemed like he wrote the most that day.
Lucas turned to the next entry only to find that he found himself back at Sunday. "James, what happened to all the other pages?"
"That is what I tried searching for last night," he responded. The glasses-clad rookie detective in a brown Inverness cape shook around a thick stack of papers in his hand. "Unfortunately, everything has been crossed out like Monday's entry. It's quite unfortunate when you consider the fact that he wrote all this in a span of three days. He went missing that Sunday."
Sophia snatched the papers from James' hands and started flipping through them. "Looks like Mr. Enoch King had a dirty little secret he didn't want anyone to know~"
"Not necessarily," Jalen said. "Maybe someone else didn't want Enoch to share their secret."
The group went silent. So far, there wasn't much that could make out Jalen's intuition to be untrustworthy.
"Hey, James. Still no luck on finding Enoch-?"
"WAGHH-!", "What the heck?", "WHO ARE YOU?!" Sophia, Jalen, and Lucas all cried out in unison, for a fifth member just joined their merry band out of nowhere.
"Oh, yeah. Guys, meet my assistant Aidan Schachfigur."
"Yo."
"He can make himself invisible."
"Yup." In an instant, the tall going man with unkept brown hair covering his eyes blinked out of sight. "Whoo. Invisible."
"We can see that."
"No, you can't."
"Oh."
"Wait, how come we didn't see you at the dinner last night?"
"It's because he came make himself invisible, Sophia. Honestly! Were you even paying attention?"
"Jalen, no."
"Oh, that's 'cuz I'm missing, too," Aidan answered.
"Huh?"
"At least, that's what we're pretending."
"Basically, we thought it was weird when no one batted an eye towards Enoch's disappearance, so the two of us decided to stage another one. Once again, no one cared."
"I've just been living here in the forest, surviving off of what Enoch wrote." Aidan pulled out a slip of paper from his pocket. "I'm gonna have to disagree with him on the small red berries, though. They taste awesome."
Aidan removed a berry from a bush right beside him and popped it into his mouth. Then he spat it out immediately afterwards. "That's not it."
Jalen spoke up. "Did you happen to come across a golden wolf while hiding out here?"
Aidan opened his mouth to respond but was cut off by the sound of rustling in the treetops.
"JORVIK!" Sophia screamed.
Lucas' eyes darted upwards. Up in the branches above them was a creature black as night and as solid as a cloud. It peered back at Lucas through two empty spaces in its structure. A third hole opened up and let out a strangled, breathy noise. The sound didn't carry far, but it's silent scream could be felt grating against Lucas' bones. The shadowy beast descended through the air and reached out its limb-like whips toward the group.
"Don't just stand there! RUN!" Aidan barked.
Lucas didn't have to be told twice.
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A/N
Yes, this is short. Yes, it took forever. Blame volleyball and math. This chapter is named after a song from the Death Note musical for some reason. Anyways, I'm bad at outros...
Bye.