The image of Kai, Tulip and Mira suddenly flickered, and after a minute, completely flickered off to static. Kipo and Gale leaned forward in confusion, and though Gale banged on the screen (it sounded like he did, at least, Kipo didn't see anything), the screen wasn't fixed.

"A-Again?" Kipo asked. She could feel the annoyance radiating off of Gale as he peered at the thing. Sometimes the static jumped, but the picture was never fixed, so whatever he was doing was clearly ineffective. "What is it this time?"

"I don't know..." Gale growled. "Somethings blocking me. What is it?"

Kipo glanced up at him, surprised. "You don't know?"

Gale's eyes narrowed. "What, do you?"

Kipo shrugged. She'd have thought he'd have some idea... "Is it that God that hates us?"

"Of course not," Gale scoffed. "Why would he stop something that's in his favour?"

"He tried to kill us!" Kipo pointed out. Gale rolled his eyes.

"We were taking too long," Gale huffed. Kipo sighed. For a God that allegedly lived for hundreds and thousands of years, it seemed a little impatient.

"So it's another thing that can block your camera thing," Kipo said. She wasn't sure how powerful that thing really was, so she shot her shot anyway. "Something as powerful as a God? Or another God?"

Gale noticeably perked up, and Kio straitened. But to her surprise, Gale shook his head.

"No, there's only one God," Gale told her, and Kipo frowned. Then what was with that reaction, then...? "Well, whatever it is, I can't get around it. We've lost them."

"What?" Kipo asked. "Then what do we do? We wait?"

"No, we control time," Gale explained condescendingly. "We skip forward to where we CAN help."

"But we can't leave them alone," Kipo argued. "What if they need help?"

Gale stared at her for a couple seconds, as if they were so stupid, he had to take a minute to comprehend it. "How on earth are we supposed to help them?"

"I..." Kipo trailed off, trying to think. She stared at the flickering screen, and then, to Gale's surprise, turned around and grabbed the last piece of paper.

"What are you doing," Gale asked her as she started tearing the paper up. "What-?"

"I have to ask the rest of them to help," Kipo muttered, and on each piece of paper, writing down the same message on each piece:

'M, K and T in danger. GO SOUTH.'

Gale narrowed his eyes. "I-."

Kipo didn't look up at him at all. "It'll work, right?"

"...You don't have enough envelopes," Gale pointed out. He didn't sound happy, but Kipo ignored that. She was doing the right thing, she knew it.

"I didn't have enough paper, too," Kipo said, but in the back of her mind, something was poking at her brain. It'd been a long time since she'd taken the paper and envelopes out originally, but wasn't there... more of those? Or less?

Kipo wasn't sure why she was thinking about this, and she decided to ignore it, for now.

Just like the paper, she tore up the envelopes. Folding up each piece of paper in tiny pieces and putting them in the envelopes, tucking them in so they wouldn't get lost. But on second thought, she also wrote the message on the envelope pieces, just in case.

Gale watched her closely, Kipo could feel his eyes on her as she worked. Before she could lose her nerve, she spoke up.

"Before we... 'skip time'... I think we should talk," she told him.

"What?"

"I have some questions to ask you," Kipo explained, keeping her head down.

"We don't have enough time."

"It'll be quick," she promised. It took a second for Gale to answer, and Kipo froze, her pencil on still on the paper as she waited with baited breath.

"...It better be," Gale finally muttered, and Kipo breath a sigh of relief.

Tulip felt a warm glow on her face, rousing her from sleep, but only barely. Her eyelids flickered open to a soft glow on her cheek and a faint like in the corner of her eye, blurry, but whether that was from weariness or from her own bad vision, Tulip wasn't sure. She was too tired to find out anyway. Only a couple seconds after she woke, Tulip was closing her eyes once again, lulled into sleep again.

-

However, a searing pain stabbed into her leg, and Tulip's eyes snapped open as she doubled over, howling in pain.

"Hah... hah..." Tulip grit her teeth, clutching her leg like a lifeline. Sweat was beading down her face, and her breathing was laboured. Tulip could feel tears on her face and falling her cheeks. The pain... the pain... it was like nothing she'd ever experienced before. "Gaaaah..."

"Tulip? Tulip?"

It took a couple seconds for Tulip to realize someone was calling out to her. Her mind tried to fit the sound to someone she knew but every bit of information kept slipping through her mind. Tulip tried to open her eyes to see who it was, but to her horror, her eyes were ALREADY open, and the darkness around her... that was real. Tulip felt her panic grow as she looked around, trying to find literally anything, but there was nothing. Nothing around her forever, and not even herself. When Tulip raised a hand in front of her face, it was like it didn't even exist.

"Wha-?"

"Please tell me that's you, Tulip," the voice came again, on the edge of pleading, and it finally broke Tulip out of her panic. Suddenly, she remembered. That was... that was Kai.

"K-Kai?" Tulip called.

"Oh good," Kai said, relieved. "It IS you."

Tulip nodded, forgetting for a moment that Kai couldn't see her. Gingerly, she reached out to the horrible pain in her leg. She couldn't see when her hand touched her leg, but she certainly felt it, and she drew her hand, now wet, away, hissing.

"...That IS you, right, Tulip?" Kai asked, the worry leaking back into his voice again. "It's not some horrible snake version of you, right?"

Tulip rolled her eyes. "No, Kai, I'm the same Tulip," she told him. Suddenly, her head perked up. "Where's Mira?"

"I don't know," Kai told her. "I haven't seen her, you know."

"Wha-," Tulip cut herself off, realizing what Kai was doing. "Kai! Not the time!"

"Oh, give me a break, I'm terrified!" Kai shot back. "But, uh, I don't think she's here."

Tulip hummed, annoyed. "What about Jolene? And what happened to the fire?"

"Fire?" Kai asked her. "What fire? I haven't seen one."

"Kai-."

"I'm serious this time!" Kai defended, perhaps a bit too eagerly.

"But it was here just a second ago," Tulip argued back. "Unless I fell asleep again..."

Tulip frowned at her leg. Falling asleep like this didn't sound very likely.

"I'm assuming you don't know where Jolene is either?"

"Nope," Kai replied. "She's gone, too."

"Dammit...." Tulip stayed silent for a couple seconds, wondering what she should say next. "Kai... I think my leg is broken."

"...What?!"

"Or something like that," Tulip continued. "Look, my leg... it really hurts. I don't think I can walk."

"You might be imagining it," Kai offered, and it took a couple seconds for Tulip to process that.

"I'm what-?" Tulip snapped, and Kai leapt to his own defence.

"Wait, wait, just listen to me!" he cried. "Uh, earlier, while you were still asleep, I think, I thought I heard voices of, like, little kids. But I'm pretty sure they were a hallucination."

"I am not imagining this, Kai," Tulip said hotly. She lifted her hand. It was still slick with blood, and the agonising pins and needles in her knee continued to stab at her. "I don't think I could make this up."

"I wasn't done yet!" Kai whined. "I was also going to say there was another thing, too. I thought I was in water for a minute when I first woke up, but I wasn't! I imagined it!"

"So I saw fire and you saw water?" Tulip muttered, mostly to herself. There was probably a connection there... but Tulip wasn't sure what it meant. For now, she ignored it. "Whatever. I'm not getting up and testing your theory because it'll probably make me worse. But can you get up?"

"Huh? Oh..." Tulip heard something shuffling to her left, and she jumped, surprised. She hadn't been thinking too hard about where Kai's voice was coming from, but she was halfway certain it wasn't there. In the back of her mind, she remembered the old horror trope, where something used the voice of a trusted character to make other character trust them, but it wasn't actually that character, instead, it was a monster, luring the other character into a false sense of security.

Tulip frowned, trying to push it out of her mind, but the sudden worry gnawed at her. How would Tulip know if Kai wasn't who he said? Without getting eaten, that is.

"Okay, I'm up," Kai's voice said. "Now what?"

Tulip frowned. "What do you mean 'know what'? I was asking you if you could stand; I didn't need you to actually do it."

"So I got up for nothing?!"

"I guess."

"Ugh!" Tulip heard some more shuffling as Kai, supposedly, sat down again. She could imagine that he had a scowl on his face, and was crossing his arms like a child. Tulip frowned. Those sounds came from a completely different place than where the first sounds did. What was going on?

Tulip didn't realise how lost in thought she was until Kai broke the silence again, a good few minutes after either of them spoke.

"So... what should we do?" Kai wondered out loud.Tulip shook her head.

"We need light," she told him. "I can't walk, or do anything, really, like this, so we need to at least check out my leg, too. And then we need to find Jolene and Mira, and then finish what we came here to do, and then we have to get out."

"Oh." Kai sounded disappointed. "Can we start with finding Mira and Jolene?"

"We need a light, Kai!"

"Okay, okay, so we get a light first," Kai said. He paused for a second. "How do we do that?"

"Hmm," Tulip said. "Well, we don't have matches... right?"

"I don't," Kai confirmed.

"Right, we don't have matches, or wood, probably," Tulip said. She frowned. "I don't know how we're supposed to do this, either."

"I'll look for wood," Kai offered.

Tulip hummed. "Good luck."

The small shuffling noises came again, and this time, Tulip tried to keep track of where they were. But, somehow, it was next to impossible. Sometimes the noises stopped in one place and appeared in a different one. Other times, they seemed to stay in place for an oddly long amount of time, or disappeared for even longer. No matter how much Tulip focused, Kai, if that was Kai, seemed to defy all reason with his movements. How?

Sometimes they shuffled by her, and Tulip held her breath, but she never felt Kai hit her or give any indication that he knew she was there.

"There's nothing here but rocks!" Kai finally called out. Tulip jumped at the suddenness.

"Are you sure?"

"Heh, heh, believe me, I have bruises to prove it."

"I do believe you," Tulip muttered. "I suppose there's no hope of a fire, then."

"No, I can do it, I just need to get some flint and stuff..." Kai spoke up, trailing off when he realized just how unlikely that was.

"We won't find them," Tulip told him. "Besides. What can we set on fire, ourselves?"

Tulip heard Kai groan in frustration. "Then what do we do?!"

Tulip chewed her lip, trying to think. If she was going to be honest with herself, she didn't know what they were going to do. It didn't look good, and Tulip couldn't concentrate, especially with this PAIN in her leg. What was Tulip supposed to do? There was nothing around, nothing they could do, and the darkness around them was... still... there...

"Tulip!" Oh, Kai was calling again.

"What is it?" Tulip asked him, perhaps a little snappishly.

It took a second for Kai to respond. "Uh... can you... keep talking? When you don't, it feels like you're not there anymore."

"Uh... oh, ok," Tulip said. Immediately, she got what he was saying. She has spent all this time wondering if this was really Kai or some horrible monster, and on the other side, he's been wondering if Tulip's really there. "I can do that."

Kai breathed a sigh of relief. "Thanks."

Tulip opened her mouth, but before she could say another else, a miracle happened. It was like an explosion, because on their left side a bright flash suddenly lit up the world, and both Kai and Tulip had to turn away squeezing their eyes shut tight as they turned away, a bright flash of pain exploding in their minds.

"Oh, there you two are," a familiar voice said, as Tulip and Kai had to blink rapidly to get used to the sudden light.

"Jolene!" Kai cried, delighted, before it turned into anger. "Where were you?"

Tulip shook her head. She didn't really care about that, as long as Jolene was back. "Can you look at my leg, please? Something's... wrong..."

Tulip tried to describe it, but her voice failed her. She couldn't bear to look at it, let alone see what it was.

"Ah, is it hurting again?" Jolene asked, setting down the lantern. But when she saw Tulip's leg, her face changed. Tulip went white.

"What is it?" Tulip asked her breathlessly. Jolene's head snapped up, and she immediately fixed her expression.

"It's nothing bad," Jolene reassured her. "I was just surprised the bandages were undone."

Jolene knelt down, and from her backpack she produced long white bandages, and a split. Tulip didn't want to think about what that meant. As Jolene got to work on Tulip's leg (every time she touched Tulip's leg, Tulip either winced or hissed in pain, but Jolene never gave her a glance), she started talking.

"I was out, looking for your friend," Jolene told them. "I left you a fire."

"It's gone," Kai said flatly.

"I see that." Jolene said, though she looked troubled. "Well, we're in the caves now. And we have to be careful. From now on, everything is against us."