It didn't exactly start out as a good day. First her locker refused to open until a minute before the homeroom bell rang. Then she found out she was meant to have read one more scene of Henry IV than she had. A double-chapter week in APUSH and a fitness day in gym rounded out the awfulness. Finally though, she made it to Latin, the last class of the day. Forty-five minutes, she kept thinking. Forty-five minutes, and I can go to practice. Forty-five minutes.

The bell rang, she got out the door, and she heaved a sigh of relief. Hitching her backpack higher up on her back, she started down the maze of alleyways that was her path to the temple, humming subconsciously. But as she walked down the alley between Judith Lane and Pine Street, a sudden gust of wind knocked her backward.

Groaning, she looked up. There in front of her, hanging in mid-air, was a green symbol that looked like a tree. A large, insect-like thing flew out of the symbol before it vanished. "Lovely," she said, and reached into her jeans pocket. She pulled on a fingerless black glove, and glancing around to make sure no one was watching, powered it up.

Any other Kaijudo duelist would have summoned their own creature to fight the Three-Eyed Dragonfly, but Michaela just tried to get rid of it using the Spell of Banishment. Eventually she gave up on that—the Dragonfly moved too fast for her. Reluctantly, she summoned Steam Star Grapalog, hoping she'd be able to banish both creatures before she lost control of it.

She did fairly well, particularly by her standards. She could tell the Dragonfly was weak, but she was starting to lose control over Steam Star, so she dismissed it. It would be easier to banish the Dragonfly now that it was low on mana. Lucky for her, the Dragonfly had become disoriented. It slammed into the wall of the alley, a blow strong enough to defeat it. Michaela smiled as it started to fade into a green silhouette—it usually took her longer to get rid of a creature she had accidentally summoned.

Then she felt a tug on her ankle.

The next thing she knew, she was falling. She hit the ground on her stomach, knocking the wind out of her. Though she couldn't move, she could think, and the first thing she thought was that the alleyway where she had been a second ago did not have a covering of leaves and moss. She rolled onto her back. The alley was not full of trees, either. In fact, Michaela was fairly certain she had never seen trees of this sort anywhere in San Campion.

"Dang it." She sat up, rubbing her sore stomach. Noticing how incredibly tall the trees around her were, she revised her assessment of the situation. "Damn it."

Michaela was in the Nature Civilization. The middle of the woods, in fact. And just to make things better, she was in the oldest, wildest, part of the woods. She cursed again. And Michaela never cursed.

Standing up, she took stock. Her mana was low, but she wasn't injured. And she and the Masters had a plan worked out in case this happened. All she had to do was summon Nadia's Rusalka as soon as she had the mana, and have the Water creature send a telepathic message to her teacher. Then the Masters would be able to come and find her. "Easy," Michaela said, getting into her habit of thinking aloud when she was alone.

She powered down her gauntlet and put it in her pocket. This reminded her of her cell phone, which had been in her pocket. She kneeled down and did a quick search through the leaves near where she had landed, but it wasn't there. It had probably fallen out of her pocket back in the alley. "No phone. Okay, could be worse. Could be better, but definitely could be worse." She sighed. "It's gonna be more than forty-five minutes before I get to practice, that's for sure."

All she had to do was wait until her mana recharged, but from experience she knew this could take a very long time, quite possibly until the next morning. She didn't plan on standing there all night waiting for a hungry creature to come along, so she decided to find a safer place to spend the night. She remembered from studying the Nature Civilization that, especially in this part of the woods, most creatures were either flyers or ground hunters. So if she climbed about half way up a tree, she would be safely below the flyers' nests and out of reach of the ground hunters. "Perfect," she said. "Assuming I can get that far up a tree."

There was a tree with a decent number of lowish branches nearby, so she decided to try it. She grabbed the sturdiest branch she could reach and sort of swung her feet onto another one, then twisted around and took hold of another branch. Awkwardly, clumsily, nearly giving herself a heart attack a few times, she managed to get a good way up the tree. Finding a branch wide enough for her to sit and lean against the trunk, she clambered up and swung one leg over it. She left her backpack on, not wanting to leave it behind if she had to get down quickly. Letting her head fall back against the tree, she soon fell asleep.

"She's not at home?" Nadia asked. Masters Brightmore and Chavez looked over at her. They were in the library, and had been doing research when Nadia's phone rang.

"She never showed up today, we thought she was home sick…. She never called you, you haven't heard anything? ... Alright. We'll start looking." Nadia hung up, then turned to the other Masters. "Michaela is missing."

Michaela didn't even realize she had fallen asleep. The trees were so dense no sunlight could get through the leaves, so it was just as dark as it had been the previous afternoon, but when she checked her watch, she found that it was already early morning. Gracie must be worried sick, she thought. Gracie was the woman she lived with, first as a foster child and now as an adoptive one. The Masters were probably worried too, but they would be focusing on finding her. "Well, no need to keep them waiting," she said to herself, and she started to climb down the tree.

It was much harder going down than it had been to get up. She couldn't really see where she was going, and she missed her footing a few times. Eventually she found an awkward but effective way of sitting on a branch and finding a path, then stopping again and doing the same. Doing this, she managed to get far enough that she was only about five yards up.

That was when she fell.

Even as she was falling, she realized how stupid this was going to sound back at the temple. She hadn't slipped, the branch hadn't broken, she hadn't even missed her step. She had lost her balance.

These thoughts stopped when she hit the ground.

Or, more accurately, when her left heel hit the ground and the rest of her crumpled on top of it.

Just as Michaela did not often curse, she almost never screamed. But you try falling fifteen feet on your ankle and not screaming. She nearly blacked out, the pain was so intense, but she just managed to keep herself conscious.

"I have to get back," she said to herself. "I have to get back."

She knew there was no way she could stand on her left leg, but if she could just rest her weight against a tree….

"Ah!" She fell again. Her ankle felt like it would hurt less if she cut it off. But she had to stand; if she couldn't stand, she couldn't power up her gauntlet, and if she couldn't do that, she had no way of contacting the Masters. A wave of nausea hit her, but she hadn't eaten anything to throw up. She leaned against a tree and started to cry. Who knew how long it would be before the Masters found her? Chances were good they didn't know which civilization she was in, and even if they did, the Nature realm was the biggest of the five. And she couldn't even walk.

"I have to get back," she whispered, and then lost consciousness.

Masters Nadia and Chavez walked down Judith Lane, following Michaela's footsteps from the day before. Master Brightmore had put together a string of Stalker Sphere footage that showed she had turned down an alleyway off of this street and never come out the other end. It was the best clue they had.

"Why does she take these back paths?" Chavez wondered aloud.

"They're faster when the streets are crowded," Nadia said shortly. She had been very blunt and terse for the past few hours.

The pair reached the alley and turned down it. Nadia immediately noticed a bit of clear, sticky stuff on the ground.

"Three-Eyed Dragonfly," she said. "She must have summoned it accidentally."

"Well, we know where she is, now," Chavez said. He didn't say it, but both of them knew what he meant. They now knew she was in the Kaiju realm, probably the Nature Civilization, but that was the equivalent of knowing someone was in Europe. They had no clue which part of the Nature realm she was in.

Just then Chavez noticed something on the ground a few feet away. It was a cell phone, one of the older ones with a slide-out keyboard. He showed it to Nadia, and she quickly looked through the history. It was definitely Michaela's, but there was nothing from the previous day.

"At least we know not to wait for her to call," Chavez said, trying to lift Nadia's spirits.

"It's been hours," she replied, her spirits not lifted at all. "Even if she used up all of her mana, it should have recharged by now. She should have summoned Rusalka."

There was nothing Chavez could say to that.

Michaela woke up feeling slightly less hopeless than before. She decided that if she was going to get through this, she had to do three things: figure out how to walk, get to where the Masters had a chance to find her, and stay hopeful.

As the last of these was the easiest to do, she had made a list of things that were good. One: she hadn't been attacked by a creature while she was asleep. Two: she was in the Nature Civilization, and while it was the largest, it was also probably the easiest to survive in. Three: despite the fact that she had probably broken her ankle, she had not gone into shock. Four: she had her backpack, and though her books wouldn't do her much good, she had a water bottle and a way of carrying things.

Her next goal was to figure out how to walk. She had learned how to make a splint in a first-aid class, and she decided that was her best option. Working up her nerve, she looked down at her leg. She had expected to see her foot at an unnatural angle, or at least twisted a little, but instead it looked completely normal. Swollen, but that was it. This lifted her spirits considerably, and she set to work immobilizing it.

Sticks and the covers of her text books were perfect substitutes for planks, and she used moss and leaves to cushion her ankle inside. She found a few vines to tie the hodge-podge together, but realized she needed something to protect her foot, since she had taken off her shoe.

She sighed. "I really liked these shoes. There aren't even that many holes in them yet." Michaela had a tendency to wear a pair of shoes until they were literally falling apart. Even if she had a new pair, she would keep wearing the old.

She picked up her left shoe and a sharp rock she had been using to cut vines. Very slowly, she managed to cut the sole off of the shoe. She put the rest of it in her bag, and then took off her sturdy, much loved denim jacket and began to cut off the sleeves. She needed the material. Once she had two rectangles of cloth, she used one to tie the sole of her left sneaker to the bottom of her foot and her makeshift cast.

She was almost ready, but knew she would need something to lean on. Scanning the ground for sturdy branches, she saw one just out of reach. "Fantastic," she muttered, only half sarcastic. Somehow she managed to twist herself around and reach the fallen tree limb without hurting her ankle. Branch in hand, she leaned against another tree and broke off one end to make it the proper length. She then scraped the bark off a spot a few inches from the top for a handhold.

This was the moment of truth. Pulling her good leg under her, she put all of her weight on her branch and the tree she was leaning on. With a great heave, she pulled herself up. Balancing between her right leg and her walking stick, she grinned. "Now we're in business."

Master Brightmore sat down at his desk tucked into a corner of the War Room. It was only early afternoon, but he was exhausted; it had been a rough day. The Masters had been up all night trying to find Michaela, and he had spent hours standing in front of Argus, Vigilant Seer, trying to piece together bits of Stalker Sphere footage to find out when and where she had disappeared.

He picked up the picture hidden in a dark corner of his desk. It showed a young woman with dark hair dyed blond, standing on a beach with the Golden Gate Bridge behind her. He smiled. Then he remembered how Michaela had once asked who she was. I should tell her when she gets back, he thought.

By the time he had put the picture back and gone back to work, he had decided not to.