Chapter 14: If Only I Knew

"Come on, we're getting ready to leave!" I faintly heard someone's' voice as my eyes slowly opened. I could see the blurred color of blue standing at the foot of my bed with someone pulling at my covers. I just sighed and ignored them, still half asleep. "We'll leave without you if you don't wake up," Jay started to pull harder on my blanket. Well, maybe if he'd stop pulling on my blanket I'd get up. I kicked his hand rather hard and he pulled it away, holding it in his other "Hey, hey, don't kick me."

"Sorry," I finally threw my covers off of me, watching them fall on the floor. I yawned and pulled myself out of my warm bed, wishing that I could have had like five more minutes like a lot of other people would probably want as well. "Now please get out, gotta get dressed," I waited for him to get out of the room before grabbing my Ninja Gi. I looked over at Nya's bed and just realized that she was gone, I wonder where she was. I shrugged and put my Gi on, then headed out for the training area. I walked in to see the guys talking to each other. "Heyo. You guys ready to go?"

The five turned to me, Lloyd speaking up. "Yeah, we were just waiting on you."

"Sorry to keep you waiting," I laughed.

"No problem," Kai insisted. "Let's get going, I wanna find out about all of this as soon as we can."

"Same," the six of us made our way for the front of the monastery before stopping. Weren't we supposed to be leaving for the monastery, not stopping in front of it. I watched the others form their elemental dragons, Kai and Jay starting to fly off. "Uh, guys, forgetting something?" I called to them. Didn't they remember that I hadn't learned that yet and that I couldn't just fly there on my own? I swear to god if they didn't, it'd just prove to me that they weren't paying attention, especially Cole and he was the one that I told!

Cole looked down at me. "Oh, I almost forgot," almost? How do you almost forget something? You either forget it or you don't. "Need a lift?" he cracked a half smile to me, landing the dragon so I could hop on as well.

"Obviously," I did exactly that, right before he flew off after the others. I wasn't sure where we were going, they didn't tell me where they were hiding out, but I trusted them that they'd get us there in one piece. "So, when am I gonna learn to summon a dragon too, huh?" I questioned him. Not surprisingly, it was one of the first, if not the first, thing that wanted to learn. I mean, who wouldn't want to learn to summon a dragon that they could ride on? It'd sure be easier to travel around. especially alone. That way I wouldn't need to walk everywhere I went, it would have been helpful to know before I came here.

"As soon as we get this snake situation sorted out, don't worry," good, I was looking forward to it being the first thing that I'd end up learning, like I had been hoping. He continued to fly behind the others, and it had been a quick thirty minutes before we actually got somewhere that wasn't forest. And where was it, fricken Ninjago City! In all my life I'd only been there a couple of times, and it seemed so much bigger now for some reason. We landed in a park in the heart of the city, colossus buildings surrounding the whole thing. They looked at each other, then into the streets. "Come one guys," Cole told us as he started running to the streets.

I ran behind all five, wondering where they were going. Where could the snakes be inside the city? We stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and at a manhole. I raised an eyebrow "Where are we going exactly?" They all pointed to the manhole, which meant... Dear god "Don't tell me we need to go down there," I groaned. Why would they want to go down there in the first place, the snakes had to be living there. I really didn't feel like ending up smelling like crap, but we had to go down there. "You know what, screw it, let's go."

I followed them down the later, almost falling down. "Damn you old, rusty ladder," I landed on the ground and jogged to catch up to the guys. It was pretty dark down there so Kai used some of his fire to light up the tunel enough so that we could see where we were going. Like I suspected, it smelt like crap down there so I covered up my nose. "How can they live down here?" I wondered.

"They're snakes, what do you expect?" Jay inquired. He was right, they were snakes and based off of what I could tell they didn't really seem to care about where they lived. Hey, if they wanted to do that then so be it, it wasn't my problem. They stopped me at a large opening in the side of the sewer, where Jay yelled. "Yo, Snakes, we're coming in!" they kept on walking so I kept on following, ending up in an area that was full of snakes. Hypnobrai, Constrictai, you name it. I got a little tense, tightening my fist, ready to fight if I needed to, it was just my instinct to raise my guard at a moment like that.

One of the larger Hypnobrai came slithering over to us. "Good to see you five again, it's been a while," he greeted them. I noticed a long tail trailing him which made me suddenly realize that that was the Hypnobrai general, Scales from what I have heard. "And someone new, I see," he added, his gaze shifting to me.

"Yeah, this is Cass, the Master of Wind and newest member of the team."

"Well, nice to meet you, but anyways, what brings you here?" He questioned. Did he have absolutely no clue about the snakes that had attacked the women back in Jamanakai Village yesterday? Either he was really stupid or he had no clue what had happened, because he would have know that that's why were were there if he had known.

"Uh, we wanted to see if you knew about the attack over in Jamanakai Village, a couple of Constrictai," Cole told him. Scale's curious expression immediately turned into a confused one. It didn't take much for me to realize that he didn't actually know anything about the attack. Then, like I was thinking before, the ones that attacked yesterday were rogue, or that's at least what made the most sense now. "Do you know anything about it?"

"No, I don't," just like he was leading on, he didn't know about it. "What I can tell you is that a few of the constrictai have gone missing, about a week ago to be exact. I know for a fact that they wouldn't just run off like that and attack someone."

"What makes you so sure?" I wondered. I wasn't sure about the others, who I had the feeling were close allies with him, didn't find it weird that he had no clue about the incident whatsoever or not. I wasn't going to wait around for one of them so speak about about it so I took the role of doing that myself. "I mean, how do you know they wouldn't do that? You can't know what all of you are thinking all the time, if at all," I just wanted to see what he had to say about that, and if he had anything else to say about the matters.

He stood in front of us, silent for a moment before acknowledging "The last I remember, they were off to help someone near Jamanakai Village, but they never came back. I was getting worried, I even sent some of the venomari to see what the deal with them was, but they didn't come back either. I fear that something bad happened to them."

I rubbed my chin, starting to grow a little suspicious about all of this. First we find out that they left to help someone near Jamanakai Village but ended up attacking someone instead? Were they lying to him and really went there to do that? No, that didn't make any sense. And then they never came back, that doesn't sound right to me. Something seemed off about it and I had the feeling that something bad did happen. I knew that they were snakes, and they haven't exactly been the best creatures around, but that didn't mean we could just stand around and do nothing. "That doesn't sound good."

"I agree," Zane pitched in. He walked in front of Scales, adding "We'll look into this, don't worry. We'll try to see what happened to them," after talking for another minute or so about the situation and the fact that we were going to try them, we finally left.

"Thank god we're out of that toilet," I muttered, thankful that I didn't need to smell the nose killing stench of the sewage system anymore. I was the last one to climb out, and the last to join in on a circle that the others created. "So, what are we going to do about this?" I asked them, curious to hear what they thought about all of it and what they were thinking that we should have done.

"I think that a couple of us should go over to Jamanakai Village and check it out," Lloyd suggested. "We don't all need to go, it's not that hard of a job for only two or three of us to do."

"I say that it's you, Zane, and I. We can go now," Cole chimed in, turning to Jay and Kai "You two can go back to the Monastery and train with her a bit," I didn't see why we couldn't all go, it wouldn't hurt to have us all go, but I wasn't going to argue with it because all five of them agreed to it.

I sighed "Okay, let's go," I started to walk off, remembering I didn't have the ability to use an elemental dragon yet. "Still gonna need a ride," Jay let me ride with him back to the monastery which somehow managed to feel like a faster trip than the way over to Ninjago City. I was happy about that because Jay's Elemental Dragon was shocking me a little bit, obviously because it was a lightning dragon, of course. Thank god I didn't chose to ride with Kai, I bet that I would've been burnt and not shocked, I'd take suffering from a little shock over a burn any day. "I wanna get straight to training. Maybe the two of can show me how you train? I could show you a couple of things as well."

"Yeah, that sounds fine. We'll start in ten," Kai said, walking away, along with Jay. Okay, so like I was curious about, I was finally going to get the chance to train with them. Yeah, it wasn't all five of them but I was going to take what I could get. I wasn't going to try to get them to show me how to summon a dragon or anything like that, I was fine with just learning how their training worked. Well, I'd accept to learn anything other than the rules of their training if they offered it to me, I wouldn't turn anything down. I just didn't want to look like I rushed things by asking them to teach me a specific thing when they weren't all there.