Star Wars: The Earthling Gamer

Chapter 18 - The Problem, and More Training

"What's the deal?" I asked as we boarded the elevator. Fortunately, a few hours of rest was good enough for her to be at least limping around. Thank gods for supernatural powers and supernatural healing, y'know?

"The deal is that someone knows about our meetings, and that fucker told the Minister. We need to escape before we're taken into custody." Medea hissed as the elevator hit the floor with our duplicate homes. "We weren't even here for a week!" I complained. Kara, however, had better priorities. "How do you know that it happened?" She asked.

"Mana proved her worth." The witch replied vaguely. "We don't have time for this. Gather your friend, and gather only what you need. We need to go." She said, cutting off what I was about to ask. I mean, c'mon, you can't say you aren't curious how Mana had proven herself at all, right?

It took maybe 5 minutes to pack up this time. "Where to next?" Hazel asked. "We can't keep running, you know. They'll keep finding us, hunting us. We need to end this at some point or another." The girl continued.

I turned to look Hazel in the eyes. "Where do you think we're headed next? Let's apply what Kara and I did a little over a month ago when we searched for you. We hide in plain sight. We go back to the start of it all. Back to Virginia. My family's on the move to find us here. We'll have maybe a week or two, with how my family travels." I say bitterly.

To say I wasn't eager to go back was an understatement. But at the same time, maybe I could find out more about what was going on back at my old home, and it places us close to DC, in case we need to make a move. Within an hour, we'd done as we did a month ago. We snuck through the airport, and caught a flight back to the States.

But before we got to the airport, Elijah and Medea bid us goodbye. Apparently they planned to stay, and it made sense. They were trying to buy us time. Elijah told us they planned to hold up our family with our original plan, with the barrier.

With luck, they'd buy us another month or two, depending on how long the barrier lasted under their siege, not even starting on the fact that the two of them would have to stay in hiding from their own government.

Mana met with us on the plane, and she gave me a small smile. "I'm glad you're okay, Mana." was all I could say, as my thoughts were otherwise absorbed with how she managed to intercept the rat who'd apparently heard our meeting back in that arena. Of course, mind reading is a possibility, but the more I thought about it, the less sense it made.

How could she have not caught the rat when they'd first heard us? Possibly some unknown surveillance, but then how would she have been able to intercept the message between the rat and the Minister? A "Ding!" rung in my ears as I figured part of it out, signaling an increase in Intelligence.

"You know the Minister somehow, don't you? In a personal way." I thought, directing it at her in hopes she'd read the thought. I could tell she read it when she paled drastically. "You likely wouldn't have been able to intercept that message otherwise. It also explains how you were privy to the information of where we were, how you were allowed to get us on your lonesome, under the Minister's nose without him knowing we were in Canada. You intercepted America's message to Canada, somehow." I think-ramble to her.

Her eyes drill into me from the seat beside me, and she sighs in what seemed to be acceptance. "Ding!" I resolved to check that later, as Mana was opening her mouth to whisper to me. "You're annoyingly perceptive, you know that? But fine. I'll tell you later."

"Can you at least tell me how you intercepted the message?" She shook her head, and I huff, just giving up on that for now.

A day, a couple of flights, and a bus ride later, we were on my front step. I fiddled with the lock, and it opened up, letting us in. I looked around, and things didn't look any different from how I left them, oddly. I found the dart Truman initially fired at me, as well as the knife I'd discarded on the floor, the chair and the rope I'd bound him in, too, all in the same place, just coated with dust.