Greetoids everyone, merry Christmas! This is the first chapter of an entirely rewritten form of Separated! I sincerely hope you guys enjoy. I've been working, with a little assistance from ell13, to rewrite the story and increase the quality of the writing, since I've grown a lot as a writer since I first started this. I loved the idea, so I wanted to go back and really do it well. Most of the story is pre-written, I just need to finish off the last few chapters, so you needn't worry about regular updates. I should be posting a new chapter every week on Sunday.
With all of that said, I really hope you guys enjoy this first chapter (and the rest of the story, too) and stay awesome, everyone!
-ROC6
There was a mousy-haired woman striding determinedly towards a gray, blocky building with a bright sign reading Goode High. She made eye contact with a woman out front, her eyebrows knit and a curious gleam in her woody eyes. The guidance counselor at Goode High had called her to meet about a case. It wasn't unexpected, the woman reasoned, she was the head doctor at a professional mental institution for troubled youth, but this was still a relatively rare occurrence. The doctor was curious as to what could lead to a trained professional being necessary to handle a teenager or two. She could honestly say that, in all of her years of expertise, nothing like this had ever happened before.
She glanced back at her car, a sleek black Honda, as though trying to reassure herself that it was, in fact, still there. The school day had just ended and a mass exodus of dead-eyed and messy clothed teenagers was occurring as they attempted to free themselves of the hindrances of school. Luckily for the doctor, and her car, too, she supposed, most of the teenagers were too busy religiously monitoring their phones to pay attention to the strange woman as they expertly weaved through their typical routes. To her dismay, there were very few that were actually legitimately socializing as they left the building, and the doctor felt a stab of nostalgia through her chest, remembering when she was younger and youth thought more about magical worlds than digital ones. So lost in her musings was she that she almost bumped into the woman she was supposed to be meeting.
The counselor was a drab looking woman who held herself as though she had better places to be. Mrs. Drandin, Eleanor recalled her name was, had dark hair half-turned to a metallic gray, which was held in a tight knot on top of her head. The dress she wore was black, straight, without embellishment and stretches down to the floor in a long pencil skirt that lead the doctor to idly wonder how she could even walk in it. She wore a ridiculous amount of makeup to cover her perpetually disdainful face, probably in an attempt to hide the rigid lines clearly etched in her skin. Overall, the counselor just wasn't all that pleasant to look at, though more from her frigid demeanor than anything else. How the woman became a teenage counselor the doctor could not fathom, but the doctor simply could not imagine any patients, students, making any mental or emotional progress with a counselor who looked more inclined to sneer than to smile.
By the time the doctor made it to Mrs. Drandin, almost all of the students had cleared out, except for a pair. They were a boy and a girl, both pale with heavily corded muscle. The boy had dark hair, though the doctor couldn't discern the exact shade from their current distance, and the girl wore a messy ponytail of light locks attempting to escape their bindings. The pair, though their stance suggested they were a couple, were standing by an alley. The boy held a glinting bronze sword, narrowed to a wicked point, and the girl brandished a knife of the same metal shimmering with unearthly power. Both were being attacked by a trio of dog-like beasts, each darker than an inky shadow, with glowing ruby eyes and frothing mouths housing deadly sickle teeth. One lunged at the boy, who expertly dodged, landing a heavy blow with his sword. The canine froze mid-leap, as though gravity no longer applied to it, then vanished in a cloud of glittering gold smoke. The doctor had to wrench her gaze away from the spectacle and force her attention back to her meeting with the counselor.
Mrs. Drandin cleared her throat, noticing what the doctor was watching as she feigned a bored look, "Hooligans, the both of them. And it's not their first incident, either-multiple accounts of attacking animals and people. Episodes in class, aggression issues. Obvious trauma of unknown source. They're the students I contacted you in regards to, Dr. Baker."
"Eleanor," the doctor corrected idly, filing the information away for later use. Eleanor Baker pulled out a beat up cell phone, dialing a number with a few efficient swipes, "Hello? This is Dr. Baker. I have two patients at Goode High that I believe we should take under Section thirty-seven."
She hung up a moment later, satisfied with the response. A retrieval squad from the institution by which she was employed was on its way. Eleanor wasn't completely certain what the pair of teenagers were seeing, but she was positive that it was not a bunch of rambunctious cats. She remembers from their case notes that they, like her, have overactive imaginations and suffer from a form of acute schizophrenia, though they were undiagnosed and untreated. With help, she was able to overcome it, and it was her psychologist that inspired her to follow in his footsteps. There was a part of her that felt sorry for having to wrench the teens from their lives, but she couldn't leave them to their own devices. Their case notes indicated them as being both extremely unstable and extremely dangerous.
It was only when Eleanor pulled her eyes from the teens again that she realized the itching on the back of her neck from the piercing gaze Mrs. Drandin was directing at her.
"I called to have them admitted," the doctor explained with a sigh.
An eerie light came over the counselor's face, and her lips peeled back slowly from her teeth, "Wonderful. I'm glad to see some people still see sense."
"Could you send me full copies of their files? And alert their guardians to the situation."
Eleanor shivered as Mrs. Drandin stretched her gruesome smile even wider, "With pleasure."
Suppressing the urge to throw garlic or maybe holy water on the counselor, Dr. Baker turned away, hoping to interact with the woman as little as possible. She may need the teens admitted, which she could do thanks to some recent legislation, that did not mean she had to force herself into the company of an unsympathetic, unfeeling human who took pleasure in the suffering of her wards.
Eleanor and Mrs. Drandin watched together as the teens scared off all of the cats, brandishing their weapons another moment before cleaning and sheathing them. They started to move away just as a glimmering stark white van with a smiley face and the word 'Happy Hills' printed on the sides pulled up next to the alley. A pair of burly, lumbering men climbed out and nodded at Dr. Baker, and she reluctantly pointed at the teens. The men nodded once, sharply, and took off towards the newest admissions. One grabbed the boy from behind while the other jabbed him harshly in the arm with a syringe and injected him with some variety of tranquilizer, though not before being given what would likely be a pretty major black eye and having his leg kicked out from under him. The girl, who had enough time to plan, attacked the one with the needle, kicking out sharply with her leg and successfully knocking him to the ground. With a quick stride, she was next to him, kicking him the last place he wanted to be kicked with a quick, efficient movement before she turned to the other man.
She was a moment too slow, and the other man grabbed her hair as it spun, and she hesitated a moment before attempting to punch his jaw, but by then it was already too late. The sleep aid had been administered to her as well.
The guard on the ground gradually uncurled from the fetal position he'd curled into, moaning and limping as he made his way over to the van. The other one man carried both unconscious teens, one by one, to the vehicle before climbing into the driver's seat and starting the engine with a purr, pulling quickly away.
Eleanor turned to Mrs. Drandin for what she hoped was the last time, and thanked the maliciously smiling woman for her assistance. Dr. Baker strode back to her car, following the van away.
She had a lot of case notes to read, and she desperately wanted to finish them early enough to not be passing out tomorrow at work. After all, she had some new patients to greet.