-One-
Title: Of Familiar Strangers
Rating: PG/PG-13 //Cursing will be avoided as much as possible. PG-13 is for later chapters where there might be battles and violence and such, but nothing too gory.
Summary: Rebecca Jung has been thrust in a world of confusion. How did she get there? How will she cope? And why doesn't anyone know English here?
Disclaimer: No profit made on any characters (like fanfiction.net would let you? Psh…), but Rebecca Jung is a figment of my imagination and Tolkien made all this rich fodder for us to work with. God bless that man.
A/N: First fanfic, and constructive criticism is greatly appreciated and taken to heart.
There was something about today that seemed oddly tranquil, even though everyone was so loud. The traffic was monotonous, time was passing slowly on this crisp winter day of late December and it was just... peaceful.
At least, that's what Rebecca Jung had to say about it. Maybe it was just because she was tired. She let her dark brown eyes follow the pavement and continued to walk while tying her uncontrollable, dark chocolate hair into a loose ponytail around her cumbersome earphones (vibrating vigorously from the over-amplified music in her CD-player), feeling the strain of her backpack strap descend into her shoulders. Rebecca lowered one shoulder with a wince, trying to balance out her walk from the strain of schoolbooks. In a couple minutes and half a gum-plastered block more, she'd be submerged into the New York City subway station to stew in a train.
The only unpredictable part was whether she'd stew sitting down on a seat that smelled like piss, or standing up and hanging onto a pole and staining her hands with its suspicious metallic smell.
She sighed, giving little thought to its visibility, if she noticed any. Bored, she skipped a couple tracks on her CD to something she would like better for the moment, just to fill up the empty pockets of silence. The CD was the soundtrack for Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, and Rebecca had loved it to death since her father had given it to her for her fifteenth birthday. It was nice to see someone wasn't totally freaked out by her Lord of the Rings passion. Having seen the movies and read The Hobbit, the trilogy, and about half the Silmarillion (it was still in her backpack, now that she thought about it) she thought it fit to obsess for a couple months in addition to increasing her general vocabulary―in Elvish. She still fancied herself well into it, but wasn't as enthusiastic as she had been in the start.
Needless to say, going home from school was a pure joy. At least it was the last day of school before winter vacation and all this wouldn't happen again tomorrow. Tomorrow she would sleep until lunchtime. She had to make up for all the lost hours spent on homework into early hours. Maybe she would just start catching up on it as soon as she got home. Then she'd wake up and eat something out of the microwave, as she was bound to be too tired to cook anything from scratch.
Rebecca let the cool breeze of an incoming train stroke her face gently as she made her way down the stairwell, abruptly feeling strangely distant from everything.
It felt unusual, as if she were watching a video of the world around her.
Her head was numb, and the beat of her CD-player rumbled over everything else around her, seeming louder than normal.
She stopped for a second to put her hand on the banister and steady herself, thinking that perhaps she was just dizzy from walking and such. Being lanky, unexercised, and not in shape could do that to her sometimes.
The sound of the train pulling in was feeling farther away, and echoed in her head. Everything was turning into a grey vertigo.
Rebecca blinked once, and then twice, just to make sure what was happening could be digested. Each time her eyes reopened, everything was doubly as unclear. Not able to comprehend, she took off her glasses and started cleaning them vigorously on her dark blue denim jacket. Possibly it was just her lens, even though it couldn't really make everything fuzzy and grey.
She put them on again, and found herself in a field of browning grass, cracked dirt, and stones. A few yards away, she could see the auburn outline of a winding road, heading to some distant mountain range. Suddenly Rebecca realized that this wasn't an illusion, dizziness, or her glasses. Quickly she turned off her CD-player, letting her earphones fall like bits of rope around her neck, and found that all around her was a dead silence—one that matched perfectly with her environment and mood a few seconds ago.
Rebecca shivered, feeling a winter chill that pierced right through her jacket. She felt as if she had been placed in a photographic scene out of a calendar. For a moment, it actually felt okay.
There was one big problem, though.
Where the hell was she?