They had never met before that day. Never talked, never made eye contact, never even seen each other. But now they were stuck together for six weeks on an unknown planet in an unknown world.

           The Agency had paired the three of them up for a reason that would come into play later. But that was then, this was now.

           She, the tall one with auburn hair, looked scornfully towards the boy in rags. She huffed noticeably.

           “My one chance,” She muttered, “My one chance to be accepted and now I’m going to fail.” The boy looked up to her angrily.

           “Working with you isn’t going to be a walk in the park either.” The other girl never looked up from her book, A Walk to the Past.

           When she did, it was to scowl at the sloppy look of her companions. And not just their clothing. They were slumped over, and they looked like they had just worked out for quite some time.

           But, as she had learned to do, she kept her mouth shut and turned her focus back to the book. The shining blue before them was a navy color. It wasn’t the right color, though. It needed to be a light, soft blue. And at the rate this hole was turning, it wouldn’t happen anytime soon.

           After a moment, the girl with auburn hair began to tap her foot impatiently. She began to pace, back and forth, so unevenly timed that the other girl snapped her book shut.

           “And who are you to be so impatient?” She asked, her eyes narrowed.

           “I never!” The other girl exclaimed angrily. She straightened to her full height, and the other shrank back nervously. “I’m Helen of Krem. But I don’t expect you to know where that is.”

           The girl’s eyes widened in anger.

           “Krem is northeast of the Tricket Circle that is three days by ship from here,” She said angrily, “And my name is Ritala. But I prefer Ri. Not that you’d care.” She muttered the last few words under her breath.

           Helen’s mouth opened slightly in surprise, but it had disappeared as soon as it had come.

           The circle ha begun to turn a sky blue. It was close, but not close enough.

           “Well, since we seem to be making introductions, my name’s Randell,” The boy said, standing up. Helen and Ri just glared at each other, an then Ri glanced to the circle.

           It was a very light blue.

           “Oh, it’s ready,” She said casually and walked up to it. Ri jumped in, and the other two followed reluctantly.

           And so began the six weeks.

 DAY 1

           The air felt- cleaner. It had a rich and satisfying quality so refreshing that Helen had to sit down. “This isn’t like Krem?”  Ri asked snarkily. “In Palasay we have learned to preserve air quality.” Helen glared at Ri, and she slunk back nervously.

           Helen sniffed at her withdrawal. “In Krem, we learn to face each other and speak, not slink back like cowards.” But then she turned back. Ri had become quiet. She darted back into the shadows and took out her book.

           Randell rolled his eyes. “Can we just get along, then?” He scoffed as he looked back and forth between them.  Helen narrowed her eyes and turned away.

            “Well,” Ri said, speaking only to Randell, “Since nobody else is going to, I suppose I’m going to have to be the one to find our breakfast. Because, in case you don’t remember, we are in the past.” Helen walked up to Ri, a scowl on your face.

            “If case you didn’t forget, we also have a mission here. It will take up the entire six weeks. So let’s get cracking.”

           Randell ignored the both of them and began to look at the world around them. The mountains and forest were truly breath taking. He sighed and began to brush all the dirt and twigs off of the ground to create a fire circle.

           “I hope that you two know how to survive out here. There’s something different about this place. I can feel it.” Randell looked around himself, lighting up with excitement. “Just think! We’ll be able to see how humans lived in the past.”

            “You’re forgetting one thing. We have matches, and watches, and all kinds of supplies prehistoric people didn’t have,” Ri argued. Randell shook the black hair out of his face.

           “No, this is different. The smell is off. The things we have, they- they aren’t, oh, I don’t know how to say it!” He grew silent. Randell stared at the trees surrounding them, closed his eyes, and took a big sniff. His eyes grew big and wary.

           “No, truly. Watch your step. This place is not like home, not in the least.” Helen rolled her eyes.

           “Know it all,” She muttered and began to stride toward a rock. Little red specks were crawling back and forth across it. Ri reached her hand and began to stop her, but then pulled back.

           By the time Helen had seated herself Ri was almost in hysterics.

            Helen squinted her eyes and then rolled them. “Krems have no clue whatsoever! Their brains are defective. Once, I came across a little girl who wouldn’t talk to me. She was just staring off, and she touched her glasses occasionally.  And that wasn’t the only time. Posels are insane!” Ri flinched at the nickname, but not before she laughed a bit longer.

           Suddenly, Helen shot up and began to run around the trees that surrounded them.

           “What the chives-“ She yelled as Randell and Ri laughed. She saw the rock and scowled. “Tensecs? You didn’t warn me?” She exclaimed, her pride hurt more than her backside. Ri just continued to laugh.

            Helen’s hands welled up into fists, and she flung it out blindly. The punch shuddered through Ri’s arm, and she reached up, so she could toss a punch back. Helen stalked away before she could, though.

           “That was not funny!” Helen yelled in a shrill voice before being swallowed up by the trees. Randell rolled his eyes.

           “Oh, goodie. Six weeks with a nerd and with an asylum escapee.  What fun.” Now he stalked off into the woods alone as well.

           To Ri, the forest began to look bigger and more threatening than it has been at first. As uneasiness began to consume her, she remembered the promise she had made to her teacher.

           “Class, you’ll never believe how lucky we are,” Fit Jusd had declared happily the week before. “Our very own Ri will be going into the past to study life for six weeks.” The other kids pretended to be bored, but couldn’t resist the talk about the past. They were lured in.

           The past means everything to Palasanians, Ri thought to herself sadly, more than the future or present.

           A hushed murmur ran through the room. Fit Jusd has waved his hand for silence, and he got it. “The C. O. T. W. B.  had recruited her,” He said proudly. A kid in the front row whistled.

           “The C.O. T. W. B. recruited her? That’s some honor.” Fit Jusd nodded.

           “Yes, it is. So, I have a request for you.” Ri looked up into her instructor’s face curiously. “I need you to keep a journal of absolutely everything you see, hear, do, everything. Then you will report back to us.” She had nodded innocently, not realizing the challenge she was taking on.

           “And now,” He continued, “I must present you with something. A bit of a parting gift.” He reached into a drawer in his desk and pulled out a thin, leather bound book.

           “This is a journal.” When Ri began to interrogate him, he shushed her. “This is something of my own invention. I enchanted it to always have more pages. If you look inside, there is only one page. But, if I enchanted it correctly, then the page will always be blank. The pages are magically stored in an invisible locker, if you understand my meaning. The only way for all the pages to appear in the book is to write the end at the bottom of the page. Then, you can’t write in it anymore.” He placed it warmly into her hands. “Use it well,” He whispered before he dismissed them.

           Now, she pulled it out of her bag uncertainly. There was a small compartment for a pen, which she had already discovered and placed her nicest pen in. She pulled it out delicately.

           After feeling every small dent and scar on the ancient utensil, she prepared to write. After explaining how they entered the past, she hesitated. She slowly slid the pen away, but then took it back out.

           After we entered the portal and were brought to the past, Helen and I got into an argument. She seems to be quite disagreeable, but that is expected of a Krem.

           As she got to the end of the page, the ink at the top began to fade. The parchment became a clean white and looked like new. Ri blinked at it. But then she smiled. She shouldn’t have doubted Fit Jusd.

           So we split up. The boy, Randell, has left as well, so now I am alone in a forest in the past. It seems strange that  C. O. T. W. B. would abandon us in the past for six weeks without giving any hint of where we were at all.

           Ri began to chew on the end of the pen. Now that she had thought about it a little, it seemed really strange that she hadn’t been informed of where they were going. While she chewed and thought, her mind drifted. It was a few moments before she felt the hot breath on her neck and heard the soft swish of hair in the wind.

            By the time her mind cleared, she had been gagged without an opportunity to scream.

            Running off had not been a smart idea. Helen had done plenty of times before, but this was different. Helen had no idea where she was, and she had no supplies. Nothing to quench her thirst or satisfy her hunger. Nothing but the growing hunger for revenge that sat in the pit of her stomach.

           So, Helen decided to find her way back to camp.  Humiliation couldn’t be any worse than freezing cold and hunger, could it? She wouldn’t know. Both were new to her.

           “I bet they think it’s funny,” She mumbled to herself, “They think I’m a joke. But wait until the real adventure begins. Then, then I’ll show them.” Helen stopped after the last sentence. Was talking to yourself a sign of insanity?

           She kicked up the dirt in front of her. There were roots here, too many roots to count, so she stubbed her toe on one of the big ones.

           “Ouch!” She yelped and sat down.  The birds that chirped and tweeted around her were all ones she didn’t recognize. She sank down, curled up into a ball, and let her thoughts wander.

           The mission. They had six weeks to- no, wait. That wasn’t right. She had six weeks to finish. The others weren’t going to be helping her very much. That was plain to see. And then she let herself sleep.

Randell pulled up his jacket’s hood. He looked around for something, anything, that was edible. There were some plants about, but there wasn’t anything he recognized. How far or where, who could tell?

            The wind nipped at his ears like a playful puppy.  He ignored it and continued to search at an even pace. When he found nothing, he thought defeatedly to himself that he would go back to camp.

           He followed the slits he had carved into trees.  But when he returned to the place where he had left, he saw nothing.

          The gag tasted like goat hair.  Ri tried to get the gag away. Her hands had been tied back, but she managed to get rid of the cloth in her mouth.

           When she began to breathe again, she realized that her eyes weren’t covered anymore. The bumpy ride that had began what had seemed minutes ago had stopped.

           A hand pulled at her feet, and she felt herself being dragged across a smooth surface. When she braved opening her eyes, she realized that the ground beneath her wasn’t flat. She was just on  a flat surface that was being pulled.

           Ri felt her heart thumping in her chest when the reality of what happened struck her: she was the victim of a kidnapping.

   

           Helen felt herself jerk awake, and then slumped bak own.  The ground felt unsteady. Her head ached, so she felt along the tight hair pulled across her scalp to check for blood. Nothing.

           After forcing herself to sit up for a few minutes, Helen felt the dizziness subdue slightly. The rock walls had become slightly more steady.

           Then she became further confused. Rock walls? And they were shaking? She pulled her knees up to head and tried to completely diminish the nausea.

           After more time than she would have liked to passed, Her muddled thoughts cleared, and she looked about.

           Light was scarce in the seemingly small cave, and the little bit there was seemed dark and unhelpful. Layers upon layers of differently colored rock lined the outer edge, leading Helen to believe it was a man-made cavern.

           A small lump lay on the dirt floor, and Helen realized in a pitiful disgust that it was Ri. Without a hint of empathy driving her actions, her foot found the middle of Ri’s ribcage.

“What’s wrong with you?” Ri cried as she clutched her stomach. Helen just glared at her.

        “Shut up,” Helen said as she glanced around them. There were very few sources of light in the room. The walls seemed to be made of solid rock with only three breaks where small slivers of light were able to escape the outside.

        “So, genius, what do we do now?” Ri asked as Helen continued to look around. Helen just glared at her and pried her fingers into the small cracks.

        “There’s nothing in here that shows how thick the stone is,” She said, pulling her fingers out. Ri sighed and slapped her hands to her head.

        “Great. Great, great, great! We’re going to die!” She took out the journal and began to scrawl inside, her small words filling the page in her messy script.

        Great! We are stuck in a cave with no way out. I’m with this idiot of a Krem, Helen, and she’s an impulsive annoying jerk and I just can’t stand her anymore.

        She slammed the notebook shut. Helen slouched down in the corner, her long hair tossed over her face in a slab of solid brown. Ri walked over to the wall and poked at it. Helen looked up, annoyed, as she grabbed her by the shoulder.

        “Helen, we can just slip out through the crack!” Helen peered at her dubiously.

        “The crack is four inches wide, idiot. I don’t think even you could fit through that.” Ri shook her head, the smile on her face slowly trickling to her ears.

        “No! I took a class on basic magic and stuff at school! I know exactly what to do!” Ri stared at the wall and then closed her eyes. Her eyebrows furrowed in extreme concentration, and then she spoke softly.

        Water began to trickle through her hand, intertwining with her fingers and twisting into a fast spiral. The water began to slowly erode the rock, the force barely denting the rock. Helen shook her head.

        “It’s not going to work, stupid.” Ri smiled again, her face lighting up in happiness. The water began to come through her fingers as ice, the crystals spiking and becoming solid.

        Helen stepped back in amazement as the ice filled the crack, growing taller and taller until the entire crack was a wall of ice.

        “You may want to step back,” Ri advised forcefully, “I’m forcing more ice into the crack and it’s going to collapse in a little while.” A small grin spread over her face as the image of Helen embedded in shatters of the ice and stone came to mind.

        Helen backed into the corner, and Ri continued to shove ice into the crack. Suddenly, there was a crack, and the tower of ice fell, the rock splintering around it and spraying onto the ground.

        From the cell, bright light swept into the cave and Ri practically jumped for joy, her feet bouncing up from under her and her hands clapping together in excitement. As she continued to make noise, Helen clapped her hand over Ri’s mouth and dragged her through the sharp passage of stone.

        Randell jolted awake, a sudden sound interrupting his rest. Nearby footsteps and hushed voices. He reached down and gingerly picked up the stick he had clumsily sharpened into a spear.

        He ducked below one of the surrounding rocks and peeked up after a few moments.  Helen and Ri, dirty as could be, stumbled into the clearing, their voices raised, not in an argument, but in celebration.

        “What are you thinking?” Randell said angrily as he gestured for them to come to the campsite. Ri looked at him, her red hair matching her red cheeks, and scowled.

        “We just managed to escape a kidnapping, that’s all,” she said angrily. He looks at her, his arms crossed and eyebrows raised, nodding sarcastically