Loke's head hurts, but it's only partially because of all the watching in the confined room.

People always said to watch TV in a lit room far from the screen, and everyone has done exactly none of that thus far because they're either brats or idiots, him included. Adding that on to the chronic migraine? No wonder his head hurts.

"Oh Loke, you're finally taking a walk with a beautiful girl, but you're not even looking at her?" Cana says teasingly, keeping in step beside him. She'd left her purse behind in the room, walking around in just her bikini top and jeans, admiring the fake sun.

Loke chuckle, swiping his hair aside flamboyantly, "oh, pardon me, milady. Would you prefer I hold your hand? Would you like a hot towel? Or shall I carry you like a princess? Your prince is here to listen to your every demand."

Cana cackles.

"You know, when you laugh so honestly like that, I'm actually hurt," Loke admits.

"But it's so funny to watch you immediately switch gears," Cana says, wiping a tear from her laughter. "How do you do it? Seriously."

"It's called talent," Loke insists, smug. Then he cringes at a spike of pain through his head and groans, shooting aside. He reaches up to it, but the pulse of muscle weakness interrupts his movement and makes him stagger.

"What's wrong?" Cana's quick to change as well, her voice softening in the way it always did when she knew things were serious.

Loke straightens quickly, hand reaching up to massage his temples. "Nothing, the sun's hurting my eyes," he says, adjusting his sunglasses. "I think I'm heading back first."

"Oh... alright."

Cana watched him as he left.

She was not convinced.

-

"What's Natsu doing?"

"He's trying to fly with flames at his feet like what we saw in the opening song."

"Oh. Is he succeeding?"

"No."

-

"It's nostalgic," Gray says, stepping across a river. Levy follows after him, trying to get to the end of the boundary just to pave out the distance they had to work with.

"What is?" Levy asks, taking Gray's hand as they hop down a particularly high edge.

Levy was supposed to help with lunch preparations, but it seemed like there were plenty of hands available, so she went out to survey the landscape with Gray instead.

They had a quick once-over when they got here, but now that they had a note, they ought to scale out just how far the expanse goes.

Gray hums, "you know, having an illusory expanse like this to play around in," he says, "we used to have a member that could make small pocket dimensions like these, right?"

"Ah, I remember," Levy says, "it wasn't as big as this, but it felt huge when we were kids! Reedus would always draw up things for us to play with when we were inside. I wonder what happened to that guy though..."

"He left the guild, I think," Gray says, "some sort of magical injury or something."

"Eh, is that what happened?" Levy asks, catching up to him quickly.

"Well, that's what I heard from the Master at least-- ah," Gray set a hand on the tree, catching a carved mark they had left when they started. "Here it is."

"Of the other end?" Levy says, noting that down and stopping her stopwatch and showing it to Gray. "So there are two solid walls, one with stairs and the other with a large rock-climbing cliff. But the other two walls are looped, and we'll end up on the other if we walk long enough."

"And in between all of that are caves, rivers, and some animals," Gray says, looking over to find a deer. "Though I only see herbivores and omnivores thus far, so I guess this isn't a natural ecosystem."

Levy writes that down. "Whoever left us here expected us to live here for a long time, definitely," she says, "long enough they actually built a whole artificial land for us to survive in."

"What's the point of that if we got a kitchen?"

"Uhm, training?"

"Training this, training that," Gray sighs, "I mean, I do get the charm... but we usually don't really train for anything other than short term goals like 'let's make S Class' or 'let's defeat Erza!', so it's hard to know how to respond to all this."

Levy chuckles, "yeah. Even if they give us a training ground as great as this... well, survival is one thing, but training and getting stronger? I mean, we don't really know how far up we should go, or where we should get started, you know?"

With that part of the boundary charted, they began to make their way back to the center of the grounds, where the rest of the group were convened.

"But you know, Gray," Levy says, "I wonder how much stronger the future us are, compared to the us now."

Gray hums at that.

"You think it'll inspire us or something?"

Levy giggles. "I'm sure it'll inspire Natsu, at the very least."

Gray shrugs, sighing contentedly, "I guess you have a point."

-

"Lunch is ready, everyone!"

"Yes!"

"NATSU YOU'RE TRACKING MUD! NATSU!"

"Hose yourself off before you get in!"

"Boo!"

-

This whole 'time is stopped outside' business may be relatively good news for everyone in the room, but it's the exact opposite for Loke, because his magic consumption isn't getting any less.

He's used to maintaining a gradual amount for living now-- but something here just stressed him out. It's like coming to another dimension, being stuck in between-- but unlike in the Celestial Spirit realm, there's none of the King's soothing magic to heal his own.

It's unsettling.

Not impeding in the physical sense, but the dissonance made his magic confused. He'll need some more time to get used to this-- but until then...

He can't work up much of an appetite, so he finds himself surveying other rooms.

The kitchen and the dining hall aside, there are way too many rooms for this number of people. They hadn't even opened all of the rooms yet, since they've been sleeping in the hall this whole time.

"What'cha doin, Loke?"

He jumps. Mira is there, in the middle of tying her hair up.

"Oh, Mira. Aren't you eating with everyone else?" he asks, fixing his glasses as a guise for fine-tuning his fake smile.

Mira hums, "well, I ate when I was cooking. So, what are you doing here instead of eating?"

Loke smiles, "I've already eaten."

Mira raises a brow, "already? Well, whatever then," then this she-demon, like a bloody persistent butterfly, asks once again because she's a master not at getting the clue, "so, what are you doing here?"

Loke's smile is getting dangerously close to burn-the-witch territory. He breathes in, breathes out-- and reminds himself that this is his headache narrating. It is not him.

"I was looking through the rooms," he explains, "there was one room that had a teddy bear, remember? So I looked through things, and I found one room with a bookshelf. I was wondering if there were more."

Every room was arranged neatly and designed in a uniform white-and-warm-brown aesthetic, but there were minute differences. One room had a makeup table, another had a proper desk equipped with a lamp.

It was like someone had made an attempt to personalize each room, but never got around to completing the process.

Mira looks interested now. "Can I join you?"

Loke reckons this will distract him well enough. "Of course!"

-

"You've been brooding all day, Laxus, what's up?"

Laxus' frown turns straight up into a grimace when Gildarts approaches him.

"I always look like this," he grumbles, arms crossed and looking away. "Don't you have anyone better to annoy?"

"Natsu spits food when he's eating, so I'd rather not," Gildarts says, because obviously the only other option here is Natsu. Of course.

Laxus broods against his palm.

Like hell he's gonna become this old man's entertainment.

"So, your friends ditched you?" Gildarts teases, and Laxus feels the sudden urge to chuck an electric-charged pillow at the old man.

"They can do whatever the hell they want," Laxus sneers, "they have friends."

"Unlike you?"

"Oh shut up."

There was a japanese-styled low table in one of the rooms, so Levy and Freed had it moved out to use as their writing and information gathering desk. Even now they were hunched over it, analysing all the information they've gotten thus far.

Evergreen was analysing the newfound library with Loke and Mira apparently, and Bickslow, ever the apparent gentleman errand boy, is helping everyone else in the kitchen. Which left Laxus here in the watching room, wondering what to do.

The Thunder God Tribe always stuck together in missions, but the reality was that in the guild, they had their own cliques. Of course they do-- the guild is family, after all.

Bickslow was always the most social of the pack-- heck, he even approached Loke, the newest member, and they were friends. Freed mostly kept to himself, but the bookworms of the guild often convened at the guild's archives, so there was a relationship there, if anything else. Even Evergreen had her girl friends from the dorm.

Laxus was the only one that never got closer to anyone else. There was a friendship with Cana once upon a time, but even they grew apart.

Laxus only had the Thunder God Tribe-- but the Thunder God Tribe had others. That was a fact, and Laxus never knew to look beyond it.

"You know, Laxus, you really ought to talk to someone one day," Gildarts told him. "You're old enough to drink, but you avoid it all the time around us."

Laxus scowled at that. Gildarts of all people should know why Laxus avoided drinking.

"I know there was stuff going on with Ivan and all-- but it's history now," Gildarts told him.

It is not history. Laxus still didn't get a proper explanation for all that yet, and Makarov only wanted to keep more secrets from him.

"Don't you think you ought to let loose again?" Gildarts says, "grab a drink, and let everything out. We're a guild, but we're also a bar, you know? If there's anything we're good at aside from destruction, we're good at being sounding boards."

(So pretend you're not an embarrassment to society and rant out all your worries to the nearest barmaid you can find?)

Yeah, Laxus can never do that.

"Maybe some other day," he mutters, noncommittally.

Gildarts gives him a skeptical look. "That's fine," he says, accepting the reluctance. "Even if you go too far-- we'll still be here to punch you back to the ground."

Laxus chortles dryly at that. "Looking forward to that."

-

-

It took a fussy lunch, a session of angry cleaning, a lot of screaming and then a lecture session-- but they eventually settled back down in the living room, finally ready to view the next episode.

"We really gotta kick back and hurry the efforts," Levy says, pouting. "Look how much we have left. We're never gonna finish if we go at this pace!"

Gray groans, rubbing his head from where Erza'd left a bump. "How about we just skip ahead, then?"

"No!" Levy hisses at him. "Don't you dare, Gray! There's an order to this. No spoilers!"

"Levy, saying 'no spoilers' when we're literally watching the future is a bit of an oxymoron," Freed says, kneading his temples.

"Still!"

"Speaking of which, do we have all the information sorted out?" Erza sits on the couch, reaching for the sprawled out papers on the desk. "We've got our landscape, and a log of the rooms as well."

"Yeah," Mira says, "we're gonna do a headcount of the animals upstairs later, too. To see if they replenish just like everything else we use."

"Ooh! Does that mean I get to hunt animals?" Natsu cheers.

"Once we get our data sorted out, yeah," Lisanna chuckles, "it's key to survival, after all."

Natsu made a disapproving sound. "No, the key to survival is food, water, shelter! We've got all of that, now just eat!"

"Aye!" Happy agreed.

Gray couldn't help but laugh at that. "Spoken like a true jungle boy, eh?"

Natsu really was the pioneer of surviving in wildlife, compared to everyone else. He was literally an animal himself.

"But we're not just surviving, we're living in an unknown location," Lisanna says, firmly, "so we need information as well. It's important, Natsu!"

The boy pouts, "I hate all the complicated stuff."

Levy giggles at that. "That's fine," she says, "that's why the rest of us are here, after all."

-

"Hey, don't you think this Mira's kinda cute?" Loke says, his bravery showing through because he's currently as far away from Mira as he can get.

Mira's eyes glint with murderous intent.

"Now that you mention it..." Gildarts mutters to himself.

"Mira-nee is adorable!" Lisanna cheers, "Mira-nee appreciation, yes!"

A few eyes turned to Mira-- and to everyone's surprise, the she-demon just sat there, burying her face in her palms in embarrassment.

"Please put me out of my misery."

"Never!" Lisanna beams, hugging her sister tightly.

Cana spits out her drink and proceeds to die of laughter. Gildarts joins her in the exact same manner, simultaneously choking themselves to death.

"That drunkard," Laxus mutters.

"Man, Wakaba has a ton of women troubles, huh," Gray says, "he was like that when I first met him too, I remember. Couldn't believe this drunkard outside was a member of Fairy Tail, of all things."

"Yeah, and then he got his ass kidnapped," Cana snickers. "Unsalvageable, that guy."

Erza blinks, "that before I joined, wasn't it?"

"Before most of us, actually. I think I'm the only one that was there," Cana says. "And Gray of course. Heck, does anyone here even remember Circus Night?"

"Circus what?"

"Oh, the guys that didn't get the clue about our mythical creature guild name theme," Gildarts says, "I totally remember them."

There's laughter after that as some people vaguely remember the existence of that small guild in the corner of Magnolia.

Loke manages an exasperated, "...we had a theme?"

"I have no idea why, but we just started doing it at some point," Gray explains, "then it just became Fiore's thing, y'know-- all our guilds got a mythical animal in the name."

Loke tried to name a guild in Fiore that didn't have a mythical animal in the name and came up completely blank.

Gosh darn, he didn't even notice.

Gildarts hums in thought. "I think Fairy Tail was one of the first-- then Phantom followed us out of spite, and the trend went on."

"Yeah Cana, you drink too much," Erza agrees.

Cana pouts, "blame the ones that got me addicted."

"It's such a shame that the alcohol automatically replenishes in this place, too," Erza says miserably, "I would wish to watch you run out of it for once."

Cana grins toothily, raising her mug of booze, "nuh-uh! It's my boyfriend now."

"Hey, learn to share."

"Didn't know you were bi, Gray."

The ice mage's face turns bright red. "You know that's not what I meant!"

Cana cackles.

Loke chuckles. "I knew you guys were gonna regret that."

Natsu makes a noise of death, "idiot me! Why didn't you take the moneeeey!"

"For the sake of Fairy Tail's name and honour, right?" Mira teased. "You're so awesome, Natsu. I look up to you."

"I can't hear you over your sarcasm, Mira..." Natsu grumbles miserably, knowing he really brought this upon himself. Like, it couldn't be helped-- but he could still be upset about it. He had that right. But STILL.

"Come to think of it, we left off with Erza's entrance, didn't we?" Lisanna says, "I can't wait!"

Erza huffs, a smile on her face. "I'm looking forward to it as well. Maybe we can finally dispel Lucy's awful impressions of me."

"I'm sure she has hope that you're nice," Levy assures her, "she's probably aware that Natsu, Gray and Happy were just exaggerating."

"Well, that's obviously Erza, ain't it?" Elfman says, "that's nice. She got a whole episode to herself."

"I want one too!" Happy whines.

Erza smiles smugly, "I get a whole introduction, huh?"

Mira pouts, "no fair. Mine is coming, I just know it!"

"No, Lucy already knows you, Mira-nee," Lisanna says, "that's not how it works."

"Fortune telling? Ah man, Master's gonna pawn that one off to me again, isn't he?" Cana whines. "He always does that."

"Well, in this guild it's either you or Laki, y'know. No helping that."

"Why can't more of you learn how to fortune tell already!"