It was a dark and dreary night in Royal Woods. Michigan. These were the kinds of nights where most children would sit snuggly in their living rooms with a warm glass of milk and some candles laying around for the inevitable power outage.
Normally, this is what Luna WOULD be doing on a rainy Friday night with her family. However, she found herself trudging through the Great-Lake-sized puddles separating her from her destination.
"Shit, 1242 East Oak Street…where the bloody hell are you…" she thought to herself, using her forearm to get a protected view of the mailboxes surrounding her. "Sam's place has got to be close…1240…1241…"
She glanced upwards, taking a quick yet thorough look around to find her crush's house. Surrounding her were at least seven or eight houses…well, if you could call them houses. To Luna, they looked more like a collection of sheds that had been left to rot for a few hundred years. The decaying oak sidings on most of the homes made the surroundings look more like a wooden graveyard than a proper modern neighborhood. If not for the mailboxes, Luna could have sworn she had walked into the nearby forest by mistake, and that a bunch of alien-monkey people had set up shop.
"Really, Luna? Alien-monkey people? You've gotta stop watching so many late-night sci-fi movies with Linc." She mulled to herself. She took a deep breath before letting out a low growl.
"You also should have brought a map or somethin', idiot." She cursed to herself.
As if materializing from the thin and wispy air, a pair of slender fingers slid across her shoulder, grabbing a hold of her and propelling her forward a few feet towards a relatively large shack in the midst of the neighborhood.
"Hurry up and get inside, Lunes! Don't wanna catch a cold, do ya?" asked a cute, high pitched yell from behind her. Before Luna could think, she darted in the direction she was pushed, trying to maintain her balance among the uneven streets and rough terrain. Dashing in front of her was a very familiar little blonde haired beauty with a single streak of neon-teal to track in the unlit streets of East Oak.
"Oi, I could say the same fer you, mate!" Luna shouted back, taking off at full speed after her friend.
After a solid few seconds of sprinting, she found herself in front of a rickety little shack at the end of the street. The door was wide open, where a bit of candle light made her crush's shadow visible to her, even though the hazy rain.
Once inside, Luna took the opportunity to strip herself of her heavy and soaking wet winter coat and beanie hat, leaving her in her much more relaxed t-shirt and purple leggings combination. As soon as she was free of her baggy clothes, she took a moment to survey the room, which was roughly the size of her own family living room. The walls were lined with an assortment of furs and acoustic guitars, with only a few photographs breaking up their arrangement on the wall. Taking up a majority of the space, however, was a brightly-lit fire pit in the center of the room. Surrounding it, however, were a couple of rocking chairs with a decent variety of music instruments sitting upon them.
"Come on in!" Sam said, removing her own heavy clothing. "I'll get you a soda, yeah?"
Luna swallowed hard, still looking around the dilapidated room.
"Woah…Sam doesn't actually LIVE in this dump, does she?" she thought to herself, nodding as Sam ducked into a small side room that Luna could only imagine was an even crappier and smaller kitchen area. "I mean, I thought her dad worked in the music biz? Do they lose THIS much money that they have to settle for a shitty little shack like this? "
Sam returned through the curtain with a little bottle of root beer in each hand, tossing one to her purple clad pal. She gave Luna an earnest little smile, taking a seat in one of the rocking chairs surrounding the fire.
"So, have any trouble findin' the place, Lune?" she asked, taking a swig of her own beverage.
"Um, just a little…uh, Sam?" she sat in the chair next to Sam, trying to keep her cool and, more importantly, her concern hidden from her. "These ARE your digs, right?"
Sam chuckled, setting her bottle onto the wooden floor before turning towards her.
"Right as rain. My parents should be joinin' us soon, I think my dad was just grabbin' some more whiskey." She answered, picking up the acoustic guitar leaning against her chair. After a moment of fiddling with her strings, she turned her attention back to her awe-struck friend. "Why'd you ask?"
"Oh! N-no reason! I mean…um…I just t-thought you'd have a bigger house. I mean, where do you all sleep?" She asked, trying to be as inoffensive as she could be.
"I'll show you that later when I give you the "grand tour"." She giggled, using air-quotes to add some flavor to her joke.
Out of the corner of her eyes, Luna saw movements occurring in the shadows. Emerging from the darkness was a very lean figure shambling towards them. Upon further inspection, the approaching man appeared to be wearing a dirty-black jacket on top of a surprisingly clean grey dress shirt. Atop his head was a jet-black fedora, with little spikes of light-brown hair peeking out from underneath. His face was entirely constructed of wrinkles that made his otherwise clean-shaven babyface look to be about 60 years old. He looked, Luna thought, like an old jazz musician from the streets of New Orleans from the 1920s.
"Maybe he IS from the 1920s?" Luna thought, glancing over at her crush as she rose to meet him.
"Hey, dad! This is my friend I was telling you about!" she shouted excitedly, giving him a quick hug before motioning to her to approach. Luna stood up, uneasily making her way over to the admitting creepy-looking man.
"N-nice to meet you, sir. I'm Luna L-loud." She managed to sputter out as she nervously extender her hand to meet his. To her surprise, he had a deceptively strong grip. What really surprised the little rocker, however, was the low growl the young man shot back at her.
"Pleasure to meet you, Moonshine. Call me Tom Waits." He croaked with an unrestrained bellow that contained the smoothness of Barry White, but with the raspiness of a full-grown mountain lion. His voice sounded like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car. With a unique darkness unlike anything Luna had ever heard, even amongst her deepest voiced blues records, the man before her commanded the presence of the room with just his tone alone.
After a moment of stunned silence, the man spoke again as he took a seat near the set of bongos around the fireplace.
"Well, Moonshine. You wanna join the girls and I for a jam?" he asked, his voice now a little more restrained.
Luna nodded quickly, returning to her chair next to Sam's, trying to avoid direct eye contact with the gentleman.
Little did she know, her rainy Friday night was about to take another unexpected turn.