55 I Think You Dropped This

After walking a decent distance away from the crash site, Clem suddenly starts to feel woozy. He looks at his wound on his abdomen and sees that the bleeding is stopped which can only mean to him that he has an infection and has a fever as a result.

He has tried to apply proper first aid but there is only so much help that cheap emergency materials can provide. Noticing that his fever can get very bad if left untreated out here, he hurriedly continues to limp towards civilization.

He starts seeing his vision go blurry and even starts to hear voices. The voices of his dead brother, his parents, his old girlfriend. Everyone of them talking to him as if it is just another day and he is back relaxing with them.

He feels so hot from the fever raising his body temperature. He takes out a object from his pocket the size of a small fist and a hangs it over his head. A steady stream of water comes pouring down from it into his mouth.

After he gets done drinking the cold water, he feels the drastic change in temperature and gets woozy once more before falling to the ground and passing out for a short amount of time. Luckily, he had made it pretty far back to Utopia and is only a few more minutes away by foot.

He dreams about him running in place as a pus and maggot covered bird swoops down to devour him whole. Just before it does, he wakes up in a cold sweat and starts making his way back towards Utopia again.

Although he still could hear the voices and some of them became louder than others. He knew that they were not real, so to keep himself sane, he tried yelling to drown them out before making a mad dash to the city.

The voices stopped speaking as loudly as he is able to make the trip back to Utopia and ask for medical aid with relative ease.

---

Alistair wakes up from his hunger induced state and is taken aback by what he sees in front of him. One of the very first young men he has ever met before is passed out on the ground a few feet away from him.

Seeing that the blood trail he was following was leading up to Clem, Alistair put two and two together to understand that he was hunting him.

"It doesn't look like I attacked him or anything while unconscious. It seems like he just fainted from the pain of his wounds."

He figured that it was not due to blood loss since the tiny blood drops that he sees on the ground a very sparse and the smell of his wound is of stale blood which means that he is healing.

"Ugh...."

Alistair hears the muffled groans coming from Clem as he is lying face down on the ground in pain. After collecting himself though, he struggles to get back to his feet and continues walking without even looking back or noticing that someone was next to him the entire time.

"Uh... Hey Clem, how's it going?"

Alistair tries to make his presence known through friendly dialogue but gets a reaction he didn't expect. Clem keeps walking as if he never heard him in the first place. Remembering back to how quiet Clem was on the car ride back to town though he didn't think much of it.

Before he could ask another question though, he sees something stuck in some mud on the ground that Clem left behind, a small fist shaped object. Thinking of trying to return it, Alistair speaks up to Clem,

"I think you dropped this."

Still no response though. Getting slightly irritated at having his goodwill being ignored, he speaks up louder,

"Hey! You dropped this! Do you want it back or what?"

This time Clem puts his hands over his ears and shouts before running off into the distance.

"You all aren't real, I won't die here!"

Not sure of what that was about, Alistair looks down at the object that Clem left behind and sees that it looks like a weird purple gemstone. He is about to put it away to return it to Clem at a later date when he stops being so weird, but he starts to feel as if there are objects floating around inside of it.

He tries looking inside of it but is unable to see anything. Then he tries shaking it, to his surprise, he feels slight vibrations on the inside of the stone and he tries shaking it harder again. With one shake, a full sized shovel flies out of the stone.

Taken aback by the situation, Alistair drops the stone in a panic. He then remembers the lectures about magical items from his classes and how some of them are able to be used for storage. Each storage item has strict requirements for its use though.

For example, some storage items can only store objects at a certain temperature. Others, can only store objects at a specific time of day. Most of them are able to contain as many items as the user wants to store with the only exception of no living creatures are able to be stored.

These storage items are only available to companies and ascended though and very few are in circulation for the mass public. The cheapest and most efficient method that most companies use though is limited storage. You can generally keep a small amount of whatever you need in these items with no other conditions needed.

The downside being that these items are shoddily made and can break easily if not handled properly. If the item breaks, then everything inside that item will be lost to the owner which is why only new small companies generally use these types of items.

"Whoa... That's really cool. I don't think he will mind me borrowing this for the time being. Besides, he is in a company and these are the cheapest ones available, I'm pretty sure he has plenty more."

What Alistair doesn't realize though, is that though these items are cheaper than the infinite storage stones, they are not cheap by any stretch of the imagination. Clem only had two of these stones, one for his important items, and the other for supplies and tools.

Alistair walks towards Utopia while looking closely at the storage item in hopes of figuring out how to store objects.

Ever since he came back to his senses, the only thing that he can keep thinking to himself over and over is, "I need to get stronger." and thinking of the uses for the storage item, he has a few ideas in mind how to do so.

He first needs to grab everything of his in his room and store it away while he comes back out to the forest through the sewer system and hunt. This is his plan going forward, to hunt like mad and try to evolve as fast as possible so he can gain as much knowledge as he can.

He has looked through most of the books in the library and after he gets strong enough, he will be able to retain more information and gain access to more complex books. He might even find information regarding creatures like himself.

He walks back to Utopia with hopeful ideals about his future completely unaware of the shadowy figure that is hiding between the trees staring at him. It looks deep into Alistairs body and sees traces of the eye that it had been searching for.

It has attacked humans before and knows that every night at some point humans will ultimately let their guard down to sleep, that is the most opportune time to prey upon them.

It slowly slinks down to the ground and hides inside of Alistairs shadow, following him back to Utopia, waiting for the best moment to strike.