1: Exchange

"I... I'm not a baby. I can do this."

About a kilometre deep into the forest and away from the village of ferma, Jur nervously paced through the dense and dark woodland, his eyes glued to the ground in front of him and his legs quivering from fear. Compared to the forest around him, he seemed almost alien; his clothes were neat and his haircut was clean enough to gain the approval of any parent. His shoes were close to new before he had come into the forest, although the dirt and the branches made his normally stiff soles not only uncomfortable, but dirty.

The trees which were once calm were now wild and massive, growing at odd angles but still able to block the sun with their leaves from pure size and numbers alone. The branches and leaves above cast shadows that could even leave an adult second guessing on whether or not they had seen a monster. The environment around him almost seemed like it was perfectly crafted to make him vulnerable; the deep greens, browns and blacks of the surroundings left his presence obvious to anything that could be hiding in the dark.

"I just need to find something... something valuable..."

He mumbled to the forest to keep himself company, his eyes continuously scanning the ground and searching for something he could bring back with him. As he continued deeper into the forest, the shadows felt like they continued to close until they were pushing close enough to pounce at him, but nevertheless Jur pushed on, the fire lit by his pride barely overcoming his shaky knees. However, even his pride had its limits; he had almost been walking straight for an hour and with no results and his confidence had almost reached an all time low.

That was when he walked into someone.

"Hey. Watch where you're go..."

Jur almost immediately jumped back and failed to keep himself upright, falling down onto the soft dirt and ruining his overalls. Overcome with panic, he began to scamper backwards, only coming to a stop after about five metres when he looked up for the first time in fourteen minutes... to see a confused young man wearing a dirty toga.

"I didn't realise they let kids into the forest."

The man approached and offered a hand, a creepy smile plastered on his face. Fighting his instincts to run, Jur accepted and the man hoisted him up easily. Before Jur could give his thanks and attempt to talk his way out of leaving, the man wordlessly circled the boy, inspecting him from every angle.

"Ummmm..."

On his third rotation, the man dusted off Jur's behind and quickly circled around to the front, poking an accusatory finger at the straps that held up the boy's pants.

"You have weird clothes."

Jur felt strangely insulted by being called out by the man who wore a toga in the middle of the forest.

"They're very normal, thank you very much. The only time I've ever seen anyone wear one of those is when my grandma went to a costume party."

He pointed his finger aggressively towards the man's clothes before quickly retracting his hand nervously, quietly hoping that he hadn't insulted the potentially dangerous stranger too much.

"Are you serious? I swear that I bought this like, a month ago. Fashion moves too fast."

The stranger looked down towards his clothes and scratched his head, looking as if he had stumbled upon an unsolvable equation. Jur was quietly relieved that the stranger didn't seem angered, but after a quick look at the man's clothes, another strange point began niggling at the back of his mind. With the amount of wear and tear on the toga, it seemed almost impossible for him to be wearing it for only a month.

"So anyway, why are you out here?"

The man smiled, this time warmly and genuinely, finally bringing some relief to the boy. He almost immediately began to speak, but caught himself before he dumped his worries onto the stranger, placing his hands around his mouth impulsively. After taking a deep breath, Jur managed to properly calm himself, although it wasn't enough to hide his intentions particularly well.

"I'm looking for something to bring back as a trophy."

For a moment, the man looked on with a face of concern before sighing and placing his hand on Jur's shoulder.

"Well, I know there's something you're not telling me, but I can help you. You can tell me your story while we walk."

Without waiting for a response, the man began to head deeper into the forest. Slightly panicked and not willing to lose his lead, Jur quickly jogged up beside the man, doing his best to keep up with his long strides. They silently passed tree by tree for about five minutes until Jur eventually broke the silence.

"My name's Jur. What's yours?"

The man smiled as he continued to face forward and walk, his eyes wandering off into the leaves above. The only sign that told Jur the man wasn't lost in his own imagination was his response.

"It's been a while since anyone has asked my name."

"Did you forget?"

Jur tilted his head questioningly, but the stranger simply smiled nostalgically.

"No, I remember it as clear as day. My name is Nem."

+++

"... and basically, that's why I'm here. I want to prove those idiots wrong."

Nem nodded calmly, still keeping his brisk pace through the forest. They had been walking for almost another hour at that point, but that was enough for an insecure boy to dump his whole life story onto a stranger.

"I'm going to be honest, I only understood about half of that. I think I got the important parts though."

"Half is more than I've ever gotten. I'll take it."

Jur grinned towards Nem he grinned back, before almost immediately returning back to his neutral slight smile.

"So... could you explain to me what a school is?"

Jur looked towards Nem in a silent disbelief, but the shock numbed as the man casually pushed aside three trees worth of leaves with one swing of the arm. Before he could form his thoughts on how to explain what a school was to a complete stranger to society, he realised the man in front of him had stopped moving to hold the shrubbery to the side, letting him pass. Just as Jur passed through the open pathway, he stopped in his tracks, simply looking on to marvel at what was in front of him.

Before him was a small, perfectly circular clearing with a small structure in the centre and a small collection of utilities surrounding it. The structure itself was built on a base of stumps of various heights connected by bridges made of oddly cut planks and vines. On certain stumps were makeshift shacks or huts, creating a small gathering of homes connected by pathways of wood. The leaves above still blocked out the sun around the edges of the clearing, but in the centre light streamed in from above, giving the structure a strange glow. Without a word, Nem put his hands on Jur's shoulders and pushed him forward, unsympathetic towards the awe that the boy experienced.

"C'mon, let's go. I've got people to feed, we can't spend all day staring."

In what felt like an instant, the pair of them made their way up the first part of the wooden bridge, following the left curve and coming up towards an intersection. For a moment Nem paused, leaving Jur a second to look around. Almost immediately, he turned to the right nervously, squinting towards one of the furthest huts in the structure.

"I thought I saw somebody."

"Everyone's shy, don't mind them."

Nem reinstated the grip on the boy's shoulders and they entered the hut furthest to the right from the intersection. The hut had a seat carved into the wall going around the room alongside a table in the centre and a dirty blanket on the ground. Along the bottom of the chair were small boxes with holes carved into the wood to house them with a small, poorly crafted wooden handle.

"This is my room. Make yourself at home, won't you."

Jur quickly took a seat and looked around nervously, peering into the other huts he could see from his position while stretching out his toes from inside his constrictive shoes. The shadow he saw before was gone, with the lack of life around him feeling eerier by the second. Nem shuffled through the boxes under the seat, mumbling to himself as he quickly pushed them back into their spaces retrieving nothing. Once he had gone through each one, even the one that was under Jur's feet, he stood up and sat across from the boy, scratching his head.

"I thought there could be something I could spare, but I guess I was wrong. You needed something that could prove you were here, right?"

Jur nodded, silently praying that he hadn't come all the way into the forest for nothing. For a few moments Nem sat in quiet contemplation before he suddenly stood up in an an excited manner.

"Jur, how would you like to make a new friend? They're a child around your age."

Jur's eyes wavered slightly as he looked towards the energetic spring in Nem's step, prepared to quickly rocket off to his next destination.

"I... I don't mind."

Without waiting for a response, Nem quickly sprinted towards a nearby hut, leaving the boy alone with his nervous thoughts to creep into his mind. After a minute of finger twiddling and nervous stretching, Nem returned to his hut skipping across the wooden bridges, holding a brown object in hand. He placed it on the table in front of Jur before catching his breath for a few seconds over the table.

"What is it?"

The boy's eyes were glued onto the leather notebook, a slight sparkle in his eye.

"It's an exchange diary. Mic isn't the talkative type, unfortunately."

"Can I at least see her?"

Nem paused for a moment, putting his hand to his chin, eyes wandering off towards the small gaps in the ceiling for a few moments before he groaned to himself, looking back down towards where the boy had been.

"N... Where in the..."

His eyes darted towards the boy running down the bridge towards the intersection, who took a glance back as he turned, excited and innocent smile on his face as he ran into the small hut at full speed. The hut was larger than the previous one with a variety of unlit torches lining the walls on the floor under the torches were a number of metallic curved surfaces about child's arm span in diameter and going up from the bottom of the floor in the centre to halfway up Jur's knees around the sides.

"Mic?"

Without hesitation, Jur began to move around the only thing he could fathom his new friend could be hiding behind; the strange half-buckets. Pushing the first to the side, he found nothing. The second propped up against the wall and found nothing yet again. He continued on and on until the twelfth, picking up the half-bucket over his head to find nothing but disappointment.

That was when he heard a drip of some sort of liquid land on metal above him.

Immediately his eyes were guided towards the roof, but even with his vision limited by the object above his head, he could tell something slimy was above him. Stumbling backwards towards where he had entered, he dropped the bucket as the thing that had been hidden above him slipped down into the centre of the hut, landing in an eerily graceful and fluid motion.

It had a face of fire; a ghostly blue flame floating in the gap between the slimy black objects that he had seen, giving off a faint glow in the spring afternoon. It was surrounded by black tentacles, flowing down to the floor and overhead, forming a cone-like shape. Four tentacles were distinctly different; towards the tips, they became an accurate mimicry of a human's legs and arms, one of which she raised up and shook vigorously. Without giving Jur a chance to react, it slowly approached, making a 'walking' motion with its tentacles and 'legs', with the human limbs moving in the same direction at the same time.

Just as the 'thing' came close enough to touch Jur, he managed to overcome his fear enough to push himself off the floor, turning and standing up in one swift motion, charging forward blindly with tears beginning to form in his eyes.

"Hey, don't go that way."

Nem called out from behind him, but Jur wasn't able to hear him; not that he was in the mood to trust the stranger anyway. The boy simply tried to make as much distance between himself and the thing that was chasing him, although now it was the 'human' instead of the 'monster'. As the two ran over the bridges, the vines creaked violently from the amount of stress they were being put under, giving Jur a good gauge on how far away his pursuer was.

"Stop chasing me!"

His helpless plea was met with no response, but instead the thunder-like footsteps of Nem, who seemed impossibly fast and strong for someone who lived in such a dangerous forest. Nem quickly closed the gap, seemingly almost instantly coming within range to grab the straps on Jur's overalls. He swiped once, then twice and upon his third time Nem overreached, messing up his footing on the bridge, causing one of the vines that held the wood together to snap as he came crashing down onto the planks. Barely making it to the platform, Jur looked back to see Nem halfway through standing back up, a manic look in his eyes and his smile as he barely managed to balance on the bridge.

"You've gotta..."

Before Nem could finish speaking, the vine that had snapped broke once more, flipping the bridge and tossing the man onto the floor with a nasty crack. Slowly and nervously, Jur brewed up enough courage to peek over the wooden platform to look back down towards the stranger, the 'monster' already forgotten during his adrenaline pumping chase. Looking down at Nem, it was clear to see that he hadn't had a particularly good fall; his head was twisted the wrong direction and his right arm struck out at an impossible angle. Out of Nem's nose, blood began to flow out like a small stream, pooling about his chest. Despite his urge to vomit, Jur felt strangely relieved; he had no real way of knowing how to get home, but at least the immediate danger was gone. He began to stand up, but as he began to turn, a familiar voice called out to him.

"... stop moving."

Jur immediately turned back around to look down and he saw Nem's whole body twitching, alongside the grass under him beginning to wither and die. After a few seconds, the man's arm snapped back into place, with only a few more being needed for his neck to snap back into place in a perfect one hundred and eighty degree spin.

"I'm coming up, wait right there."

As Nem stood up, Jur looked down to see that the stranger had left a black imprint of himself on the floor, the bountiful nature now replaced by withered weeds and the pool of blood which had settled around the imprint's torso. Quickly, he began to circle around the edge of the platform, looking for a way to get down which didn't involve breaking any legs. Unfortunately for him, there wasn't one.

"Almost there..."

It was barely a mumble, but in the isolated serenity of the forest it was clear and audible to Jur. His eyes darted towards the hand that had gripped onto the platform from under it, fingers soaked in blood. Without thinking, Jur backed into the hut, taking small steps as Nem hoisted himself up from under the platform. Slowly but surely, Nem managed to get both of his feet onto the platform as Jur reached as far as he could go, his back pushed up against the wall.

"Stop."

Nem reached towards Jur as he began to stand up slowly, carefully approaching the child as if he was a wild animal. Jur shook his head in response, his knees and his arms uncontrollably shuddering, his strength on the brink of giving out.

"Don't look, just close your eyes. Just walk out towards me slowly."

For a moment, Jur took heed of Nem's warning, looking straight forward but not budging from his spot. However, his mind gradually began to take in more and more of his surroundings, until he came to a sudden realisation.

He was in a human skin rack.

Around him were numerous different people of all sorts of shapes and sizes, from adults to children, men and women, both the beautiful and the ugly all lined up and hanging from their hollow arms, drying on racks that had been placed around the top of the structure. Each one was seemingly skinned from a corpse, only missing their feet and their eyes, alongside having a large cut along the bottom that made them almost like a wet towel. The smell of the room finally came to him, almost instantly causing his eyes to water in disgust; the stench was like the burning smell after a public execution, but hundreds of times worse. As Nem began to quickly approach, Jur's shaky legs finally gave out and he collapsed to the floor, hitting his head on the way down.

"That... could have gone better."

Nem entered the hut and picked the unconscious boy up with his right arm, scratching his head with his left, a nervous smile creeping up on his face. Just as he left the hut, a bundle of tentacles slithered up the platform, making its way in front of him and springing up to life. It faced Nem and began to gargle, click and stomp, almost immediately making the man laugh. He placed a hand slightly above the flame on the tentacle entity, and began to rhythmically stroke it lovingly, his eyes locked into the fire as he spoke.

"Don't worry, you're plenty cute. You're just not... human enough yet. We still have plenty of chances to try again, don't worry."