Ah yes, moving on to the next chapter. Sorry it took me so long to update. My editor was having issues that I'm pretty sure you guys don't wanna know about. Still, moving on and ignoring my mother, I bring you the next installment of this funny, cute, and what will eventually be a romantic story. YAY!

God, I have no life.

I own nothing.

OWTF!!

Sammich
Just Hanging

Obviously, Alex and Cloe really hit it off, even if they were just talking about piercings. Despite the way she was dressed, Cloe turned out to be friendly and bouncy with a big smile that could light up a room.

Loor, around the corner, smirked to herself and leaned her head back against the wall. She could probably leave, visit Onin, and come back and no one would know that she was gone. Oh well.

"Oh!" Alex was pointing at something on one of the displays. "What is that?"

"That," Cloe smiled, using her key to open the display and take the addressed item out. "Is an ear cap."

An ear cap was made to go on the top ridge of one's ear, covering it from the base and cupping over the tip, thus the name. The one that Alex had pointed out happened to have the design of a dragon's body and wings carved into the lightweight metal, the dragon's head going a bit beyond the cup of the cap. "I like this..." Alex muttered, taking it from Cloe's hands and looking at it from a few different directions.

Cloe snickered. "They're not a new concept. Ear caps have been around since before the war, and if you look at some of the old people in town you can still see the holes."

"Holes?" Alex asked.

"Yeah." Cloe took it from her, gripping Alex's ear in the middle, right under the ridge for the bone. "We make three holes along the bone so that the thing doesn't tip or fall off if you're active. It's a little hole, but you can still see through it."

Alex whimpered. "Maybe I'll pass..." She muttered.

Cloe cuffed her. "No worries. Where did your buddy go?"

Alex turned around, looking around and whining in her throat. "...Loor?"

"Right here!" Loor's head suddenly peaked out from around the corner. "We ready to go?"

Alex nodded. "Yeah." She then turned back. "Nice meeting you Cloe! We'll drop by again sometime."

Cloe smiled, giving Alex a quick hug. "You'd better." She joked, letting go and sitting back down in the chair they had found her in.

Alex grinned, and then ran to Loor. Both girls got walking, just in time to hit a rush of people coming into the place. They got past it, got outside, and Loor took the lead again.

"Hey, Loor..?"

"Yeah Alex?"

"You never told me a lot about what happened to you while you were here."

"That's because you didn't believe me till I left again."

"I know... and I saw that... thing."

Loor snickered. "Her name is Lyra."

"Yeah, and why did you come back anyway?"

"It's a long story."

"Is this a long walk?"

"Kinda..."

"Then you can start talking."

Loor giggled, scratching the back of her head. "When I got to Haven in the first place... I thought it was all a nightmare. I woke up in the fortress, in a funky test tube with needles in my body, broke out, had a brush with Errol, and saw Fury looking like a hellish beast. Add that on top of the first meeting me and Fury had outside the building set us straight on the path to the underground, I thought it was just a little... out there. We met Jak, and started doing missions, and it started feeling like living the dream; only I kept fucking up."

"Really?"

"Really. First mission I was on, I separated myself from the group for a short cut and ended up getting cornered by a group of KG. I was lucky that when I dropped down, Jak drove under me to catch me. If not, I would have splatted on the street."

"What about Fury?"

"She was fine for her first few missions. She helped with delivering Krew's payment and rescuing Vin from the strip mine. Then... She was killed on the mission to eradicate the eggs from the drill platform. She bled to death... in my arms."

"Lovely..." Alex muttered sarcastically.

"Yeah, and I can't say it got any better from there. I ended up following Jak around, and I could hardly hold it together half the time. I kept screwing up, or running into things that I couldn't do. Add the nice little warning that Vin gave me, and I was a mess."

"What warning?"

"Vin was the one and only person that I had told about where I was from and what I knew. Shortly after he started trying to help me get back, he figured out something scary. Since I knew how things went, I had to be careful and make sure that all the events went the way they were supposed to. The information that I had in the wrong hands would be very bad, and I also had to be careful on what I did to make sure the storyline was unaltered. If I hadn't followed that... the metal heads probably would have won the war."

"Whoa..." Alex then hugged Loor. "But you didn't screw up! You're here, and so is everyone else, right?"

Loor nodded, smiling lightly. "Yeah, but that's the reason I came home. I was scared about what my influence would do. After Vin died, Onin picked up the slack. Right after the victory party... right after I had admitted to Jak that I loved him... Pecker gave me a call telling me that I had to go home. I told Jak to stay, but he followed me."

Alex stared at her friend for a moment, and then started gushing. "AWWWWW!!! That's so CUTE!!!"

Loor blushed lightly, shrugging it off. "I-I guess... I was kinda mad at him... and then, he wouldn't give up on making me go back with him. In the end, he convinced me, and I left home after... y'know, what happened at activity night."

The event that Loor was not mentioning was that right before they left, the group (plus Jak) had gone to a dance that the school was holding. At said dance, Loor had been confronted by her rival at school while on a high of emotions, and changed into Lyra.

Lyra was her dark personality, what had been 'gifted' to her by her time in the fortress.

Still, Onin had stripped most eco away from Loor when she sent Loor back to her own time, so Loor hardly had enough to change, and she was dependent on it. She nearly died, but she and Jak left in time to get help in Haven.

"What happened when you got back?" Alex questioned at once.

"I..." She paused, sighing. "I went into a coma. The shock and stress on my body was just too much."

"What happened next?!" Alex really wanted to know. "How long were you out? Did Jak start seeing other people??"

Loor giggled, patting her friend on the head. "Calm down Alex, I'll tell you later. We're here."

Alex stopped, and looked up at what she knew to be Onin's tent. "Wait... why are we here?"

"To see if you can stay."

Both girls walked in to see that Onin looked to be taking a nap, and Pecker was about the same, sitting in the woman's head basket.

"Should we come back later?" Alex asked.

"Naw... Pecker's faking."

When Loor said that, the moncaw twitched slightly. Loor sighed, shaking her head. "C'mon, lazy bones! I don't ask you guys favors that often."

Pecker lifted his head out from under his own wing. "Alright, Alright." He leaned over the edge of the basket. "Fossil lady! Up!"

Onin jerked awake, nearly throwing Pecker. Loor smiled lightly. "Hey Onin, how are you today?"

Onin started signing at her, and Pecker did his job. "Onin says that's she feels fine, and thanks you for your concern."

Loor smirked at Alex. "Onin turned one hundred twelve last month. I've been worrying about her ever since I found out how old she was."

Pecker's voice called the girls back to reality. "Onin would like to remind you two that she's not deaf, and I'd like to remind you two to get on with this so I can go back to sleep!"

Loor rolled her eyes. "Same old Pecker." She snorted. "Alright, buddy boy. If you've been listening to Onin, you'd know that Alex here is from my time. She arrived three days ago. Now, if Okaa-san Onin would do a quick analysis and tell us whether or not my buddy can stay or if she has to go home, we'll be on our merry way."

Onin gave a slight smirk at Loor's works, and Pecker shut up to looking down as his master motioned Alex forward. Loor also backed up, almost out of the tent. She needed Onin's judgment to be clear on this, and to her knowledge, powerful magic had a radius to it. Loor made a point of standing out side that radius.

Alex looked a little nervous, standing there as Onin appeared to go into some sort of meditation-like state. She got a little more frightened when the fire in the middle of the room suddenly turned green. Still, she didn't move, she just watched. A few seconds later, the tent returned to normal, as the fire, and Loor came back as Onin started signing at fast pace.

Pecker watched. "Onin says your friend is more than welcome to stay."

Loor gave a small yelp of victory and glomped Alex.

From there, Loor and Alex got moving. Even if Alex didn't know how to go back to the muse form, she still wanted to be back at Torn's apartment when she made an attempt. So, they went to New Haven, went to Torn's apartment, used the card key that Alex had snitched, and let themselves in.

"Alright..." Loor muttered. "We've officially committed breaking and entering."

Alex wasn't listening, looking around the place. It had been a long day, and now she was back here. Still, she didn't know how to go back to being Jules.

"How did you get to be human in the first place?"

"Thinking about it really hard...?" Alex shrugged. "I was sitting on the floor, and I was..." She paused, sitting down on the carpet. "I could feel my fingers..." She closed her eyes, bending over and thinking about it. Loor was silent, watching, as she tried to figure it out. She had been able to feel the other form.

She just had to find Jules. The muse was floating around, somewhere in her brain, wasn't she? She just had to feel the ears, the tail, and the paws all over again...

There they were! She at once took hold in her mind, flexing all of her feline parts as she felt them, twitching her tail, fluffing up the fur on her back, lifting her ears, and trying to figure out how to flex one's claws.

She heard Loor yelp, and opened her eyes.

When she did, she couldn't see clearly. At once, she expected that something had gone wrong and made a move to run. She tripped for the following reasons; She was a muse again, she was trapped in her own shirt, and her hind leg got caught on the bra she had been wearing. Upon tripping, she rolled several times, and her head smacked into the wall.

Loor swallowed her yelp and walked over to untangle her friend. "I'll take your clothes and wash them, and come get you tomorrow morning, okay?"

Jules, as she was, lifted herself away from the wall, nodded at her friend, and fell down again. Her head hurt.

Loor picked up the outfit that Alex had discarded in turning into Jules, shoving it in with the other clothes that she had borrowed Alex, and got on her way. She had to get home. She had been gone for four hours, and Jak was probably worrying.

Lynn probably wanted her mom too.

Torn sighed, leaving the FL building at eight and stopping on the way home to pick up some real pet food, and other instant meals for himself. He had been kinda worrying about Jules, but not that much. What was to worry about now that the window was closed? The biggest danger was that she'd hit her head too hard and bust it open on a wall.

He frowned at himself. That was a possibility.

He shook his head, getting to his building, taking the stairs up, and getting to his apartment. He let himself in, dropped the stuff he had picked up on the counter, and looked around. "Jules...?" He felt almost stupid calling for a pet, but did it anyway. When he did, he heard movement somewhere else in the place, and then the tell-tail sound that Jules had rammed herself into another wall. He snickered, sitting down on the floor when the muse finally got into the kitchen from his bedroom.

The animal leaped into his lap and started nuzzling him. "Whoa... what's this about?" He snickered, petting her and scratching her behind the ears, which made her melt at once, mewing and nuzzling him some more.

"Jeez, you like attention a lot, don't you?"

She nodded, pressing her head against his hand and starting to purr. Then, without warning, she pulled away and gave him a look.

"What?" He asked, forgetting about how stupid he felt for talking to an animal.

She kept staring, intently.

"What, you wanna know what I did today?"

She nodded, forgetting on her own part that she wasn't supposed to be using human gestures.

He gave her a funny look, and shrugged it off. She must have been pre-trained or something before he found her. "Not much..." He laid back on the tile floor of his kitchen. "Just sat around at my computer most of the day... yelled at a couple of idiots that probably made it through training at the bottom of their group... tried to dodge Ashelin and failed."

She got up off of his lap and sat on his chest, looking down as he crosses his arms under his head.

"She doesn't get why I'm avoiding her... she thinks just because we screwed around while her dad was still on top of the city that it was something other than forced. She's nice enough, I'll admit, but I didn't like the relationship. That's why I ended it."

Aw... Poor baby... Jules whimpered, laying down on his chest and curling her tail around her body, her ears dropping while her eyes begged him to go on and explain.

He gave her a look, and then chuckled. "Oh well, water under the bridge, right Jules?" He lifted a hand to run it down her back. "If I keep turning her down, maybe she'll come around, right?"

She gave him a miffed look, but still put her head down to relax as he started to pet her.

Maybe, when she went with Loor the next day, she'd be able to meet Torn... in person.