Whimsical Orange Road (Master Retelling) [Abandoned! Temporary Hiatus]

II. When You're Gone

"Uh! That's it; I quit. Why did I agree to this?" I whined as I tirelessly dragged my bicycle up a steep slope at 6 AM. Even though the cold soothing wind was blowing everywhere, I was half drenched in sweat and on the verge of collapse.

"Well, If you wanna get something. You gotta lose something." came the knowledge-spreading reply from Sid, another person from my group of idiots, I mean friends.

"We shouldn't have traveled so far down the slope." replied another out-of-breath voice belonging to Amy.

"If anyone of you knuckleheads would have said that while we were idiotically going 1 km downslope, it would have been APPRECIATED." shouted the slightly annoyed voice of Akash.

"Wait! We could do that?" I stopped on my track to ask that in a voice matching that of a lost child.

"Yea', cycling in the morning is for fresh air. We aren't gonna be able to enter in Olympics with our crappy speed." announced Sid.

"...except downhill." Amy decided to put in her precious perspective.

I gave them a poker face and asked, "Then how come I didn't know about this for the last, I don't know, 15 YEARS?" or more like shouted and then came back to my miserable self, "man, this is ridiculous. I should have bought my bike."

"Stop complaining! Would you? You are more tired because of your backpack. You were the one who wanted to take early morning shots of the cemetery." Akash's reply succeeded in shutting up my whining.

Taking a look at my low-hanging backpack, which thumped against my right thigh with each step I took, I tried to come up with a reply to get the blame off my back,

"Uh- uh- uh... well, you know, If I wanna get better at photography, I gotta practise more. Practise makes perfect, right. Also, I wouldn't have brought my backpack; how do you suggest I would have carried my camera and lenses?"

"Oh, just decide on one thing. Either you make an effort, or you take the easy way out." Amy added in a very frustrated tone.

Once the atmosphere turned to total silence, it was broken by the noise of slightly controlled laughter from the person who hadn't spoken a word all the while this pointless complaining session was going on. We all halted at almost the end of the slope to get to know the reason for this amusement and turned towards Akku with our faces questioning with a look of 'What?'. After taking a few seconds to calm down from her high, Akku answered,