Chapter 1- A Home Invasion
If you're reading this, either I'm dead or you're some high-up official in the FBI or something, because I can pretty much guarantee you any written account of adventures like the ones I've had are classified up the wazoo. I decided to write down everything that's happened to me since that fateful Tuesday in June, so long ago—well, only about half a year to you guys, stuck in time's normal progression.
I guess I should introduce myself. Erica Stone at your service. The place I call home? Chicago, Illinois, in the good old US of A. Just turned twenty-five two weeks ago. I share an apartment with my sister Naomi. We own a moderately successful bakery together called Just Desserts. Our mom died from some freak health complications after she gave birth to Naomi, and we lost our father to a drunk driver when I was eighteen and Naomi seven. Since then, Omie and I have been sticking it out together in the Windy City. I looked after her like a mother (which she hated half the time)—I helped her with homework, intimidated any boys she brought home, and made sure she got to bed on time every night. I was like a sister, too—we'd talk about our crushes (celebrity or otherwise), argue over what movie to watch, and feed each other's unhealthy obsessions with a TV show or book series (everyone's got at least one). I opened the bakery when I was twenty (thanks to a trust our mother had barred our access to until I reached twenty years of age, which happened five years ago), and however meager a living we ground out or memory of our past that suddenly resurfaced couldn't change the fact that we were happy.
Which is why I was devastated when Naomi disappeared.
That Tuesday in June was a sunny one. I remember regretting the fact that I didn't have to go outside to go to work: we bought the apartment below us and turned it into Just Desserts when the Chaundrys, a lovely Indian couple, moved back to Bangladesh. I had left Naomi upstairs- she was the latest riser I've ever known- and gone down to open the shop alone. I wasn't suspicious for the first half hour: Maya and James, two employees, had come in, so the store was running smoothly. I thought maybe Naomi was coming down with something, or she just wanted to stay in bed. I only got slightly worried when I realized that she was running about twenty minutes late for school.
"Can you watch the place for a few minutes?" I asked Maya as she slid a homemade brownie into the microwave. "I want to check on Omie, make sure she's not coming down with something."
"Yeah, no problem," Maya replied, furiously hitting keys on the register. "I'll take care of that brownie. Go up now."
"Thanks, Maya," I said, turning into the back of the store and fishing my house keys from my pocket. James was in the back, taking a new slab of lemon bars out of the oven. "Be right back, James," I called.
James' red head appeared from behind a pie rack. "Got it!" he called as he wheeled the rack out of my path. As I approached the door that opened to the staircase which led up to the apartment, I readied my key, painted with Mickey Mouse's face. Opening the door, I quickly darted up the steps, taking them two at a time as I pulled the loop of my full-body apron over my head, allowing the top part to hang down to my knees. The soft orange color had been Naomi's idea.
"Omie!" I called, unlocking the door to the apartment. "Omie, is everything alright?" I stepped through the door, expecting to find my sister sitting at the table wrapped in her giant white quilt, her straw-blond blond hair sticking out as she slowly ate her Lucky Charms. Instead, the kitchen was empty, devoid of human presence.
"Omie, if you're just doing this to get out of school—" I said, marching towards her bedroom. I intended to say more, but I was brought up short when I caught sight of the inside of her room.
Inside, her blankets were messy, her clothes were hanging unevenly from the hangers in her closet, and her jewelry box had been pushed completely off her dresser, its contents spilling out in a beaded pile below the casement window that gaped open like a mouth. "Naomi?!" I called, close to panicking. "Naomi, what the hell is going on?!" I glanced down at the pile of jewelry and saw the class ring on a chain, encrusted with a single amber stone, amid the necklaces and bracelets. It was our mother's class ring—I had our father's, inlaid with a single emerald, on an identical chain. I had found the rings, made them into necklaces, and given the amber one to Naomi for Christmas because she liked that color better.
My sister never left the house without it.
I flung myself onto the floor and rooted through the pile, pulling the ring's chain free of the tangle. "Oh my God," I whispered. I could hold the chain up—that meant that it was really there, that I wasn't hallucinating. If it was just a figment of my imagination, I could go on pretending that something horrible hadn't happened to my sister.
"Naomi!" I yelled, clutching the ring in my fist. First my mom, then my dad, now my sister? I dragged my hands down my face, mentally processing the last week. Everything had been pretty normal—the only thing weird that had happened was the power going on the fritz a few times. Something was always broken in this damn building, I thought distantly. Naomi hadn't been lying about where she's been going or who she's been with (trust me, I know how to tell when my baby sister is lying), and the most trouble she's ever caused was accidentally tipping over the water cooler in fifth grade. So why was she kidnapped?
Somehow, I found myself sitting at the dinner table with no memory of how I had gotten there, the ring tucked into the back pocket of my jeans
"Erica, is everything alright?" James' distant voice floated in. "What's going on?"
"She's gone," I called, my voice threatening to crack. James appeared in my doorway and I stood up, my face too weak to create an expression that encompassed the whirlwind of emotions fighting for dominance. "Naomi's gone."
"Oh, God," James said, catching me up in a firm hug. I accepted the support gratefully. "What happened?"
"I don't know—someone must've just kidnapped her!" I stuttered, too shocked to cry.
James was rubbing my back in slow circles. "It's okay," he soothed, his bone-crushing embrace the only thing holding me together. "We'll look all over her room for anything weird—there's bound to be some clues there."
"It's pretty trashed now," I said as James' embrace tightened around me. "I just don't understand. Why would anybody kidnap her? She hasn't done anything wrong!" I squirmed slightly. "James, stop, you're kinda hurting me." James didn't stop—if anything, his arms seemed to become more solid around me. "James, let me go!" As I tried to wriggle free, a realization came to me: he had only seen me sitting at the dinner table. He didn't know I had gone anywhere down the hall.
"James, how did you know Naomi was taken from her bedroom?" I asked, suspicious. James stayed silent and strong, and I began struggling against his grip. "James, let me GO!" I yelled, stomping hard on his foot. James barely flinched.
Suddenly, a new, unfamiliar voice said, "I don't know about you, mate, but I'd let go of her if I were you."
James and I both turned to find an out of place-looking man standing in the doorway, holding up what looked like a robot version of a Harry Potter wand. James partially obscured my view of him, but I could tell he was wearing a long, green velvet coat, bow tie, and some weird kind of Steampunk-looking welding goggles. In some weirdly separate, spectating part of my brain, I noticed that his pants looked a little short on him.
James said in a strangely robotic voice, "The Escape cannot begin without calibrated minds. Erica Stone and Naomi Stone's minds are calibrated. We possess Naomi Stone. We now require Erica Stone."
"What the hell?!" I shrieked. "James, what is going on?!"
"That's not James," the newcomer said, lifting his robo-wand. He hit a button on it, and a green, brightly glowing light glowed from its clawed tip. A strange buzzing filled the room (a buzzing that could've been far more annoying than it actually was) and James' body seemed to flicker, as if he was a hologram. Suddenly, the hologram-James completely shorted out, and in my friend's place stood a giant, metal rectangular prism, with countless thick, metal tentacles with claws at the end protruding out of every edge and a strange, black, bar-shaped screen where eyes should be with a single red dot, like the laser pointer a sniper would use to aim.
And I was wrapped in all of its arms.
I let out a stream of swear words that would make the cast of Jersey Shore blush, fiercely struggling against the contraption that had masqueraded as my friend. The third party who had revealed the Thing was bustling around behind it, his strange device's buzzing bouncing off the metal. "I'll assume you're Erica Stone?" he asked, and for the first time I noticed an English accent.
"Shut up—I'll deal with you later!" I yelled, finally yanking one arm free. One of the Thing's tentacles shot around toward my upper arm, and I caught it where the tentacle joined the claw, mere inches away from my face. Another tentacle shot toward my wrist, clamping around it and forcing it forward. My hand was gripping the other arm so hard I twisted the robot's wrist, causing the claw to suddenly detach itself and fall to the floor. The red laser dot on the slim black screen suddenly shifted toward the disarmed tentacle, and the next second, the wires dangling from the open arm came alive with electricity and strained for my wrist like snakes. I writhed in the Thing's grip, to no avail: the wires brushed my wrist with the slightest touch. I shrieked with pain as I received the electrical burn, an angry red weal appearing across my skin.
"No!" the bowtie-wearing intruder yelled, activating his Buzz Wand again. As the shrill-yet-soothing buzz joined the sound of a robot struggling with a human, said robot's black-screen-with-a-red-eye suddenly flared red and then went completely black—it had shut off. The electric current died, tentacles stopped trying to squeeze the life out of me, and the whole thing dropped to the floor like dead weight, taking me with it.
I landed painfully against the smooth metal and began trying to wiggle out of its arms. "Hang on, just keep still," the intruder said from on the floor beside me, although I blatantly refused to listen.
"Shut up!" I snapped, frantically writhing around in the heavy tentacles' grip. "I told you, I'll deal with you later, Ringo!"
"Oh, I remember Ringo," the tweed-clad man said reminiscently. "Lovely chap. Though when he got drunk, he was quite the joker." I could hear the Buzz Wand come to life, and weight began falling away from me—he was separating the tentacles from the metal slab and trying to free me. As soon as physically possible, I untangled myself from the remaining robot arms and crawled backwards out of the wreckage. "So, Erica—" was as far as my "rescuer" had gotten before I had frantically scurried to a cupboard below the counter, threw open the door, and ripped out the first frying pan I could touch, standing up and advancing toward the man in the bowtie still sitting on the floor.
I cocked the pan back like I would a baseball bat; that spectator gland in my brain fondly recalled the three years I spent catching flies and stealing bases. The man on the floor had thrown up his hands, dropping the Buzz Wand on the floor.
"Who the hell are you?" I demanded, carefully stepping closer to him but still out of his reach.
"John Smith," he replied.
"Yeah, and I'm Albus Dumbledore," I replied sarcastically.
My hostage pursed his lips and sighed through his nose. "I'm called the Doctor," he amended.
"Doctor who?" I interrogated.
A tiny, tiny smile lifted the corners of his mouth for a fraction of a second. "Just 'the Doctor'," he answered.
I didn't have time for this; I had more important things to find out. "Take off the goggles so I can get a good look at your face," I said, gesturing with my chin to the oddball eyepiece.
The "Doctor's" extremely fair eyebrows rose. "Oh, apologies," he said. "I didn't realize I was still wearing them." Slowly, as if not to startle me, he removed the one-way goggles with one large, pale hand, the strap of the eyepiece pressing down his rather voluminous light brown hair. Once the tinted lenses had cleared his face, I could see he had rather dark green eyes, and his chin wasn't as prominent as the goggles made it seem. I was about to ask him to kick the Buzz Wand over to me, but a sudden pain flashed across my wrist.
"Ah!" I yelped instinctively, my grip on the frying pan loosening. The Doctor put his hands down to lift himself from the floor, but I gripped the pan in my uninjured hand, swung it closer to the Doctor, and ordered, "You stay down!" The arm with the burn hung limply at my side, the edge of the pan inches from the Doctor's face.
The Doctor slowly opened his green velvet coat and fished around in the inside pocket, drawing out a black leather ID badge. "I'm a doctor, remember?" he prompted, letting the badge fall open. I snatched it out of his hand, keeping the frying pan in place and ignoring a slight headache (with everything that's happened today, I'm surprised my brain hasn't exploded yet), as he continued, "I'm not here to hurt you. I can fix that burn on your wrist, and then I'll tell you everything you want to know." I mentally debated briefly: his ID checked out, but on the other hand, he found a way into my apartment—but on a hypothetical third hand, he had figured out how to shut down the Thing that had attacked me.
I flipped the ID closed and tossed it onto the floor next to him. "Okay," I said, setting the frying pan on the counter. The Doctor stood up from the ground, picking the Buzz Wand up and gently pulling the burn towards him. "I can take care of it myself, you know," I said defensively as the Wand lit up and began buzzing, and he ran it across the red weal.
"But I can completely heal it," he rebutted quietly, switching settings on his wand. I breathed through my nose contemptuously, but then I looked down and gasped aloud. Whatever his contraption was, it was healing the burn: the redness was fading and the searing pain was dulling to a slight prickling across my wrist. Soon it was just a thin, pale-pink scar.
I yanked my wrist out of the Doctor's grip. "What the hell was that?" I demanded.
The Doctor sighed. "Americans—always so quick to profanity."
"Answer the question," I ordered, picking the frying pan back up. "And drop the Buzz Wand," I added, gesturing to the slender contraption he had wrapped in his fingers.
The Doctor had been complacent until I mentioned the Wand. "Excuse me," he said indignantly, "but Buzz Wand?" By using my nickname for his utensil, I had apparently greatly offended him. "It's called a sonic screwdriver, Ms. Stone," he clarified. "Blimey, there've been a lot of names for it, but 'Buzz Wand' is a first."
"Just drop the sonic…whatever," I ordered, and the Doctor set it down on the counter with so much contempt it nearly hit me in the face. "You said you could explain everything. Well then: what is that thing, what happened to James, and what did it do to my sister?"
Suddenly, the Thing on the floor rose up a few inches, the screen blazing to life for just a second before it collapsed back onto the floor again. "It's rebooting," the Doctor said, snatching his sonic screwdriver up from the table. "We need to get out of here, now."
"Agreed," I said, setting the pan on the counter as the Doctor bent down to retrieve his goggles. "Don't think we're finished here!" I added as the Doctor swiveled me around and pushed me out of my apartment, slamming the door shut behind him. He buzzed his screwdriver on the keyhole, and I could hear the lock sliding into place. "What the—" was as far as I had gotten before he grabbed my hand and pulled me down the staircase behind him, the Thing making loud noise as it rebooted.
"James?" I said incredulously as the Doctor yanked me through the kitchen. There he was—red hair and all. James was going through all the freshly-bakes pies resting on the rack and writing down which flavors we needed more. It was as if whatever happened upstairs hadn't happened at all.
"That's the real James, the Aligrena- the thing upstairs in your apartment- took an imprint of the last person you saw and projected their image- in this case, James- onto you," the Doctor explained at a merciless ninety miles per hour. He stopped in the middle of the kitchen, head snapping back and forth a thousand ways at once. "We need to get everyone out of the building."
I whirled around and pulled the fire alarm on the wall behind me; immediately a shrill whining filled the kitchen. James stared at me doubtfully. "Get out of here!" I ordered.
"What the hell is going on?!" James yelled over the wail of the fire alarm and the sound of the patrons in the other room leaving.
"Get out of here, or I'm firing you!" I yelled impatiently. James threw the Doctor an angry glare and stalked away. "You better give me a good reason for doing that," I said to the Doctor, now absurdly nodding at the red alarm.
"I was thinking about starting a fire, but that works, too…" he trailed off.
"A fire?" I exclaimed. "Not in my bakery!"
Suddenly, we heard the distant sound of a door being pounded upon. "The Aligrena's completely rebooted," the Doctor said. He grabbed my hand again (must be a British thing, all this hand-holding) and shouted, "Run!"
He had gotten me halfway through the empty café area of Just Desserts before I tugged hard on his hand and pulled him to an abrupt stop. "Hold it, bucko!" I yelled, pulling his arm hard enough to make him swivel around toward me. I dropped his hand and brought my own up, curled into a fist except my pointer finger. "I'm not going anywhere until you explain what the hell is in my apartment and what it did to my sister!"
"Ms. Stone—Erica," the Doctor said pleadingly. "I know you're confused, and angry, and a little afraid. Being afraid is good; if you weren't afraid of the thing in your flat, I'd think you mad. I know you don't know me, but I need you to trust me. Just trust me for a few minutes, and I can help you find your sister."
I wanted to say so many things: that I could find Naomi on my own, thank you very much; that he had no business asking for me to trust him; that if he did want my blind trust, I should at least know his real name; that I wasn't afraid at all, and I'd be able to handle it. But all that I replied with was a meek, "Are you afraid, too?"
The Doctor nodded solemnly. "Yes, Erica," he said. "I am."
I regarded him thoughtfully. He had come uninvited into my apartment, but he knew how to shut the Thing- didn't he call it an Aligrena, or something?- that had tried to apparently crush me.
"Okay," I said. "Let's go." Suddenly, a bang as loud as a subway crash sounded from near the back of the building. I whipped around toward the sound and said, "The thing- the Ali-whatever- it must have broken my door down."
The Doctor grabbed my arm and pulled me the rest of the way out of the bakery before the Thing could come down and face us.
We ran blindly down the street, dodging passersby left and right. "Where are we going?" I panted as the Doctor's hand left my arm and plunged into his jacket for his beloved screwdriver. He brought it out, its tip blazing green, and pointed it over his shoulder.
"Well, your front doors are locked, so that should hold it long enough," he said as he stowed the screwdriver back in his jacket, grabbing my arm and yanking me down a side street.
"Long enough for what?"
"For us to get in there and take it with us!"