Author's Note: I decided to merge together the prologue with chapter one, because there was a decided lack of DL-ness that I found offensive. I like this better.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything you recognize. I don't own anything, period. I am a fanfiction hobo.
Chapter One
In Which I Don't Expect the Unexpected, and the Unexpected Happens To Happen
"PARTY AT SARAH'S HOUSE!"
I winced, holding the phone away from my ear as my best friend and crowed excitedly. I'd just let spill that my parents were going to London for a month on some kind of investors' business trip, leaving the house in my command. To me, this meant time to indulge my hermit tendencies. To Rachael, this meant alcohol and boys in large quantities.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," I calmed my friend like I would an excitable horse. "Simmer down, Rach. I'd like to still be able to hear when I'm sixty. I'd also like to stay in my house until I'm out of college. I imagine my parent's wouldn't be too happy to come home to beer-drenched carpet and slices of bologna stuck to the walls, and I'm not much for the whole 'starving college student' idea."
"What? Like we'd leave the house looking like shat?" Yes, shat. Rachael was renowned for astonishing fluency in swearing as well as creatively avoiding it, depending on her mood.
"No farking way," I snapped. Okay, so maybe she rubbed off on me. "But I doubt you'd be too keen on playing Merry Maids with me afterwards."
"Oh, come on, Sarah." I could just see her large brown eyes rolling at the stubbornness of her introverted friend. Rachael was the perfect debutante as well as social butterfly extraordinaire. She just couldn't understand the loners of the world. "It's just harmless fun. Kickbacks, you know? No more than twenty people. I'm not talking fifty-person rave."
I groaned loudly for her benefit.
Rachael would not be swayed. "We'll do it in the first week. I'm sure you'll have plenty of time to spruce up after that, and even more to live like someone stranded on a desert island."
I glared at the nearest red thing, imagining it to be my friend's red-haired self. Said thing happened to be a beanie baby crab with a horribly happy smile stitched onto its face. Damn crab. Pissing me off. "Well, now that you put it that way, you're an ass."
"Smirnoff, Sarah," Rachael sing-songed temptingly. "Envision grape Smirnoff..!"
I snickered despite myself, and she joined me smugly. Hook, line, and sucker.
"Alright, Rachael. We'll see."
What followed was a string of jubilant cursing, punctuated by words like "dang" and "spiffilicious," and phrases like "kick mass azzle." All very, very loudly.
"I said 'we'll see,' not 'let's do it'!"
"Yeah, well, 'we'll see,'" Rachael purred, convinced of her victory. "Call me when the parentals are gone, okay?"
"Okay," I replied, grinning. The girl was irrepressible. "They leave in two days."
"Sweet chickens! I love you!"
"Love you too, you spaz. Bye."
"Ciao!" Click.
Setting the phone down, I slapped my hand over my eyes and flopped in a boneless sprawl onto one of the several mismatched couches in my living room. Was I so possessive of my free time that even now I was plotting my escape? It wasn't like I had anything exciting planned for my month of liberty. Work. Renting movies. Junk food. Work. Drawing. Work. Playing my music so loud that I was bound to be deaf long before sixty. Work.
Hey, I was saving up for college. I never actually said I was in it yet.
I frowned as I surveyed the whole of my life from my place on my sofa. I never had many friends. Just one or two very close ones and a plethora of acquaintances that had the nerve to call me friend when they were really my friends' friends. I'd lived in Bend, Oregon for all of my nineteen years, yet I knew practically nobody. I had spent the majority of my life by myself, daydreaming, clunking around on the computer, and sitting around in ponderous silence. Maybe that was all my life was. One big, ponderous silence.
For the love of God, I was even trying to dodge out of a party. A party that promised to have no consequences.
What other conclusion could be arrived at?
"I am such a loser," I moaned piteously. I wasn't without sympathy, however, for Zeke, my one-year-old golden retriever, loped over to me to deliver an exceptionally slobbery kiss to my cheek.
Startled, I flailed my way into a sitting position and glowered at his adoring face before touching a hand to my own, staring at my glistening fingers as I drew them away. Eww. "And I'm slimy…"
"Rruurph," commiserated Zeke.
"…and don't forget to lock the doors at night!"
"Yeah, I know. Those darn rapists." I watched my mother as she fluttered about, neatly placing clothes and toiletries in her suitcase. 'Darn' was actually a necessity in this case—mommy darling would probably make me drink holy water if she heard me utter an oath. "Mom, I've been home alone before. I'm a big girl. If psychos try to get me, I'll just kill them first."
Mother fixed me with a reproachful, worried look. "Don't use such violent words, sweetie. They make you sound hard."
I choked on a perverted quip that crouched on the tip of my tongue, settling for a melodramatic sigh. "I've gotta get to work," I announced, rolling to my feet from my place plopped on my parent's enormous, poofy white bed.
Mom whirled around to face me, beaming her perfect smile at me. "I love you, sweetie," she crooned, pulling me into a hug I returned firmly. My personality and hers were as opposite as ink and bleach, but she was my mom, and I loved her dearly. "I'll miss you."
"I'll miss you too, mom," I smiled. "Love ya oodles. Bring me back something shiny."
She laughed, and I wandered into the living room, seeking my dad. I found him perched in our most elegant chair—a dark blue velvet throne that looked like it belonged to an emperor. Or just a snobby Victorian lady. My dad looked silly in it. He always reminded me of a lumberjack, what with his dark brown beard, burly frame and ruddy complexion. He also reminded me of an owl. It was the nose.
And the bastard just had to pass the feature on to me.
"I gotta get to work," I echoed to him. He turned his bright blue eyes up to me from their place riveted to the newspaper, smiling brightly. "You guys'll be gone by the time I get back."
"Yep," he said cheerily. "And I'm glad. Glad, damnit!"
I snickered. I had a lot in common with my old man. "I'll miss you too, precious father," I growled as I ruffled his graying dark blond hair mercilessly.
"Aw, my young fruit loop," he said, standing up to hug me and kiss my forehead. "I'll miss you too. Have a good day at work. Don't get fired."
"Okay, but just because you said so," I returned. Then I blinked. "Whatcha reading?"
He blinked back at me. "It's a newspaper."
"No kidding?" Mock-glaring at him, I snatched it from his hands and read the headline again to make sure I had read it right.
Extraterrestrial Activity In The High Desert!
"What kind of garbage are they printing these days?" I sniffed, shoving the paper back into my dad's hands. "Honestly. Light rings and humanoid non-human whatevers. You wanna know what else Central Oregon is known for? Meth labs!" Hugging my dad again as he grinned at my good-humoured tirade, I turned and stalked to the front door. "Besides, life isn't as exciting as that. Crack-heads, sure. Supernatural activity, no."
"I'll see you in a month, sweet pea," Dad said, smiling fondly.
"Crack heads!" I cried in farewell, waving gracelessly as I left.
"Lord," I grumbled as I slammed my car door shut. "Eight dollars and twenty-five cents an hour just isn't worth it." Work was a nightmare. My main manager was the most critical hag on the face of the planet. I constantly prayed that she'd "meet her Maker," but I'm certain that if she did, she'd just tell Him what a shitty job He did making the rainbow.
After I rescued my hair from the jam I'd unintentionally trapped it in, I stalked fuming into the house, muttering to myself like a schizophrenic. Zeke padded along behind me, beaming furrily, oblivious to my less than chipper mood. He followed as I stormed into my room, stripping viciously out of my work clothes. I paused before dawning my pajamas, which I wore whenever I was at home, to regard myself in the mirror.
I wasn't a modern beauty. Modern beauties were all straight-lines, thin and athletic, with delicate faces and slender hands. I was curves. I was built like the Vikings I descended from. I was owl-beaked and wild-haired. I was fifty pounds heavier than the average fashion model, with the strong hands of a tomboy and the ink-stained fingers of an artist. I wasn't ugly, no. At times I thought myself rather pretty. But I wasn't the norm, either.
I was a wildebeest among gazelle.
Cringing, I hurriedly gathered my home clothes and fled the condemning presence of the mirror, seeking comfort in the form of a hot shower.
I'd have stayed in lot longer than a half-hour too, that is if I hadn't gotten the distinct feeling that something wasn't… right. The half-nauseating, half thrilling feeling that comes when you know you're going get into a head-on collision with the semi-truck barreling toward you—
I had actually been waxing eerily poetic about the sensation when I heard something that stopped any excess thinking dead in its tracks. It was a deep, monotonous humming sound. I was climbing out of the shower when it grew noticeably louder. Baffled and more than a little afraid, I quickly slung a towel around myself and crept cautiously into the living room, from whence the humming was emanating.
Only now it wasn't a mere hum. It was full-blown roaring, eliminating my desperately logical guess that everything electric in my house was overloading. I was just considering running into the computer room at the end of the hall and diving out the window when an explosion of light nearly fried the contacts right out of my eyes. I screamed for my dad instinctively, vaguely aware of Zeke's terrified crying somewhere in the house, the sound somehow magnifying my own fear a thousand fold. I pressed back against the couch behind me, compelled to watch the scene by freakish curiosity as the light molded itself into the shape of a circle. The cacophony was intensely painful at that point, and I wondered if my ears were bleeding—
When everything was suddenly deathly silent.
My humorous side urged me to snigger at the irony that I'd indeed gone deaf long before turning sixty. I was tempted to follow it's prodding if only for the hope of hearing my sniggering, but before I did, a dark figure was spit from the pool of light and hurled to the floor like a paper pushed by the gales of a hurricane.
Suddenly the light and the noise was gone, leaving me alone with what appeared to be a long, lumpy, black curtain, crumpled on the floor lifelessly.
I stood where I was for a long time, gawking at the curtain as if I expected it to fly onto my face like one of those nasty hand-thingies from Alien.
Alien…
Memories of the mocked newspaper article my dad was reading that morning returned to my like a punch to the gut. Did an alien just beam into my house? …Did an alien just beam its curtain into my house? And why was the curtain moving?
I squished back further against the couch as the curtain rose to it's feet, groaning and snarling. I gasped, and it whirled around, staring at me with razor-sharp eyes the colour of flames.
Eyes I knew as well as the white hair that fell into them.
My mind raced, analyzing the situation. His eyes were gold. Okay, after The Soulforge. His robes were black velvet, which meant he was from somewhere in between his fainting at the Great Library in Palanthas and his kind-of-not-really death in the Abyss. Summarized, he was at his most ambitious, most dangerous, most powerful zenith.
And he was standing in my living room.
And I was only wearing a towel.
Of course, my frazzled, disbelieving thoughts spanned about a half-second, because he almost immediately slouched back to the floor, convulsing violently with the most horrid, gurgling, sickly coughing I'd ever heard in my life.
So I did what anyone would do with the Archmagus, Raistlin Majere, fighting for his next breath on their living room floor.
I shrieked and ran, locking myself in my parents' room.
Review and I'll let you touch his robes!
