Twisting Thoughts

With the competition starting Xilo let Relia lean on him. "Maybe she's a bit tired." With her sickness before and all these people Relia might have been quite stressed out, especially with Hazel nearby. Grabbing her hand he kept his attention on Hazel as much as he could while splitting it with Tearia. This time there was a different announcer here that quietly explained the rules to everyone and started the countdown. Silence filled the stage as everyone started to get to work. "Good luck." He really hoped Tearia and Marie would do well even if he didn't really understand what was going on himself.

Taking all the ingredients she needed, Tearia listened to the list of instructions as she started. None of them would hear them again so each had to do their best to remember them as their hands began to move. Looking out of the corner of her eye Relia saw Hazel in the distance as her whole body shuddered. "It's her." She didn't have a lot of direct contact with Hazel in the past. The times she did she always remembered how she was treated like trash by her. A problem that was in her way that she just had to deal with. "They're coming to get you." Those voices taunted her with her greatest fear of going back to that prison.

"...No..."

Memories flashed in her head as she remembered her skin getting ripped off or cut repeatedly. That place was a nightmare that would never leave her memory nor would the scars on her body. "A murder was set loose the day you escaped." "Shut up!" Burying her face as much as possible she couldn't run away from the voices in her head no matter how much she tried. Feeling the world swirl around her she felt like she was going to be sick as more memories came back. "I just want to forget." She thought travelling with Xilo's group would help her forget with time but it only made her worry more. What happened if those people did the same thing to her new friends that they did to her parents? She didn't know if she could handle it.

Watching Xelfia, Xilo, Kirel and most importantly her best friend Tearia all being killed in front of her eyes once more. She could barely start recovering from her parents death after years had passed. If she lost them she would seriously break like a twig that snapped into pieces. "We'd set the world on fire for you." "No!" "This world isn't deserving of mercy." Relia tried to fight against it's thunderous voice but it was too powerful for her. Instead she just stayed quiet as she tried to let it pass. With a couple days of this constant pain she was slowly getting used to it. "They won't die." if she really saw them die before her eyes then she wouldn't know what'd she do.

"...Maybe...I would...light this world...on fire.."

Taking each ingredient carefully into her hands Marie inspected them while forcing a smile. Long ago when she was a kid she used to run around with her teacher trying her best to learn how to help people. She loved the idea of helping sick people just like her teacher. So she listened to her teacher as they passed down her skills to Marie. "I don't deserve them now though, Sorry Millan." Her teacher was a beautiful and kind older woman who was reaching the end of her life at the time, she wanted to pass on her skills to someone and Marie was the choice she made. As a kid Marie had a family that she had willingly abandoned and hadn't seen in years.

"Ran away from home."

She was never satisfied with how her parents looked at life. They always seemed so cynical and gloomy, at the time Marie hated it. So she ran away on some silly whim and ended up trying to playfully help people. "I guess that caught her attention." That day her Teacher found her and asked if she wanted to learn about real medicine and Marie agreed. She didn't even care that there was a potential to never see her parents again. She left when she was only Twelve years old and now she is reaching her mid twenties. "It's been almost thirteen years since I've seen them." As well as eight years since she saw her teacher pass away in her room, Marie had finally finished her training.

With nowhere else to go Marie took her Teacher's final Will and travelled the world on her own to help people. For the first year it went great, she met lots of sick people and helped them all with a smile on her face. After that year though it started to change though. That joy she found in helping people started to twist and turn into something else. She saw a lot of nasty people on her journey. People who tried to attack her when she travelled or even after she healed them. There were also people who refused to pay her or tried to take advantage of her, even the people she healed. She hated it and wanted to just stop but she kept going even with the same cynical look on life her parents once had.

"I started to hate the people I helped."

More memories flooded back to her as her smile faded with each ingredient she put in the bowl under her hands. Years on end she continued helping people and even with the few really nice people in between she still ended up hating them.She saw herself turning into her parents slowly as that will to help people began to fade. One day when she was walking through a forest trying to find ingredients but was interrupted by the smell of blood off in the distance. She knew it was probably another human but she took a few minutes to decide whether or not she wanted to help them unlike her old self who would have rushed to help. More blood entered her nose though as the growling of Astral Beasts got closer.

"Ahhhhh, fine. This one last time...I'll help someone. After that never again."

Spitting that out she walked to where it was coming from as she found an opening in the forest. Lying in the grass was a man's body completely covered in blood and leaking Astral Energy like crazy. She could even see another man in the distance walking away with his back turned. Once he disappeared out of vision Marie came out of the trees and killed the Astral Beasts threatening to attack the man on the ground as she inspected his body. Cleaning him up she went through the motions of healing as she dealt with all the massive damage that had been done to him.

"He's a cripple....all of his energy gone. Some people are really cruel...but maybe he deserved it."

Once she finished patching him up she stayed there and waited to see if the man would wake up. With an hour passing the competition came further as Marie went through memories. If it wasn't for Tearia she probably wouldn't be remembering all this stuff. Tearia had that old spirit she used to have as a child, just wanting to help people and that spurred her old self on. "Is that really why I'm taking this so seriously, because of her?" Thoughts ran around in her head as she thought about that day in the forest. After a couple hours passed and the man's breathing finally calmed down she saw him struggling to open his eyes. looking down over at him, that was the first time she locked eyes with ZIlan, the man who became the love of her life.

"Hi, sleepy head."