This is the first part in what can become a multi-part story, if there is sufficient interest.

It is based on my character in a Kingdom Hearts role-playing forum. The address is linked on my personal webpage. It is called Kingdom Hearts RPG, if anyone is interested in joining us in role-play.

Kendra is a character I have been working on developing for a while and this was an opportunity to develop her in a role-playing environment. Please let me know what you think of the story. I could certainly use the feedback.

A Songbird Blown Off Course

Kendra woke to the sound of laughter in her dorm room. For a moment she actually wasn't certain who was laughing, her dreams had been so strange that they had turned her awareness upside down and backwards. It only took a second, though, for Kendra to realize that the one laughing was her roommate, Sanura.

"No!! Don't go that way! Gosh darn it, will you never jump far enough to catch up with him?! Don't let him win every darn time!"

Kendra blinked her eyes open. Apparently Sanura had dug out her game system and was playing a game of some sort. It was Saturday, and none of them had regular classes. She didn't hear Edeline in the room, so she supposed that their other roommate was out, probably shopping. Edeline loved shopping.

Kendra lived in the dormitories at The School with two other girls. Edeline's family was wealthy on the world where they lived, and wanted the best magical education possible for their only daughter and youngest child. She had three older brothers who doted on her and who had practically adopted her roommates as little sisters as well. Kendra wasn't certain what to make of their gruff affection, but she appreciated the effort.

Sanura, sweet, darling, kittenish Sanura, was a prodigy. That was what all their professors said. She was two years younger than her classmates and had been too young, really, when she had come to The School for training. She cried for her mother for a week straight until Kendra had volunteered to be her mother-at-School. They had been nigh inseparable since then.

Kendra was two months away from her sixteenth birthday. It felt like two months was going to take forever, especially with the dreams she'd been having lately. Whoever had heard of a sword shaped like a key, anyway? The weapon which had been in her hand had to be metaphorical. A symbol of unlocking something within herself. It could not have been literal. That would be absurd, not to mention impossible.

Of course, who was she to say what was, or was not, impossible.

She sat up slowly because she knew that her head was going to be aching. It always did after the strange dreams. At least in this one she had seen a woman she wanted to think was her mother. She could only hope that her mother would look at her with that much approval and acceptance. She sighed. She was turning into as much of a romantic as Sanura was already.

Sanura still claimed that Kendra was a long-lost Princess of some sort or another. She had reams of papers telling one impossible story after another that she claimed were the true tales of Kendra's background.

The simple answer was that Kendra didn't know where she came from, or why she had been left at The School within an hour of her birth. For all she knew, she was cursed or despised by those who had borne her because of her hair or her eyes. Kendra didn't know anyone else with green hair, or eyes like liquid gold. The Headmaster told her that there wasn't anything wrong with her hair or her eyes, but Kendra still wondered.

The headache faded and Kendra looked up at the television screen and Sanura sitting cross-legged on the floor with the controller in her hands, elbows on her knees, as she focused on the action – some spiky haired kid running some sort of an obstacle race against another kid with blue-white hair.

Sanura cried out as the spiky haired kid fell from the palm tree he was trying to climb and threw down the controller before reaching for the reset button. "I swear, Sora, can you be any more clumsy?" She looked up at Kendra and grinned wide. "Hey! I got a new game! Do you want to try?"

Kendra shook her head slowly. "Why don't you show me? Hmm?"

Sanura squealed in delight and Kendra had to smile in response. She sighed and reached for her clothes. Might as well get dressed while Sanura started up a new game.

The beginning movie was actually pretty good, graphically, and the music was rather good. Lots of shots of the spiky haired boy she'd seen earlier, some of the white-haired boy, and some of a girl with short reddish hair. Definitely odd, but then Kendra wasn't as familiar with the video games that the other students played in their spare time.

She thought her heart had stopped completely, though, when the spiky haired boy stood on the stained glass platform and faced a choice of weapons.

Sanura looked up at her with an expectant look. "Well? What should I choose for your game?" Her eagerness faded as she took in the slack-jawed expression on Kendra's face. "Uhm, Kendra?"

"Wh-where did you get this?" Kendra was actually surprised that she could speak. "Were you playing this last night?"

Sanura paled. "No, why?"

"Where did you get this game?"

"Uhm, my parents sent it to me. I just got it this morning. There's like three games already and a couple more are supposed to come out soon. Daddy said that he'd send them as soon as he could find them. He said that he saw the kids of one of the vice presidents playing them and thought of me. Why?" Her voice wobbled. She was very worried.

Kendra felt a stabbing pain in her head and she knew, suddenly knew, that she didn't have much time. "I dreamed that platform last night, Sanura. I made the choices and I fought my own darkness. I have . . ." she winced again at the stabbing pain, "I have to talk to the Headmaster. If . . . if I don't come back, look to Edeline, please, and be good."

Sanura was on her feet in a moment as Kendra started for the door. "Wait, Kendra, what did you choose?"

"I chose the sword and gave up the shield. I don't know what it means. I have to go." The door closed behind her.

Kendra struggled through the pain to run through the hallways on bare feet. She winced slightly, thinking that she should have at least grabbed some sandals or something, but she didn't have time. She had to get to the Headmaster. He would know what was happening to her. He would know what to do. He was an adult. Surely that meant that he knew things she didn't.

She found her path blocked by one of the teachers; she wasn't certain which one and her head wasn't clear enough to remember. She felt like her brain was swimming it was so difficult to concentrate. "Please, I have to see the Headmaster."

"Kendra, what is going on?" The teacher had her arm in a firm hold, and she wasn't letting go.

Kendra couldn't explain. She didn't have time anymore. Whatever was happening to her was going to happen now and she wasn't going to make it to the Headmaster's office. She closed her eyes against the stabbing pain in her head. "Forgive me!" she cried out, "Tell the Headmaster that I tried!" Then she spun her arm, pulling it from the teacher's grasp and struck the teacher with a two-handed push.

It was only supposed to push the adult backwards so that she wouldn't be caught in whatever had Kendra, but there was a gust of wind from her hands and shoulders and the teacher flew backwards into a wall. Not hard enough to do great damage, but harder than Kendra had intended to push her, and she would definitely need some Healing at the Nurse's Office.

Then Kendra was surrounded by light, blinding light that carried the roar of wind through it, and when it faded, the hallway was empty and the teacher was slack-jawed in disbelief.

---

Traverse Town. The street was quiet and empty, more an alleyway between two large buildings in this cobbled-style city than a major thoroughfare. A park was nearby with trees and greenery made shadowed in the distant moonlight. A dog ran barking at a fleeing cat to no notice in particular.

All that was about to change.

A wind from nowhere rushed through the space between the buildings – blowing at windows and shrieking at eaves. It faded for a bare moment before blowing through the street again. On the third return, the wind gathered in a swirling funnel in the center of the forgotten street. There was a flash of light and then all was still again.

A few scattered slips of paper settled back to the ground unaware that where the street had been empty . . . now it was not. A girl stood, trembling, in the center of the alley, in the place where the wind had gathered.

Her eyes were squeezed shut, as if in pain, though she made no sound, her entire body tense and strained. She looked to be perhaps fifteen or sixteen years of age. She wore a yellow blouse with black calf-length pants. Her feet were bare on the stones of the street. Her green hair hung in loose curls around her face and shoulders.

After a moment of stillness she slowly relaxed and opened her eyes, her strange, unearthly, unmistakable eyes, to look around. They were golden. Not merely yellow, not merely amber, her eyes looked like molten gold around the black and shown as bright as a new-minted coin. She looked at the street around her curiously.

"I would ask where on God's green Earth I was," she murmured to herself, "but this isn't God's green Earth." She chuckled softly at some thought of her own – how Sanura, a friend of hers, would be beside herself in glee at the thought of actually seeing a whole new world.

The girl suddenly sobered. This was a new world, one that neither The School she attended nor the Headmaster who had raised her had ever told her about. She had to be wary and she had to be especially canny.

She had to survive long enough to find a way back to The School, if that was even going to be possible, and the strange sense in the back of her mind which told her so much about people and the places where they came from told her that simply surviving was going to be much more difficult than it had been in The School. She wasn't going to be able to do it alone; that was for certain.

But how to find allies she could trust?