When we fell from Earth

The Training Begins

Mariam sat in the grocery store she worked at, checking the stock they had and counting them on her tablet. For the insane amount of mangas she had read about other worlds and the movies she had watched had always shown that being in another world meant being in a world less civilized than her own. But damn, this world was advanced as her world. Well, instead of electricity, they had the Varten, which had turned out to be the name of the technology itself. From what Mariam had gathered, the light that appears in the sky, their version of northern lights, gets trapped into the mountain structure, and later on, the stones with light in them can be used as energy stones. So, they would mine these stones and attach them to machines to pump power into them. Well, it was what Belimerando said, but Mohammed implied that there was more to the process of creating these machines.

"They are called Enrichments. Stop being uneducated like that." Mohammed had said when she called them machines.

Mariam rolled her eyes at the memory as she walked down the canned food aisle to be amazed, yet again, by the insane number of weird vegetables and fruits this world had. She noticed however that the Honta fruit was always missing. She noted that down in her writing tablet and counted everything else. There have been a lot of customers lately, Barona included, to buy supplies. It was rumored that Belimerando would start having a curfew around town so that anyone would be home during the nighttime so patrols would feel free to roam the town and the walls, making sure their impending meeting with Berberan was belated another day.

Mariam clenched the pen in her hand, almost breaking it. Berberan was a sadistic murderer who liked to toy with his prey. He wanted them to be scared, to be on edge all the time. Scaring someone when he knows he will be scared is the worst type of...well, scaring someone. Yuto did it all the time. But...If Berberan took his time to attack...that means that at some point the town will relax, and they will assume that Berberan forgot about them, and boom! An attack.

Mariam thought of other strategies, trying to come up with something that might help Belimerando and the soldiers to figure out what the hell Berberan was up to, but she came up short. She was no strategist, she didn't even know what her powers were, for God's sake! How was she expected to help anyone if she didn't know what–

A can of what seemed like Okam shot toward her and she caught it, more swiftly than she thought she could. She shrieked a moment later, and glared at the can, remembering Mohammed's taunting that her reactions came later than the actual event.

Who the hell threw that at her? She looked around, but she was alone in the aisle. Looking through other aisles, she realized she was alone in the shop, beside the Banor, the Cashier. She raised a brow as she heard Banor snoring, but she couldn't blame the guy. Banor was a tall, lanky guy that, if he was in their world, would be their age. But here, he was said to be in his eighth immortality cycle. Mariam didn't understand what it meant beyond that he had been immortal for eighty years now. Belimerando hinted that it meant more than what the name gave away, but she wasn't curious enough to know. All she knew was that he had spent eighty years alive, and that was too much for a person to stay awake.

Mariam walked back to the aisle and looked closely at the can. On the front, there was a picture of a round, blue fruit that had purple spots forming rings around the circumference of the fruit. Above the fruit was written Okam! Make your soup taste better!

Mariam looked at the back of the can and found the benefits of the Okam fruit. "It can help you think clearly and calm your nerves down..." she read loudly. She needed the Okam fruit in her life and–

And she needed it right now, when her nerves were frail, and she was on edge. She needed to think of a strategy, and she needed to think clearly and the Okam gave her just that. Mariam looked closer at the can to make sure she read it right. And...wait...