"Are you ok?" he asked. Rei could see clearly three claw scratches across his face.
"What the heck do you think you were doing?" she demanded.
"Saving you, duh!" he replied.
"Well I didn’t need…" she started, but he already turned back to the wolf. He tensed up and Rei saw a symbol flash on his forehead. Thinking nothing of it, she turned her glance at the wolf. It wasn’t a bad looking wolf. In fact, had it not attacked her, it would have been really interesting to watch it in the wild.
The wolf was all black, except the paws and a circle on its forehead, which were white. The wolf was barely over the age of a cub, Rei guessed. This possibly could have been its first hunt.
Glenn and the wolf circled around each other and Rei could clearly see on Glenn’s forehead the symbol of the lion. Both boy and lion waited for their opponent to attack.
"Glenn, couldn’t you use your powers? To make the wolf more friendly or to send it away?" she asked. Glenn stopped to think about it for a moment. It did seem like a good idea, he thought. In that moment he stood there, the wolf leaped into the air, landing on top of Glenn.
The wolf stood on Glenn’s stomach, not knowing what to do with its catch. It glanced at the other wolves, but they were too busy to show what to do with Glenn. Glenn took that moment, cleared his mind, and then reached into the wolf’s mind.
Glenn’s mind flooded with the wolf’s feelings of constant hunger, terror, and a strange force he’d never felt before. He separated all those feelings, like strands of a cloth, and threw out any of those thoughts that had anything to do with eating him and his companions. Once through with that, Glenn let go of the wolf’s mind.
The wolf got down and started to lick Glenn’s face. He shoved it away roughly.
"What’d you do to it?" Rei questioned.
"I pushed out all its thoughts about eating us," he replied simply. At that moment the wolf noticed Rei. It walked over and started licking her face too.
"Can we keep him?" she asked.
"Heck no!" Glenn replied. "Do you know how much problem he’ll be?!?"
"Aww…He can’t do THAT much! Let me keep him!" she begged.
"If he causes one problem…" started Glenn.
"Yea, yea…You sound like my mother!" she cut in. Then stalked off, with the wolf following right behind, just like a dog.
"I hope I haven’t cause a future problem this way…" Glenn mumbled to himself. And followed Rei back to the camp. At the camp Alex was disposing of his wolf’s body, and Dryden was pulling out the five poison darts she had shot in it while being up in that tree.
Rei sat on her pallet, across the campfire from Glenn, who sat on his staring at the wolf beside Rei. A few moments later, Dryden sat down on her pallet beside Rei.
"Rei! Don’t move! There’s a wolf beside you!" Dryden screamed. Alex ran over to see what was happening.
"It’s ok, it’s ok," replied Rei. "This wolf is my pet. Glenn made him nice."
Both Dryden and Alex turned to stare at Glenn, who decided to hide his face.
"Do you know how much of a problem that wolf will be???" asked Dryden.
"You sound like Glenn," Rei replied with a grin. "I think I’ve decided on his name, its Problem!"
"Well you better hope he doesn’t cause any," replied Glenn. "Now goodnight!"
All went to sleep, the wolf curled around Rei to keep her warm. In the mourning Rei woke to the smell of cooked rabbit, rabbit that Problem had caught and Alex had cooked. After they had eaten their breakfast, which was rather quite good even though Dryden refused to admit it, they cleared the camp and started to travel again.
By late that afternoon, the ruins of the airport were in view. Most of the buildings had their roofs collapsed in, and their sides looked like a bulldozer had rammed into them at random angles. The control tower that was the place they decided would most likely find a radio, looked as if someone or something had pushed it over like a domino. Most of the windows on it were still intact, except one.
"How do we get in?" wondered Rei. Problem decided to break the silence that followed that question, by running in through the broken window. They looked at each other thinking of how to break the glass, when Problem back up and rammed at the huge piece of glass that was making the window to small for the humans to go through. They crawled through the glass and wandered around in the dark control tower.
"Here’s a radio!" shouted Rei from a dark corner. The other members of her group walked over and looked at the radio. It was in almost perfect condition, it only had a few dents and scratches. Dryden took over the radio and called for a spacecab from the nearest transit station.
Within hours it appeared, a yellow rocket shaped cab. It landed on the ground in the middle of the airport. The driver was a green alien with four eyes coming out of its head on stems. The cab its self was dirty and the cushions on the chairs were torn. The driver spoke in a strange guttural language, which only Dryden was able to understand. The cab driver and Dryden spoke for a few minutes.
"Where’d you learn to speak that?" asked Rei, after Dryden came back from talking with the driver.
"Oh, in school we had to take foreign languages…and I choose New York Cabby." She replied with a sly grin. No further questions were asked. All the passengers sat thinking about their future. Rei got bored and pulled out her mini Ultra System, which was a virtual system that you wear on your head, in the form of sunglasses.
In the glasses she appeared in a sunny meadow at a picnic with Glenn, Dryden, and Alex. Alex motioned to her that he wanted to show her something. He led her to an area with very beautiful flowers, and she sat down to pick them. When she looked up at Alex he opened his mouth and…
"HEY! Rei are you coming or what?" the voice was Dryden, they had arrived on the correct planet.
The driver had landed in a field, less then a mile from the city of Han Wavel. Glenn and Alex were already out of the cab and Dryden had called Rei from the ladder. Rei pulled off her glasses, and after allowing Problem out first, started to climb down the ladder.
The moment she touched the ground, she felt a tingling feeling.
"Ah, the time has come Rei. Let’s have some fun!" a voiced called to her insider her head. Then all went black.
--- End of Part 9 ---