iFilm Freddie
Chapter One: Powers Awaken...
On the way to Michael's Apartment:
Michael looked at the damaged signpost and then back at his hand, the conclusion obvious but still unbelievable. He then slowly and reluctantly gripped the pole again and squeezed… to no effect. Michael, then wondering if he had gone insane, grabbed the sign with both hands and pulled and tugged with all his might, digging his feet into the ground. He even tried swaying but nothing in the inanimate object even remotely budged.
"Ummm dude, you do realize that stealing a stop sign is a federal offense. Believe me… I know."
Michael yelped and spun around in fear only to find Alex staring curiously back at him.
"I was… Um… Were you just following me?"
Alex looked offended at the thought and cocked her head to one side as if wondering about Michael's current mental status. "I live in the same apartment building as you… with my mom. Remember?"
"Yeah, I remember. You live on the first floor, and I live on the…"
"top floor… Yeah, are you sure you're okay?"
Michael nodded enthusiastically, turned around and quickly sprinted into his apartment building taking the stairs two steps at a time. Alex just looked on suspiciously at the retreating figure before commenting to herself.
"Well, I swore I heard a gunshot, but he looks fine… well as fine as he ever looks."
Michael continued sprinting up the flights stairs reaching the end of the third flight as he turned around and leaped, prepared to keep going. That is until he realized… that he had cleared the entire flight of stairs… in one leap. Michael froze, once again too stunned by what had just happened to even think. He turned slowly and mechanically descended the previous flight of stairs back to the last floor and at the bottom he paused, turned, and jumped. Again he found himself on the upper floor, landing in a single bound. Be it said that Michael was a logical person, and he allowed himself a moment or two of cool and rational analysis before delivering his reasoned assessment of the situation.
"Wow."
Michael, suddenly thrilled at his newfound agility, quickly ran back down the stairs again. He put himself in a launching position, sprinted, leaped, and crashed landed his face against the steps. He swore he heard laughing in the back of his head, it was so embarrassing.
Hahahahahahahahahaha. I'm sorry, kid. It was too funny to pass up.
The hairs on the back of Michael's neck rose, as he spun around, only to find no one present.
Behind you…
Michael tangled up his legs in his exaggerated reaction, and ended up falling on the floor.
Hahaha, I'm sorry. You're just too easy. I should really be giving you a break.
Michael looked up as he began to see glowing crimson dust gather together to form a ghostly apparition in front of him. Michael instantly recognized the person.
"You're that redheaded freak!"
The ghostly apparition crossed his arms and sighed, before continuing in that eerie, echoing, in-back-in-your-head-sounding voice.
My name is Xenos, and it seems that for reasons unexplained, you have… absorbed my powers and me as a consequence. I was just playing with you earlier.
"Wait, you're name… is Xenos." Xenos performed an exaggerated bow before continuing.
The Prince of Vampires, at your service. It seems that, for the time being, that you are…
The Shay's Apartment Room:
"…stuck with me, Freddie," commented Spencer as he showed Freddie a cool red-haired wig for his Xenos character.
"Thanks a lot Spencer. I mean, for a second I was really worried about the budget for props and background scenery, but with you helping me out, that makes things so much easier."
"Think nothing of it. We of the creative mind have to stick together. You've got crazy imaginative ideas that need to take shape and form. I've got crazy shapes and forms that need imaginative ideas." Spencer motioned over to his fresh crates full of junk that he had collected. "Believe me. You can expect nothing but top quality stuff from me."
As if the very universe begged to differ, Spencer's wig decided to spontaneous combust at that exact moment.
Freddie sighed, not remotely fazed by the burning red hair next to him. Spencer's ability to make anything catch fire had become something of a norm the longer Freddie had gotten to know him.
"Is it going to do that when someone wears it?"
Spencer grabbed a fire extinguisher and nonchalantly put out the fire while never taking his eyes off Freddie.
"I really hope not."
In the iCarly studio:
Sam and Carly were going over their scripts for the next iCarly show. Freddie was normally there just to stay informed, but he had told the girls that he was currently busy with his movie and to just email him the script. Carly looked over her lines one more time, took a deep breath and began. Sam stood on stand by, ready to alternate every other line with Carly in their typical speedy introduction.
"Hi, I'm Carly!"
"and I'm Sam!"
"and on today's iCarly, we have a special treat for you today."
"and not the kind you can eat."
"because you see. Our technical producer Freddie."
"or as I like to kindly refer to him, dork."
Sam and Carly chorused the next line together. "is making a movie!"
The two girls were interrupted when the door to their studio opened and Shane pulling a cart full of complicated-looking technical equipment came through the door. His brow was covered in perspiration and he was breathing hard and fast.
Sam and Carly put down their scripts and walked over before Sam made the first greeting.
"Hey Shane!"
"Ahhh! Oh, it's you Sam… and Carly… together…" Shane swallowed hard, as he looked back and forth between the two girls. He never really did get over his fear of the two after the hospital released him.
"Why do you sound like you're out of breath?" asked Carly.
"I took the stairs," answered Shane matter-of-factly.
"Why?" asked Sam.
"Elevators… scare me." Shane shivered for emphasis, while Sam and Carly shared a quick look of guilt to each other.
"Anyway, Freddie told me that he needed some help for the special effects with his movie, and I was going to meet him in the iCarly studio."
Carly answered him quickly, eager to get over the uncomfortable atmosphere that was now present in the room. "Freddie's in his apartment on the floor below, doing auditions."
"Thanks," and with that Shane left the studio, once again pulling his cart. As soon as Shane was out of ear-shot, Carly turned to Sam.
"Are you sure you don't want to audition for something?"
Sam sat herself down in a beanbag, yawned, and prepared to take a nap. "Nope."
Carly grabbed the two iCarly scripts. "Well, I promised Freddie that I'd help out with costumes. I'm going to bring some of my finished ones over so he can see the outfits on the people he's casted. You staying?" Carly was answered with Sam's snores. She shrugged, grabbed a blanket and threw it on Sam, and then left via the elevator.
In Freddie's apartment:
"Okay, next up for the role of Alex, Rona Berger." A girl almost exactly Freddie's height and with wavy brunette hair that ran down past her shoulders walked up with an irritated look on her face.
"Okay, remember, the key thing to her character is to be aggressive and mean… like Sam," said Freddie, "Also, stand with your weight on one foot, and your spine not completely straight. Alex always looks bored and lazy. Now remember… aggressive and mean." Rona tilted her head to the side and gave a look of disgust at Freddie.
"Are you always this bossy?! Because if you are, you're REALLY going to hurt my creative energy… And where's your mom with those snacks? I want snacks now!" Freddie blinked a few times in confusion before commenting.
"You're hired. Congratulations."
Rona just put a hand on her hips and continued walking. "It's about time…"
Freddie whispered to himself as soon as she was out of earshot. "Now I remember why I hate that girl."
Jake Krandal tapped on Freddie's shoulder to get his attention before showing Freddie his own script.
"Hey Freddie. I know you have me casted as Michael, but I'm having trouble channeling my inner dork and loser. Can you give me some pointers?" Jake said all of this with such a straight face, that Freddie figured that the last statement actually wasn't intentionally supposed to sound insulting. He sighed and started working with some lines with Jake.
Back in the iCarly studio:
Sam couldn't hear Carly's footsteps for a while, so she assumed the coast was clear. She got up from her beanbag and walked over to the dresser where she sometimes hides Freddie's food (sometimes to disgusting results when it was found later) and grabbed Freddie's movie script out of it. She hadn't gotten a chance to finish it yet with Freddie constantly chasing her down to retrieve it, and… well… she was bored, okay? Sam looked around the room suspiciously again, even though she was already sure that she was alone, and...
Alex's room:
…flipped a page in Michael's diary. It wasn't that she was interested or anything… it was… well… she was bored, okay? She skimmed some pages of uneventful entries until a particular paragraph caught her eye.
Sometimes I wonder why I had been born. It's not like I want to end my life… All in all, I find ways to keep myself happy. It's just that everyone ignores me, and I don't feel like I mean anything to anyone. I've tried out for probably every school club I could, and no one really talked to me. In the end, I've only stuck with the Theater club because Cassie's in it. I do the work of like five people, always making sure the lighting is good, and making sure the props do justice to the scenes, and in the end, no one says thanks except Cassie and even then it seems reflexive rather than meant.
I just want a purpose… I just want to have meaning to the world, a reason to exist… a chance to make a real difference, to have people notice me and realize that I matter…
Is that too much to ask?
The entry went to the bottom of the page, and Alex grabbed the corner, preparing to flip it, when the book burst into yellow flames. Panicking, Alex dropped the book, but the flames had somehow worked their way onto her arms. They were slowing spreading towards the rest of her body.
"I'm on fire… I'M ON FIRE!" Alex tried smothering the flames with a blanket, but the embers continued their advance, eventually engulfing her entire body.
"I'M ON FIRE!!! AND… I don't even feel hot…" Alex took a deep breath and calmed down, and made her way over to her mirror. What she saw was a soft glowing aura of yellow fire engulfing her entire body. She was providing more light to the room than all of the lamps and light bulbs she had turned on.
"Whoa…" She tried to pick up a pencil she had knocked onto the floor and accidentally incinerated it. She swore the feeling was like a she was giant battery and she could direct power to any part of her body at any time. She reflected quizzically for a moment before turning an eye to her history textbook. Alex grabbed the book and threw it out of her window before gathering a fistful of energy in her palm and throwing it at the offensively-boring pack of paper. This time, the object didn't just incinerate, it exploded.
"Alex! How's your homework going?" bellowed Alex's mother through her bedroom door.
Alex was still staring at the soft, glowing embers emitting from her fingertips. "I'd say it's finished."
On top of the apartment building:
"This is so amazing!" screamed Michael as he balanced his entire upside-down body on only one arm. Then, just because he could, he pushed off his arm, did an entire front-flip and landed back on it.
Yes, you'll find that your strength, speed, agility, and sense of balance are greatly augmented. Also your reflexes have increased. If you concentrate really hard, it wiiillll sssseeeeemmm aaaaassssss iiiiifffff tiiiimmmmeeee hhhhaaassss ssssloooooowed dooooooowwwwwn.
Xenos' voice seemed to be nearly at a standstill as Michael looked around to find that indeed every object as well had slowed its motion to a crawl, including some pigeons in mid-flap.
"What else can I do?" Michael was ready to try the next inhuman ability he had apparently inherited from his vampiric friend.
Well, walk over to the edge of the roof and think really hard about sticking to the ground.
Michael did as he was told, and looked down at his feet and saw a red, glowing circle below each foot. Within the circle were different shapes and symbols, like the magic circles seen inside of books of sorcery.
Now don't lose focus, and keep walking over the edge.
Michael hesitated for a second, peering over the edge at the near eight-story fall. Chuckling to himself nervously, he took one step over the edge and felt himself begin to fall. His stepping foot made contact with the side of the building and his other came over the edge as well. Michael planted it and found himself standing sideways along the edge of the wall.
See, you'll get good enough that you don't even need to think about it. I used to sleep upside down while adhering to the roof of a room.
Michael couldn't help it; he started sprinting up and down the wall like an idiot. Endurance he never experienced before in his life was coursing in his body as he didn't tire. Michael even leapt from one side of the alley to the other as he experimented with the timing of sticking and unsticking to surfaces.
Yay, I'm glad we're all happy with our newfound playground skills. Now can we please go inside? It's freezing out here, and you need to remember that your body now houses two people, and one of them hates the cold.
"No way. You're going to tell me that I can leap over rooftops in a single bound and then expect me to not even try!" Michael then spent the next hour covering sections of Seattle in times that helicopter pilots would be proud of. He finally returned only when he remembered that he had history homework to finish.
Later that night in Michael's room:
Xenos willed Michael's body out of bed, looking at the time. It was two in the morning, and he could hear Michael snoozing in the back of his head. He put on some clothes and left the apartment. He looked across the hall at the door to Cassandra Claire's home. Michael didn't know that Xenos had intended to find the girl all along, and Xenos wanted to keep it that way. He was about to knock on the door when he noticed a note taped over the front. It was blank, but Xenos swore he smelled ink on it. He extended his range of vision to both infrared and ultraviolent, a technique he used to see better at night, and noticed that the note had been written with a form of invisible ink.
Xenos, I'm am currently at my school's library. Meet me there.
Cassie
Xenos raised an eyebrow, irked that the girl had seen this coming. However, the eerie note only added credence to his theory and made his need to find her all the more urgent.
At Westside's High School's library:
Cassie was writing in a notebook while in the deserted library. She wasn't bothered by the darkness or the silence. She did this nearly every school day. She did pause to open up a window, peering down from the second-floor onto the school grounds below. It was then that Xenos' head appeared in the opening, pulling himself through the window.
"I'm not even going to ask how you knew I was coming at that very moment," commented Xenos as he landed in the library.
Cassie shrugged, not remotely bothered that she'd never seen this person before, and returned to her notebook.
"Hello Spencer, I've been expecting you." Xeno paused, confused for a moment.
"The name's Xenos."
"I know. Sorry, inside joke." Xenos walked over, and Cassie still found her notebook more interesting. She picked up a pencil and started to doodle on it.
"You really do have the sight, don't you? You're the Harbinger. The seer that sees all, knows all, and tells very little."
"That rumor's exaggerated, and I talk quite a bit when I feel like it." Cassie continued to doodle on her notebook, drawing a brunette-haired boy that looked alot like Michael and a blond-haired girl Xenos had never seen, both wearing helmets that were hooked up to machine that was spitting out yogurt. It was titled "iSwitch."
"I know why you're here, and I can't give you what you want," said Cassie with a bored tone. Xenos pulled up a chair to the table that Cassie was sitting at and sat down across from her.
"But you're also the Source aren't you? I've heard the rumors. It's not just that you see the future. You MAKE what you want, happen. The sight is just a consequence."
"I definitely wouldn't know, since I have no recollection desiring any of what I see to come to existence. If what I see is what I want, then I definitely don't know what I want. Also I can barely control what I see, much less will things into existence as you're implying." Cassie this time was doodling a kid that looked like Michael turning into a Shiba Inu dog under the label "Dog Days" at the top of the page.
"Just please. I'll do anything for you to help me." Cassie finally stopped, and put away her notebook and pencil. She took a quick glance at her watch before taking a very business-like tone with Xenos. He suspected that she had been waiting for this moment all along.
"There is something you can do for me, and it may or may not help you in achieving your goals. I'm not sure." Xenos sat up straighter as Cassie continued.
"Now you need to understand that there are many worlds in existence, each one very similar to worlds next to it, but also different and isolated from each other. I can open a portal from this world to another that I need you to visit. There's some equipment I need you to modify."
"Why do you need me, and why at three in the morning?"
"I can't enter the portals I create, and there's this guy named Fredward Benson who needs to be asleep during this entire operation."
"Is he another seer or something?"
"Something like that, but the point is I need you to find a person called Spencer. He looks a lot like you so you can't miss him, and then I need you make some changes to a prop he's building. I've put all the necessary details in this notepad." Cassie pushed a small notepad towards Xenos as he sighed with the realization that Cassie had clearly planned this from the beginning. Flipping through it quickly, both he and Cassie stood up in preparation. Cassie closed her eyes and started murmuring in Latin an incantation Xenos had never heard before.
She paused for a second. "This will take a few minutes. You can sit down." Xenos couldn't sit. He had just heard from the one person who seemed omniscient and was potentially omnipotent as well that he had a chance to fulfill all his desires and visit an entire other world. One couldn't sit down in anticipation. All of a sudden, a deafening roar appeared and a blinding white light started spewing from what looked like a tear in the very fabric of space and time. Cassie walked back over to the table and chair she had vacated earlier and continued to doodle, her work finished. Xenos walked over to the portal, but glanced back at Cassie first. She was currently rhyming… what seemed like gibberish.
"Sam's in a jam… with her fam… Freddie's brought a cam… but Sam doesn't give a da…"
"Cassandra!" Cassie looked up with a bored and a slightly annoyed expression. Xenos swallowed a nervous gulp.
"You've seen it all… Does it end well?"
Cassie blinked a few times before answering, "Good and bad is matter of perspective, Xenos. What may be good for me may not be good for you and vice-versa. Now hurry, that portal doesn't stay open forever." Xenos quickly passed through the portal and the library was once again silent. Cassie looked back down at her notebook, continuing to doodle.
"…and Sam wants some ham…"
A/N: Review please… now that the holidays are here, I'm finding it really hard to find time to write and review response is how I'm prioritizing updates to the four stories I'm juggling.
Random A/N:
Cassandra Claire: One reviewer noticed that I made a reference to Cassandra Clare, the writer of the Mortal Instruments series. I remember her as Cassandra Claire (note the 'i') the greatest Harry Potter fanfiction writer ever. Her Draco Trilogy was a masterpiece and even JK Rowling acknowledged that she knew of it and its popularity. I was one of her rejoicing fans when she quit fanfiction to write her first Mortal Instruments book. If you're a fanfiction writer hoping to one day do it for a living, You can do a lot worse than Cassandra Clare.
Cassie's doodles: I did indeed have Cassie writing down visions of other author's fanfictions that I like. Kudos if you knew the stories I referenced.
Tone of the story: If you noticed the iCarly parts of the story were significantly lighter in tone compared to the alternate world, that was intentional. I think that anyone's private fantasy world is way more serious and over-the-top than the real one since we retreat to it when real life is harsh and as such Freddie's fantasy world contains a lot of the insecurities he feels.
Random Fun: I think the idea of characters in the stories you write conspiring against you while you are asleep really amusing and kinda scary.
Remember, PLEASE REVIEW!!!