Welcome to Hatred!

This is the sequel to Hostile, and an exciting one, at that.

At least, so I think.

:3 I hold my opinion pretty highly, too. I almost always agree with myself. Not always, but usually.

So, let's talk: This story is AU. It's OOC. Take everything after the episode "Taken" and forget it completely. If you haven't read the series – for kicks, let's list the order: Homeless, Hybrid, Hunter, Haunted, Hangover, Hazy, Halloween, Hot Spot, and Hostile – you'll be incredibly, incredibly lost. I'm not kidding. This whole universe is one wild ride.

As for the rating, it's T for a reason. Cussing, allusions to drug use, some drinking is possible, demons everywhere, violence rampant. But where's the fun without any of that, right?

For the record, I do thank you in advance for reading the random trappings I call a "story." You're very, very patient. Or adventurous. But I wouldn't have it any other way. :P

So, everyone, I'm sure you aren't here to listen to me babble on about nothing, right? So, Hellcat, let's kick this off.

"Zara doesn't own Lab Rats or anything you recognize. If you don't recognize it, it's probably hers."

"One person's craziness is another person's reality."
Tim Burton

"Never seek; only find."
Marty Rubin

Ra'Zara the First proudly presents Hatred.

Chase

Otherworld was something.

For starters, everything was kind of dark. I mean, I could see, so light had to be coming from somewhere, but even that seemed dark somehow. It seemed to come from the whole of the sky instead of a single star.

Did I mention that the sky was red? A dark, bloody red. It was definitely different than the usual blue I was used to seeing.

My surroundings were the amazing part of this whole thing, though. Although it looked like your basic wilderness scene, everything in this place was made from essence. It puffed up in dusty clouds from the ground whenever I took a step and floated around as clouds over my head. And, since it was essence, I quickly discovered that I could do stuff with it. It took me several minutes, but I managed to create a small home out of a tree.

Well, not really a home so much as a kind of wood shed that looked ready to fall down in a minute because I made it lean very far to the left just to see if I could. It didn't fall - because I fixed it in the end so that it looked like a regular wood shed - but it should have.

Of course, that got me thinking of something else. If a house that would fall over in the real world stay up here, what else could I do? I decided to test this by finding a tree - a tall one, too - and casually walking up it. Not climbing up, walking. Standing at a ninety-degree angle and everything.

That proved the theory that I was going for: Gravity only existed if I wanted it to. I could create my own physics!

Good, my voice said after it became bored of me standing upside down on a branch. Got that out of your system?

I pinned my ears, righting myself on the branch. Piss off.

You could do very constructive things here, and all you've done so far is make a watershed and climb things!

I'll create when I feel like it, dick, I responded.

Good. Then we've forgotten all about that little Bree project?

Bree! I had forgotten about her for a moment. Right. Where is she?

How should I know? retorted the voice. I don't have a tracker for her.

I sighed heavily. I had forgotten that particular part of the problem: How to actually find Bree. It shouldn't be too hard to find a human among demons, right?

It should be about as easy as finding a single needle in a haystack when you have to pick from thousands of haystacks.

I let myself float gently to the ground and sniffed the air, listening carefully. I was glad that I didn't have to hide my demonic side now. It was liberating. It was awesome. I could track someone with my nose to the ground. Not physically against the ground, but you get the idea.

I'm sure you're wondering who I'm tracking. Well, it wasn't Bree. I couldn't smell her. But I could smell a demon. And the quickest way to find something wrong or out-of-place was to ask the normal things what changed.

"Like a church bell, a coffin, and a vat of melted chocolate, a supply closet is rarely a comfortable place to hide."
Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book

"We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror."
Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

Bree

Wherever she was, it was terrifying.

Demons were everywhere. Pulling her hair, ripping small holes in her clothing, scratching at her bare skin. And those were just the little ones! The larger creatures were hiding in the shadows, waiting on her to run from the imps. She could see sparks of lighting coming off fingers and fire surrounding hooves. The djinnis and afrits would certainly hurt her more than the tiny imps that clawed pettily at her.

Of course, that was before she climbed a tree.

Now, though she knew they could get up there any time they felt like it, the imps were surrounding the trunk on the ground, calling up to her in a weird language she didn't understand. It didn't sound like anything she recognized. Even if she had recognized it, she wouldn't understand it still. They were cackling, though, so it likely wasn't good.

Bree shifted a bit on the branch she had balanced on, wincing. Some cat-creature had gouged a good chunk of flesh out of her leg, and the piece of shirt she tied around it kept slipping against the wound painfully. It wasn't the only injury causing her pain, but it was the worst so far.

So far….

That was the thing that scared her. She wasn't a Summoner, but she knew demons fairly well. At least, she knew them well enough to know what they wouldn't stop until she was strung out across the landscape for miles. A tooth here, a fingernail there, and so on.

They would never stop.

Bree huddled closer to the tree's trunk. Though she never thought of herself as religious in any sense of the word, she found herself praying to any and every deity she had ever heard of that the demons would want to drag the situation out as long as possible by not climbing up the tree to pull her down.

Poor Bree.

So, what's gonna happen? Is Chase gonna find her?

Is Bree gonna survive?

Will my dog stop terrorizing my guinea pig?!

We'll just have to wait to find out, won't we?

So, until next time, feel free to review. Or don't. By now, it should be known that I really don't care if you want to or not. :P

And enjoy.

*Bows and exits*