“I’m so glad you guys are safe, I barely made it in time.”

“Ford is that you?”

“I’m sorry but I haven’t seen anyone but you two.”

As the figure came closer it became clear that it wasn’t Ford, but they couldn’t see them all that well, Rachel ordered Marco to work on the campfire and to stand back.

“Don’t take another step.”

“Wait I’m not an enemy!”

“Marco pass me your lantern.”

As Rachel lit up the candle and shone the lantern at the figure it revealed a rather chubby man with a suspiciously well-trimmed beard.

“Show me your right hand.”

As the man showed his right-hand Rachel stood back, she was quite disturbed.

“Your number, its one digit down.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t act stupid buddy, everyone I met had a nine hundred mark on them, you have the number 899, why is it?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about, my number was always eight hundred!”

“Rachel calm down, even if the number indicates how dangerous someone is, he is just one digit down.”

“Marco, we don’t know how much that single digit weights, he could be extremely dangerous.”

“I think you two are forgetting something.”

“What are you talking about.”

“I saved you both from that centipede.”

“So that was you…”

“Yes, my power is to control the temperament of any wild beast. I can make them angrier, afraid, neutral, anything.”

“Rachel if he’s telling the truth there’s no reason for us to doubt him, he saved us back there.”

“Alright sorry man, you can come over.”

“No problem, we are all stressed out by the situation. So what are your powers?”

“Marco over there doesn’t know yet, it’s his second day. Mine is pretty useless, all I can do is check whether something is edible or not, needless to say I’ve been exchanging it for the daily tips. Ford is reliable though.”

“You mentioned him before, what happened to this Ford guy, is he lost?”

“I hope not but he shouldn’t be out there at nightfall.”

“He might have been killed.”

“Marco please don’t say shit like that.”

“I’m sure he is fine, there’s not that many dangerous creatures in the forest to my knowledge.”

“Hey you, what’s your name?”

“Oh sorry, forgot to introduce myself, my name is Charles.”

“Charles, how did you know he went into the forest.”

“Well, I just assumed.”

“Don’t you think that’s a rather suspicious position to be in?”

“What are you implying?”

Marco and Charles dreadfully stared each other as a awkward silence set in. As the cold air of the night came sweeping, a hard dragging noise approached the camp. It was Ford who was dragging a dead animal with him, quite large in fact.

Ford threw the creature in the middle of camp, it looked like a fusion between a boar and a fox. From the looks of it the creature’s skull had been smashed.

“What’s all this arguing about Marco.”

“He is asking one too many questions as usual. This guy here is Charles by the way, he saved us from a giant centipede, which could have easily eaten us both, if you were here it wouldn’t have been a problem, next time keep guarding camp.”

“If that’s so then we should all just go together.”

“Someone must guard the camp.”

“Moving as whole is better, Ford is right.”

“Well let’s leave that for later ok? Does someone know how to cook this thing?”

No one replied, and in the silence it became apparent they would need to figure this out if they were to survive in the future. As Rachel and Ford tried figuring out the proper way to open it up, Charles and Marco started trying to get the campfire lit.

“Charles I’m sorry about what I said earlier, I was just getting paranoid by all this.”

“No problem, specially since you were right. The mark on my hand is suspicious, as soon as you thought about the possibility of me having done anything to Ford you linked that with the number on my hand. Even though it was wrong you are a fast thinker, we need that.”

“Sorry for all the interrogation but, how did you find us?”

“I spent about five days inside the forest, I was gathering mushrooms when I heard a woman screaming, which lead me to you guys.”

As everyone was doing their things, the campfire eventually lit up. Rachel and Ford didn’t do a great job at carving the creature, but they still managed to get some food out of it. They ended up cooking the meat they took out of the creature since the nutritional blocks would last longer than the beast’s meat.

After dinning they planned that one person would be on the lookout and they would take turns to make sure everyone got enough sleep for the next day, and like that, under the starry sky they eventually fell all asleep after some hours, the lookout plan was a complete failure.