Act 1

The sun rose over Seaside Boarding School, a lovely school sandwiched between the cities of Santa Cruz and Monterey, California, bathing its cluster of Spanish Mission-style buildings in refreshing, renewing light and starting a brand new day. Aroused by either their internal clocks or loud artificial alarm clocks, the students of this particular school began to awaken and go about their normal morning routines. It was a bright, crisp September day, meaning that the school year as a whole was still a fairly new concept.

"Nngh," muttered Mary Patterson as she heard her alarm clock sound. She lifted her head, which seemed to take a great deal of effort, to see what time it was before deciding if it was indeed time to wake up. When she saw the time, she yawned and sluggishly moved out of her bed, accidentally knocking over a hardcover book in the process, making it fall onto her vulnerable feet. "Ow!" She knelt down and retrieved the book, placing it back on her bed. She shuffled over to her wardrobe and selected a navy blue T-shirt with a funny slogan on it, a pair of well-worn blue jeans, and Birkenstock sandals, effortlessly slipping into all of these items within seconds.

She left her suite, her blue backpack balanced on just one shoulder, and stopped at her sink to brush her teeth and her slightly wavy brown hair. As she did this, one of her suitemates came out of her room, yawning. The girl in question was Kayla Brown, an impossibly tall girl (nearing 6 feet) who was the star of the softball team.

"Morning," Kayla said to Mary. "How was the show last night?"

"Awesome," Mary responded. She heard her own stomach rumbling and laughed nervously. "Excuse me."

"It's okay," Kayla replied sheepishly as Mary moved away from the sink, towards the door to the room. "See you later!"

"See you!" Mary replied, throwing the door open and doing a little jump into the hallway. The feeling of being a senior was still sinking in for Mary, although she was now allowed to wear casual clothes of her choosing every day, something she dreamt of ever since she was invited to Seaside. She walked down the hall of Kell Hall's fourth floor, carrying herself proudly, beaming with the power that being a senior carries, watching as a pack of 9th grade girls walked by and looked at her in awe.

Then, as if the universe was placing a balance on the other side of Mary's scales, she promptly ran into a wall, shattering her power for the time being as the 9th graders took a moment to laugh at her. Rubbing her aching nose, Mary looked down so her hair would conceal her face and walked briskly the rest of the way to the elevator. When the door opened, she was able to place one foot over the elevator's threshold before a hard plastic object bumped into her soft, vulnerable leg.

"Ow!" Mary exclaimed, looking over to find the offending object and discovering a hard plastic violin case, attached to the hand of a Japanese girl who immediately looked shocked.

"I'm so sorry!" the girl exclaimed, her face reddening. "Please forgive me."

"No, it's okay." Mary put her right hand on the elevator doors, which were starting to close, and motioned with her free hand for the violin-toting girl to enter first. She did, nodding slightly, and Mary jumped in right as the doors closed. The elevator shuddered on its way down to the ground floor, which made Mary nervous, but the journey was soon complete and she was able to race off towards the student center and its cavernous dining hall.

When Mary shoved open the double doors to the student center, she immediately turned left and walked up to the row of newspaper boxes, searching for her beloved hometown paper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel. She smiled upon finding it and fed two quarters into its money slot, opening up the box and retrieving the paper on the top.

"Oh no, not again," she heard a girl standing before the San Francisco Chronicle box mutter as she counted out her coins and came up short. "I must've dropped that last dime…"

"Oh, here," Mary offered, searching through her wallet's coin pocket and discovering a dime. "Take it," she added, turning to look at the girl for the first time. She was a fairly tall African-American girl with friendly brown eyes and with a shaved head. Mary smiled brightly as the girl took her dime and fed it into the Chronicle's box.

"Thank you," the girl replied.

"No problem!" Mary hastily replied. 'Oh no, did that sound too snobby?' she asked herself, grimacing slightly as she folded her paper under her arm and walked into the dining hall. She retrieved her Seaside Dining Card from within her wallet and gleefully hopped in line, examining today's breakfast offerings and feeling even hungrier as she did so. The way the lamps reflected off the glossy frosting of a cinnamon roll batch hypnotized Mary for a moment, just long enough not to realize the line was moving.

"Hey, can we walk, please?" a female voice behind her said gruffly, making her snap back to reality. She whirled around, ready to apologize, and got a good look at the aggressor. The aggressor was obviously an underclassman because she was wearing a uniform, but she also had extremely wavy brown hair with bleached blonde highlights and kind blue eyes.

"Sorry!" Mary said, slightly exasperated, as she shuffled forward and picked up a plastic tray. The aggressor did not reply. 'How rude! I apologized to her and everything…' Mary sighed, shaking her head, and gingerly put a white plate onto her tray, a plate that was soon loaded up with hash browns, scrambled eggs, a cinnamon roll, and a biscuit.

"Got enough there?" a girl with stick-straight blonde hair, brown eyes, and the air of a supermodel, asked upon seeing Mary's tray, adding a little cackle to the mix.

"Look who's talking," Mary replied, looking at the model's plate and seeing a giant, fluffy omelet. "I think that may be one of my pillows! I've been looking for it!" she added, imitating the model's cackle before sauntering over to the cash register. She handed her dining card over to the hairnet-wearing dining hall employee and looked around for a possible place to sit.

"Thank you, have a nice day," the employee replied in a hollow voice, giving Mary back her card. Mary graciously took the card, smiled, and shuffled out of the way so the model could pay for her giant omelet.

"Ah, someone took my favorite table," Mary lamented upon seeing a group of fresh-faced 7th graders commandeering her table. "Oh, but the one next to it is open!" Feeling energized, she hustled over to the empty table, passing by the 7th graders on the way and picking up pieces of their conversation.

"Are you excited about section placement today?" one girl asked another.

"Definitely!" the other girl, a tan girl with platinum blonde hair and bright blue eyes, replied in a soft Southern accent. Mary briskly walked past them and seated herself at the very next table, laying out her newspaper and setting her tray in just the right place so she could read and eat at the same time.

"This seat taken?" Mary heard a male voice ask just as she opened the newspaper, doubling its size on the table. She looked up, assuming a deer-in-headlights sort of look, and saw that Joshua Haygood wanted to sit down across from her. She took too long to respond to him, though, because she was too busy checking him out from head to toe. "Hello in there?"

"Oh! Um, no, you can, you can sit here if you want to," Mary stuttered, gesturing for Joshua to sit down so she could look at him some more under the pretense of staring off into space. She drank in the sight of his dirty blond hair, just disheveled enough to be attractive, his mysteriously light blue eyes, that dusting of freckles across his nose…A contented smile crept onto her face, even though she hadn't taken a bite of her food yet.

"So, did you do the pre-calc homework last night?" Joshua asked, trying to reel Mary back in from her dream world.

"Huh? Oh! Um, I think so!" Mary exclaimed. 'Yes, you did, Mary! You did it first thing after school let out! It was about graphing!' "Yes! Yes, I did it. It was easy! Graphing is easy." 'Shut up!'

"Yeah, it was easy. I have this bad feeling, though, that Ms. Marshall is going to sneak in a really tough concept soon just to trip us up," Joshua said forebodingly.

"Hm, maybe you're right," Mary replied, stabbing a piece of scrambled egg with her fork. "I hope not, though. I'm not very good at math." She quickly popped the egg into her mouth and chewed on it thoughtlessly.

"Well, you know I can give you tutoring if you need it," Joshua offered kindly, almost making Mary cough up the egg in shock. She aborted the cough, though, and managed to swallow the egg before speaking.

"You'd do that?" Mary asked for clarification.

"Sure, why not? I might as well put my knowledge to good use." Joshua smiled, and it was only then that Mary noticed the only things gracing his tray were a cinnamon roll and a glass of milk.

'I'm eating more than a guy!' Mary observed, cringing slightly as she mindlessly pushed her hash browns around. She decided to just glance at her paper instead of trying to talk for a while.

"So, how about the game this Friday?" Joshua asked casually.

"What about it? Not going," Mary answered.

"I figured. You've never been a football person," Joshua pointed out.

"Correct. I'm a baseball girl, through and through," Mary replied, giving a thumbs-up sign.

"How about we play hooky from the football game and go get a coffee or something?" Joshua suggested. Mary's eyes widened in shock and her eyes shot up from the paper to meet Joshua's.

"Are you serious?" she asked in an oddly deep voice.

"Sure, why not?"

"Well, my show doesn't come on Friday nights…I can just do homework over the weekend…" Mary tapped her index finger to her lips as she thought aloud. "Sure! I'll do it!"

"Cool. I'll see you at the coffee shop at eight," Joshua said before peering at his watch. "I gotta go. See you!" He took the rest of his cinnamon bun and left the table, leaving Mary alone with her thoughts and overly active imagination. Her loneliness didn't last long, however, because soon enough the bell rang to signal the beginning of the school day. She folded up her newspaper, shoved it into her backpack, and took her breakfast tray over to the steam table for cleaning before leaving the student center altogether and walking down the path to the two school buildings.

The Upper School, the larger of the two buildings, was where she was headed, specifically to her first-period painting class, a relaxing, mellow class where other students frequently brought in music to listen to and the teacher would eat her breakfast inside. Mary thought of the project she was waist-deep in, an assignment to copy the iconic painting The Scream onto a ceiling tile using tempera paint, and sighed. The project just seemed like it would never end to her. Even though she faced the prospect of a seemingly never-ending art project, though, she was happy.

In what appeared on the surface to be a beautiful whitewashed steeple, complete with a large bronze bell and a blue dome at the top, a pallid woman wrapped in a black sheet sat on a throne and gazed apathetically into a crystal ball. She let out a sigh, preparing to get up and move, when suddenly the crystal ball pulsated and revealed a hazy image of Mary walking to class. The woman's black eyes grew in anticipation as the crystal ball turned red.

"Yes!" she hissed, pumping a fist in the air. "It finally found one. I knew this ball was good for something." A crimson jewel between her eyes flickered for a moment and began shining. "Now to find a suitable creature for possession." She touched her index finger to her jewel and scanned the image of Mary until she found an earthworm writhing on the sidewalk. Mistaking it for a snake, the woman touched it, feeling as some of her power was transferred to the worm.

Standing up from her throne and gazing out of a small window into deep space, the woman's lips curled into a smile.

"Sailor Sedna," she declared to the stars. "I'm coming for you."