“So Marco, why did you insist on going forward?”

“If we are near a town then it would be worse for us to stay in the forest.”

“You make a good point, but initially you wanted to go alone, its almost like you knew you could keep on going forward and it wouldn’t be a problem.”

“To be honest I already knew you would go with me.”

“Right your reading people power, that’s annoying.”

“Hey Charles, I never got to ask you, what items did you receive on your backpack?”

“You mean the differing items I got right?”

“Yes, me and Ford both received one social item, I’m trying to find a pattern on how it works.”

“You really like investigating don’t you? Well why don’t you use your power to find out what I got?”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“I was just making sure.”

As Charles said that he gripped something from inside his coat.

“You can tell if I’m lying or not right?”

“Yes I can analyse you behaviour.”

“Is that so? Because it doesn’t look that way to me.”

“I guess it might be hard to understand it.”

Charles then pulled out what looked like an old dark revolver and pointed it in between Marco’s eyes.

“Why didn’t you see this coming Marco?”

“Why are you threatening me now?”

“If you can analyse my behaviour you would have to know I was going to pull this gun on you.”

“I already stated I must be looking at you, we were walking side by side.”

Charles then pressed then gun onto Marco’s head.

“You looked, I made sure. Now spit it out, what’s you true power.”

“You are a smart man Charles, I will give you that.”

“Unlike you, but I hope you will make the smart choice here.”

“There is no point in threatening me with a empty gun Charles.”

“So you knew, I expected as much.”

Charles hid his gun in the coat again and took out of it two bullets.

“You did have bullets with you.”

“Yes, but I wasn’t going to waste them here.”

“I know, after all you didn’t intend to kill me, you just want to know what my true power is. If that’s so then let’s make a deal.”

“You want me to tell you about the numbers.”

“Yes, if you tell me how your number went down I will tell you my true power.”

“You go first.”

“Alright, I know lying to you won’t work. My true power is to get answers to any question I pose.”

“So that’s how you knew about everything I was going to do, that makes sense. However, there was no way of you knowing what I was going to do once we split paths, you need some backup plan.”

“I do, but you won’t need to worry about it for now. It’s time you to keep your end of the deal.”

“Did you use your power to know if I was going to answer you truthfully?”

“Yes I did, I also used it to know if you intended to kill me or if you had bullets loaded.”

“That explains how calm you are about all this. But there is a flaw. I won’t tell you what the number is until Ford goes away.”

“What do you mean?”

“Even if you knew I wasn’t going to kill you there’s no way you had the guts to go out here alone, Ford is somewhere around us just in case I attack you. Am I wrong?”

“Partially, Ford will only be here soon, I don’t want him to know about my power. He will only come here when the fog becomes thick.”

“Then you would just get shot if I had bullets.”

“You weren’t going to kill me.”

“I could have shot your leg. You are always making bad choices, if you kept quiet yesterday this whole conflict could have been avoided but you had to open your mouth.”

“Everyone makes mistakes its just up to yourself to fix the mistakes you made. That’s why I devised this plan.”

“I guess I can’t expect much out of a kid like you. Nonetheless there is a town ahead no?”

“I’m not sure what is ahead but it’s the path we should take.”

“Why didn’t you just ask if it was a town?”

“I don’t want to be disappointed.”

“I see, that makes some sense. Well, the fog seems to be getting thicker, I should hurry up. The truth about the number in your hand is simple, the value goes down when you kill someone, or so I believe.”

“You killed someone!?”

“No need to act so surprised, it was an accident.”

“If that’s it then you could have told us all.”

“It’s too risky, unlike you I don’t enjoy taking risks.”

“Rachel said the lower the number the more dangerous someone is, if the number goes down as you kill people then it all makes sense.”

“Don’t let yourself develop an anchoring bias, we don’t know if that’s all there is to this number, it can go down by killing but perhaps it can go down by other actions or go up if you do certain things.”

“But there is a way bigger problem here.”

“What is that?”

“If the counts down, what happens when you reach zero?”

“Hell if I know, considering I made it go down by killing someone perhaps you die once it reaches zero. Some sort of penalty.”

“It doesn’t make sense a penalty would be applied only after you take nine hundred lives.”

“I’m sure we will find out the true meaning of the mark soon. If our destination is ahead then this is where I part ways with you three.”

“We will meet again in town though.”

“Perhaps, but I don’t intend to stay there for long, there are roads around here, that means there are multiple places to go. I need the most information I can get.”

“I will go back then, goodbye.”

Marco went away and disappeared within the fog to look for Ford. When they were all reunited they kept on going to the next location. Marco had still not tried to find out where they were going, afraid he might lose hope.

This fog reminded Marco of when he first came to this world, he was transported during autumn but this looked more like winter to him, that’s when snow became to fall from the sky, Marco had never seen snow before even though they were lost in a bizarre world, the sight of snow was something Marco considered extremely beautiful.

“We are screwed, we need to get going fast.”

“Why is that?”

“What do you mean? We will freeze out here, it’s friggin snowing!”

“Rachel is right this is bad, we don’t know how the weather works here, if we get caught in a snowstorm we are done for.”

With the snow covering their path they ran through it as it got denser and denser, the danger of the situation started becoming apparent. Eventually they saw a figure further down the road.

At first they thought it was Charles but later it became apparent it was someone else. They fell prone on the snow and did not move from there. As they came closer they picked them up and kept heading forward but things weren’t looking good. The person they picked up was unconscious, she looked like a rather frail girl and was in bad shape.

Then they finally arrived at their destination, the snow was falling rapidly and they were freezing cold but there was hope, in the distance they saw light, coming closer and closer they arrived at a wooden gate.

“Someone is out there open the gates!”

After a man shout this at the top of the gate, a tiny opening slid open revealing the eyes of a young women on the other side.

“Show your marks.”

“We are all nine hundreds.”

As Rachel showed her hand the gate was open, and they went in. It looked like a rather large town, there were multiple streets and houses, everyone seemed to be stuck inside due to the storm aside from a couple guards and other folk of sorts.

“Excuse me she is in very bad shape can we get any place to treat her?”

“Go down that street and enter the last house to the left.”

After they went in it seemed like the house was a hospital of sorts. There were multiple beds some of which occupied by wounded people. A old men came up to the group and greeted them.

—Let me guess you arrived recently?

—Yes, its our first week here. We found this girl collapsed on the snow.

—She seems fine, I will let her rest here but you three will need to find shelter elsewhere.

—Do you know any place where we could go for now?

“We have some inns but I assume you don’t carry any gold with you all so you will have to find Theresa, she takes care of the marked that have arrived recently. She’s probably home now, when you get out of here look for the cat’s tavern, her house it’s the one on the side with the cross.”

The group then departed to find the tavern he was talking about, it was increasingly cold but they managed to find her house before their extremities started freezing. As they knocked on the door the could hear lots of noises inside. Suddenly the door ripped open.