Bonds - The Past Echoes | MHA Reader-Insert

She Guides Me

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Up the mountain he hiked. Step by step, by climbed higher and higher. The light snow underneath his feet crunched, due to the twigs that had gathered on the ground, hidden by that thin white layer.

It wasn't anywhere close to the winter, or even late enough in the fall for it to be snowing like this in Japan. That's just how high up Ricky has found himself, on his journey to gather the keys he has been searching long and hard for.

"Damn, it's cold up here. Is there really anything to find this high up in the mountains? I suppose it wouldn't be the weirdest place that I've found one of the keys.
How did I get on that oil rig anyway?"

Ricky said to himself. Or out loud anyway. That's something that he did often.
Even disregarding the fact that he's at an elevation of three thousand meters, and you wouldn't find anyone up there, he never had any company with him throughout his journey.

Ricky's only friend was Ricky.

At some point in his hike, the mountain had morphed into a path. It was clearly man made, but Ricky didn't mind it, he didn't care for it.
All he knew, was that it made climbing easier, so he followed it.

In the distance, smoke billowed up into the air. Or at least Ricky thought it was smoke. It blended in with the visible, blowing wind that flew by him on occasion, like ghostly wisps there to make him cold.

Actually, the higher he climbed, the less cold it became.
Eventually, he found the reason why, and the source of the smoke that was rising into the air.

A village in a clearing. A clearing that they most likely made, using this rare flat section of the mountain to build their village on.
Ricky stood on the outskirts just long enough to observe this, along with the number of buildings that there were, which was quite a bit.

Then he walked further into it, without a care in the world.

It didn't take before he confronted by someone. A flash of light burst out in front of him, and he closed his eyes from how blinding it was.

When he opened them, he was confronted by a teenage boy. He held a spear, that was pointed right at Ricky's neck. A couple centimeters away from his neck, actually.

"Who are you, stranger?" The boy spoke.

The thing was, he didn't speak in your traditional Japanese. He was speaking a variant of some kind, just unique enough that a normal speaker wouldn't understand it.

Ricky somehow recognized all of that. Not only that, he completely understood what the boy said to him.

And when he responded to the boy, he spoke in the same dialect. Perfectly.

"It's just how you say. I'm a stranger, a traveler."

The boy was taken aback by Ricky's fluency. So much so that he even reared back his spear before shoving it towards Ricky's neck again.

"W-Who are you, really? I've never seen you before in my life, but you speak our language so well."

"No one that you would know. I just wandered up here. I'm looking for something, and I think it might be here." Ricky explained to the boy.