Stranger in a strange land (part 1)
Disclaimer: none of the characters are mine, but belong to their respective owners.
Note: this story takes place after the end of P:NW S1 and in place of the last four episodes Grimm S3.
Theresa Rubbel (also known as "Trubel" to her friends, not that she had any lately) was, well, in trouble: she was lost. This was a different kind of trouble as opposed to what she was used to, but still...
Theresa Rubbel's problems began when she had hit puberty, and people that she knew as well as perfect strangers began to transform into bestial monsters and tried to kill her, while claiming either self-defence or that she was "Grimm". Theresa did not know what a "Grimm" was, she was positive that she was not one, and she was really tired of monsters trying to kill her.
She was also tired of monsters turning back into humans after they died. This made Therese get into trouble with law as well, and Therese really wanted to clarify her situation at that end as well – but she did not know how. The law obviously was not going to save her from monsters, and Therese was nowhere ready to die, no matter how pathetic her life had become.
This state of affairs has left Therese... well, lost, but more immediately on the run. For several years by now she had been moving from state to state on foot, on train and plane and automobile...and she had become quite adept at doing that.
OK, not at flying planes. This Therese has done only now, after taking a real risk with airport security, only to find out that she was lost – rather than land her in northwest USA, the plane had deposited her in Canada instead. Western Canada, which meant, that if she wanted to return to her homeland she only needed to go south, to the main 48 states rather than westward to Alaska – but still.
Therese was sitting on a bench. It was late April, almost May, but the weather has just recently begun to warm-up: it had been a hard, long winter with overly large amount of ice and snow, so the plants – and the songbirds, Therese had noticed absent-mindedly – were doing their best to make-up for the lost time and to show the world that they were still alive!
For the trees it meant sprouting as many buds, flowers leaves and seeds as possible in as little time as possible...literally from everywhere. Not just branches, but roots and trunks as well. That included the seedlings, which were sprouting throughout the lush grasses and flowers (dandelions and white clover at this stage) all over the place.
The songbirds were present as well, robins and starlings, pigeons, gulls and the ever-present sparrows, whose simple song reminded Therese of the States...but in a good way. "Maybe I can make a new life here?" Therese muttered to herself. "I mean, there are no monsters here, maybe?"
It was when the giant tortoise appeared. Moving with all of the grace of an armored truck, swinging its spiky head, and chomping on the nearby linden and maple trees, it ignored Therese, as if the latter was completely insignificant and not even worth to be killed ASAP.
For her own part, as soon as Therese's brain caught up with her body and shifted it out of a fighting stance (and standing right next to a smattering of spruce trees that the monstrous reptile ignored – it was a leaf-only herbivore, it seemed), she realized that as well, and relaxed.
"Giant tortoises," she muttered to herself. "Plant-eating and rather dim giant tortoises. I can live with that."
"Ms, are you talking to yourself? Are you all right?"
Therese looked, genuinely startled once again: giant tortoises and other monsters was one thing, but ordinary people were another, and she was generally good at detecting them beforehand.
"Yes, I am fine," her mouth moved before her brain reacted that most of the people on the scene were dressed in military uniforms of some sort, meaning that they were not quite ordinary either. "It's just a tortoise, a giant tortoise...it isn't going anywhere."
Therese's interlocutor blinked. "Well yes, it is that...still. It is a giant tortoise, you know?"
"Yes, well," Therese blinked in her turn. "It's no big deal. When I was little, I had a tortoise, and it never really went anywhere, it just stood at one spot and grazed. This one does too... so it isn't that different from the ordinary ones, right?" she smiled gratuitously at the man, certain that some submissiveness, when dealing with a man in a uniform, would not hurt. (She learned this the hard way.)
The man blinked again, apparently deciding that it was his turn. "You're not an animal control person like Dylan is, are you?" he asked, apparently as unbalanced by this conversation as Therese herself was.
"No," she replied. "In fact I've arrived here only recently."
This was true: as soon as Therese exited the airport, she grabbed her few belongings and left, seeking to vanish herself inside a city...but Canadian cities were smaller than the American were, and Therese soon found herself in the suburbs instead. Since she was not just hungry, but also tired, she decided to take a rest on the first convenient-looking bench in the small park, where the giant tortoise had apparently found her...and the military, it seems, have found the tortoise instead.
"OK, but where do you usually work?" the man insisted. If he was not in a uniform, Therese would take offense and go on the offensive, but since he was, she did not dare, and in fact all that she wanted was to escape...although she was just a little bit curious what these soldiers were doing with the giant tortoise and from where did they all come from.
"I am between jobs," she said instead, deciding that honesty was the best policy here. Then some of her old – very long ago – character raised her head and asked:
"And why are you asking this? Who are you, people?"
"Oh!" the man became noticeably flustered. "I am Lieutenant Ken Leeds of the Canadian military. I am with the project Magnet...and this is project Magnet!" he swung his arms out and about. Instinctively, Therese looked around. Nothing has changed – same trees, same people, same giant tortoise, and the same overcast spring sky, really.
"I don't see it," she confessed. "What does it look like?"
Lieutenant Ken Leeds of the Canadian military also looked around and winced. "I mean," he began, paused, open his mouth to start again and changed his mind. "Ms. Finch, Ange, could you help me out here? We seem to be talking the same language, but apparently we just aren't quite communicating!"
"Let me see," the aforementioned Ange said softly as she emerged into Therese's field of view, and the young woman's heart sank for here, she could unexplainably feel, was something much more familiar to her: one of the monsters that would attack her on sight for no particular reason-
Only it did not happen: something was wrong. The monster – Ange – had obviously seen something that was different with Therese from it was with lieutenant Leeds or anyone else – but there was no attack, no sense of hostility, no nothing.
Well, there was something, but more like irritation or annoyance, which most certainly was not the same, and that difference kept Therese sufficiently off balance for her to do anything stupid or regrettable.
"What's the problem?" Ange, who may or may not have been a monster, turned to Lieutenant Ken.
"Her!" the latter pointed at Therese. "She, she-"
"Yes?" Therese was actually hurt and upset – she assumed that she was acting normally until now. "What am I supposed to do?"
"Nothing – except maybe faint in fear at the sight of a giant tortoise," Ange said acidly. "Although I don't know why – it is just a giant tortoise, you know?"
"Not that!" Lieutenant Leeds groaned. "About project Magnet!"
"Ah, right, you should've said so at the start," Ange grinned. "Just joking. All right, Ms.-"
"Therese."
"Ms. Therese. What you have stumbled into is a rather classified operation of the Canadian military. Now, from what I have overheard, you are actually from the States, so this makes it slightly trickier-"
"I got my paperwork in order," Therese said quickly as she reached into her backpack: that was certainly true, as Therese has cobbled a rather successful legal patchwork image over the years from bits and pieces. "There is no problem, isn't there?"
"Let me see," Ange looked thoughtfully at Therese, suggesting that she had a better idea at what was going on with Therese than the other woman would have liked, took the half-offered paperwork, and walked away, clearly intent at looking over the documentation at her leisure.
This was bad, Therese was not sure that her work would stand up to a proper scrutiny at all, but before she could react, there was a loud noise, and a machine, vaguely similar to both a bulldozer and an electromagnet appeared on the scene.
This was strange even by Therese's standards – not dangerous strange, more like bizarre strange – and she stared open-mouthed as the odd-looking vehicle manoeuvred itself into a proper position... and stopped.
"All right people! Let's do it!" lieutenant Leeds cried excitedly.
There was a pause as everyone stopped whatever he or she were doing and looked towards Ange, who, sadly, was engrossed in Therese's fake identity and did not react in time...
"Ahem!" Lieutenant Leeds said, sounding slightly cross now. "I am in charge of the field operations, Colonel Hall had said so, so let's do it!"
There was another pause and then the military's machine flared to light – literally! When the chromatically white light faded from Therese's eyes, she found that herself, and the others, were no longer in a Canadian park, but elsewhere: the climate was hotter and drier, and the plants were different: not lindens and maples, but palms and even eucalyptus of all sorts. Grazing among these trees were other giant tortoises, clearly of the same species as the one that Therese and the others have met first, and next to them were some strange beasts, hairy and mammalian, as big as rhinos, but without any horns...
"Lieutenant Leeds, you idiot! We have been here before! We have tried to retract a plane before using this invention! It backfired, remember?!" Ange's voice was loud and angry, but the lieutenant was not worried at all.
"No we haven't – you got it backwards! Last time we tried to return the plane to our time, while in this case we have had to return a prehistoric tortoise to its time, and it has worked."
Ange paused, looked around, and came to a conclusion. "Very well, I grant you that. Now please take us all back..."
There was a pause as she trailed away because by now everyone could hear a heavy tread of a stampede, and see a small herd of giant-sized kangaroos, each one bigger and heavier than an average man, going straight towards them, chased by a giant lizard that looked longer and heavier than an average boat.
This action was not going on too far from the humans and was actually moving towards them at a very respectable speed, so the humans needed leave ASAP.
"Ahem!" Leeds turned back towards the vehicle and its operator. "We need to leave now-"
"On it!" yelled the other man as he did something inside the cabin...and some sort of a wildcat landed on top of the vehicle. There was another chromatically white flash of light and when it faded, Therese found that she, and the others, were standing back in the city suburbs, without the giant tortoise... but with the wildcat standing on top of the project Magnet's roof.
Therese frowned. True, the wildcat looked more like a leopard or a cougar, though its proportions were different, and so were the teeth, but beyond that...it wasn't a monster; Therese stared at it almost eye-into-eye, and felt no fear, no haze that would come over her whenever she faced off against a monster that could wear a human's shape. This was a dangerous animal to be sure, but just an animal – she could handle it...
Only she did not have to: there were sounds of gunfire, and the animal collapsed...not dead, but tranquilized.
"That's one way to handle a troublesome problem," lieutenant Leeds said brightly.
"Sir – the controls are fried, we'll have to rebuilt it almost from scratch again," came the response that wiped the smile clean off the lieutenant's face. "I'm not sure what the superiors will say-"
"Um, Ange-" Lieutenant Leeds turned towards the woman.
"Um, nothing," Ange was not very helpful either. "Right now I have to take care of Ms. Therese, so you are in charge of the clean-up, so try not to kill the new animal, or Dylan will have us all for garters. Ms. Therese?"
"Just Therese is fine," the aforementioned "Ms" said quickly.
"I'm afraid that we have to go now and have a talk with a lawyer," Ange said, as she firmly took the other woman by hand and led her to a car.
Faced with a prospect of being on her own with a monster, Therese gulped and almost bolted. But... there still was no feeling of danger, no threat underlying Ange's voice – Therese may have been in trouble, but not in peril as she was used to. And so, this realization kept Therese sufficiently off balance long enough for her to get into Ange's car and for the two women to drive off.
As the hubbub of lieutenant Leeds's clean up faded in the distance, Ange gave the other woman a look:
"I think we need to talk."
TBC