Lightning illuminated the night sky, and a thunderous roar shook the ground in the small town of Austin, Nevada. The town had seen these strong storms before, but never had they lasted more than a few minutes. The rain was a never relenting torrential downpour. Most of the population was already inside at this time of night, they smart enough to know going out at this hour in the terrible weather wouldn't be the best of ideas. However, there was one among the few who did brave the outdoors…
"Nonono. You've got to be joking," Orthani Mynx yelled at her truck as the power died and it started rolling to a stop. "Oh come on, not now you piece of junk," she muttered as she turned the key once it came to a halt, attempting to get it started up again.
After making a horrible whining noise for more than a few seconds, she stopped and waited a minute before trying again. Same result.
I'm 3 miles away from home, 3 miles! Three lousy stinking miles! She thought to herself as she growled audibly and rested her forehead on the steering wheel of the old Ford truck that was at least 20 years old. It couldn't wait until I was at home to die on me? No! It just has to make me trudge through a storm just to get there. Fantastic. She slammed her hand against the steering wheel and yanked the keys out of the ignition and sat there to see if the storm would at least let up enough for her to start making a run for cover. Even though she was out in the middle of nowhere, she figured there was probably an abandoned gas station somewhere down the road where she could hide out until the storm had passed.
It didn't. It only started raining harder, and the fact that there were no street lights made visibility made it that much worse. Orthani sighed and looked in the back seat. She hadn't even bothered bringing an umbrella with her since the town wasn't expecting the rain to hit until two days from now.
"I swear, if I get pneumonia and die, I hope you never get towed off so you can stay here and rust to the point you just break into a million pieces for absolutely no reason," she ranted to her truck as she grabbed her purse from the passenger seat and threw the strap across her shoulder. She grabbed her phone from the dash, even though the storm had knocked the phone lines out and had rendered it useless, and shoved it into her jeans pocket. She grabbed her long sleeve knit jacket and shoved her arms through it, knowing that going out into the rain with only her wife-beater like undershirt and a light weight short sleeve shirt would definitely get her sick.
Lightning struck again as she opened the door of her truck and stepped out into the pouring rain. She slammed the door shut and locked it, knowing that if she just left it there unlocked, someone could strip the thing down before she even made it back home. As she turned away from her vehicle she realized she hadn't even been out in the rain for a minute and she was already soaked. She jumped when thunder exploded over her head. And now for the longest, coldest, and most terrible night of my life. Way to go, Orth. Way to go, she thought to herself as she began walking down the unlit road ahead of her towards shelter.
The wind picked up the further she walked, making it hard to keep her footing against the slick asphalt of the road. The sound of the rain hitting the ground was almost as deafening as the thunder when it rolled through the clouds. Her only source of light was the split seconds of lightning illuminating the sky. Her brown, curly locks of hair clung to her face and to her back, and it was cold enough to make her start shivering slightly. She simply kept her head down and kept walking.
By the time she got to the second mile, the storm had leveled off some, and by level off meaning it remained at a stable downpour and a constant stream of thunder and lightning. She had set a steady pace until witnessed something no one ever wanted to see happen. A tree, not but a foot away from the road she was walking on was suddenly struck by lightning, causing her to jump and lose her footing. The noise that happened sounded like a bomb exploding in her ear as she hit the ground and the tree was literally dissolved into a stump and a good amount of woodchips went flying into the air.
She covered her head due to instinct and curled up in a ball in the middle of the road. She stayed there for a minute, letting her heart rate slow down back to its normal speed before she went to pick herself up.
Just as she put her two feet back on the ground and was about to stand, another noise behind her made her jump and swirl around to see what had startled her. She watched as something careened into the ground at top speed, causing the asphalt to actually crumble to due to the force of the impact. She screamed for a split second as she scuffled backwards a few feet, not knowing what the hell it was and how it could have fallen out of thin air. She stared at the spot where the road had depressed into the shape of whatever it was, and as her eyes recovered from the blinding lightning just a minute before, she began to see the outline of a person.
"Um…hello?" she called out over the rain, feeling stupid afterwards. People just don't fall from the sky and live to tell the tale. She slowly got to her feet and crept towards the person. "Are you dead? I didn't just witness a suicide, did I?" She started rambling. "Cause if I did, I sure don't have time to go to court if I call the cops, so if you're dead, I'm just going to leave you here…hello?"
She reached the person and knelt down, studying the face of someone she presumed to be dead. He was pale, very pale. He had black hair, slicked back and out of his face, and a gash adorned his cheek. He was wearing odd attire: black, green, and gold garb with a green cape.
What on earth…? She thought as she rolled him over onto his back and put her hand to his neck to check for a pulse.
Suddenly, his eyes flew open and he gasped, grabbing her wrist in the process. She screamed and jumped back about a foot. She watched in horror as the man took a few desperate breaths of air as he stared up into the sky. The storm had suddenly grown calm, and the rain was falling slowly and less heavily than it had been before. He groaned as he slowly tried to sit up.
"You're alive after that?" Orthani screeched at him in fear. After a fall like that, she would expect there to be more carnage than this.
The man turned his head and just stared at her, studying her it seemed.
"Hello? Are you going to answer me? Do you need help, maybe? Do you need a hospital? Or a doctor? Our town doesn't really have a proper hospital-"
She was cut off. "Must you talk so much?" the man groaned, raising an eyebrow at her. She opened her mouth to answer, but then quickly shut it, dumbfounded for words. "I am on Earth, correct?" He spoke with a fluid British-sounding accent that shocked her. How a Brit landed out in the middle of Nowhere, Nevada was beyond her.
"Yeah, where else would you be, Narnia?" she sarcastically scoffed. He gave her a puzzled look. "Never mind. Do I need to try and call somebody? You just fell from god knows what height, you probably broke something-"
"No. I do not need to be seen by healers; I simply need a place to rest for me to recover properly." He clutched at his side, wincing in pain as he sat up.
She bit her lip. "Well, if you can somehow miraculously walk, we're about a mile out from my house. The storm's suddenly gone quiet, so it shouldn't be too bad trying to get there," she offered, going against everything her parents had taught her about letting in strangers. He seemed nice enough, and hey, he survived falling from the sky, so she doubted he was in any condition to harm her.
He nodded. "I shall follow, then." He slowly stood up with help from this strange woman to his right.
"What's your name, by the way?" she asked, curious as to who he was.
He hesitated. Should he risk compromising his location? "That is not important." Not yet, at the moment. "There shall come a time where that would be of use to you, but that time has not yet come." He winced as they walked down the road at a slow pace, she holding him up in order to support some of his weight to make it easier on him. "How is it you enlighten me to yours, seeing as though I shall be partaking of your hospitality?"
"If I tell you my name, you've got to tell me yours." She said firmly. "Otherwise, I drop you off at the town's doctor."
He pressed his lips into a thin line. She was intelligent, he had to admit. Intelligent enough to know that letting a stranger into her dwelling place without knowing that stranger's name. "Then you are wise to understand the value of information. Go on then."
"Orthani. Orthani Mynx. And you?"
He again, hesitated. "I am Loki."
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I'm staying up late to write another chapter, so expect another within 24 hours.