Dragons' Positions [Fickle Positions Chronicle # 1]

Prologue

Alala felt hopeless, her mother entrusted her with the job of scavenging today and finally let her go out on her own, but today of all days,she couldn't find a single thing!
She was about to leave, to trudge her way back home when she remembered a mostly untouched part of The Ruins she had discovered long ago. The one, in fact, that she could never find again no matter how hard she tried. For her mother, she would go and try again and this time, just maybe, she'd find it.

So there she was, in The Ruins,the place that the human race once lived in, but abandoned after the social structure collapsed. The one place in the world where you were sure to find a scavenger, and that is exactly what happened to her.

"Mo, why are we still here?" A pudgy man spoke up, panting, and she realized, he didn't look like he was very used to The Ruins.
"Why, what do you mean 'Why?' We're here because we wanted to become real scavengers, of course." Mo, as the pudgy man had called him, was thin and looked like he hadn't eaten in a long time, so much so, that young Alala wanted to give the poor man whatever she found in The Ruins just so he could eat. She remembered though, what her mother had told her about people, that you should never judge them by how they look. The man might've looked frail and sickly, but maybe he wasn't really like that, after all.

Having remembered that one fact, she pressed on, passing by the two scavengers unnoticed and heading in the general direction of the mostly untouched part of The Ruins she had found. She walked on, her feet aching, until she came upon a corridor, the same ever present corridor she found whenever she tried to go look for The Ruins' mostly untouched parts. This time though, she didn't stop there and jumped, scaling one of the walls.

One hand and one foot after the other later, she had reached the top and jumped down to the ground. Immediately after that, she realized that there was a road leading to another dead end . Undeterred, she climbed the wall blocking the trail on the other side and found something that astonished her, she had found the mostly untouched part of The Ruins she had been looking for.

Quickly, she began to gather what had been left there by the scavengers who had come here before her and began to head in the general direction of where her home was. She was so happy, who would've thought she could ever be this lucky? Alala was rushing home to tell her mother when she heard the two men from before talking not too far from her and she paled, realizing they would take what she had.

Long ago, her mother had told her she was nimble and now was the right time for her to be just that, she realized, as she made her way through the maze that was The Ruins and went around the trail the two men were on. Her heart pounding from nearly losing what she had scavenged, she hurried her way home. She was glad that her mother wasn't there or they would've been caught, seeing as she was much less light footed than her.

As she made her way home on the dirt path, the young scavenger, as she often did, basked in the thrill she got whenever she was able to scavenge things and get home safely. She knew she wasn't quite home-free yet, but she might as well have been, seeing as she was quickly approaching her home. Though, the moment she was close enough she realized something was odd.

Her house's black wooden door, the very same color that all doors in her house was, which was always, without fail, closed and locked tight unless she or her mother opened it to go leave or enter, was ajar, showing the stones that made the entryway to her house. Alala's guard went up immediately and she sneaked into the house, quite as a mouse. That is, until she heard raised voices. Her heart thumping wildly in her chest out of worry, she dropped what she had scavenged, her footsteps louder as she neared the source of the raised voices.