When worlds Divide
A Tale of 'Daylight' by BatLurker AKA LSauchelli.
ZERO HOUR
It was the day when a superman that wore a ring of power beyond human understanding revealed himself to the rest of the world as a hero that was ready to die for everyone's sake. It was the day when said hero died in vane. It was the day when the world died, and a new one was born out of the ashes of the old one.
-From Daylight, by Daria Morgendorffer, who never met the superman in question.
Daria yawned and stretched her arms at the irritating beeping sound of her alarm clock. She raised her head from her pillow and stared at it for a long while, secretly hoping to gain the power to blow things up with her mind. When that didn't happen, she sloppilly tried to hit it. She was more asleep than awake, enough so that she actually failed. So she glared at it a second time, and when she raised her hand again ready to strike with enoguh strength to break it, the small alarm clock made a weird wail, like a puppy dying in a most horrible way.
She stared at it, for a moment thinking of checking what had happened. But she decided it wasn't important, she had an excuse to stay in bed for a while longer.
It was a school day. She had to get up.
But she wanted to sleep. So she closed her eyes again, knowing full well that her mother would probably come five to ten minutes later complaining about her not being up in time. She was surprised, however, when the person that came to wake her later was not her mother, "Daria!" it was Quinn, her annoying little sister.
The aurburn haired girl decided that Quinn wasn't worth waking up over so she put her blanket up to her head. "'m asleep." She barely whispered.
"Daria, wake up!" The younger girl exclaimed, and pulled Daria's blanket down. "Daria, something weird is going on!"
The older sister lazily opened one eye and glared with it for good measure, "What, Quinn? What's so important that you can't let me sleep in peace?"
"There's a blackout! My hair dryer is toasted and mom and dad won't wake up!" Daria could almost smell the panic in her voice.
That alerted Daria. Not really what Quinn had said, as it could be interpreted in, oh, so many ways. But the tone in the girl's voice was, well, touching, to say at least. "Calm down," Daria said, sitting on her bed, fully awake, "what do you mean 'they won't wake up'?"
Quinn looked to both sides and bit her lip, "I mean they're in bed," she made a motion with her hands, "not doing anything! And today I'm sopoused to have my picture taken! I can't go out with my hair like this! It's not even half as bouncy as I would like it to be!"
"Your hair? That's what you're worried about. Are you kidding?" Daria rolled her eyes and massaged her temples, "That's not even remotely strange, you know them, I don't know why I expect more from you at times."
Quinn glared down at her older sister, "I'm not an idiot!"
Daria gave her the best 'actually-you-are' look she had in her arsenal. "The power outage says you're not going to get bouncy hair this morning."
Quinn closed her hands into fists, but it was clear she didn't intend to use them to hit her sister, she was just scared, "So, what about mom and daddy?"
Daria yawned, she had already decided it was useless to try to get any more sleep, "probably sleeping because their alarm clocks didn't work, or something"
"But I tried waking them up! It won't work!"
Daria frowned at the thought. "What did you just say?"
"I tried waking them up,"
Daria climbed out of bed and ran past her sister down the hallway towards their parent's room, "you idiot!" she spat at the younger girl, she opened the master bedroom and frowned at the toxic-like smell that came from the room. "Quinn," she said in a quiet voice, noticing her sister following her, "when you tried waking them up, did the room smell like rotten eggs?"
"Gawd! No!" The younger girl's face turned green and she ran to the bathroom, from the distance Daria could hear her throwing up.
The auburn haired girl shook her head and put a foot inside the master bedroom, she raised her right hand to her nose, shielding it from the smell. "Mom, Dad?" She hoped they were okay, she wanted them to be okay. But there was something that simply didn't sit right with the situation. Something that told her that everything in her life was about to change for the worse.
Neither of her parents answered her call, so she decided a more direct approach. She extended her free hand to Helen's shoulder and tried shaking it. To her horror, she immediantely noticed how cold she was. "It's like ice, only-" her mother's skin was not only ice cold, it also didn't feel anything like human flesh. If anything it felt like a spoonge. "This is insane, this can't be real."
She tried with her father, and got exactly the same results. She moved his head a little and it made a weird rasping sound. She looked down at Jake's neck and took a step back. It had cracked just under his chin, and from inside came a purple ooze. "God." She bent her head to the side and threw up right there. The ooze was the source of the rotten egg-like smell.
Daria started hyperventilating, "This is surreal, this can't be right," her whole body was sweating, "what the hell is going on?" She forced herself to look one more time at her father's neck and shock her head in sadness. "Insane." She told herself, slowly walking towards her mother's cellphone, "911, got to call 911." She picked it up and dialed the number. And then she blinked. The phone was dead.
"Daria? What's going on?" Quinn's voice sounded weak, almost child-like. "Are they sick?"
Daria closed her eyes. It didn't matter that the phone wasn't working. There was nothing anyone could do for her parents. "No, they're not sick, Quinn," she said, and walked to leave the room, "they're-" she sobbed and fell to her knees.
"They're what?" Quinn sat on the floor in front of Daria, "tell me they're okay."
The older sister looked at the younger girl's eyes and didn't know what to say. She couldn't lie, but she also couldn't admit the truth. So she simply hugged her sister and kept sobbing.
"Daria?" Quinn's voice was shaking. "What's going on?"
Hours later, the Morgendorffer sisters were downstairs, Quinn still crying over the couch and Daria looking over the window at the neighbors. "This is getting more insane by the minute," Daria said, gritting her teeth. When Quinn didn't have the strength to ask why she decided it was best to explain, "the sky is bright yellow and there are no signs of life outside."
Quinn raised her head a little at the mention of no life. "What does that mean?"
Daria shook her head, "I don't know yet, but I need you to stay inside the house, away from the window."
The younger girl's eyes grew wide, "what? You're leaving me here, all alone?"
"I need to check on Jane, I promise it won't take me more than a few minutes at most," she laced her boots and took a deep breath, "If you notice anything weird starts to happen before I get back, I want you to run as fast as you can to Jane's house. Okay?"
"O-okay, bu- but why do you have to go?"
Before Daria could come up with a hasty explanation, someone knocked their door, "that could be Jane" Daria declared, hoping that was the case. She didn't know if she had it in her to be there for Quinn if Jane was dead too.
She surprised herself by thanking God when, upon opening, she saw her best friend in the world on the other side. "So, did you notice?" the taller girl said, almost without any hint of emotion left in her voice, "all the adults are gone."
TBC
This story was spawned mainly by connecting the Daylight Shared Multiverse with an Iron Chef and me watching and reading a few too many post-apocalyptic fiction.
Funny thing, I'm pretty sure this is actually the first, true non-crossover Daria fic I've ever written (other than a few very short ones here and there). Let's hope it works.
In the next few parts, you can expect a younger version of a popular fanon character. It will be fun to take that one in the direction I'm planing.
I'm following what I think is TAG's tao: "When in doubt, just kill a lot of people."
