What you and Lucia then did was stupid, reckless, irresponsible and myopic — you and her entered a fissure that formed nearby.

If it couldn’t get worse, it did; Lucia bounded for some Ethereals that she saw.

Panting, though less of exertion and more of tense anxiety, you slowed to a halt and held your upper body with your hands, shaking your head in exasperation as your eyes struggled to dismantle the blanket of night around you. You threw your hands into the air with a ‘oh come on!’, trying to ignore the realisation thumping on your chest that you were lost in the Hollow out of anything, desperately needing a Proxy and a Carrot, alone and vulnerable.

Silence greeted you like an oppressive veil of danger…

...punctuated by naught by the heavy, regular snaps of twigs behind you. Led by your head, you turned to face whatever it was.

Its features were too veiled by the dark for any discernible detail, but what you could pick out, chilled you to the bone. A crown of monstrous spikes around a round glowing blackhole orb, which sported a luminous glow. It looked at you from the side like a horse, and on its right arm was a sword and the other arm a shield, behind it was a green coat that languidly swished back and forth like a stalking cat.

Whatever it was, you could safely slap the class of Nickel upon it, and your hand instantly went to…

“WAIT!” Lucia yelled as she barged into you. “Oh my gosh. Is this Thanatos, Nickel class?” her eyes widened to their limit as she squealed with delight, and bounced up and down like a giddy schoolchild, “So spiky and shiny! With both a shield AND a sword made just for precise attacks, but that’s not all! It’s a knight with incredible shoes! Wait, wait, in my journal…there was this…sort of thing to distract it…”

There was a pause from both you, her and, strangely, the Ethereal itself. You watched her eyes move left and right as she visibly searched her memories, and then witnessed possibly a change into the most glorious expression you had ever seen her wear — the dawn of recognition. She instantly fell to the ground, and her eyes went wide as her mouth dropped open.

If the hand you held up to defend yourself had caused a retaliative response, you didn’t notice nor care, so focused was you on her. Lucia’s face morphed into a goofy grin as she formalised whatever ‘distraction’ she had read, and immediately she began bouncing on her feet like an excited dog, issuing a guttural noise that sounded suspiciously like hur-hur-hur.

The Ethereal, if it at least had some semblance of humanity within it, kind of looked at her like she had gone crazy. As did you, too. Undeterred, Lucia dropped low to the ground and curled her hands over her eyes, and occasionally drew them back for a weird game of peek-a-boo over and over again.

Still, the Ethereal regarded her with a tilt of its head, as though her antics were a threat to its personal safety. You considered backing away; the representative of her tribe, the one who could cast incredible spells, was playing peek-a-boo with her rapidly increasing, or decreasing, modesty.

So, Lucia brought out the big guns in distracting it more thoroughly. Curling herself around on the floor, she rolled across the area and then grabbed onto the back of its coat, bringing the material to the floor and subsequently the Ethereal, where it whirled around the air and was flung to the ground swiftly like a ragdoll.

That did it, Lucia absolutely wiped out the poor thing. You watched with a glowing grin as Lucia began issuing a series of cries while she tried fixing the poor Ethereal she wiped out by mere accident, feeling your heart blossom with warmth at the sight of her throwing her hands in the air. You appeared before her, regarding her with an amused eye.

She felt a hand move around her upper left arm, and steer her around to meet your face. You looked at her with a ‘its fine’ face, keeping your eyes locked with hers.

For some reason, she felt her inner body leap. Unable to take her eyes off of you, Lucia said, “I guess we’ll search for more, {{user}}…”