I own the as yet unnamed main character and the story idea, Mercedes Lackey owns everything else, you all know the drill.
She had had enough. She was tired of being unappreciated, unnoticed, and was just tired of her family, and her life. Seventeen years old, she had no where to go, but she just packed up anything and everything she cared for, cleaned out all the cash and her mother's credit card, took her car, and left. She had no final destination, no goal, only to change her life, to not have to put up with anyone else's crap. No high school, no worrying about grades, no nothing, only a brand new life ahead of her. Into her trunk went all of the camping gear in her house, she kissed her dog goodbye, and left when everyone was asleep, and started driving west.
She filled up her gas tank in West Virginia using her mother's credit card, and slept in a rest stop until dawn. After she woke up, she took a sponge bath in a sink, washed her hair, and got on the road again. Before she stopped for the night, she filled up the tank again, and visited four different grocery stores buying imperishable goods until she maxed out the credit card, wiped it for fingerprints, and dumped in a trash can in the parking lot. She kept on heading west.
Eventually her car died, and she loaded all of her belongings in to a backpacking backpack, and started walking. All she thought about was getting away, about not being found. She had a plan to find a job, in a town in the middle of nowhere, but until then, she just walked, camping off the road anywhere she felt was safe. All went well until that night a month after she ran away.
A massive thunderstorm blew up, and as the road was a ditch between several low mountains, she had to get to high ground before any flash floods started. She started hiking, and found respite from the hurricane- force winds in a stand of trees on the top of a cliff that looked down on a massive river. She managed to start a fire, and managed to cook a little dinner, and have a little tea. Worried about the fate of a tent in the high winds, she wrapped herself in a blanket and tarp and laid down to get what little rest she could in the storm.
Growls woke her up, and when she opened her eyes, all she could see were large toothed animals, approaching. Feral dogs, attracted by the smell of her dinner, had come looking for food, and the most readily accessible food was she.
In the fight that followed, the girl was severely wounded in many places, but was holding her own until her ankle got tangled up in the strap to her backpack, distracting her for a second, just long enough for a dog to lunge for her throat, hit her in the shoulders, and cause her to lose her balance and tumble over the edge of the cliff.
Her campsite was found several days later, and by the fingerprints left on the camping supplies, the case was related to the missing person's report of the teenager from Herndon, Virginia. They searched the river, and all of the surrounding area, but no body was ever found. The case was sealed, and her name was forgotten by everyone except the friends who barely knew her and the family she had forsaken. But even they only thought about her rarely.
Well, here's the start to the story that's kind of been brewing in my head for the last month or so. I need a name for the main character and the companion who is soon going to choose her, as you'll see in the next chapter. Any info at all would be soooo awesome, by the way. Sorry to leave the story just hanging here, but it had to be done, I'm afraid… Hey by the way, how in the hell do you get fanfiction to let you tab the beginning of a paragraph? I'm completely technology illeterate, so help!