Phoenixfire: I've been re-reading the older chapters of Crimson Rain, and I… cringe. I know I can do so much better than this. Which is why I'm re-writing them. Sorry everyone who wanted a new chapter… please don't kill me? I really think you'll like the new version better! Please review and tell me what you think. If you hate it, I won't change the real story. I really think that part of my problem with getting out new updates was that the early chapters had no direction and no plot. By editing them, not only can I improve the quality, I'll also be able to get new chapters finished faster.
So, if you like the new version, tell me and this will go away and be incorporated into the story. If you don't… I'll probably just leave this up as an ongoing project of mine. It'll give me something to do over the summer…
Disclaimer: I still don't own Baten Kaitos. I don't own Mountain Dew, either. I don't want to own WalMart.Too much work...
Prologue: And when you hit rock bottom…
It was late November, almost December. Close enough to December that the stores in the sleepy little backwater town were already decorated for Christmas. Even in the more remote areas, Christmas was a holiday to be exploited.
Huh. I've had this nightmare before, but this is definitely a new twist.
Two teenage girls stalk out of a small store selling antiques, scented candles, and other oddities, arguing in raised voices. Both have brown hair and pale skin, although one has hazel eyes and the other brown. A certain sameness about their features suggests that they may be blood kin.
Yup, the whole floating spirit bit is new. For this particular event, anyway. Hoo boy, I am not looking forward to the next part…
The one with the darker hair and the dark eyes seems to have their money. When she refuses vehemently to relinquish it, the hazel eyed younger sister forcibly grabs her purse. The wrenching motion knocks the older sister off balance, causing her to trip and crash into an elderly woman doing her shopping.
I'd forgotten that part. What a bitch Azil can be when she's not getting her way…
With a hastily shouted apology, the older sister tears off after the younger, closing the distance by virtue of her longer legs.
Ah, the good old days when I was taller than Azil… and my hair was a normal color…
They reach the end of the street. The younger sister chooses to dash across without looking for traffic, missing the large blue pickup truck that weaves drunkenly down the street, heading straight for her. With a look of sheer panic, the elder sister puts on an extra burst of speed. Knowing that she won't be able to grab or stop her sister in time, she leaps forward, knocking her sister out of the way…
And throwing herself in front of the truck instead.
Yeah, not the smartest thing I ever did…
The truck catches her as she is stretched almost horizontal, throwing her over onto the hood. She rolls from there onto and over the windshield, her body going vertical as she flies off the roof of the car. One white sneaker catches on the back of the pickup, flipping her upside-down and smacking her headfirst into the pavement.
Ouch. That almost looked more painful than it felt.
The pickup veers wildly, smacking into a telephone poll. There is dead silence for a few moments, and then the younger sister begins to scream.
It takes about ten minutes for the paramedics and police to arrive. They go first to the driver of the pickup and the sister, checking for the extent of their injuries. On the older sister, one of them ties a tag.
Things blur, and suddenly the tag is the focus of the entire scene. On its white surface, stamped in bright red, is the acronym D.O.A.
Dead on Arrival.
…now that explains a lot…
And suddenly, there was white. A white radiance that filled the murky red-gold of the cave with its brilliance. But it was not the gentle glow or pure holiness that most people associate with whitness and light. No, it was a harsh white light, a coldness, an emptiness that yet is not empty, that seethes with rage and hatred…
Holy Hellfire, I am not reliving this again!
A slender, feminine fist smashed down on the dusty nightstand, in a square blank in the layer of dust where an object had rested at one point in the not-so-distant past. As if on cue, a buzzing reminiscent of a swarm of killer bees began to blare from somewhere in the vicinity of the fist, shattering the stillness of the morning. The fist continued to smash almost methodically, seeking to find and destroy the source of the noise. This went on for several moments, until the fist came into contact with a small glass box containing various pieces of jewelry, shattering it.
"Ouch, goddamnit!" snarled the owner of the fist, leaping out of her bed. Gingerly, she pulled glass shards out of her hand, the injuries healing almost before she removed them. She flicks the glass into the wastebin near her bed with a supremely pissed expression marring her face and causing her eyes – an extremely odd shade of golden yellow – to glint in the predawn light. Once she was certain all the glass was out of her hand, she leaned over – carefully, to make sure that she didn't come into contact with any more glass – and extracted a rather ugly white alarm clock, with the numbers displayed around the face in a minty green color. Instead of smashing it, as her previous actions would suggest she wanted to do, she calmly deactivated it and returned it to the patch of unobstructed wood, brushing a few pieces of glass out of the way first. She then leaned over very close to the clock, and said in a poisonously sweet voice,
"You are very lucky that buying a replacement would mean a trip to Walmart with my mother and something else for me to clean up at the unholy hour of six in the morning. Otherwise, I would smash you from here into next week."
The second hand of the clock continued its endless journey around the face of the clock, and the mechanical hum continued without change. Vexed, the teenager stalks into the bathroom and grabbed several paper towels. She then wasted the next ten minutes cleaning up the blood and glass. Luckily, none of the blood got onto her white carpet. Once done with this task, she returned to her bathroom and turned on the shower. She stuck a hand into the water, scowled, and turned the faucet farther to the left. After doing this, she stalked (carefully, in case she missed some of the glass) out of her room, down the stairs, and into the kitchen. Upon arrival, she did a cursory check for other members of the household. Finding none, she opened the fridge, and grabbed a Mountain Dew. The girl dashed as quickly and silently as she could manage back to her bedroom and threw herself onto the bed, popping open the can with a satisfying sound of pressurized air being released. She proceeded to take a long swig, listening to the rhythmic, soothing sound of the shower.
"Life was much more fun when I was dead," she said ruefully, taking another sip, the anger visibly seeping out of her as she did so. In fact, it looked as if she might be able to handle the rest of her day with a reasonable amount of patience and tolerance…
When something with bat wings, brown and approximately the size of a small child flew past her window.
She blinked. Several times.
"Oh, you are kidding me…"
It flew past the other window on that side of her room.
"You are freakin' kidding me!"
She slammed the can of soda down on the nightstand, jumped out of bed, and opened the window, the one between the foot of her bed and her dresser, and stuck her head out. The creature was still flying around near her house.
"A Sharwa. It's Monday. It's a fu… freaking Monday morning, I have to go to school in forty-five minutes, and you're already popping up?" The end came out as a shriek, drawing the monster's attention to her. She ducked out of sight for a moment, and came back up with a whip, various sharp and pointy things sticking out of the braided leather chord. She leaned her whole upper body out the window, ignoring the fact that her room was on the second story, and swung. The whip took out the creature's wings with a sickening crack, and a muttered incantation incinerated its body before it hits the ground, sprinkling the grass with ashes.
"Serves you…" she freezes, realizing that she must have been seen, if anyone was looking. She slams the window shut and looks out it with wide and frightened eyes, trying to detect movement, any movement at all…
Something rustled in the thorn bushes at the edge of her family's property. She froze for a moment, her hand clutching the whip convulsively…
And her youngest sister's cat, Smokey, darted out and made a beeline for the mudroom door, clearly spooked.
She sighed, the tension leaving her slender frame.
"Astarael Victoria Sanders, you're losing your touch," she sighed. "And quite possibly your mind. If you ever had one," she added. That was when she looked down, and noticed that her bloody whip had dripped on the aforementioned white carpet.
Her left eyebrow twitched. Her whole body, from her fists, which were clenched so tightly that the knuckles were turning white, to her waist-length blue hair, which faded to brown for the last foot and a half, shook. For a few moments, she could only stare at the crimson droplets gathering on the off-white carpet.
Drip.
Coming back to her senses, she walked over to the bathroom and deposited her whip in the sink, cleaning of the blood as thoroughly as she could manage, with a false calm that was, in some ways, more frightening then her near-explosion mere moments before. Once that task was done, she literally jumped into her bed, shaking the whole thing and moving the mattress several inches to the left. She then grabbed one of her pillows, muffled her face with it, and proceeded to scream every foul word she had ever heard, some not even in her own language. Even with cross-cultural additions, the list was still rather short, a reflection of her more or less sheltered upbringing. She had to go through them all several times before her anger burned itself out.
Blearily, she pulled her head out of her pillow and looked at her clock.
6:24.
"I really hate Mondays," was all she could say to that.