Disclaimer: I do not own anything in the following story. All real persons belong to themselves and all properties of Buffy the Vampire Slayer belong to Joss Whedon and his henchmen. Or his company's… whatever.
Foreword (1): This is the sequel to a little comedic, somewhat mean spirited, insane, archaic, crude fic that I wrote called BS2K. Really quite out there when I look at it now but still, somewhat funny. While this will also be comedic, insane, and archaic that's where the similarities end. Hopefully this will be a bit more pleasant and happy-happy-joy-joy than its predecessor.
The original title was supposed to be J5 vs. BW (I have a feeling the BW may still be applicable) but I decided to scrap the comedic bit that was supposed to be the tent pole for something a bit more sane. Don't know how this will end, don't know how long it will be, but I'm going to try and go at this Stephan King style (finished reading Wizard and Glass a few weeks back) and write without an outline. I'll probably mess it up but who cares! I doubt you guys do.
Takes place a few months after "New Moon Rising". Foreword (1) end.
Intro
1
To be honest Daniel Osbourne, Oz to most, did not know what day it was when she appeared. He'd spent the last few months of his life wandering. Not traveling but wandering. Traveling would imply that he actually had a destination in mind. With honesty also in mind, he could say that he had no idea where he was going, in every sense of the phrase.Later he'd find out that it was a Monday. He should have known it at the time. The best and worst things of his life often stemmed from Mondays.
The index finger and thumb of his right hand were holding a pick, strumming up and down as the song dictated. Playing the guitar had been the only constant in his life for the past few months, ever since…
It hurts even to think about it,
Oz thought.So instead of thinking he decided to leave. Unfortunately somewhere along the way his leaving became running. There isn't much time for self-examination when you have to worry about where you're going to be sleeping that evening, he'd discovered. A thousand other broken hearted men before him could have told him that.
The street he was sitting on was a hectic thing, almost alive in how it moved in waves and patterns. Right now it was brisk, flowing with a variety of people that only LA could put before him. Beside and slightly to the front, was his guitar case. He found people seemed to tolerate his playing in front of their stores if he was asking for money while doing it.
He supposed his appearance was also a factor. He no longer looked the middle class rocker but more a lower class hippie. A trip to the nearest beach was what constituted a shower these days and there was little else to substitute for the other essentials of basic hygiene. His hair was longer than he could remember it being in ages. A scruffy beard had managed to camp out on the line of his jaw (or take over his face). The task of shaving had slowly been losing its appeal the past few months and had now altogether lost. His mom would have a fit if she saw him.
He was cruising into the first chorus of "Like a Rolling Stone" when the hum began to build in his ear, the way a fly slowly buzzing towards your ear would. For the moment he was a bit more concerned with the quality of his performance. A year ago he never would have attempted to sing a Dylan song. It was lately that the sound of his voice would actually please him, playing back the lyrics as he thought them.
"How does it feel? How does it feel? To be-"
A tearing sound; tiny, faint. Later he'd compare it to a piece of paper being ripped in two.
"on your own? With no-"
Oz slowed his playing.
R-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-P.
The sound was coming from somewhere above him.
"Shiiiiiiiiit!"
Oz looked up quick enough to catch a glimpse of the figure falling before it hit, colliding with the car sitting at the curb. The windshield of the vehicle broke into a spider web pattern. The thin, sharp sound of the fracturing glass followed by the hollow thud of the person bouncing onto the hood stopped his fingers immediately. The person stopped there, rolling onto his/her stomach, lying on the sunken surface.
Oz looked at the people passing, faces forward, paying no attention to the person from the sky. For a moment he felt like the local crazy. It was obvious that they couldn't see the stranger from the sky but the question was why? Acceptance was something he was an achiever at, he was told.
His thoughts quickly passed when the girl (the soft jaw was the first hint) began to stir. She raised her head and looked around briefly, her eyes looking dazed. She seemed to pay as little care to the passer byes as they did to her. Oz put the guitar to his side and started to his feet and the girl did similar, fighting to her hands and knees. Her arms wobbled, the way the rotted legs of an old table would, and she tipped to her side, falling off the car and onto the hardened road.
She's not wearing any pants, Oz thought, only what looked like an oversized potato bag, ending just below her thighs. Thinking of this made him worry about her scrapping her knees.
The idea of this didn't strike him as ludicrous given the fact that she just fell from who knows where. He only worried about another human being in pain.
She was lying on her side, almost in a complete fetal position, when Oz reached her.
"Oh crap," she muttered, her eyes closed. She groaned low, the way an old man would trying to escape from a low chair, lifting her head off the ground. She spotted Oz's feet and looked upward. Her eyes weren't exactly alert from what Oz could see in the light. They looked cloudy, like someone who'd just awoke from a couple days sleep.
The palest of green, Oz thought, regarding her eyes. She smiled crookedly, bearing her white teeth, and began to chuckle. The laugh turned into a low cackle and the smile took on the same sort of mischievous from. The girl struggled to her feet.
"Oh yeah, this is sweet," the girl said, her laughter continued to build in its harmonies. "Truly, truly great. I'm sent all the way across the country, to California of all places, to help out a guy who looks like Shaggy after the LSD kicked in. And I'm-" She looked down at herself, the laughter subsiding a moment. "I'm wearing... something that the drunkest drunk wouldn't be caught dead it! Oh, Jebus, this sure is rich!"
She placed her fingers lightly over her rounding mouth, the grin still there despite the two rows of teeth being pulled apart. Her head shook on her shoulders with such a strength that it scared Oz and then the rattling went lower until her entire body was seized by the laughter.
"WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO MY CAR?!"
Oz turned around and heard something hit the ground. A Starbucks coffee lay before the man, spilling its contents out and into the cracks of the walkway. The man had thin hair, a graying goatee clinging to his jaw, and other characteristics that pointed to a fellow in his mid-life crisis.
He took a step towards the car and began to motion to the damage in the vehicle.
"This is a BMW people!" he shouted. "Do you know how much these things cost!?"
Oz paid no attention to the man. His attention was with the people walking past. They looked, not gawked, only looked at the events unfolding between the trio. They weren't worth a stopping glance.
Because they didn't see its origin,
Oz thought. For all they know we're normal people."Oh... yeah," the girl said. Her laughter was now calming. "Me and Oswald (Oswald?) here were sitting over there jamming when these three young punks came running this way." She pointed to Oz (still looking away) and they to the guitar and its case by the wall. "One of them screamed 'Britney Spears rules!' and then began to bash your car with a bat."
"A bat?"
The girl nodded. "Yeah, a bat. Those Britney fans are an eccentric breed. Isn't that right Oswald?"
It took a moment before Oz's eyes finally snapped back to them. When they did they must have held some conviction because the man looked to believe him. "Yeah, that was what happened."
The girl threw her arms out in a 'can you believe it' expression. "How could you not believe testimony like that! Pfff! You'd be a fool to, I'll tell you that much." Both men were quiet. The older gentleman looked more confused than angered. "We tried to stop them but... Hey! Me and my friend here are not the most intimidating of authority figures." The man considered, looked at Oz and the girl, and then nodded sympathetically. "I can hardly get my dog to stop shi- pooping on my in my bed, but that's a tale for another day."
A moments pause settled in before any talk resumed.
"So let me get this straight," the man began; his tone held more rationalization then the sarcasm that would take over by the end of the statement. "A gang of Britney Spears fans came running from that direction. They ran over here, screamed 'Britney rules', and then proceeded to beat my car with a baseball bat. Just to clarify."
"Yeah, that's exactly what happened," she replied immediately. The girl's tone had now gone from slightly nervous to slightly annoyed. "A group of doped up Britney fans beat the heck out of your car before we could do anything about it. Truth to truth."
"Wait, they were high?"
"Yeah, didn't I mention that," the girl said. "Well that's what Oswald said anyway. I don't really have too much experience in that area of life."
You're lying
, Oz thought and couldn't help but smile, though, he suppressed it to a thin one.Oz watched as the girl scampered over and began to lead him away when:
"Fucking Britney Spears fans!?" the man asked.
"Fu- damn Britney Spears fans," the girl agreed, smiling.
The man was running his fingers through his hair, staring at his car, when Oz felt himself being pulled away. He followed through the moderately sized passing of people, not dawdling but not running. He'd play this out, he decided. This was interesting.
The girl reached his guitar, and the some five odd dollars in change in the case, and crouched down. Oz felt himself being yanked down with here. He knelt beside her and watched the girl pick up his guitar and the pick beside it. She placed them in the case, not bothering to fetch out the change, and shut its top. The locks snapped audibly.
"I hope you have some cash lying around," the girl said. Her grin was near to where it started, slick and playful. "Cause I need a whole new wardrobe."
2
It turned out that Oz had more money in his van that he realized, nearly fifteen hundred dollars. Most was from his own personal savings while the rest was a gift from his parents. We worry about you, they'd say. This isn't like you. Even the year you were left back you still had that spark, a drive somewhere inside that noggin of yours. You were never this idle.Now in thinking of his two sets of clothes, the mini stove for heating cans of soup, the nights sleeping in the back of the van with his shirt as a pillow, all while a significant amount of money was taped under the passenger side door, he guessed the girl was right when she said he was being self destructive.
"You're far too self destructive," the girl said. She was currently standing behind a changing room door, trying on half the store if he had to be sarcastic about it.
This was the third store they'd been to since that morning. The first was what could only be described as a Goth store. Everywhere he looked was a pierced eyebrow or tongue. A few pierced nipples even managed to catch his attention in the dreary, gray atmosphere. They'd only been there a minute before the girl fell sick. Her stomach seemed to be the problem so Oz thought it best to get her outside and into the fresh air. Sunlight, clear and untainted from the clouds, often had a soothing effect on Oz. They went, she felt better.
They didn't go back in.
The next store was a retro sixties shop. Everything had been going fine (Oz had even managed to find a few shirts he wouldn't have minded buying) when it happened again. He was standing by a glass case filled with marijuana bongs when he heard her groan and then collapse. When he found her she was sitting by a rack of tank tops, clutching her abdomen.
"What happened?" he asked.
"Cramps," she replied.
"Cramps?"
"Yes, cramps! Now can you please… uck off! I'm trying to shop here."
They left five minutes later.
The van was now parked in front of what the girl called 'the mom and pop Sears for the mentally challenged shopper'. So far they'd been in the store for an hour. The last half she'd spent in the dressing room. If he were a bit more normal he'd probably be wondering what the owner and his daughter thought about this little display. The little girl was crouched in front of the register, playing with a Barbie. The older gentleman was standing behind it, watching intently.
"I mean, I know you've been through some stuff, but grow up! Be a man… or a werewolf… whatever the situation calls for."
A pair of jeans came fluttering from behind the door. There was a good-sized pile now, shirts, pants, and other clothing's scattered before it.
Oz felt it inevitable so he decided to ask a question. The query that had been at the tip of his tongue since she first implied knowledge to his past.
"How do you know about me?" Oz asked. His voice felt oddly detached.
"Don't know," the voice said.
Instant
, Oz thought. No hesitation or doubt at all."It's like a movie of your life is being played in my head and leaving memories behind. How that's actually happening I have no idea. Right now I'm seeing you becoming a werewolf… and now I'm seeing you with a redhead. Wow," she said. There seemed to be genuine amazement there, and maybe a hint of sadness. "You really have some puppy eyes going there."
Another shirt was thrown over the door. It was red with a broad corporate logo on its front. He could see why she didn't like it.
"So, miss, why-"
"Please," she interrupted, "Call me Cybergirl. And don't bother asking if my parents really named me Cybergirl. (The question didn't even occur to him.) Of course I have a real name but it doesn't really matter in this situation. What does matter is I've been sent to help you and get you back on your feet."
The door to the change room opened a crack. Oz could see her face, her curly brown hair, and the top of her neck. Nothing else.
"Aren't you going to ask me why?"
Oz shook his head.
"Men," the girl (Cybergirl) scoffed. Her eyes shifted to somewhere behind him. "Would you be a dear and pass me those khakis over there."
Oz grabbed the brown pants and passed them to her. She grabbed them quickly and snapped the door shut.
"I'm beginning to forget some of this so I might as well tell you now. Back in New York I was a world famous pimp." Oz was silent. All movement had ceased on the other side of the door. "You don't believe me."
"Actually, I think I do," Oz said, doing his best to put mimic the tone that usually led to a teacher's amazement in High School. "How can I disprove your statement when what you've said about my past, while sounding equally strange, is the truth. With the philosophy of looking to the past credibility being worth something, I'd say I have to believe you."
That is the worst argument I've made in my entire life
, Oz thought. Even without the benefit of Philosophy 101 anyone could have made a hundred arguments to disprove the statement.His primal side told him to trust her, the part of himself he loathed.
Movement resumed. The snaps of buttons and the rustling of fabric said it to be true.
"That's good," she said, pleased. "You know the truth when you hear it. That's a excellent trait to have."
Oz said nothing.
"Well here's the rest of my tale for you to judge. I was in this pay-per-view event and having a pretty good time with it. The crowd was really into it and I was getting out some pent up aggression. Not sure if Freud would have approved but it was pretty darn fun."
The door opened again and an arm appeared and began to survey the floor. It found a yellow shirt, held it for a second, and tossed it to the side. The process continued till it found what it was looking for, a lime green T-shirt.
"Where was I?" Cybergirl said. "Oh yeah, I was kicking this guy Daniel's buttocks when I think I must have said something blasphemous cause the next thing I know I'm in hell."
Oz's right eyebrow rose; an unconscious gesture he rarely made.
"Hell?" he asked. "Literal hell?"
There was a sigh from behind the door, and a piece of clothing hitting the floor.
"Well, maybe not literal hell but it was pretty darn close," she said defensively. "I think it was the place you go right after you die. Where you… um, make up for your sins or something?"
"Purgatory?"
"Yeah! That's right, purgatory!" There was relief in that voice, Oz thought, and wondered for the first time what this girl had been through. Where there's relief there's worry and worry stems from fear.
"What was it like?" Oz found himself ask and wished his silent nature had stopped him before he did.
"Disco."
"Disco," he echoed.
"Yeah, I have the distinct memory or a disco club," she said. "The ball, the neon lights, the rolling hands dance move! It was my own personal hell brought to life."
The door flew open. There Cybergirl stood, a shin high pile of clothes before her and a neat pile sitting on the plastic chair behind her.
"Hell may not be it," she said, "but purgatory is a giant disco inferno in the sky."
She walked out and did a quick turn, modeling the clothes as a child with a proud new wardrobe would. Oz felt the enthusiasm for show.
"You don't like them?" Oz asked.
She frowned. "That's supposed to be my question, you know. I come out here, do my little modeling thing. And then, and only then, you say 'that is the stupidest bunch of clothes I have ever seen'. Then confident in the knowledge that I look like a damn suburban, I proceed to beat myself to death with a brick."
"Sounds like you have it all figured out," Oz said flatly.
"Ugh!" she cried. "I feel so…so… wholesome!"
"And that's a bad thing?"
"Yes!" she snapped. "Do you know where I come from? Pimping! Flamboyant clothes, crotchless panties, wonder-bras! All the things that make life great!" She threw her arms to the air and screamed/mouthed what looked like something that would offend the most tolerant of peoples. "Darn it! I can't even swear! I'm a pimp and I can't even swear. The only hoe I can refer to is the garden utensil."
Oz smiled. This was something that he'd picked up on earlier but to see her make such a fuss over something so trivial, it reminded him of…
Say it! Just say it already!
"Willow," he whispered.
"What?" She looked at him, her expression a mixture of annoyance, rage and questioning. "Whatever. Now, how do I look?!"
He looked her up and down. She was wearing a pair of dark brown dockers, procured from the very store, the khakis (a tad lighter shade of brown), and a faded, tucked in shirt, also hinting a brown touch.
"That's a lot of brown," he said, finally.
"I feel like sh-" she scowled and mouthed the rest of the word before bawling, "POOP! I FEEL LIKE POOP SO I MIGHT AS WELL LOOK IT! What!? What are you looking at?!" she growled at the owner and his daughter. The man only looked at his daughter once before picking her up and taking her up the stairs at the back of the store.
"You're filled with a lot of rage aren't you," Oz stated.
She shook her head. "Duh! You need a q-tip or what!?"
Oz looked to the stairs and fought back the urge to smile, sucking his lips inward. The owner wasn't coming back down yet. He looked back to Cybergirl, her eyes burning of hatred.
"You look nice."
Her head coiled back, her eyebrows rising and jaw pulling back as if she took offense to the remark.
"Good? As in good good?"
"Yes," he replied calmly, soothing. "You're not wearing the exact shade of color all the way through, you're shirts tucked in, and it goes nicely with your hair."
Her hair was a light brown and even lighter with the highlights. It was probably as long as his was (or short, if you wanted to go that way) but he knew it looked a lot nicer. He'd taken the time to slick his hair back with water while she did nothing to hers. The curls kept it so that the Afro thing that he'd be victim to earlier in the day didn't inflict her. It puffed out more on the sides but that was okay.
It looks nice that way.
"Really?" she asked, still disbelieving.
"Yes, really," he said and smirked.
"Okay, I'm going to have to ask you to leave the store," the owner ordered reaching the bottom of the stairs. "You're causing a scene, making a mess, and scaring my daughter. And if you think I won't call the police you're-"
"It's okay," Cybergirl said calmly. "We'll just be paying for all the stuff in there and then leaving." She pointed to the clothes in the change room and then looked to Oz. "That okay?"
He nodded. "It's okay."
"Good." She leaned towards Oz till her lips were only an inch from his ear. "I think you're destined to do something big here," she whispered. "And I also think I'm the one that's going to help you get there."
Cybergirl took a quick step back and then turned around, her back to Oz.
"How does my butt look in these?" she asked.
Oz glanced down and quickly looked back up. "Fine."
"Just fine?"
"Very fine?" he said hesitantly.
She turned back round and pointed to the dressing room. Her expression was amused.
"Pay for the clothes please," she said. "I have a feeling we have to be out there soon."
3
The only other time that Oz and Cybergirl were even near his van again was immediately after buying the clothes. They purchased the garments (at a price that Cybergirl called 'princely', though, Oz felt a major department store probably could have done better) and she then instructed him to carry them back to the vehicle; all six bags."Big, tough man can't carry an iddy biddy amount of clothes?" she teased.
He did and made no complaint. The passive side of himself was a rule for the day and minded not to help the young lady with the items. He knew most others would have begun to feel upset with the girl but he felt no such ill will, yet.
To grudge was not in his nature, after all, and he felt the girl knew that. She didn't strike him as (too) stupid and she did have privy to his history in that head of hers. How much was still a question but she already had the advantage. He, on the other hand, had no idea who this girl was. What did she like? What did she hate? The best thing to do was to be as non-threatening as possible. She knew where his limits were and he hoped she would respect that.
He put the bags in the back of the van and Cybergirl covered them with the faded sheet that made his blanket. The once bright roses that decorated the makeshift duvet were now a pale pink. The rest of the van could be described in much the same way.
"This is the last time that I voluntarily step into this death trap," Cybergirl said leaping out the back.
She slammed the doors shut and looked at Oz, her head slightly tilted to the side. The sunlight of the day shone brightly on her face.
"I should have bought some shades, for me and you," she added. "You should put a lot of money in the meter. I think we may be a while."
And that was the last thing she said for the next several hours. Most of it was spent walking, never trotting or hurrying in any way, just walking. On a few occasions they would stop. Usually around the time Oz felt his feet begin to hurt, his soles aching lightly. They would stop for around ten minutes each time and sit on the street, Cybergirl looking into nothing.
She's sleepwalking
, Oz would find himself thinking once in a while.She did look blank, blindly marching along the streets of Los Angeles. But that wasn't the truth.
When they walked, he always stayed behind her, on guard. He didn't know what he was worried of. It could have been something practical; like running into another person on the sidewalk, a piano falling from the sky (Heh), or her accidentally leading them into a bad neighborhood. None of that happened. She walked through the crowds gracefully, no objects came from anywhere to attack her, and she never strayed off to an area that he would have considered unsafe.
It was when they did stop that Oz felt his fears justified. She was as silent as he'd ever seen a being. Her normally volatile palate of expressions was dead. It was as if she'd been stripped of all emotion.
She is thinking, though,
he could see that. Behind those eyes was thought, so deep that it embargoed all concentration and left her numb to the world. Thought, nonetheless.He never spoke to her and never tried to distract her. It often annoyed him when something actually found his interest and then someone tried to derail his attention. He made good use of the time, anyway, analyzing the situation from every angle possible.
I was in this pay-per-view event.
How was that possible? Granted he wasn't tapped into the grapevine of popular culture lately but even he would hear of something that audacious, wouldn't he?
I was kicking this guy Daniel's buttocks when I think I must have said something blasphemous.
What Daniel was that? And how does saying something blasphemous get you sent to purgatory nowa-
"I don't think I belong here."
They were sitting on the corner of a street. Oz didn't know the name. He's lost interest in keeping their exact path after the first hour. Cybergirl was beside him, the block filled mostly with small offices rather than walk-in shops. The atmosphere was less lively because of this. A few pedestrians passed but other than that the area was barren of activity.
An emotion was now showing on Cybergirl's face: disillusionment.
"I…" she stuttered and sighed. The words were caught in her mouth, Oz though, and she had to choke them out. "I don't… feel…right here, you know? At first I was just so happy to be in a place where you don't hear the Bee Gees all the time that I didn't really notice. But after we started walking… after it started calling…"
She trailed off and Oz could see her face was flustered, she was close to fighting back tears.
"I just… I don't think this is the place I grew up. This just doesn't feel like my world. Everything looks the same. Everything sounds the same, but… Your memories-"
"It's okay," Oz heard himself say. He found it trite and cliché but he was thankful he did. He knew someone on the edge of an emotional breakdown when he saw one. "Just start at the beginning. Maybe it'll help you understand if you hear yourself saying what happened."
"The beginning," she said, and sighed like a girl with dread on her mind. "The beginning is that my world is different than yours. Nothing major, pigs don't fly or anything, but things are different. I kept hoping for a rational explanation to present itself but it was clear at the end that it wasn't going to happen."
"End?"
"Of the line," Cybergirl finished and smiled briefly. A forced smile, Oz thought. "Okay bad didn't-make-any-sense-joke but hey…" She trailed off and paused briefly before saying, "Uck it, the end of the mini-movie of your life. And before you ask, it was edited for television. No shots of you in the crapper, no shots of you," she shook her hand back in forth in a loose fist, "relieving any tension. Just the moments that shaped your life as far as I could see. A lot of moments," she said with light sarcasm.
Oz didn't say anything despite the silence. Any more encouragement on his part he could easily see as coercing her to do something she didn't want to.
There are better ways to satisfy one's curiosity,
and in an after thought, kinder ways."Here's an example," Cybergirl began again, "did you guys have an 'A-Team: The Next Generation'?"
The image of Mr. T saying, "I pity the fool!" flashed in Oz's mind and he suppressed a smile.
"No," Oz said simply. "Never."
"See! And I bet you guys never heard of a little band called Menudo either?"
Oz paused a moment and searched his memory. "Yeah, back in the eighties there was a band called Menudo."
"Really!?" she exclaimed. Her eyes were large and round. "Wow. I thought that was a fluke of the cosmos or something for them to be in my world, but yours! There's got to be some soul selling going down."
For a moment Oz actually considered this possibility. Was the selling of souls possible? he asked himself. He cast the thought aside, though, when he saw that spark in her eyes, the slight curl at the ends of her lips, and realized she was joking.
"Well, anyway, I was in this pay-per-view thing that you've never heard of when I vanished from my world and ended up in the other. Purgatory, as I told you. The rest of what I remember is just kind of blurs: shadows, shapes, fragments that I can't really fix on. Kind of like after going out on an all night bender, you could say."
A person walked past, casting their long shadow the two. As the darkness fell on Cybergirl, Oz felt an icy grasp run down the base of his spine. He turned to witness the person and only saw a dark shape, a silhouette of a humanoid being.
Sunnydale
, Oz thought and felt his heart wince. Then, before he could do something rash, the figure became a person. The light no longer hit so wrong and Oz watched a man, dressed in a dark blue suit, walk away."Yo, over here."
The voice sounded annoyed and Oz turned to see an accompanying expression.
"Telling my tale here," Cybergirl said; her face the picture of indifference if it weren't for the eyebrows, high and pointed.
That was good. Anything but depression was good.
"You have a low attention span," she said. "Can't go a minute before checking out another man's butt."
"Sorry," Oz apologized. "Thought I… saw something. Continue please."
"All right, so I'm in purgatory," she continued, abruptly. "And the music's killing me. I know that much. I can also say that I heard voices. Not crazy voices or anything saying, 'Kick his butt, CG. Kick his butt and take his wallet'. Nothing too weird."
"But there were voices. A presence," Oz said, slightly questioning.
"Yeah, like a couple of people were speaking through a really muffled PA system or something. Now if God was punishing me, he wasn't alone up there. I have the distinct idea, not memory but idea, that there were a couple of guys up there. I don't remember any of the voices but I remember thinking, 'Geez, can't these guys shut the… up'. Just my thoughts at the time are all I can remember now. Nothing concrete."
Nothing concrete and you said you were forgetting your past earlier
."How's your memory of your life in New York," Oz asked, his tone inquisitive.
"Fading," Cybergirl said simply. "I can't remember past twelve right now. Pfft! I don't belong here!" she whispered loudly, coldly. "I don't feel right here. I'm not from this place. That's why those people didn't see me when I did my little sky dive. I was nothing but a ghost to them. And that's all I am, a ghost."
Oz thought back to when she fell or more specifically, when she hit.
After she stopped, when the momentum had finally run out, there'd been a moment when she glanced around, wasn't there. Where she seemed to take in her surroundings as any rational person would after finding him or herself in a strange land.
He thought, no he knew, that she'd seen him. Her head had panned around like a camera on a dilapidated crane, shaking and tumbling as it twisted around, but she had seen him. The longhaired man with the scruffy beard and beige acoustic. He'd been putting his guitar away and getting up, staring at her. If there was one person to notice, it'd been him. And she had.
"You saw me and I saw you," Oz said. Cybergirl stared at him, not understanding. "I saw you when you arrived when no one else did and you saw me." He paused and moved closer to her, looking into her pale green eyes. "You are here for a reason. Said so yourself earlier. You're here to help me out with some task and I have a feeling I'm supposed to help you too. I don't know how yet but I have a feeling that I will. Soon."
Cybergirl gawked at him, her grin amused. "Hey Zeus, boy, you really are a romantic aren't you! The lord will provide," she said mockingly. "All will turn right in the end. You may have that much faith in life but I have no such beliefs. As far as I'm concerned those high and mighty dudes who sacked me here can cram this little crusade up where the sun don't shine!"
She sat back against the wall of the building, its surface looking hard and unyielding. She was looking at her shoes when she began to speak again, and hers eyes slowly found their way back to Oz as she did.
"But… in the tradition of self serving smart butts (she grimaced saying 'butts' and Oz felt himself once again amused) who have no doubt found themselves in similar situations over the years, I'm willing to play this out. Best scenario, I end up back in my world before anyone can say testes. Worst scenario, I end up a weirdo on the streets of LA with no memory and my only friend being a guy who can't feel a real, raw emotion without turning into something hairier that my aunt Gladyce."
"Testes?" Oz asked.
"Yeah, I'm surprised I can say it too," Cybergirl said, her grin wide. "Usually I start feeling sick if I go against the programming. It's kind of like my brain is saying 'No! Don't go there!' and if I do, bam! Iller than the Beastie Boys."
Oz considered this a moment before asking: "Why were you able to say 'sheeeeeet!' than if you start to feel sick when saying an obscenity?"
"You try not cussing when you're falling from who knows where," she replied frankly. "I'm telling you, man, it's haaauurd."
"Yeah, I can see-"
Oz paused, or stopped abruptly might have described it better. His attention shifted and suddenly a girl named Cybergirl didn't exist. What was left were his senses, those that were so much more acute since the change. He'd tried to ignore them the past few months, grow apart from them as he hoped with the memories. But they'd always been there, in wait. And now… he spelt-
"You said you were being called, is that what you said?" Oz asked.
Cybergirl looked confused and a little off. "Yeah."
"Do you still feel it? The calling?"
Oz couldn't see her but the silence told him she was thinking about it. "No," she said. "Whatever it was stopped with your movie. Why?"
Oz continued to not meet her stare. His gaze was fixated elsewhere. Following the direction of it.
"I can smell something," Oz said, his eyes squinting in the direction of the sun. "Something not human."
Cybergirl stood and Oz found himself follow without realizing. Where he was looking was to the right of the way they came. The vintage feel of this avenue quickly changed to something more modern. The buildings glossy, flush and sprawling upward. And people, so many people.
"You think you can find it in all that?" Cybergirl asked.
Oz rubbed his hang along the side of his face, feeling the long stubble. How long had it been since he'd turned into a werewolf, since he'd tracked down a prey? That, of course, needed no answer.
When Willow left you!
his subconscious screamed and Oz felt reluctance tear into him. Did he really want to let that part of him live again after trying to suppress it for so long, even if it was just a fraction?No choice
, he said back, no choice at all."Time to find out," Oz said and began to cross the street, mindful of cars. He didn't see the hesitation on Cybergirl's face when she began to follow.
To be continued…
(Author's note: Anybody who actually read to this point think I should work a bit more on my imagery? I take things in obsession and right now I'm obsessed with imagery. Should I break out the thesaurus and dictionary and go for it or is good as is? Thank you in advance if you even think of answering and thanks for reading to this point/or scrolling down. It's the effort that counts :)