Adventure!

Alyria was pumped. Today was the day she finally got out of her Aunt's house. So what if she hadn't told her aunt she was leaving? It's not like she would care. She only cared about Isabella and Raymond, the adorable blonde children of hers. Whatever, it didn't matter anymore. Aly was so out of there.

Excitedly that morning she had packed her savings, some clothes, and various other things in her back pack. It was pretty big and it fit everything she needed quite nicely. After getting ready and finally packing things like her brush and teeth supplies, Aly was ready.

Instead of walking to school like she was supposed to, Alyria instead took the Laketran all the way to a town called Painesville. It was kinda small and dumpy, but hey, whatever. She'd take it.

Knocking on the door of her new friend Cady's house, Alyria was full of bright expectations. Helping some strange people and getting out of Ohio at the same time. What could be better?

Thump, thump, thump.

What is that? Cady wondered groggily from her bed. Whatever it was, it was responsible for waking her up. She'd had the weirdest dream; there were these people from another world and she accidentally hit one of them with her car-

Oh crap! That wasn't a dream! That happened yesterday. And that thumping was probably Aly knocking on the door. Quickly she flung off her covers, leapt out of bed and threw on a bathrobe before answering the door.

"Aly!" she greeted cheerfully. "Sorry, I just woke up, I didn't know you'd be here so early!"

She stood aside to let her newest guest in. "Make yourself at home! If you haven't had breakfast I think there's some frozen waffles in the fridge."

She ran back into the hallway and pounded on the door Alecis and Rowan were in, yelling, "Rise 'n' shine, guys!"

Aly did as she was told and quickly threw her backpack on the nearest couch, making herself at home. After that she looked around to find the kitchen, she was hungry. Pulling open the freezer she grabbed the waffles and quickly shoved two into the toaster.

After putting the box back in the freezer she looked for the syrup and found it quickly, on a shelf in the fridge. After setting it on the counter Aly sat down on one of the kitchen chairs waiting for breakfast to finish cooking.

"Rise 'n' shine, guys!"

Alecis jolted upright in bed as she heard pounding and then an unfamiliar voice yell. Where the heck was she? Her head turned side to side as she surveyed her surroundings. It stopped moving when she noticed that Rowan was next to her.

Oh. That's right. Her heart quickly stopped beating as fast as it had been a few seconds earlier as the events that had happened in the past few days came flooding back to her.

"Kay, Cady!" Alecis called back, pulling the covers away from her. She was ready to get her day started, they had a lot of work ahead of them.

Rowan was slowly brought back to the land of the awakened when he heard Cady yelling and felt Leci moving next to him. He'd had a restless sleep; dreams that made no sense, his mind still swimming with "what ifs". And the poor sleep was already taking its toll; he could feel a pounding headache coming on.

He got up, not nearly as quickly or enthusiastically as Leci, and stretched. "Morning," he said to Leci tiredly.

"Hurry up, sleepyheads!" Cady called through the door in a sing-song voice. "We've got a big day ahead of us!"

When they finally emerged from the room Cady spun around and practically skipped back to the living room where Aly was now eating breakfast. "Aha, I knew I had waffles!" she exclaimed triumphantly.

She was in a damn good mood today, for some reason. She grinned widely and flopped down on the couch next to Aly. "So what's the game plan?"

Aly had a mouthful of waffles when Cady came bounding into the room. Grinning as she chewed Aly noticed that Cady looked as happy as Alyria felt, "I say we search around here for a bit, yesterday Leci told me that maybe there might be other clio around here. Maybe we can find some more."

"Good morning, Rowan!" Alecis said cheerfully as she got up and stretched. Rheis yawned on the foot of the bed, he wasn't quite as ready to get up as his clio counter part.

"I think I hear Aly out there, we should hurry," Alecis smiled at Rowan who was still sitting in bed. "If you want to stay in here for a little while though, that's okay."

"Nah, I'm coming with you," Rowan replied, standing up. Nym poked her
head out from under the bed where she had somehow ended up during the
night.

"'Mup," she said, which was supposed to be "I'm up." She
crawled out and followed Rowan and Leci out into the living room where
the two clio-but-not-clio were.

"Mornin', guys!" Cady greeted cheerfully as the two people-but-not-people appeared in the living room. "Hey, we think we're going to go out and try and find some more...what are you guys? Cloi? Clio? Whatever. We're going to see if there are more of you. Whattaya say?"

Aly continued eating her breakfast as the two clio and their souls came out of the bedroom. Had the boy regained his memory yet?

"Yeah, do you think it's a good idea?"

Alecis laughed when Cady called them cloi, and again when she said "more of you".

"That sounds good to me! I was thinking there might be some more around here, and I'm really in the mood to see some more familiar faces. When are we gonna go?"

"It shouldn't be too hard to find other clio," Rowan agreed, trying to be as productive as he could. He didn't want to be a dead weight or anything. "Judging by you two's reaction-" he indicated towards Cady and Aly- "we kind of stand out."

"Yep, you guys stand out a mile," Cady confirmed, nodding all important-like. "We just have to find the weirdos with the talking animals who don't know anything about technology."

Suddenly and idea hit her. "You know, if anyone else noticed something as weird as talking animals, I bet it would be on the news! We should check it out!" she exclaimed, fumbling with the remote. She turned on the TV to the news channel. Annoyingly, she saw that it was on a commercial break. They were playing some stupid movie trailer. "Ugh, I wish I had DVR."

"Oh hey! Look, it's ____, I wanted to see this movie." Aly finished her waffles and turned her attention completely to the TV screen.

At first Alecis was absorbed in the fact that there was a box that had clio in it. She peered at it with squinted eyes trying to see if it was a mind joke or if there were actual clio in there.

After the initial shock of the TV though, Alecis let her eyes see what it was that the clio were doing. One was flying! There was another that was throwing a big block of metal!

Oh. My. God.

These clio had Eilemaiden! And I bet if she could see them closer up she would find their dæmons as well.

"I need to talk to those clio! How do we get them out of that box?!" Alecis walked over to the TV and started looking all around for a hole the clio could have climbed through. They must have been tiny, but the fact that they still had Eilemaiden meant they knew something she didn't They were here on Earth but they could use their powers! Maybe that meant they knew where Amelia was.

"Uh...that's a TV..." Cadance said slowly, looking at Leci incredulously. How on earth could anyone, alien or not, grow up without a TV? Those poor deprived people! Cady couldn't even begin to imagine living without a television in her life.

"There's not really anyone in there, it's just moving pictures," she tried to explain best she could. She really didn't know exactly how TV worked so it was hard. "And those aren't clio, they're actors and actresses."

She felt so informed compared to these people.

Cady wasn't making sense. First she said that there weren't any people in the "TV" or whatever, but then she said there were and that they were actors?

"Even if they're actors, doesn't it still make sense to go find them if they can use Eilemaiden?" he asked, 99% sure that using Eilemaiden was what the actors were doing.

"Rowan," Aly started, trying to think of a way to explain, "I don't think they're using Eilemaiden. It's all special effects nowadays. In fact, they like to ruin some movies with it." Aly huffed at the end, she had been referring to the fourth Harry Potter movie that had been mauled, practically, by the use of too many special effects.

"Okay, I'm pretty sure I know what Eilemaiden are, and that," Alecis pointed back to the box called a TV," is definitely Eilemaiden!"

Turning away from the TV for one second to look the humans in the eyes Alecis asked them, "How do I get to them? I need to talk to them."

Her eyes returned to the screen but the clio with Eilemaiden were gone. "Where did they go? I need to find them!" she asked all panicky like.

"Leci, maybe we should listen to Aly and Cady about this..." Rowan said slowly. Even though Leci seemed to be having an epiphany, Aly and Cady seemed pretty confident that the TV-clio had nothing to do with Amelia. And even though he hadn't known any of them very long, in his opinion the human girls seemed a lot more...informed about this world. "They seem to know what they're talking about and you...well, don't."

It was really hard not to be condescending while watching Leci talk to the TV. She also couldn't decide whether it was amusing or sad. Either way, it made her feel smart and superior.

"Leci, trust me, you won't learn anything from those people," Cady insisted. "They're not really using Eye-lah-may-den. It's all done on a computer. Not that you know what a computer is...I mean, even if they WERE clio, there's no way you could possibly talk to them!"

"Really Alecis, you can't talk to them. I mean, they're famous. You can't just walk up to famous people and demand to know where they're from. We'd have to travel to like Hollywood or something. That's all the way across the country for one thing and for another we'd probably never find them."

"Then lets go to Hollywood! Where is Hollywood? Can we go now?" Alecis was full of questions. She needed answers. "And how do you know that they aren't using Eilemaiden? Huh?"

"I think you might be missing the point," Rowan commented to Leci, glancing between her and the human girls. When it came to anything involving this world, he was going to be more inclined to trust the people who actually, you know, lived there. "Leci, you should listen to them."