“Your time is up. Better run!”

The forest was thick and lush; amazing to look at, take in, breathe in. The air was fresh and crisp, the day was just starting and the sun was peeking over the treetops. The forest was beautiful. It was also, however, horrible to run in.

“If I find you, you will fail the test. Failure of the rest will result in immediate termination of your time here. Remember that.”

The world almost felt like it was spinning; like the ground was rising to their faces in a perpetual falling motion. The group got awoken before sunrise after staying awake until the early hours of the morning working on a project that involved the precise and careful reuniting of a Larken butterfly. So the early morning that should have been entirely out of the blue, while jarring, was not unexpected.

There were no trails, no easy path to take. Not that you would want to make yourself an easy target and take the beaten path, quite literally. You were better off running to nowhere. Although the training was in depth and very hands-on about finding clues and markers to remember where you are in a situation just as this one, doing it at 6 AM with an hour of sleep made it much more difficult, even for the above average person. Yet off we ran.