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Chapter 2: Fire Stirs Men
Chapter One:
"A little fire can stir the blood in men that fight entire wars"
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The first thing I noticed upon my awakening was that I was cold. The second was that it was dark. The third was that I was so cold I could not feel my limbs. Perhaps I'm in shock I thought disconnected from reality as I lay stunned, my cheek resting against a hard surface.
I blinked my eyes heavily, each blink feeling like a hundred pounds drooping from my eyelashes. At first I thought I that maybe I hadn't died. Rather, I had passed out and was somehow still alive, pined beneath the scraps of metal and plastic in my car.
But I was not. In fact I had almost a free range of movement, and moving made me feel strange. Like my arms were too short, and my legs to thin as if I had been stuffed into a sardine can. Like I was missing something vital, for one discording moment I thought that maybe I was in the hospital hooked up to a spiderweb of tubes and wires.
Is my car alright? I hope I do not have to pay much for the damages. I wondered fuzzily and not too sanely in the moment. Looking back, there should have been a hundred other things that I should have been thinking about right then.
I do not know how long I lay there uncomprehending at the starry night sky. But eventually I started to wriggle, I had an account all ten toes and fingers. I ran my hands all over my body to get my blood pumping, and I felt strange. I felt strange bumps and contours that I had not remembered I had earlier, had I been a victim of burning? Had my skin been seared with scars? When I finally pulled together the strength I had to stand I realized I somehow shrunk, and I was naked as the day I was born.
Was I experimented on? Had I been drugged? Was I sold in some odd human trafficking ring? Why was I small and naked? What memories were I missing?
It was a surreal experience, like it belonged in a movie somewhere.
I shifted and stood up, flexing my muscles, toes and fingers. Shielding most of my body in to keep it from the bitter wind that shook what seemed like a wooden box I was in. But nothing could have come to a more severe shock when I looked down at my tiny dark hand.
Yes.
My hand was dark under the clear moonlight, as in a different skin color. I blinked, did I have hypothermia? Or…had I…dare say it, been experimented on?
How else was I supposed to describe me being in a vastly different body with different skin tones without coming up with ridiculous theories?
The most important thing: I was alive. And therefore, I could survive. I could get back to my family. I could get my life back.
This was all that mattered.
After that all I registered was survival instincts. I needed to get moving-or else risk freezing to death. Keep moving. If I stopped I would die.
I picked up the box and let it shield me from the wind as I pushed my legs as fast as it would go down an icy road facing the wind. I lifted the box that smelled like cedar to cover the majority of my body while I stumbled towards where light glittered in the distance. A town, a house, a city, whatever it was it was civilization and my ticket to get my life back.
The road I followed seemed to stretch forever-but I didn't notice-I was hypnotized by the way my feet seemed to fall upon the snow. It almost shimmered an odd shade of blue in the night-it was strange-it was exotic. But I knew I must have been seeing illusions, I was extremely hungry after all.
After reaching the point where I could make out the shapes of houses, I almost cheered. I wanted to just fall asleep after such a confusing and an exhausting day. But I had no idea where I was, and I wanted to collect some information before I went out into the public. So I ducked into a dark shadowed alleyway that had a gigantic clunky heater. I huddled next to a giant wooden porch that seemed to be a back of some kind of lodge where I could hear people laughing and music playing inside. I slowly grew warm from the heat the radiator emitted and once again I succumbed to the blackness.
When I awoke I listened. I listened to people with different accents talk about people and things I did not recognize. I saw people in old fashioned trousers, shoes, coats and skirts walk in different directions. It was like I felt like Alice when she fell down a hole. Where was I? Why were there old fords, oxford shoes, and long dresses that looked like they belonged in the early 1900's?
During this time I would sometimes I'd just fade out into unconsciousness and my vision would slip and spin into black bliss. All I knew that when I was awoke fully aware-it was day and the snow had melted a tiny bit creating large puddles of water on the streets. People were all about chatting talking, and I observed. Even though I was beyond ravenous, I was starting to starve.
Looking down at the crate I had carried for a makeshift bed, I saw for the first time that my hallucinations from the night before were not hallucinations at all. My skin was really blue. My skin was blue. I clapped my hands to prevent me from screaming as I felt a thrum of fear rush through me. What had happened to me? Why didn't I remember anything? Was it true that I had really become some mad science experiment?
Calm down. I scolded myself, my mother had always said there was no use panicking. I had to analyze the situation.
First, I get into a bad car accident, one I was almost positive was fatal. Two, I awoke in the middle of nowhere in a wooden box in the middle of winter. Three, I was in a strange two with old fashioned people and technology roaming around. Four, I had blue skin. Five, I was not already dead from the cold or hunger somehow.
That last one was probably easy, I wondered if the small scales on my body protected me from the elements that my other body had not had. That probably why I was surviving temperatures below zero in the dead of winter completely naked.
I didn't dare go out. No, I would have to wait until nightfall looking like this. There were lots of people around me that I didn't know and my first instinct was to hide from them all. I didn't know what a stranger would do to me. Maybe one of them were the people (person?) who did this to me. As far as I was concerned I was in an unknown surrounding where people spoke in different accents with different speech patterns than I was used too. It was alien and unusual and I didn't like the conclusions it led me too. Had I really become an Alice in Wonderland?
To keep myself busy (and from delving into panic) I started theorizing how I ended up in this place? Was I back in the past? Was time travel really possible? Was I in a alternate world, dimension? How would I get help without getting killed?
It was pretty obvious to me that I had been drugged, my memories wiped, and abandoned on the side of the road like common trash. It was also obvious that I had either a) possessed an alien, b) was reincarnated/experimented on, or c) I felt into some weird multiverse I did not recognize or understand or finally d) I was crazy and drugged. But I knew that I had few options and my top priorities was food, clothing, and shelter. And I needed to do this all without anyone seeing me, therefore I would wait until dusk before acquiring any of these things.
It was that first night I first discovered my strange new power.
When the sun waned and stretched its last rays it was then I started to sneak a foot out of my little box.
Only to cringe back later when the door from the lodging burst open and a woman in a fur coat stepped out. "Mary!" A male voice called from somewhere in the pub. "Come on honey, come back!" A man yelled at a woman making an angry fixed pace away from him closer to where I hid in the dark corner. She was a beautiful lady, a brunette with wide eyes and pale skin with a cigarette clamped tightly between her lips. Lips that were currently pulled down into a frown, and tears glittered in her eyes. "Don't talk to me Jack!" She yelled turned back and yelled to the man behind the door "I saw ya' all over -!"
"It's not what it look like sugar!" Jack pleaded. "She was just looking for a tip!"
The woman sniffed, "Tha' wasn't wha' it look'd like!"
The man chuckled and stepped out into the night, he had dirty blond hair, sharp cheekbones and a sheepish smile that stretched across his face crinkling at the corners.
"I swear I wasn't cheating on you babe, I really really wasn't." He stepped even closer to the woman an hesitantly wrapped his arms around her. She sniffed and looked at him for a moment before tilting her head up in a manner that struck me as being childlike.
"Ya' make sure it don't happen again." She shook her finger at him.
The man chuckled and leaned down to kiss her, "I promise." He growled playfully as she giggled and linked arms with him. Preparing to go back into the pub.
I was struck at that moment how much I was intruding on a private moment. Not just in the middle of a dramatic break up, but in this whole situation in general I felt alone. Alone in a strange world, in a strange body, cold, hungry, and scared for my life. I just wanted to go home, to curl up in my warm bed and forget this whole nightmare. I wished to be this woman, this man, who were warm and young. Not worrying about what they were going to eat next, or where they were going to sleep and body snatchers. The next thing I felt was this urge to be them. Like I could be this woman-like I could just blend into the borders of her life and sink into her skin.
The next thing I knew-I was seeing the world from a different angle. I was taller and fair skinned. I was warm, wrapped in a coat that looked just like the one I had seen before on the woman. I looked down staring into a puddle that reflected light from a nearby lamp and I saw a mirror image of the woman in a warm coat, a cigarette dangling between lips that fell to the cobbled streets with the shocked 'O' my lips took. The light from the bar flickered and shifted, the people long forgotten as I touched my face in awe. I was in a stranger's skin. An exact replica. I prodded at my new face-everything-down to her perfectly slim nose- to her warm, comfy clothes, tiny dress, and uncomfortable high heels. It was all a perfect mimicry down to her styled hair. I blinked. I didn't want to stay like this forever! What if I couldn't change back? What if I wore this woman's face forever?
Then a blue-skinned little girl with piercing yellow eyes like fireflies shimmered in the reflection of the puddle.
I had just discovered that I was a metamorphous. Like Tonks from Harry Potter.
Shock, a little panic, and excitement flooded my veins. I closed my eyes and again I pictured the woman in my mind, again I felt my skin stretching, my bones shifting seamlessly and without pain to wear her exact image.
I experimented. I traded her brown eyes for blond, her thin nose for my old flat one, her thin frame for my old stocky one. Suddenly, I wasn't a stranger any more, I was looking back at am image I was familiar with.
But it didn't feel right. It felt like I was wearing warm paint all over my body. It wasn't uncomfortable, just different. Like somehow my brain knew that this was my skin but my body didn't recognize it as my skin.
I stood up, in the same fur coat the lady had. Warm, for the first time in nearly twenty four hours.
At that point I was more fascinated, dazed rather, than scared. I had some sort of super power.
One that eerily reminded me of a certain villainous from a serious of movies based on a comic.
I could not think of anything logically explaining this phenomenon. I felt like an alien (a freak) my mind whispered.
I tried to shake that thought out, after all, it did not matter what my true skin looked like when I could switch forms in an instant.
When I regained some of my bearings I started to mimic other people walking down the streets and steal. I stole lots of things then. I stole blankets, wallets, pillows, tools, food, water, soda, books, bank account numbers, and jewelry. I stole anything I could get my grubby blue hands on, and then I stole some more. I gathered that I was in a completely different time period where store cameras were not thought of, where fingerprints were a complete joke. It was easy shifting, using a stranger's voice to steal or threaten people into giving up their belongings.
I never stole from the obviously poor, and I never killed. But it did not excuse the fact that I was a thief.
Stealing was a different way of life than I had ever known. Facing the choice of stealing or starvation the choice was pretty easy. But soon I began to crave a life outside of sleeping in inns. A life outside of crime and this image I had built up. I craved companionship, a real friend, family that I took for granted in my previous life. In these times I reminiscenced, I stole, and I studied.
In my down time I would take my prizes back to a makeshift shelter I made. Food could go into coolers I had dug in the cool dirt (that I had lined with tarp). Or this was covered easily by stealing cooking ware and storing foods that weren't canned and didn't need refrigeration. Books were tripled wrapped in tarp to prevent water or mud from damaging them. At night I would take a lantern and crawl into a tent I had (actually purchased).
I made further plans of enrolling in schools. I needed an education in this life. I needed it desperately, especially as World War Two was just beginning to wage.
While I was researching the time, pop culture references, and general science knowledge; I tried to look up my grandparents. But I couldn't find any mention of them in Texas where I knew my grandfather had been an established Doctor during the Second World War and my grandmother had been a nurse. But there was no mention of them, and I had not memorized their address from the future.
But it was not like I could hunt them down and say "Hello, I'm your granddaughter from the future, can you take me in and feed me cause I'm out of time and completely alone?" Yeah, right. No insane person would believe me, much less believe me when I had blue skin and yellow eyes.
It amazed and frightened me every time I looked in the mirror. The blue skin was dark and rich with vibrancy, while my yellow eyes were stark contrast against my skin. My flaming red hair also stuck out like a sore thumb, even when I tried using it in different crowds in public. Sometimes I liked to pretend that I was a blue dragon in this life, that all I had left to do was spread my wings and fly away. As childish as it sounded, it made me feel less like a freak and more like a courageous warrior. I needed a little fantasy in the dark world that formed around me and threatened to swallow me whole. I had this need to feel like I was not weak, that I was living in constant paranoia.
I lived in constant fear. Fear that I would be discovered, for both my crimes and my skin. I was born just at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement (1950s-1970s), born in the tail end Woman's Suffrage movement (1840's-1920's.) People feared and hated what was different here, they were ignorant and unaccepting that was not them. There were even separations of colored and white people in this place! I had walked past dinners that did not accept colored people. It was eye opening.
I almost wanted to sit down at one of those places and reveal my trueskin, it would certainly give all of them a whole different meaning to the word 'color'.
Doubly against me was that I was a woman, which already oppressed in this population today. Where women were judged on beauty over brains. Women often did not go to secondary education, and women in the work force were somewhat of a joke amongst men.
So I was thankful for my gift of shapeshifting. I was able to blend seamlessly into crowds. For me to roam freely in trousers I often went as a man. It gave me less restrictions from a skirt and I was not looked down on.
The little burrow (as I fondly nicknamed it) did what it was built for. It kept the bad weather out, and the heat in. It was one room about five feet in diameter, with a tub outside (that had been in a garbage dump) a few buckets, and a few bunched up blankets under it to keep me warm. The walls were covered in quilts, and insulation to keep the heat from escaping. The corner held a lantern where I used candles and a flashlight for light. I kept dried food in the cabin, shoved into all corners. For perishables I ate them until I had to throw it out. To relieve myself, I often either went into public facilities as men or women or went out into the woods. Finally, the last feature of the tent was a small mirror to reflect what my body looked like. I used this to experiment with my power.
I could change me face and arms to mimic anybody. I could even change it to represent other creatures-I could change the hair on my arm to fox fur for example, or my nails into sharp claws of an eagle.
I did not fully change into an animal, for fear of what it would do to my mind. What if I became lost in that instinct? What if I could not shift back?
After all my needs were met I planned and schemed. Beyond my needs, what could I get to help me?
I needed an identity. A couple actually. I needed an identity to sell the jewelry I had stolen on the black market. I needed an identity to be of legal age, maybe with a crippled leg so I would not get drafted into the war. Finally, I needed an identity around my highschool age so I could pass my exams to enter college. Somehow, I needed to manage and work all three of them.
Next time I was in the village, I stole what information I had on government laws about personal property and I stole a journal for me to write down experiments and thoughts.
I researched into forging. And got a few practice ones until I was good at it. You see, birth certificates had certain stamps on them and I had to steal many identities to copy them exactly how they looked.
All of this took around a five months to collect, in between I stole food and watched the nearby school kids to blend in with the kids my 'age.'
I studied people in depth, how to converse, to seduce, to coerce a stranger into doing something to twist it to my benefit. I copied accents flawlessly, I used manners and pasted together physical features to create my own. These talents were as natural as breathing to me. It felt like this was a part of who I was and the deception was only normal.
The other thing I noticed was that I had naturally gained a gift for language. I had picked up a book written in French and halfway in I understood most of what was being said, by the end of the book I was reading it flawlessly.
I wondered if my new talent was due to the way my power was such a communicative one. I needed other people to used my power as a sounding board and I naturally adapted to survive.
By this time I was starting to come up with wild theories of why I had these powers, why I had seemingly travelled back in time.
I didn't have much to go on other than that, so I theorized that maybe I had been toss into an alternative dimension, or reincarnated, or just something that could explain my situation.
This might be permanent, I fretted, as I wrote down my thoughts into my journal one evening. I might have to have blue skin for the rest of my life. It would affect a lot of things.
Like I wouldn't be able to get married, after all I couldn't see anyone wanting to marry someone with blue skin. Especially from a time period before the whole excessive liberal acceptance that would come with time years earlier. Even then, I would be wary because I could end up on some lab table. I need to cast aside any plans I had for (future or past) family, since I wasn't family anymore-or any that they would recognize.
I gently bit the tip of my pencil in thought, I will have to live on my own merits. Even if I don't have a family that does not mean I cannot live on my own, I'll adopt a dog or something.
I wasn't too sure where I wanted to go from here, I suppose I could become an inventor. Or a biology major to study my own skin-that, would be interesting. I wondered if I had DNA a little similar to a Chameleon, or fish who were able to change their looks to blend in to the environment. Perhaps my unique DNA could cause people to survive cancer or whatever, because they could just will it out of their bodies.
I could do both. I could use the revenue I make from inventions that have not been made yet to put myself through college.
I leaned back a little from where I was sitting, studiously ignoring the fact that the wind was causing the tarp to flap all over the place.
What about other things? I was in Sullivan County, in New York for heaven's sake. Being a girl from Michigan it was a bit jarring to deal with this cold weather when I had come from a period of summer (but cold was inconsequensal due to my powers of shapeshifting.)
Why Sullivan county? Why New York? I underlined in my book; is there some sort of connection here?
So many questions, I mourned, and not enough answers.
I decided to create a list of these events:
Why Am I Here:
-Car wreck, Death?
-"died" in snow, woke up in snow- Connection?
-Abandoned in a Box at the side of the road
-Box is cedar wood and very sturdy.
-naked, cold, but not frozen to death
-From 26 years old to 5-6 years old (in body)
-blue skin and scales
-Snags on clothing, uncomfortable.
-shapeshifting powers
People and parts of animals
-impervious to cold, (to warmth?)
-powers of language and mimicry
-In a time period before the 2nd World War. (1940, one year into the war America has not entered it yet.)
-Westchester county, NY? (Miles from home). Significance?
That was all I knew. In my journal I started creating character profiles of people I would set up to launch my life.
First, was John Meyer. He had grown up in Boston, never graduated high school. Walked hunched over in a long coat. He was a thief, and a newspaper seller. At night he'd slip to a pawn shop and sell the wares to an older man with thick glasses. He came at random times, and often with good heists filled with bracelets, necklaces, watches and purses.
Second, was a researcher. Dr. Albus Blackthorne, biochemical engineer. He especially was good at creating weapons, newer and faster for the war. His favorite research was medicine however, he tended to delve deep into the academic community. Dr. Martin soon rose to power due to the invention of the x-ray, and the CAT scan that could show clear pictures of the body which helped in hospitals that could afford this new technology.. But he was often ill, he had bone cancer. From it he gained a prosthetic leg. He also lost his wife to a factory accident, it was common for them to happen. He was left with a fourteen year old son who he home schooled, and was well beyond his years. He had around an estimated decade to live and was desperate for money to support his sons schooling.
Thirdly, there was Ruann Blackthorne. A weedy nine year old home-schooled genius. With vibrant red hair (as close to my natural color) light brown eyes and a mischievous grin. He passed all the secondary exams needed to pass highschool with ease. An ambitious and out-going boy who wasn't afraid to speak his mind and a little rough around the edges. He would outclass all of his peers his 'age' and he would enter college straightaway before America enters the war.
John Meyer would only "live" until Dr. Albus Blackthorne got his businesses up and going. He would also make money off the patents he would apply for his inventions so nobody could steal them from him. Then once Rue hit majority, Dr. Albus Blackthorne would die after, leaving his inheritance to his little son.
This was my plan. It was rough around the edges. But everything checked out. I doubled, tripled checked over and over trying to find a flaw before I put the whole thing into motion. In something failed I could always "kill" off my people and start again in a different town. It was necessary for success and survival. Impersonating people and blending in with society was so much easier with established identities, especially with a degree.
I would need it to survive World War II, which killed more men than even recorded in written history.
My name is Ruanna Blackthorne.
I will survive.
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EDITED: 4/3/2016.
Hope you like my second chapter! Please R&R.
If there are an Beta's out there that are willing to help with this story, I'm willing to exchange over PM.
Chapter Three: Where I Belong
Sneak Peak:
I hummed under my breath and I picked up the form, "I've seemed to have drawn the eye of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I forgot that they used to pick people up right after highschool with no secondary education."
