If you want to see some more of this, let me know. I'll put it up anyway, but only when I get really bored. Otherwise, review, I'll notice, and get some more up.

Shizuru Viola was not quite sure when the change happened-when it was that she stopped caring, that is. She only knew for certain the moment she realized that she had. It was two years ago, December and still seventy degrees in Los Angeles. Lack of beautiful weather (like snow) notwithstanding, she would never understand why people chose to live in California. Realistically speaking, it has had the highest natural disaster rate in the entire world. So, why then do people flock there by the hundreds to live? One of these days, that dismal state is just going to break off of the U.S. and float away-and she would be on the new West Coast, pointing and laughing at those silicone-poisoned, pot-smoking plastic hippies. Yes, Shizuru mused, she was quite bitter about a great many things.

Anyway, she was sitting on a park bench near downtown L.A. around three in the morning, thinking thoughts similar to those as she wished she were closer to home-somewhere with changing seasons. Beautiful colors as the leaves fell during autumn, drifts of snow colored a white that reflected the sun which made them seem like silver mountains as far as the eye could see in winter-even the angry and violent storm season that signaled the coming of spring. Here, there was only a year-round summer. Disgusting, really. Although they could not miss what they never had, she supposed.

A frightened, decidedly human cry of distress jolted the woman out of her bitter thoughts and she turned to look behind her toward the source. She saw a young girl, human by the smell of her, being held down by a group of men (also human). A few muffled screams and several minutes later, as the last man jumped off of her and he and his friends disappeared into the night leaving a broken and sobbing girl, Shizuru realized exactly what she had just witnessed. That realization took her another few minutes to process. Why had she not jumped up from the bench to defend her? Why was she not helping her now? Why had she not killed them all...most importantly, why was she not even upset? All valid questions, and yet she still did not seem to care. She simply watched the girl lie there for hours that night, sobs shaking her small frame as she tried to understand the changes in herself that she had not noticed until after they had taken place.

She supposed that she should have seen it coming long ago, as every member of her own race that she had met who had passed the age of 100 seemed to have lost most of their human qualities-compassion, chivalry, love-but she had thought them monsters at the time, beneath her-and determined to never become like them herself. So why, on that beautifully horrible December night of her 173rd year, had she only just realized that she had become one of the monsters which she so hated? Even after Shizuru's apparent epiphany, she still did not help the defiled girl up from the ground of that park that night, she simply got up and returned home to sleep for the day.

She remembered getting up the next night, and staring into the mirror for most of the night (yes, she did have a reflection). What kept the woman staring at the girl who looked back at her was how much she had changed. Shizuru could barely recognize herself. She did know that she had not paid much attention to her appearance after she had become what she was now, but in her defense, she had not the need to do so. It was an extra they all received-ethereal beauty. Still, she had never realized just how different she looked until she passed the mirror that night. Indeed, she was no longer the young girl of eighteen, only just married to the handsome and rich young Lord her parents had always wanted for her.

Her hair, she observed-once a rich and deep brown that shone with a red tint in the sunlight was still full and of a decent length (to the middle of her back), but the color was so much different than she remembered. Over a century without sunlight had taken its toll, her once deep brown hair was now a very light, tawny color. Still beautiful in it's own right of course, simply...not herself. In contrast, the eyes that had once been a deep, autumn brown, sometimes darkening into almost blackness were now a thick, wine red, attracting even the most avoidant of human eyes with their unearthly pull. Needless to say, her once perfectly toned skin was now anemic and pallid. At least her teeth still looked great, she remembered thinking bitterly, if you discounted the daintily pointed canines. Then again, some people found that attractive in this day and age.

Shizuru spent a very long time after that alone with her thoughts and sometimes simply staring into that mirror, trying to figure out what had changed and why, even what she should do about said change. The problem was, she just did not seem to care. That was the only thing that even concerned her, the only reason she had even understood that her heart had become cold-the fact that she should have cared, but did not. So, for a few weeks, she mulled over what she should do to try and return to the self she did not dislike so much. Although realistically, at this point Shizuru disliked everything that existed equally. Therein lie the problem.

Late in the summer after the first year of near-solitude in that Hellhole humans called California, Shizuru had a sort of idea and moved inland again, desperately missing climates similar to the home she lost so long ago. There was nowhere like London in America, but she would have to make due with what she could find. So the woman came to make a residence in Southwestern New York, in a town called Granville. No, it did not sound all that attractive, but it was large enough to have a community college and quite a few residents, and yet remained small enough for her appearance to attract very little attention. Yes, that was her grand plan. The Lady Viola was going to attend college, 150 years late.

Then again, there had not been universities in her time, either. So she could not be held accountable for her previous lack of interest in such things. She would be taking night classes after sundown, of course-either way, she knew had decided to look in a very strange place for the feeling, the sense of caring that she seemed to have lost. She hoped she would find the humans interesting enough to care for them-and this was the only age group she had ever paid any mind to as far as humans were concerned. The young ones seemed idiotic these days, the old ones too set in their ways. The age for adulthood, she had found, was also much later than it had been when she had been a child herself. She had been prepared to be a wife and mother by the age of fifteen, and had been married at sixteen-and that was quite late in her time, as it was, her parents had been relieved that the Lord had wanted her.

Shizuru located a beautiful abandoned two-story red Victorian house there near the college which seemed to have been empty for decades-likely one of those homes owned by some wealthy person who was going to float off with the rest of California whom knew not or could not be bothered to care of its existence as far as to have it torn down or taken care of either way. It looked decent enough on the outside-no broken window seals on the front side of the house although there were a few in the back-but no one was likely to pay that much attention. She spent a few nights moving things in, and then working out ways to insulate the home from the coming winter's chill.

She had to make it seem as if the house were hers, and lived in. She had to buy carpeting, fix linoleum, things of that sort. She was quiet and did all of these things in secret (lucky for her, she had 150 years to perfect her home improvement skills) and it was finished within two months. She covered the holes in the back windows of the house with plywood (as well as covering the front windows with plywood so that her light did not leak out and alert any unwanted guests to her presence there), and since there was not much rotting in the floorboards or support beams (very surprising) and the roof was leaking so little that she could fix it herself with only minimal tools (even more surprising), the old house seemed beautiful and well-taken care of by the time the autumn came and it was time for college. In fact, she had only just replaced the old fireplace in the large and comfortable den the week before classes started.