The sun had yet to come up when Morgan tried slipping out of the Atchisons’ home that morning. Not wanting to wake them up, he operated with the greatest of stealth. Or so he thought.

“So it was you making that noise,” Linda said, flicking on the lights.

Morgan looked back at her with a bewildered expression on his face. Beyond the fact that she had somehow managed to hear him while he was tip-toeing through the house, how had he once again failed to sense somebody who was standing so close to him? Was he really that inept at detecting people who gave off no Quintessence or magical energy?

“You got a free bed so now you’re trying to run off with a pair of free shoes too, huh?” Linda said while eyeing the new sneakers the Chosen One was wearing. “And you’re even wearing those new sweat pants and jackets George bought a while ago? Does he know you have all this stuff?”

“…Yeah, actually. Before he went to bed I asked him if I could borrow a pair of shoes just for in the morning. He gave me some sneakers and even lent me these sweats too. He said he bought them to get fit in but said he eventually ‘came to his senses’ and stuffed it all away in the closet.”

Linda blinked. Without even waking her husband to clarify the story, she already knew it was true.

“I swear, he’d give this house away to anyone who bothered asking him for it. Why are you even up this early?”

Morgan could have asked her the same, but considered the consequences of such an act and thought better of it.

“Couldn’t get any sleep last night, so I’m just going for a morning stroll to clear my head.”

“It’s 3:00 AM. The sun’s not even out.”

“When you beat the sun outside, you get the whole city to yourself for a few hours.”

He tried to further disarm her with a smile, but she just gave a little huff and shut off the lights.

“Whatever. Just know if you’re too late coming back they’ll be no breakfast for you. George never leaves leftovers.”

Morgan cocked a brow as he watched her disappear from the room.

“But I thought she didn’t cook for strangers? Am I no longer a stranger?”

After contemplating for a moment, he shrugged and headed outside, locking the door behind him. He started as he told Linda he would – with a light stroll through the neighborhood. But once he made sure there was nobody watching, he picked up the pace after rounding a corner. His pace increased as he reached a non-residential road, and upon hitting Highway 99, he went all in; running a bit over what the speed limit would allow cars. Mostly because he didn’t want to risk being seen casually breaking every sprinting record known to man.

Seattle was a bit over half an hour without traffic from Tacoma by car. Morgan in the pair of sneakers George gave him was easily faster than any car traveling on the highway that morning. It was so early that traffic on the highway was basically non-existent, but whenever he did spot a car driving towards him, he would slow down to a jog just long enough for them to pass him by and then start blazing down the highway again. Anyone who caught a glimpse of him in their rearview would have been left rubbing their eyes in disillusionment about what they just saw.

Just how would anyone explain a guy running over 60 MPH on the highway?

When he finally reached Seattle, Morgan had beaten the standard time by about twenty minutes. It had taken him under half an hour to get there by foot and he still hadn’t cracked a sweat yet. He did worry about George’s shoes though. He was reinforcing them with Quintessence, but twenty minutes of that type of punishment was still a little too much for a pair of cheap sneakers. He had given them several weeks’ worth of wear and tear in under half an hour.

“I’m gonna have to go slower when I head back to Tacoma, or else these things might fall apart on me.”

The hero continued his trip through his hometown as a jog, though he still occasionally streaked through alleys and parkoured his way across rooftops when nobody was looking. He took in the sight of the Needle. He was never all that taken with it when he was a kid, but being away from something for a decade was a surefire way to make one miss it. He missed everything about the city – its evergreen trees, the breathtaking sights of the nearby Cascades, the rumbling of the tides they rolled into shore. It was all instant nostalgia that hit him like a truck.

The hero was so nostalgia drunk, he might have gone exploring from street to street, seeing all that had changed and stayed the same in the time he had been gone. But as he wandered, Morgan suddenly felt as though there were a pair of eyes on his back. When he whipped his head around, he found there in fact were – cat eyes. The cat in question exchanged a moment’s gaze before giving a curt meow and trekking off into a nearby alleyway.

"Man, I’m more self-conscious back on Earth than I was on Validar," he said to himself.

It seemed those ‘delusions’ for the night before were still getting at him.

It was strange. On Validar, he was the Hero of Eight Realms; a foreign warrior whose fame from his countless adventures followed him no matter where he went. He was always aware that friends and foes alike were keeping eyes on him constantly, but here on Earth, he was once again just some regular guy who nobody would glance twice at. While the lack of attention was appreciated, the hero did feel more awkward walking the streets of his hometown as a Regular Joe than he did traversing the murky swamps of Barclave, the dire mountains Zokaria, or the turbulent coasts of the Toragashima. Between this awkwardness and his possible ‘delusions’, he definitely had some readapting to do.

“Alright, I think I still remember the address.”

The city had changed which wasn’t much of a surprise. It had been ten years and Seattle was a big city. Big cities tend to change quite a bit from decade to decade. Businesses he recalled from childhood were now closed, some city blocks had been renovated while others had not only depreciated but been torn down entirely to make way for new buildings. There was enough that he recognized that the things that had changed triggered something in him – the feeling of missing out.

It was a feeling he was always aware of in the back of his mind, even back when he was in Validar, but never one that he had ever given proper time to ruminate over. Morgan Moon had missed out on a decade’s worth of time in his own world while he was busy saving one from which he was now estranged. The Chosen One had lived the lifetimes of one hundred men – hell, maybe even a thousand – but the ten years he would never get back on Earth triggered a somber feeling he had always felt even in Validar, but never properly bubbled to the surface like it did while walking his hometown’s streets.

This feeling crescendoed when he finally arrived at his destination – his old home. He had been able to recall the address from memory. His family had lived there since he was five; that was nine years’ worth of memories that even a decade in another world couldn’t cause him to forget. His mother and father were still together for most of this time even. Almost everything about it was identical to before with two small details: There was now a small maple tree in the front yard and a new mailbox with “the Cunninghams” written on the side under the address number.

Morgan sighed. “Yeah, that's about what I thought. Dad said he wanted to move about a year before my plane crash, so it makes sense he went ahead with it 10 years later.”

It was likely his father didn't want anything to do with this place. In the near decade since he had stayed there, he had lost both his wife and his son. The amount of suffering his father had suffered alone after Morgan’s accident was probably immeasurable. The hero had experienced countless hardships in Validar, but at least he always knew he could overcome them. How was a man supposed to overcome losing his family and never receiving any closure? Morgan’s father didn’t know his son would return. Morgan himself didn’t know he would until some hours ago.

Morgan’s brow abruptly twitched. He turned on his heel and scanned his surroundings. There was no one.

“…Man, I must have brought some crazy paranoia or something back with me to Earth.”

The fact that he was on Earth and knew there were no nefarious actors out looking to catch him with his guard down simply wouldn’t resonate with his mind. Like a veteran thrown back into civilian life, readjusting looked like it was going to be an arduous work in progress.

"Looks like I came all the way to Seattle for nothing," he said while leaving the home.

He didn’t run or even jog from the residence. Instead, he just slumped along at an indolent pace, feeling more than a little crestfallen. His father having moved was something he expected, but the amount of emotional baggage it revealed Morgan had been carrying most certainly was not. As much as he missed it, walking through it that dark and quiet morning gave him a pensiveness that he hadn’t been prepared for.

“It wouldn’t be so bad if I knew where he was,” the hero said while coming up to a corner. “I’m not even sure if he’s still living in Seattle. He might not be living in Washington at all anymore. So what am I supposed to do? Just go online and start Googling ‘Christopher Moon’ until I find something?”

“Why are you looking for Christopher Moon?”

Morgan paused just as he was passing the corner. Standing on the corner was a young girl with brilliant eyes that, for reasons the hero couldn’t quite put his finger on, made him extremely anxious. She held a leash for a Rottweiler that she frankly looked too small to be walking by herself. She looked too young to be walking a dog in the streets at this time of day by herself at all.

“Are you standing here alone?”

“No, I have Tito here with me,” she said.

Tito gave a short gruff bark upon hearing his name and resumed doing nothing in particular.

“I meant somebody besides your dog. A little girl like you shouldn’t be out by yourself when it’s this early,” Morgan said. “The sun’s not even up.”

"I'm not. I'm waiting for my mom to come back."

"Your mom seriously just left you alone on some random street at 4 o’clock in the morning?”

"So? She had to go do something important. She does stuff like this all the time,” the girl explained, causing Morgan to raise a brow. “Besides, Tito and I can look after ourselves. Anyway, stop trying to change the subject. What do you want with Christopher Moon?

"Do you know him?”

"That depends: Why do you want to find him?"

"Because I..." Morgan tried to think up an answer. He couldn’t come out and say “I’m his son, Morgan” because Morgan Moon was supposed to have died ten years ago. If this little girl was familiar with his father, a confession like that would make her incredulous to the point of thinking he was a charlatan and refusing to tell him anything more.

"I'm an old ‘associate’ of his,” Morgan said. “Me and him go way back. We used to be real close before he moved.”

The girl’s intensifying gaze made him even more anxious.

"…Are you a drug dealer?"

"No, I'm not a damn drug dealer!” he exclaimed, annoyed that somebody had accused him for the second time in only a few hours of being involved in drug use. “What made you even think that?”

"One: Even though you say you and Christopher are close, he didn’t bother to give you his new address. Two: You’re dressed in baggy clothes like you want to hide ‘stuff’ on you. And three: You look like you need a haircut. Conclusion: You’re super suspicious and probably up to something.”

Morgan clicked his tongue. "What's suspicious is your mom leaving you alone with the family dog on the side of the corner while it’s still dark.”

"I already said my mom will be right back!"

"Yeah, and what's she doing while she's not here? Maybe she's the dealer or going to see one and she just wanted you out of her face while she did her business.”

The girl puffed up her cheeks in a fury. Her dog Tito didn’t share frustration and gave an indifferent yawn before resting his head back on his paws. A pair of strangers Morgan finally took notice of, and whom he again cursed himself for being unable to detect without the use of Quintessence or magical energy, showed a more perturbed reaction toward the spat.

Two very fit women who appeared to have been jogging past had paused when they heard the commotion. They now looked fixedly upon Morgan with concerned looks in their eyes. The hero looked back just as awkwardly. He knew the looks they were giving him were perfectly justified. They had just caught him, an adult, arguing with a child early in the morning about whether or not he was a suspicious drug dealer. Regardless of any protests he could make about his being a drug dealer, he was most certainly fitting the criteria of a ‘suspicious’ individual.

“Is everything okay?” one of them asked worriedly.

“Are these your customers?” the mouthy child beside him asked.

Ignoring her, the hero approached the ladies and tried to white lie their worries away.

“You see, she and I are just, uh… waiting on her mom to come back from doing something important. She’s got a big attitude and an even bigger mouth so I lose my temper from time to time. Not the best excuse, but, y’know.”

His cover-up didn’t make his actions sound any less immature, but at least the girls stopped looking at him like he was crazy.

“Did she really call you a drug dealer though?” the other girl asked.

Morgan shrugged and begrudgingly admitted, “Well, I do kinda look the part, don’t I?”

That got the girls laughing; a very welcome transition from their initial assumptions about him. Morgan, though he was never quite sure why, had always had a talent for talking with the opposite sex. Even when he was in middle school, chatting with girls regardless of who they were or how they knew him was just, well, simple. Cerdric, after discovering the Chosen One’s parentage, concluded it had something to do with his fae blood giving him the ability to naturally appear more charming to the opposite sex. While this theory was one of the many things the wizard would obsess over, Morgan never put that much stock into it. Talking to girls was just something he was good at, fae ancestry or no.

With the odd exception, of course.

“I don’t know you,” the girl declared. “You’re just some weirdo snooping around for people you lost tabs on like Christopher Moon.”

Morgan made a tired expression. This girl was actually unbearable.

“Oh, you’re looking for Mr. Moon?” one of the girls asked.

Both the attentions of Morgan and the mouthy little missus behind him were caught by her question.

“You guys know him?” he asked eagerly

“Kind of? I remember a Moon from some years ago? Don’t you, Renee?”

“Yeah, I remember the name. In fact… I think I remember you,” Renee said, pointing at Morgan. “Quinn! You remember him too right?”

Quinn looked Morgan up and down like he was a new coat she was considering whether to wear or not. Eventually, she nodded.

“Actually, I think I do remember this guy. You’re Morgan, right?”

A gleaming smile began to stretch its way across his face. He didn’t expect anybody in Seattle to recognize him. The city was too big, and he hadn’t been in it in over a decade. No one who knew him before even knew what an ‘adult’ Morgan Moon even looked like. And yet here were these two women who claimed to remember who he was. He couldn’t hide his excitement.

“Man, I can’t believe this,” he said excitedly. “But where do you guys know me from though? Did we go to school together? Did your moms know my mom?”

Quinn hummed in thought. She and Renee turned their backs to him and began taking turns whispering something to each other, causing the other to giggle. The hero became antsy just watching them. He must have done something terribly embarrassing in his childhood that was causing them to laugh like that.

“Yeah, I got it now. I remember exactly where we know him from,” Renee said.

Instantly, the feeling from earlier returned to Morgan. The feeling that someone hostile had eyes on him like he were an animal being preyed upon from the bush – the feeling of danger. Tito, having sensed it too, began to bark and growl viciously.

“I remember that you were the one who killed us and our father…” Renee said glaring back with a look of pure malice in her eyes.

As she spoke, her sister had already started toward Morgan with light gleaming from within her clenched fist. As she swung her arm towards the hero, a broadsword materialized into her grasp and nearly cleaved the hero in two. Had he been even a fraction slower to react, his entrails would have painted the pavement red.

The parked car beside them was not so lucky, receiving a great gash on its side. Some of its windows even cracked from the air pressure Quinn’s stroke had evoked.

“…W-what just happened?” Morgan stammered in disbelief.

While he was still processing things, Tito pounced from beside his owner, tearing his leash from his grip. With fangs bared he homed in on Renee, but a sudden sharp blast of air from behind her sent the hound flying a quarter mile away and through the glass of some corner shop.

“Tito!” his little owner cried.

She glared back at whom had blown him away – Renee. She currently held an orb that levitated above his hand. It shimmered in a way that Morgan knew was no good. The air compressed before it, preparing to shoot a second and more powerful bolt of air than what she had nailed Tito with.

Morgan again moved with little time to spare. By the time the orb cast its spell he had scooped the young girl into his arms and bolted across to the other side of the street. The bolt of air he had narrowly missed tore up concrete and violently threw up debris. He might have survived it with injury, but the girl he held would have been obliterated had it hit her, like a dandelion caught by a strong gale.

“You think you can get away from us, Mr. Chosen One?” Quinn barked.

As if he had any other choice while this little girl was involved. He couldn’t fight and keep her out of harm’s way at the same time. He bounded to the nearest rooftop to make some distance, but the sisters easily matched his pace and followed up after him. A race across the roofs of Seattle began with a distraught child who probably couldn’t process a bit of it caught in the middle.

Morgan swore constantly as he darted from building to building. Those feelings of his had not been just delusions after all. How sorely he now wished that they were.