We Are

“Well..:” Diago said, reluctantly, “I guess that this is our que to return to the others and let them know the bad news…” and the two of us immediately transported back to the base at the North Pole.

The only person who was there was Arelis, and she looked very relieved to see us back again, and told us that the others were out looking for us and for string-puller.

We told her about everything that’d happened in the cave, and about how (assuming that Maximon hadn’t just been trolling us with what he’d said) Kahuna was now uncontained and capable of being quite a big threat to quite a lot of people.

“Look,” Arelis said, after we’d finished explaining what’d happened, “some people might blame you for all of this (and you might even blame yourselves), but it doesn’t make you villainous that you got tricked by someone who’s been at this power stuff quite a bit longer than you have. It is what it is, and hopefully we’ll be able to thwart whatever dastardly plots and schemes Kahuna unleashes.”

Before Diago and I could respond to Arelis’s words of advice; Isana, Shoma, Aleeza, and Oron all transported to near where we were, and Diago and I repeated our tales from the cave for them.

“Well,” Shoma said, with a shrug, “This means two things. #1 You two get to go back to living with your parents. You weren’t gone long, and it’ll be easy to feed them some story about how you impulsively tried something silly but realized that it was a bad idea. You’ll still be able to visit here for training and to get ready for missions, of course. #2 We know what to look out for. Anything in the world that stinks of an extremely powerful power holder being involved could be Kahuna, and we can keep our eyes out for any sign of them. They’re probably going to be cloaking their power’s presence, and so we almost certainly won’t be able to track them that way, but I have a feeling that it won’t be long before we’ll be able to figure out what some of the terrible things that they’ll have been up to are.”

We all continued talking and planning for a while, and Diago and I then had to face the music with our parents. Luckily, both Diago’s parents and my parents were all so glad to see us home safe and sound that they just basically gave us a pass on our little runaway, and even assured us that if we again decided that we were so in love that we couldn’t take it anymore before we turned 18 that they’d just allow us to get married while we were still 17, seeing as the law in our state allowed for 17-year-olds to marry if their parents signed off on it.

Wow! We sure got off easy! I had been sure that there would’ve been some hell to pay for at least one of us, but I supposed that it made sense to just be thankful that we hadn’t gotten into trouble with any of our parents over our running-away-from-home disaster.

And it had indeed been a disaster, and one that was almost certainly far from over. Kahuna was almost certainly at large, and (despite Arelis’s well-meaning words) I couldn’t help but feel some responsibility for having set them free from the cave that they’d been being held captive in. And this meant that I also had a responsibility to try to thwart whatever evil that they might try to unleash on the world, which meant that my life-in-the-fast-lane was just getting started…