'That shouldn't be too much of a problem .' she thought to herself. Aurelie's photographic memory, made it so that languages, to her, were fairly easy to learn. The longest she'd ever needed to learn one from scratch was a week. There was no reason why this language would be any different. Other than the fact that they had no common language between that he could use to teach her. And they had no way of communicating. And that he was probably going to be curious as to who she was, where she came from, and what she was doing. Plus she was a pretty suspicious character and he was as likely to run screaming as he was to teach her his language. Yeah, this was going to be hard.

In any case, how was she even supposed to communicate to him that she needed to learn his language? Suddenly, she remembered what had happened right before the rhino had charged out of the bushes. He had motioned for her to get away. In other words, he had used sign language. Thank the gods, sign language was truly a universal language. She frowned, thinking about how she was going to do this.

Finally, she stood up and looked at the boy. Surprised by the sudden motion, the boy jumped a bit and looked at her curiously. Aurelie lifted both hands and made a show of putting the gun on safety before carefully tucking the weapon into the waistband of her jeans. While doing this, she also imperceptibly shook her left arm, loosening the combat knife in her left arm sheath. If she shook the sheath again, one of her two combat knives, which was placed within it, would come down her sleeve and fall into her hand. (The other combat knife was in her right arm sheath.) Just because she needed him as a teacher didn't mean that she trusted him yet.

With her hands free, she started to make the motions that she had thought about just now. First she pointed to her ear, then tilted her head and made a confused face at him. Then she pointed at him, then acted as though she were a student learning something, then pointed at herself, then clasped her hands together. While doing this, she also slowly said in English, "I... have... no... idea... what... you... are... saying... teach... me... your... language... please..."

Taken out of context, her movements looked really weird and crazy. Luckily, the boy had context, and managed to piece together her meaning. Giving her a broad grin, the boy nodded vigorously. Then he pointed to himself and slowly said "Farn", which Aurelie correctly took to be his name. She nodded, then pointed to herself, saying "Aurelie." The boy nodded again, giving indication of his understanding. Aurelie then knelt back on the ground, and, under Farn's curious gaze, cleared away some leaves and grass before digging a little pit, and then a winding squiggly line coming out of the pit. Opposite the squiggly lines, she made some hand motions as though something were falling into the pit. Farn looked confused for a while, before exclaiming, "Oh, that's water! You're talking about the waterfall!"

"Wadel? Wadelpar?" Aurelie asked, looking at him. She tried to say the only two words she could make out, but could tell that she had mangled them.

He shook his head, correcting her by repeating the words and giving her hand motions. First, he pulled out a water skin and let a little bit of the liquid spill onto his hand before repeating the word water. Then he made the same motions that she did for the waterfall and said "Waterfall."

She nodded. Truthfully, she didn't need him to repeat the words, as she had his previous exclamation in her memory and could use that to perfect her pronunciation, but the motions helped her understand which word meant what.

After ensuring that she'd understood, Farn made a come on gesture and started to lead her away from their current location, but Aurelie grabbed his arm. Looking at her quizzically, Farn realized that she was pointing to the two dead animals that he'd forgotten in his excitement of finding out that he would be able to spend more time with the strange person. He had only ever lived in his small village, which, while not isolated from the rest of the world, was very far removed due to the forest. He thirsted for knowledge of what lay behind the trees. Whenever adventurers visited, he would always sit near and listen to amazing stories of battles and watched them show off their strength. He was under the (mistaken) impression that Aurelie would be able to tell him some more about the elusive outside world.

He quickly calculated the distances in his head, then he went over to the rhino and slung it around his shoulders. Then he grabbed the snake by it's tail (the only body part that he could grab, considering everywhere else was too thick) and dragged it behind him. Aurelie stared with astonishment, her gaze travelling between the crater on the forest floor, to the rhino that lay on Farn's shoulders like a sack of potatoes, and then to the twelve foot snake he dragged behind him. Yep, this was without a doubt another world. Nobody on Earth could do that, except maybe bodybuilders and that was a large maybe, and Farn didn't have huge bulked up muscles. Not to say that he didn't have muscles, but they were more towards the lean side.

Farn, realizing that she wasn't following him, turned towards Aurelie and jerked his head in the direction he was going before continuing on his path. Aurelie stumbled after him.

~~~~~~~

Before long, they reached to the waterfall. Seeing her bag where she'd left it, Aurelie ran to it and quickly checked to ensure that nothing was missing, especially the guns. She made sure to keep the medicine kits and her phone from of his attention, though. There was no way to know how advanced this world's technology was, and she wasn't about to bring more attention to herself by showing her possibly incredibly advanced tech. She'd already made a mistake by showing off her gun's firepower, though, admittedly, she hadn't realized that this wasn't her own world at that point in time and hadn't known to hide the gun. Well, there was no use worrying about the past now. What was done was done.

While Aurelie fussed over her meager belongings, Farn put down rhino, and started to pull the snake into the clearing surrounding the lake. Finishing that, he went to Aurelie and made a 'wait' symbol while saying the word at the same time. Nodding, Aurelie repeated it, managing not to mess it up. Despite that, it still came out heavily accented and rather harsh, nothing like how musical it sounded when spoken by Farn. Well, there really was nothing she could do about that, an accent was an accent was an accent. She actually liked her accent, it reminded her that she was not from this world and that she needed to hurry in order to see the one she loved.

Aurelie watched Farn run off into the woods, then got up and walked towards the two animals that lay in the clearing with her. She went up to the snake first and stared down at it's tail. She reached down and grabbed it and had to struggle to lift it up. It was heavy and she almost dropped it several times, and her arm muscles protested the exertion vigorously. She was amazed that Farn could actually lift the tail, let alone drag the entire snake behind him. She tried pulling on the snake herself, but her cracked ribs emitted so much pain it was a struggle not to scream, and she could never make the snake budge an inch.

After multiple failed attempts, she gave up on the snake and moved towards the rhino. She went around to one leg and tugged at it. No movement. She pulled harder. Still no movement. She ignored her protesting ribs and pulled at the one of the rhino's front legs with all her might, placing the limb on her shoulder, which in itself made her tired as the rhino was heavier than the snake, and putting her back into the effort. Absolutely no movement from the rhino. Aurelie was hard pressed not to scream, but her ribs were threatening to mutiny and she had to stop and catch her breath.

And so she went, back and forth between the two animals, trying to budge them. She tried multiple different stances and used every muscle in her body when she pulled at them, but she invariably failed every single time. Finally, she got too frustrated and was in too much pain to continue. She sat down by the river and splashed water on her face, pulling down her hood to do so. She considered taking the hoodie off, but was sure that she would throw up from the pain of doing so, and instead rolled up her sleeves and gingerly laid down. Breathing hurt at first, but after about ten minutes of recuperation the pain subsided a bit. Of course, she wasn't fully healed, but she could at least move around a bit, though pain shot through her at every movement she made.