The Peculiar Case of an Anomaly
AKA An exploration and deconstruction of a common plot device involving OC's in a world that was probably not meant for self-inserts. Trying to be genre-fluid here, but expect the unexpected as they say.

EDIT: Updates will be sporadic. Sorry 'bout that, guys. ~Life.~

Also revised Chapter 1 slightly. :) Lemme know what you think! Leave me a review, when you can.

I
The x Straying x Girl
Year One, Day One

It was a Wednesday when Noah decided she was afraid for her life.

The sun was at its peak in the sky, her shadow nonexistent beneath her feet. One minute, she was standing in her kitchen trying to tie her shoes while shoving a poptart down her mouth; and in the next, she was not.

She stumbled at first, but when the dizziness ebbed away, she knew she had to run. Her feet kept her mobile, purely out of instinct. Left, right, left, right. It wasn't long before she felt the firm, suffocating embrace of panic squeeze her from the inside. She grasped at her chest and clawed her hands through her shoulder-length hair. She entertained the thought of pulling at her hair hard enough to cause a headache. God, why won't anyone talk to her? Why didn't anyone know what she was talking about?

Their silence, she realized, was the sound of true fear. It was fueled by the ringing laughter of alien children sporting magenta colored hair and blue eyes, and of her voice coming out as an unfamiliar language you have never learned to speak before.

But Noah followed its beat because there was no other choice. Eventually, she decided to approach a sensible looking woman seated by the benches. With a shallow breath, she stirred conversation as casually as she could. But the tremble in her voice betrayed her.

"Madame, may I ask what time it is?"

The woman, with a cropped bob and pearl earrings the size of baby's fists, elegantly turned her wrist upwards to check the time on her watch. It looked expensive.

"A little past noon, my dear," she answered airily.

Noah bit the inside of her cheek. She spoke more urgently this time. "Date? Day? Month? Place?"

A pause.

"Please?"

The stranger seemed amused at Noah's distress. Then, she chuckled as she stood to walk towards the other side of the park. Small toddlers were running by their feet. Noah was struggling just to keep up with her long strides, and because she wasn't sure where she would go to next as soon as the sidewalk ends.

"Today would be a Wednesday, the 21st of June, and you would be in Yorknew City." She gasped, as if remembering something, and then added; "Can't you read the street signs and billboards? It's practically everywhere in this town." She hid a condescending chuckle behind her pale hand. "Yorknew City will never let you forget where you are, ahaha."

Don't you think I did that already? she snapped back, internally. The problem was she couldn't read anything. And even though she knew it would make no difference, Noah took the woman's cue and started looking around again. They were still there. The signs, none of which spoke her language. There were plenty of them. Some were shaped like arrows, others were shaped like traffic signals, and dye-cut advertising with obnoxious neon lights.

Noah could not read a single letter. She searched her memory for a familiar symbol, syllable—nothing. Alien gibberish, all of it. The slow-build of panic finally manifested in the form of bile that rose to the base of her throat. Coupled with her disheveled appearance, with eyes that kept darting around like prey being hunted in an open field, she began attracting more suspicion from the woman. She began to look at Noah with a frightful expression.

Suddenly, she turned her nose away from Noah.

"You must be from the outside. Explains why you aren't literate. Excuse me."

Noah wasn't in the right mindset to even bother taking offense to anything she said, as she watched her hastily walk away. Her ears began to ring with a deafening high-pitched sound, while her limbs felt tingly and numb at the same time. Noah took two steps back and bumped into a group of people before she took a mad dash towards the nearest secluded bush by the back of a broken water fountain. The decorative stone angels were no longer spouting out water from their mouths. Cobwebs were prominent fixtures inside the cracks on the base. Noah threw up onto the solid earth in an instant. She could still taste the lingering flavor of stale strawberry and icing on her tongue.

Yorknew City? What the fuck?

As her senses returned to her one by one, her vision blurred through her tears. She sobbed silently into her hands. Then, she began to laugh, almost deliriously. When she realized that she was running out of breath, her wheezing causing her to cough out phlegm, she decided to make a mental list of all the things someone who was dreaming would do in their dreams just to wake up. There were the obvious methods. Falling, dying, broken bones, shattered teeth, pain—

Her smile disappeared. She leaned her head back until her neck was craned as far as it could go. She kept her weight there until she felt the ground touch the back of her t-shirt. She cried again, her mouth exhaling violently, her body heaving into wracking sobs that she could no longer control.

It was a Wednesday when Noah decided that she was afraid for her life.

xXx

"Ma'am, we understand that you are going through a lot of trauma but we will need to see some identification if we are to help you with your stay in the institution."

As her bad luck would have it, the local police caught her as she attempted to jump from a rooftop restaurant seven-stories high. It was frequented by lovebirds, which Noah thought was a poetic way to end her little nasty nightmare.

When they were finally able to restrain her, Noah's clothes were stained with all sorts of dirt and fluid, her backside stunk of wet grass, and her hair was standing up at the ends from the humidity. Three officers claimed she was merely hysterical in their formal reports, but one was a little wiser and wrote Noah down as clinically insane.

"I have ID, but will you believe me when I say I'm real?" Noah looked into the eyes of the officer interrogating her with all the seriousness she could muster. She didn't even recognize the sound of her own voice. The officer only blinked at her tiredly. He was treating her like a child getting reprimanded.

"Ma'am, of course you're real. Aren't you right here, sitting in front of me?" One side of her mouth twitched upwards. Am I? Am I real? Are you?

"Now, just cooperate and show us your identification. We will accommodate you in the nearest facility for treatment, I'm sure your card will cover health insurance. There's no need for you to take your own life, ma'am."

Noah wanted to laugh at his face. Maybe this was the cue for her to wake up? She will show them her identification card from work—she worked in retail for two years until they decided she was better off in human resources—then, they'll officially write her off as crazy, and just as they're about to throw her in the nuthouse, she jolts awake. Her nightmare will be a story to tell friends, an icebreaker, something to chuckle at when the day is over. For how could they take her MedCard seriously when she was, apparently, living in a world of Hunters and psychopaths and murders and thieves and people who could kill her—

"Ma'am!" he shouted. He waved his hands in front of her face in an attempt to grab her attention.

Noah did not respond. She dug into her pants pocket with restrained force. She found her leather wallet from last Christmas, slipped her finger into the innermost pocket, and threw her ID card on the metal table in resignation, and hope. Her mind was reeling with scenarios of how to escape, how to get out and leave and never look back, because she never asked for this. She never asked to leave her life behind.

Yorknew City. What the actual fuck. Please, God, wake up. Wakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeup.

The OIC took it with a sigh and moved to write her name down on his pad of paper. Noah watched his reactions with a dreadful sense of calm. No chance. No way. I'm stuck. I'm dreaming. I'm drowning. I'm stuck.

He turned the card to its back, then upside down, then back to the front. His brows were furrowed and his frown was unreadable. Without turning his head upwards, he stared at Noah and threw her card back to her as gently as he could. But he was frustrated. He was getting tired of her games. It's not a game.

"Ma'am, please. Actual ID."

This time, Noah couldn't help herself any longer. She took her ID card and tucked it back into her wallet as her giggles steadily evolved into bellowing laughter. She grasped at the sides of her head as she leaned her elbows on the table. Noah slammed her forehead into the table, wakeupWAKEUPWAKEUPWAKEUP. She continued this motion until she could feel her head spin and her eyes water. At some point in time, Noah faintly heard his chair screech as he called for help from the two-way mirror.

Noah only continued to laugh as they restrained her.

xXx

They won't beat me.

When she had a moment to herself, Noah inexplicably found an escape route. After she was given sedatives, and her focus was back in place, they put her in a room with padded walls and the barest of necessities. There were two hefty guards standing by the door, and she noticed no other source of ventilation but from the topmost window a few feet above the farthest wall. The mirror on the other side of the room hung above a rusty sink. Noah looked at her reflection in the mirror and blinked at what she saw. She didn't look any different from when she woke up that morning, and that was what bothered her the most. She was dirtied and pale, her forehead was swollen and red, and her hair mimicked a bird's nest. Her eyes were bloodshot, her bottom lip was swollen.

But she looked the same.

I thought people were supposed to look better or worse in their dreams.

She opened the faucet and drank the cold water flowing from the pipes. She washed her face and spoke to herself against the mirror, watching her breath mist the surface.

"Maybe because you're not dreaming, you moron."

Yorknew City. Fuck.

"They won't beat me."

Noah turned the faucet off and grabbed all that she could carry. Small, travel-sized packs of toiletries, a blanket, a pair of cotton slippers, a cheap ballpen and a thick black notebook. Its paper smelled like cherries. When she couldn't find anything to carry them, she tied knots around the corners of the blanket and made a makeshift pack.

Then, she waited for the guards by the door to change shifts. When they were stationed, she knocked on the door frantically until they had no choice but to open it for inspection. As soon as they did, Noah pushed herself out of the room, shoving them with a bruising force using the backs of her arms. She sped off as fast as she could and never looked back, even when the whole force called for her arrest and detention. They won't beat me.

Noah felt a strange sensation, like tendrils of air, vibrate from behind. It was trying to grab her and keep her from leaving, but when she realized that these people were not there to take care of her, that they were talking about her being from Meteor City and therefore of no considerable value to society, she understood where she was meant to go next. She resisted the strange energy that followed her, and was able to flee from the vicinity with little to no trouble. She breathed in the moist midnight air until it pained her to breathe.

Noah disappeared into the night with a sobering reminder that if she was to return to the comfort of her own mundane little world, then she would have no choice but to survive here for the time being. What other decision was to be made? Home. I'm going home. The details would come later. Her mind has been made. She had nothing left to lose, literally. Only my life, she heard her conscience whisper. Noah blinked the tears away before they could fall.

As her thighs quivered from fatigue, the long day finally catching up to her, Noah stopped in the middle of an empty street and searched for the nearest alley she could hide in.

Nestled between a dumpster and a bag of rotting garbage, she removed her wallet from her pocket once more and stared at her ID with hazy eyes. She allowed herself one last solid sob, for now she was stuck in a place of no mercy. She has turned into the unwilling player of a brutal game. "They won't beat me," she repeated like a mantra.

But where to go? What to do? What to become?

She needed a plan, an identity, a place to stay, a reason. She needed to wake up, she needed to—

"—come home," she choked. Noah hugged her knees to her chest and cried, exhausting herself in a much needed catharsis.

She looked at her ID one more time. Her personal details were written in blue ink.

Name: Noah Aigner. Age: 25. Birthday: May 4. Designation: Human Resources Associate — Sales Floor Department. Motto: "Keep pushing forward!"

Noah stood and made a move to throw her ID into the trash bin. What need would she have for it when no one could read it? No one could know who she really was? But she hesitated and ultimately, decided to keep it as a reminder of what she was going to be fighting for at the end of the line.

Noah Aigner wiped her face against the back of her hands and decided that she would beat life at its own twisted game. If her memory serves her right, Meteor City would be the place for her. A place for nobody's. She took a moment to compose herself, her stomach twisting and turning, before she dashed across more alleyways, eventually finding herself near the outskirts of the district's entrance.

Meanwhile, the Yorknew District Police and Temp Hunters agency began issuing a warning to find and detain a girl of medium build and height who they have now named, The Straying Girl.

'NOTICE TO THE PUBLIC: To all Blacklist and Crime Hunters, please detain alive. Reward invalid otherwise.'