The group rushed to surround the man who had shouted. He had turned on his flashlight and pointed to a piece of sand where a small piece of parchment, the same color as the sand itself, protruded. The group finally stopped scanning the area with their eyes. The man carefully unrolled the parchment the size of a finger, and waited for someone's light before reading it.
[To advance to the next class, you must obtain a class upgrade token. One of these is hidden in your area, and another in the sand, which will disappear after an hour. This only works during the duration of the tutorial.]
The group hurried to search in the sand. Rargnes searched half-heartedly, like most people. With that number, he had no chance or almost none. Perhaps it was this possibility that continued to make him search with slow movements, gently stirring the sand, while others searched frantically, looking at every area with their flashlights, occasionally blinding him on their various turns, before feeling the ground and all the walls by rubbing their entire bodies.
Rargnes was more in reflection. A reflection, which, during this trial, prevented him from clearly searching for the thing with a 100% capacity. He was always on two tasks at once, imagining scenarios of crime against him in the street before the apocalypse. He knew it was stupid and yet… you never knew. He wasn't manic or crazy, and he didn't put extra locks on his door, just when he got home, he locked the door and added the iron chain. He wanted to live after all, and he often complained about the confusion people had with this word, as if you had to experience thrills to live.
Returning to his senses, he continued to grope without results. Honestly, it annoyed him. He just wanted to sit down but a part of him wanted to find, just as it had wanted him to get a diploma, even though he didn't want to study.
He finally listened to himself towards the end of the half-hour, sitting on the ground, looking at the others and then closing his eyes. Perhaps someone had already found it.
When the sand began to disappear, layers by layers starting to fly, each grain following another, forming fine fillets, no one claimed to have the token. Maybe searching people could have been an option, but apparently impossible.
The group found the others who bombarded them with questions. Rargnes didn't like useless conversations and stood aside, watching the situation and wondering what he was going to do.
The apocalypse had really bored and stressed him out at the same time in his previous life. Most of the time had been quiet, and then suddenly, events happened against which they could do nothing. Of course, Rargnes knew that preparation was needed beforehand, but sometimes motivation was lacking.
He was mainly motivated to understand why the group hadn't returned to the bar, and where they had gone. So he approached the group and asked, "What do we do now?"
They looked at each other without finding answers.
"I'm not sure going back is a good idea. There's a storm... better to wait for it to calm down."
A valid argument.
"And then?"
The storm had stopped after a day, even before, it had only been a wave.
"And then we join the others and bring them here."
So Rargnes waited, looking at his phone, and, bored, he thought that next time he would install a useful app, if there was ever a next time. He was already starting to make plans, not because the horror of dying and losing his body had disappeared, but because his brain liked to imagine the craziest plans. For once, this imagination would serve him well, if it wasn't a bad dream.
As night fell, Rargnes and his group stayed apart, among themselves. They occupied a part of the supermarket, and had gone to get mattresses which they had brought closer together and slept on.
The next day, the group left, little rested, on edge, and made their way back to the bar. They opened the door – which, to Rargnes's surprise, was not barricaded – and burst into the bar, searching in every nook and cranny.
They were gone, and the bar was, as in their memory, clean, as if someone had cleaned it the day before, as if they had gone to the bar a day before the apocalypse.