A/N: Well, here it is. Enjoy. Laugh. Review.

CHAPTER 2

As predicted, I experienced my emotional breakdown after about three miles of walking.

Up until then, everything had been totally fine—I hadn't gotten hungry yet, I hadn't had the need to use the restroom, and I hadn't encountered anything particularly dangerous except some angry squirrels—and then I reached a gorge of sorts. It wasn't all that deep...maybe fifteen feet if my mental measures are in any way accurate, and there were just some rocks at the bottom and what looked like a dried up stream. Just half a dozen yards to my left was a part of it narrow enough to jump over. Shouldn't be a problem, right?

Wrong.

Even though I'd been expecting it, the sudden need to panic was overwhelming. Like most panic attacks, mine started with some freaked-out breathing patterns. Then the whimpering. Then the screaming and the crying.

And then...the hysterical shouting that made sense only in the deepest recesses of my brain. "WHERE THE HELL AM I? MOOOOOOM! DAAAAAD! GENESIS! GET ME OUT OF HERE! I DON'T LIKE BUNNIES! I DON'T KNOW HOW TO EAT THEM! IT'S TOO HARD AND THEY'RE ALL FUZZY AND CUTE AND THE SQIRRELS ARE BULLIES AND THIS CLIFF IS IN THE WAY AND IT WON'T MOVE AND I WANT TO GO HOOOOOOOOOOME!"

By this point I was groveling on the ground, hugging my curtain rod like some sort of anorexic teddy bear. The shouting went on a little while longer, gradually making less and less sense until I was just spewing gibberish. I'm fluent, you see, and Genesis has a tendency to speak in made-up gibberish-talk when she's extremely stressed, so I'm not alone.

Oh dear. I'm basing my sanity on a standard of my less-than-sane cousin. From Canada. (Not that that makes a difference, but my brain was clearly someplace else at the moment.)

Although, in her defense, Genesis' gibberish sounded a lot cooler and more elegant than my gibberish.

It finally collapsed on me that I was miles from home, in the middle of nowhere, probably in a foreign country whose language I didn't speak, and about to starve to death if I didn't take a chance and find something in the forest to eat. In other words, I was completely and irrevocably screwed. Thus my emotional breakdown was perfectly justified.

If something good, besides that realization, did come out of my hysteria, it was that it apparently drew other life-forms' attention to me. By the time I'd calmed down enough to stop babbling, the forest had grown almost unnaturally quiet. Moments later, someone—or something, I reasoned—called out in what I could only identify as an uncertain tone. It sounded ridiculous, like...like...like a lizard trying to roar, but it meant that I wasn't alone. I wasn't totally sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

"Hola?" I tried, peeking around my shower rod into the foliage. "Anyone there?"

No answer, unsurprisingly. Lion-Lizards (or whatever creature capable of making that "I'm-too-lazy-to-get-off-of-my-butt-to-investigate -the-weird-naked-monkey" animal sound) probably didn't understand English. Like...at all. Or Spanish, for that matter.

Then again, better to have a weird made-up creature for company than to be all by your lonesome, and as the creature was probably some kind of freakish hallucination anyways, I might as well investigate. Leaves crunched under my bare feet, and I'm pretty sure I stepped on a spider or two. Branches whipped at my hair (I just ignored it, having gotten used to the complete mess at least an hour before) and a couple of them caught me in the eye. A few hours ago I would've sat on a rock and cried in all my pathetic urban glory, as the outdoors itself was usually enough to make me miserable, but after hiking for a couple of miles whilst stark-naked but for a shower curtain, you kind of get used to it. "Hello?" I tried again.

Something moved about a hundred feet to my right, and I carefully picked up the edge of my shower-curtain-dress and stepped over a log to get myself going in that direction. I hadn't seen the 'something', per se, but I'd definitely heard it moving around.

A hundred feet on, and still nothing. I sighed, shoulders slumping, and blew a strand of sweaty blond hair out of my face. "Well this sucks," I muttered to myself, glancing into the foliage as though it were personally responsible for my misfortune. It was, I suppose, just not wholly.

I took five more dejected steps through the brush, and found myself in the middle of a small, sunny clearing.

Staring at someone's back.

The shock of suddenly being face-to-face—or...face-to-back, really—with a person, like, an actual, living, breathing person halted me in my tracks. My jaw dropped. The person stopped whatever it was they had been doing—something in their lap that had them hunched over as though working—and froze. They tilted their head to the side. Brown hair rustled in the breeze, and they turned an ear towards where I was, listening. My jaw would've dropped further if it hadn't been firmly attached to the rest of me.

Pointed ears.

"ELF," I blurted out before I could shut my fat mouth. I was not thinking. At all. I need human interaction in order to be properly sane, and my brain seemed to be unsure whether or not this counted. Apparently, at least, those lonely hours of walking were taking their toll in the common sense department.

Maybe Elf-Dude could direct me to Santa's workshop. Certainly Santa knew where I lived and could give me directions. Elves were friendly, right? Friendly and clumsy and all jingly from the bells on their little curly shoe things?

Elf-dude moved really gracefully (apparently he was the worst elf ever, as they're supposed to be always tripping over their feet), whirling around so I could see his face properly and standing up almost in the same movement. I took half a step back, eyes wide.

"Tall elf," I quickly amended out loud with a squeak, clutching my shower rod more tightly. Another detail came to mind at that moment, and I added in a brief whisper, "With sword."

Because Elf-Dude did have a sword, which was apparently what he'd been all focused on when I'd showed up. It was blue, which was kind of cool, except for the fact that I was pretty sure Elf-Dude was going to gut me with it, despite the lack of malice in his expression. He looked just as confused as I felt.

Eventually, after a few seconds of just staring, he said something in strange Foreign-Elf-Speak. I wasn't quite sure what to do. Elf-Dude frowned and said something else, but the way he said it made it seem like the same question/sentence/insult/whatever in a different Foreign-Elf-Speak dialect. I hadn't the faintest idea what to do with that either.

The Lion-Lizard—the one that I was certain was a figment of my imagination—suddenly let loose a roar, and Elf-Dude looked up, off to his left, with a somewhat amused expression on his face. The sound was much louder and much closer-sounding than it had been before, and with it came the sound of heavy footsteps coming through the foliage. I followed Elf-Dude's gaze, held my shower rod at the ready, and prepared myself to come face to face with...

A goat.

A goat stepped out of the trees and into the clearing.

I glanced at Elf-Dude for confirmation, but he didn't seem to care much about the goat at all. No, he was making funny facial expressions, almost like he was having a conversation with the Voices in his head. This did not reassure me in the slightest.

My brain offered up two choices: consider the potentially schizophrenic Elf-Dude with sword, or examine the rather harmless-looking goat that is minding its own business and nibbling at the grass.

I chose the latter.

Big mistake.

For a short while, all was perfectly fine. Mr. Goat regarded me for a moment, decided it wasn't going to waste time that could be spent eating by trying to figure me out, took a few more bites of the greens around him, and spat out a rock. My aunt in Canada—Genesis' adopted mom—had goats. They really were rather dumb creatures. Not as dumb as sheep, of course, but it's still relaxing to watch them, I've found. Mr. Goat was something rather familiar.

Elf-Dude laughed once, but I ignored him and continued to focus on Mr. Goat.

And then the forest around Mr. Goat burst into flames.

The next few seconds will require a bit of explanation. First off, it must be said in my defense that my brain was clearly elsewhere and not exactly functioning properly. Blame it on shock, if you'd like. Second, it is entirely Genesis's fault that my reaction was so immediate and over the top, because she is the one that planted the idea in my head in the first place.

She is the one responsible for my sudden fear of gangsters, Medieval balls, magic scrolls, and—

"FIRE-BREATHING GOAT! FIRE-BREATHING GOOOOOOAAAAAAAT!"

I, for one, feel the need to point out the impressively high pitch that my voice reached in that moment.

I ran in circles for a little while, still screaming, and then when I tripped over a stump, I ran to hide behind the nearest object that was bigger than me. Namely Elf-Dude.

"Don't let it EAT ME," I whispered, holding my shower rod at the ready.

He looked at me over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow like he had no idea what I was freaking out about. As though a freaking GOAT didn't just SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST right in front of our faces. Deciding that I wasn't going to be moving anytime soon, Elf-Dude glanced back up and said something in his Elf-Dude-Speak—the pretty one, the first one—in a softer voice than he'd been using before. At first, I thought he'd been talking to me, but then immediately dismissed the idea because it was obvious I didn't speak Elf-Dude-Speak and he was more than likely talking to a tree. Or someone standing in the trees.

Another person. I liked that idea.

Carefully, I leaned out around Elf-Dude's back to get a quick glimpse at whoever had conquered the fire-breathing goat—I mean, that is the general direction that Elf-Dude was facing, and he obviously wasn't deeming the goat a threat as his sword was still at his side—and ended up staring into the most ginormous blue eyes I have ever seen in my entire life. And I don't mean like, whoa-dude-you-have-some-serious-doe-eyes-going-on- there big eyes, but holy-crap-dude-your-eyes-are-the-size-of-soup-bowl s big eyes.

I took a step back—the Goat-Conqueror, as I was beginning to call it in my head, had been entirely too all-up-in-your-face for my taste—and then immediately decided I had much bigger things to worry about than fire-breathing goats.

Literally bigger.

The logical part of my brain (which was only just then deciding to make an appearance, instead of half an hour ago when it would have been useful in navigating, or two years and three months ago, when I took that stupid Geometry quiz that I failed—dumb brain) eventually came to the conclusion that the goat really had just been a goat, and the lovely flame special effects had come from a different fire-breathing creature, most likely the one that I had dubbed Lion-Lizard.

In other words, Goat-Conqueror and Lion-Lizard were one and the same.

In other words, Elf-Dude had definitely not been talking to a person.

In other words, I was staring down a big-ass fire-breathing lizard with huge blue eyes, a massive pair of wings, an impressive set of claws on all four feet, and cobalt scales glittering down its entire length.

"Oh. Dragon."

A round of applause for my brain.

And I'm pretty sure that's the exact moment when I passed out completely.

A/N: First off, pretty sure they don't speak English in Alagaesia. Second, they probably don't speak Spanish either. Third, Elise will become a little more coherent and a little less psycho the more she gets used to this place. I mean really, how would you react? Fourth, sorry about all of her internal ramblings. I assure that nearly all of it is important. Reviews make me happy! RANDOM TRIVIA OF THE DAY: A viceroy is capable of flying, but what exactly is it?