To Live Again, For the First Time!

Emilin's rations slowly dwindled as two days passed just like that. 

The rain clouds didn't show signs of wanting to move away, and Emilin felt iffy when she was exploring the cave, not that there was much to explore.

There appeared to be various footprints on the sand in the cave, which she hadn't noticed on the first day she arrived, but seeing as no one had come to the cave in the past two days, she decided to forget about it.

Well at least she would stop thinking about it, after all, it had already been pouring for hours on end. Just which idler would come out to the mountains now and even if they did, would they really travel so far just to get to this cave? 

Chances were, this cave was probably just used once or twice, and then the footprints were just left there.

Anyways, she would move out right when the rain stopped so it wouldn't matter if someone else came to this cave afterward, they wouldn't bum into each other.

In the past two days, Emilin had set up her tent inside the cave and would spend most of her time inside the tent with the tent door open, looking at the scene outside the cave.

She was waiting for the rain to stop, but sadly, it never happened.

As for what she was doing these past two days, she really couldn't do anything but sleep, eat and meditate. 

Not that it was a bad thing.

It gave her some time to think about things and she didn't even have to play artificial water sounds to make the mood.

Emilin could have also been on her phone, using all the applications that didn't require a signal, but then that would go against the whole point of this trip.

There was one more thing bothering her these days.

It was the issue about whether she should send her brothers a signal so that they could get her some support.

Of course, she didn't want her Big Brother Theo nor her Big Brother Nathan to come themselves since they both had their own lives and their own classes to attend. After all, they were both in prestigious colleges, but the issue was that they would have to come up with some excuses.

Since they wouldn't know just what exactly was going on, it wouldn't be optimal to get the police involved and so Emilin would really rather start contacting some of the more trustworthy partners they worked with.

They were already coming of age and it was about time they started meeting, though this was likely not the best way to meet.

As all three of them were rather young in an age when they first started garnering fame and power, all being underaged, none of them had revealed their identities to any of their business partners yet, which meant that if someone came to help Emilin under the name of helping one of Emilin's identities, the connection would be exposed.

They would have to come up with some good excuse.

But even if they did, they would still be correlated to the identity they were trying to hide. 

'Well, it's about time to meet some of them, but I wonder who would come... who's around this area?' Emilin couldn't help but imagine a meeting. 

She could definitively say that this was most likely not the best time to meet any of those people, but it would still be fun.

In the best-case scenario, Emilin would just pretend to be 'her own' apprentice, in the worst-case scenario, she would reveal her identity, but she didn't really see why that would be necessary.

But at this rate, she might really need some support.

Her rations wouldn't last too long, she didn't really know where she was, and she had no idea how much longer she would have to stay here.

The obvious choice would be to activate the 3ed hole, sending the signal of 'I need help, but I'm not in mortal danger yet.'

With such smart brothers, with a combined IQ of probably over 300, they would have no trouble going to a random search engine to figure out the weather here.

Right?

Well if they couldn't do a google search, then she had really taught them for naught.

Ha. That would be a truly sad moment in her life.

Thankfully, it was highly unlikely for anything like that to happen, ever.

'I guess reinforcement would take a while to come, so if I'm going to ask for them, I should probably do it now.'

After grueling over this thought for the past two days, staring at the endless rain, she finally took out another one of her needles from within her hiking bag and inserted it in the third hole of the alinement for the exact time of 3 seconds courtesy of counting with Mississippi [1], showing her urgency.

'Hm... I wonder who will be coming. There should be quite a few people in this country, but who would Big Brother Theo contact?'

'I wonder how he'll choose…'

***

3 days ago

Theodore, who was still busy with the game, working along with Kayden, had finally made a breakthrough after a (not to be disclosed) number of deaths.

He finally realized why the 'right answers' were always changing, every time he played as well as what was used as a signal, telling the players when which answers would be right.

At first, he had been mostly using instincts throughout the gameplay, seeing as the same answer could lead to multiple results, but when he started taking screenshots every time he restarted after dying, he finally realized what was different about the characters and what would lead to the different outcomes.

It was the micro-changes in the character's expressions.

It was so small that he couldn't even tell at first glance, especially after staring at them for hours on end, but when the images were side by side when he knew he was looking for something, he would be able to tell the minute differences.

He had been so concentrated on the options and the formating on the answers that he hadn't noticed the small details in the bigger picture, quite literally.

After testing his THEOry out, he quickly came to a conclusion, telling Kayden his findings before Kayden could finally reach the 500 deaths mark.

"I got it." he calmly said.

"Mhm, mhm. Ok, sounds nice," Kayden replied, absentmindedly.

He was severely sleep-deprived and so his mind really wasn't working properly.

A couple of seconds passed in silence before Kayden snapped out of his daze.

"Wait, what did you get?"

"These characters, they have 'emotions'." He didn't even blink as he responded.

"Their facial expressions, a slight purse of the lips, extra tiny wrinkles between the brows, those are supposed to tell us how the character is 'feeling' and that's how we distinguish when which answers are right," Theodore said all this as if it were nothing, and that he hadn't just spent the past, who knows how many hours working on this.

It was truly hard to tell as those signs were not in the form of lines on the drawing, but rather a different shade of similar colors, which would change the character's expression.

"Of course, I still don't know which ones match up with which, but this should at least set us up. We should continue with this plan in mind," He finished up.

Kayden just sat there and blinked for a while.

"Gah!" He let out his frustrations as he leaned back on his chair without a second care in the world.

"Are you telling me I've been playing a game of chance so far?"

"No, you're saying that. I'm not saying anything." Theodore took this chance to drop any and all blame.

"That's even worse!" Kayden continued.

Just as he was about to go into a rant, a glaringly loud alarm sounded from Theodore's electronic watch.

Kayden, who was still stuck on the revelation about the game that his roommate had just disclosed to him wasn't able to react to another surprise, just shifting his gaze to Theodore's electronic watch that was shining yellow.

Suddenly, Theodore's phone also started ringing.

'Shit comes in sheaves huh,' Kayden thought, looking at Theodore's sour expression.

'This guy always seems to be held up with something.'

"Sorry, I've got to get this, I already told you what I know. You can take a rest or keep going if you'd like." Theodore said, turning around before concentrating on his screen while also picking up his phone while he was at it.

Theodore completely forgot about Kayden's existence at that moment, but that didn't really bother Kayden.

He already seemed to be okay with entertaining himself.

Kayden decided to make himself useful before anything else popped up and started collecting more data according to Theodore's new theory.

As for Theodore, he was currently in a call with his Big Brother.

As for the yellow light, flashing from Theodore's electronic watch, it was to promptly signal Theodore when there was an alarm going off.

This yellow light was reserved for when Emilin poked that second hole in the soles of her shoes, as for the reason his elder brother called, that was self-explanatory since he had received the same signals as he did.

'I should really consider making things less loud and flashy...' Theodore thought, looking down at his wrist as he shut down the obnoxiously loud alarm in his computer.

The reason why this was set up like this was just in case something happened while he was sleeping, he didn't want to miss anything important if that was the case.

Now he had to consider, what if something happened while he was in class?

Wouldn't this be way too eye-catching?