Open Hideaway Hollow

[Kuru Watashi]

The path was too steep and uneven for Watashi to pull his cart up; at the base of what he figured was the mountain, the young lad had filled his pack to the brim with as much as he could from it before setting out. In hindsight, maybe bringing a cart full of stuff wasn't exactly the best idea that he'd ever had. Of course, he hadn't intended to come to the mountains when he had loaded up his cart. He hadn't even intended to come to the mountains when he was sneaking out of the village to come to the outer zones. It was only after he had made almost gotten to the Solum de Asphodelus that he realized the mountains would make a much better place for a hideout than some sort of lowland place where you could see for miles.

No sir, that was when Watashi made a sharp turn and began setting out for a place where most no one else would bother him – in the peaks of the Lightning mountains where only weirdos and lunatics would roam. Watashi reckoned that the plan would also work to find out if that strange policeman by the gate had anyone tailing him. His ears were peeled for any sound out of place, searching to see if anyone else was out here that wasn’t a weirdo or lunatic. Luckily for the young boy, he fell into both of those categories, and it was with a fierce abandon that he climbed forward into the darkness with his oar-walking stick.

Watashi was wearing his good soft-felt slippers – he’d had ordinary shoes, better for hiking in, but they were back in the village at his old alley-place, and he didn’t really fancy hiking all the way back just to ask some other homeless guy if he could have his shoes back. His slippers were extremely good for their intended purpose, which wasn’t hiking; close-fitting, thin-soled and real floppy. Excellent for obfuscating his tracks (in a place that wasn’t a mountain range) and keeping himself quiet (which normal shoes could have done in a mountain range). Those thin soles were now starting to wear down as he walked in the rough terrain, and he could feel every pebble and rock through them as he walked.

Not all was bad though, as Watashi decided to take a break and give his poor feet a bit of a rest. Sitting down and hoping successfully that he picked a decent place to rest, he unslung his knapsack and pulled out his small box of saved pizza. Watashi listened to the wind blow strange sounds around the craggy cliffs as he opened the lid, taking a deep whiff of his cold, stale pizza before ripping himself off a slice. Yum yum, the perfect food for a nice hike into the mountains.

 

[Kuru Watashi]

The boy snacked on his pizza for a long few minutes, feeling the wind on his back while he pondered his next steps. He would definitely have to collect the rest of his belongings from the cart that had been unceremoniously ditched. He would definitely have to head back into the village to get some new shoes. And he would definitely have to pick up a few more supplies now that he had decided to set up base in a much more remote location than before. First though, Watashi would need to get to a good enough hiding spot to set up base for any of that to matter.

Finished with his last slice, Watashi got to his feet and packed up the cardboard box of pizza. Taking his shoes off – he wasn’t about to get his nice shoes even more ruined than they already were – the blind boy tried to ignore the deep chill that he could feel underfoot. Watashi was no stranger to hard, unforgiving terrain. The boy had lived homeless in the mountain village of Cloud for years after all. However, Cloud was behind *walls* and there was plenty to keep the wind out and the cobblestones only slightly cold.

Unlike inside the Cloud Village, if Watashi was lucky then the rest of his journey upwards would be on frozen, jagged rock. If he were less fortunate, then the boy would have to be making his way on ice and snow. As he would though, Watashi found a bit of solace in the fact that this journey would more or less be a one-time, one-way one. With his newfound pseudo-mastery of the weird pizza-box power, he would be able to come or leave as he pleased. After all, he had done his best to hide a pizza box inside the old janitors closet of the academy. He assumed that with all the higher ranked people running around the academy nowadays, the students there had more to worry about than blind kids stumbling out of storage spaces.

Turning his headset on – and noting with mild surprise that the signals still reached – Watsashi began flicking through the few music stations that had been setup. It was something to help take his mind off of the trip, though the selection was a bit lacking. That was something that Watashi would have to eventually deal with as well. The blind boy wrote that one onto his mental to-do list too. So much to do, so little time!