AN: Roadtrip disaster! This is based on an experience I had while getting lost in New York State, though the ending was much less exciting than what awaits Erik and Company on their way to Seneca Falls. Hey, it's about the journey, not the destination, right? Anyway, in this chapter, Charlotte is a bit defensive, Christine is sweet and clueless, Freddy holds out on Erik, Erik is weirdly angry, Ahmed is exasperated and Meg...well, Meg is afraid of Republicans. Enjoy! (And do drop me a review, if you either like, love, hate or think this story is getting boring).

Disclaimer: None of the characters from any incarnation of Phantom of the Opera belong to me. Nor am I affiliated with Facebook (and no offense meant to anyone out there who has had a good experience while in Schroon, New York). Any musicals, plays, movies, people or places referenced by me are the property of their respective owners. I am making no money off the utilization of anything with a copyright.


I don't know how he does it,

But he lives like a king and he dallies
And he gathers and he plucks and shines

And when the man dances, certainly boys, what else?

The piper pays him!

Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir, yes sir.

When the man dances, certainly boys, what else?

The piper pays him! Yessssir, yessssir.
But he doesn't know the territory!

-The Music Man

After the initial getting-to-know-you conversation, the ride to upstate New York was quite mellow – well, mellow considering the fact that they were not actually members of a Columbian drug cartel, nor did they deal in the buying and selling of human beings. Charlotte eventually woke and began peppering Christine with questions about herself, her school, her interests, roles that she had played, etc. Christine was slightly flattered by the attention and eagerly chatted on with the redhead, assuming the other girl was just being friendly. While it was true that Charlotte was a naturally talkative person, her questions toward Christine had just as much of an 'assessing a potential threat' motivation as they did a 'getting to know you' motivation. Charlotte was shrewed like that and Erik was wise to her motives.

"Okay, Charlotte, lay off the Spanish Inquisition," he said into the rear-view mirror (having taken over driving from a sleepy Ahmed who was napping with his mouth unflatteringly open in the passenger's seat).

Charlotte was appropriately irritated by the racial slur. "I was just wondering," she said defensively, flipping her unruly hair out of her eyes with great irritation. "I mean, come on, what's wrong with a little chatting? Do you feel like a ghettoized Jew, Christine?"

A little shocked at someone likening what she had taken to be Charlotte's friendly inquiries to torture, capital punishment and forced conversion, she was silent for a moment and could just gape for a second before saying, "It's okay. I mean – no, I don't feel like...I'm in a ghetto. Or whatever – not whatever! It was traumatic and all I'm sure...for the Jews. The Jewish people. Um. Chosen Ones of God. So...it's fine. I'm fine. Not ghettoized here, entrenched firmly in the suburbs. Ah. The suburbs of conversation."

Grinning at Christine as though she had just spouted out something poetic and profound. "See?" she asked, settling back smugly into her seat. "It's okay. And I am not Queen Isabella."

"She was a psycho!" piped up an eager voice from the cargo hold.

"Yes, psycho, thank you for that brilliant assessment, Freddy, what would we do without you?" Erik asked sarcastically

Affronted, Freddy popped his head up over the back seat and settled his chin down between Meg and Christine's shoulders. "What bug crawled up your butt this morning, Negative Nancy? You've been nothing but a bitch since we left Massachusetts. If I were Christine I would so rather talk to Charlotte than to you, and isn't that just a little bit sad?"

Charlotte wasn't entirely sure whether it was she who was supposed to be insulted or Erik, so she settled for keeping her expression neutral, though she did fold her arms just to communicate an aura of overall disdain. "He's just antsy," Meg said decisively, taking in Erik's stiff shoulders and white knuckles on the steering wheel. "He doesn't nap, that's what happens when you don't nap."

Erik rolled his eyes, "I just hate being in a car for eight thousand hours."

"Wow, then it was totally awesome for you to suggest going on a road trip to a place that's eight hours from Little Rhody," Freddy said, totally unimpressed with that explanation. "But yeah, this trip is a little lame...um...I have fireworks, if you - "

Even though they were in the middle of what had to be a highway (even though there were no cars around them and only endless farmland to either side), Erik decided that he had to pull the car to a dead stop. This jostled Ahmed into consciousness as his limp body was thrown forward and nearly strangled by his seatbelt. "What the fuck?!" he exclaimed, adjusting the strap so that it was digging slightly less into his neck.

Slowly – oh, so slowly – Erik turned around in his seat. If looks could kill, Freddy would have been consumed by fire from the inside out. "You," he began, his voice deadly and low. Christine squirmed slightly in her seat, feeling like she was in the line of fire since Freddy was right next to her. "You have explosives. Explosives. Gunpowder. And you didn't tell me?" Clearly their friendship did not mean as much to the fair-haired boy as it did to Erik.

"Um..." Freddy said, obviously attempting to salvage the relationship in whatever way he could. "Surprise? Happy birthday?"

"My birthday was in May," Erik said, clearly not assuaged in the least.

Ahmed interrupted the argument with raised eyebrows and a look of mild alarm on his face. "Are fireworks illegal in this state? I don't want to get pulled over and have them look in the back. And seriously, Erik, if we're going to just sit here, pull the fuck over, we'll get pulled over if you don't."

"Ha, irony," Charlotte muttered under her breath.

Slowly, still glaring at Freddy in the mirror, Erik inched the car over into the breakdown lane. "We have to set them off. Now."

Sighing deeply, it was clear from the expression on his face that this was not how Ahmed wanted to spend his nap time. "Okay, no, not now, we'll freak out the cows. You don't want to freak out the cows. It's animal cruelty. So we'll hold off on the gunpowder until later. After AA. You know, we can even wait 'til we're home, we'll go to the beach it'll be great."

But Erik had that steely glint in his eye that meant there would be no compromising on this point. The cows were the only thing that were keeping him from grabbing the goodies in the trunk and running into the hills to cause minor mayhem. It wouldn't do to upset the local livestock. "Fine," he said testily. "But the first opportunity we have, I am setting those suckers off."

Opportunity came in the form of the small, holiday town Schroon Lake, once home to the production of a Hollywood movie starring some of their favorite dead actors. Of course, no one knew that at the time. They only knew that they were hopelessly lost.

One wrong turn. One wrong exit. And they wound up two hours out of their way from Albany, in some creepy little Friday the 13th style town where the locals all had Midwestern accent and called Erik "boy" which he had not appreciated in the slightest when they pulled into a gas station to ask for directions.

Of course, in revenge for being creepy and in-bred, Erik decided that they would leave their mark upon Schroon Lake before exiting – this was the place to set off nearly one-hundred dollars worth of fireworks. Charlotte and Meg stayed behind in the car – Charlotte because she wanted to drive the get-away vehicle (and be the first to tell the police that she had nothing to do with this when they were all inevitably carted off to hick jail) and Meg because Schroon Lake scared the crap out of her and she was utterly convinced that if she left the safety of the van, she would be tortured by cannibals while "Dueling Banjos" played in the background. This left Erik, Ahmed, Freddy and Christine to go off and wreck the aforementioned havoc that Erik was determined to cause to enliven the afternoon.

After they wandered around for about ten minutes looking for "the perfect spot" - Freddy mumbling that Erik was like a puppy with a full bladder – Christine was beginning to think that she should have remained in the van with the other two girls. Really, she just wanted to look at fireworks and didn't realize that it was going to be this big production (since they still weren't sure how legal they were in Schroon Lake). She had been assigned secondary look-out detail, since Ahmed was the number one look-out. Erik was, of course, going to be doing the setting and lighting of their minor explosive devices and Freddy was going to be taping it all for the sake of history and Facebook video uploads.

They wound up in some kind of rock-strewn clearing on the side of an enormous lake (the lake the town got its name from? Perhaps, no one wanted to ask a local and find out). Ahmed was thrilled with the location, if they set them off behind a boulder, no one would know, they would have plenty of time to run and plenty of places to hide if someone called the sheriff. Surely someone would call the sheriff, it wasn't like they had a police department there. A sheriff and a shotgun. Gulp.

Of course, Erik had slightly more grand ideas about relieving his stress than Ahmed had entertained when his friend stopped, looked around and said, "This is it." No, Erik could not be content with just quietly making things go boom. Rather than setting the fireworks off behind the rocks, he decided it would be much more dramatic (consequently, much more dangerous) to set them off on top of the rocks.

Oh yeah. Bad idea. And another equally bad idea was to have a police look-out. They really ought to have assigned one of them as an Erik look-out. Often Erik grumbled about the fact that people either treated him with kid-gloves or else left him to his own devices. Just pick a technique, he complained, and he would live with it. It did not seem unreasonable that Erik should be left on his own much of the time. After all, he was a bright kid, a self-described genius and things had a way of working out for him when he could not devise a way to make them work out for himself. This was not one of those times. While Ahmed had been looking to the east and Christine looking to the west for signs of law enforcement authority, Freddy had been looking at the camera, trying to find the zoom function and Erik...well, he had not been looking at all.

Not wanting to shout and alarm the locals, Erik was silent as he lost his footing and tripped over an unseen indentation in the rock. The sound of his body hitting the ground, as well as the box of fireworks falling atop him was the only indication Ahmed and Christine had that something was amiss.

Immediately, the two ran to Erik's side. The tall, gangly boy was lying on the ground, just a splay of limbs on his back. His thin chest was moving up and down, but his eyes were closed and aside from breathing, he wasn't moving at all. Understandably, Christine began to panic, very slightly."Is...is he going to be okay," she asked, her voice slightly high-pitched from anxiety as she wrung her hands nervously in the pockets of her sweatshirt, afraid to actually touch Erik. Oh God, she should never have left the car, should never have gone on this trip, what was she thinking? Online, Erik just seemed like a nice, slightly bitter guy, she didn't know that he had a penchant for death-defying stunts coupled with a love for gunpowder. How was she supposed to know? And now he had knocked himself out and he might be seriously hurt and they probably didn't even have doctors in this part of the state, just...voodoo or whatever backwoods magic that people who lived in random, rural small towns two hours outside of Albany practiced.

"Uh, yeah, sure," Ahmed said distractedly since he was an actor, dammit, not a doctor and he had no fucking clue. But the fluttering of Erik's eyelashes gave him some clue that he wasn't just going to lie there unconscious for days on end, so that was probably a positive development, right? When those odd hazel eyes flickered open again, Ahmed gave Erik a nervous, crooked smile and stammered, "H-hey, man, you okay?"

Erik's gaze slid from Ahmed to Christine, whose hand he reached out and seized rather impetuously. The blonde girl looked slightly surprised, but took Erik's hand in her as he began to speak in somewhat high-pitched raptures. "Oh, Toto!" he exclaimed, giving Christine's hand a squeeze. Then he directed his gaze to Ahmed, "Auntie Em! Oh, it was so strange, there were elaborately costumed midgets and I just kept saying that I wanted to go home and now I am! Oh Auntie Em, there's no place like home!"

Ahmed's mouth was set in a grim line. "Yeah, he's fine," he said shortly to Christine, rising and brushing dirt from his jeans compulsively. "Come on, Dorothy, get up and grab the fireworks, I'll see you back at the car."

"What happened?" Freddy asked, jogging over, not having heard the crash when he wandered off to frame his shot. "Are we going somewhere else? What about the fireworks? I thought we were going to revenge ourselves on the ignorant...hill people or whatever Erik called them. I thought we were going to light fires and claim to be their new gods and demand worship and libations."

"The dream died," Ahmed said, his voice still slightly strained even though Erik had hopped up from the ground like an eager bunny rabbit on speed and was helping Christine put the fireworks back in their box. "God over there tripped, so we're putting him back into the car just in case his thick immortal skull isn't immune to a concussion."