After a few more hours of trying to rest, I got up, and made myself breakfast, porridge and rye with butter, Allen has some pretty good stuff when it comes to food, too bad he treats to kitchen like a monster he needs to hunt.
And of course by the time I finished, he had woken up and we ate in mostly comfortable silence.
After that, we set out to the training grounds outside town, and, we both began to stretch, before we would really get into it.
The real question is, where's everyone else?
"Ahoy!" A voice came from behind me, one familiar me as Quinte, an orphan like me, and Allen's right hand man.
He's about, maybe 5'8'' (around 1.72 meters) and six years my physical senior.
"Oh hey, wait a minute, Shepard, is that you? What happened?" His tone was, kind of annoying, but I put it to the side.
"Ehh, got stuck in a hole fer a few weeks, ya know how it cin be with all tha'." as I spoke, I waved my hands in a blase motion, and shrugged.
"Anyway, how's it been witt'chyou? Anythin' mad happen while I was dealin' with that righ' mess?" I was fairly certain my face was showing curiosity about it.
"Ehh?" His face contorted, and he scratched the back of his neck, before replying, "around the time you disappeared actually, there was a pretty big Tide, knocked out a pretty substantial chunk of the wall…"
Huh, weird, not only was he actually being mostly tolerable to talk to for once, I think that's the first time I've heard him use the word 'substantial' before.
Oh well, nice to see him finally out of that annoying teen phase, I guess.
Going back to my stretching, he joined us with a bit of promting from an oddly silent Allen.
After a while of stretching, the training began in earnest, first a refreshing run of the obstacle course, made easier than it should have been, simply as a means to get me back on my feet.
For Allen, it was nothing, most likely meaning he's planning on the 'hunt' part of the retraining to be the real hell.
And just as I thought, Allen proceeded to kick my ass for the next three hours.
No matter how I dodged or even tried to run and hide, the result was the same, a kick or punch, to my center of mass after a few seconds of no sight.
This was predominantly due to Allen's multiple speed increasing spells, which he used frequently to remind me what I had 'missed' in my time away.
Despite the growth of control had gained in Ki, whatever small amount I had, still wasn't enough to even keep track of him movements.
Clearly, he had went easy on me when he had chased me before.
Afterwards, he was called in to th union to speak about something, so i decided to go to the hunting lodge to see how things had been since my sudden departure.
The walk down is familiar, the small bridge overlooking a babbling brook I once tried to fish in hasn't changed, neither has the hunter's lodge.
The hunter's lodge is building with a stone wall at the beginning, about half way up it is replaced with wood, it has pillars of an off, brownish white, from the rib cage and spine of the monster that was used at the building's frame remains unchanged as well.
Before I entered, I paused to once again savor the sound and feeling of being here.
A different kind of silence, the silence of home.