Heya! So, I'm alive and all that. Thought I'd post something on April Fool's Day because it only makes sense, right? OH, and thank you to the people who told me how to do links. If you guys want 'em, I can do it again, but right now it's late for me so I'm gonna go to sleep after posting this. Kay? Kay.

Ch. 7: Jessica Meets Trouble (that's not the name of the person she meets I promise...although it would be a good nickname, totally match his personality)

Time: Before the Interviews, when Jessica is little

Location: Home of the Angels (I gave it an actual name, and it meant 'heaven' in another language, but it's buried under my earlier chapters from the interviews and I'm too lazy to go find it so I will get back to you on that)

Summary: Because of how angel time actually works, Jessica is just a child in this chapter, and looks to be only five. She encounters a kind of creature that she never has before, known as the Creatures of the Void. And as dark as those things are, they aren't even her biggest problem.

WARNING:

I am not responsible for any headaches, heartbreaks, tear-welling, mind-blowing, terrifying or confusing moments, and/or murders during the making of this story. Okay, so, fine, I'm a LITTLE responsible. Teeny tiny bit. Oh, and it's April Fool's Day, so, um, in the words of Herobrine (aka the most powerful and successful prankster of all time), BEWARE, and BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID. In my own words, just be looking for the annoying joke. It'll be obvious when you see it.

Jessica had never been so afraid.

She barely recognized the pain. At one point, it had been unbearable, but now, it was as if it were all she had ever known. She didn't remember what it felt like not to feel like her head was being split open. Her neck was prickling with a cold, icy fear that slithered down her spine, but could she even really remember heat anymore?

The faces before her weren't human, that at least she knew, but then, did she even remember a human face? The faces, if that's what they were, melted together. She saw pointed teeth and gleaming red eyes, or maybe even gleaming red teeth and pointed eyes. She saw muscled claws and ripped-open limbs, as the monsters tore each other apart to get a chance at tormenting her. The voices mixed and melted and so she only caught a few. What she did hear she didn't like, yet she had trouble remembering anything different. The hisses kept telling her there was nothing else but this.

But they were creatures of the Void; images of dark, forgotten people. They wanted her to forget everything, to lose her every memory and piece of her being. She didn't know what that would do, but she knew she couldn't let it happen. She had to remember, she had to…

~A Little Earlier That Evening~

Magic School For Young Angels and Magicians (MSYAM) had ended, and every other angel had already gone home. Jessica was still at the corner where she normally waited for her mother to pick her up, but it had been hours, and the small angel was worried. The only reason her mother wouldn't come is if she had other plans, and if she was, she would call someone to go pick Jessica. No one had come. Was her mother in danger?

Jessica had other worries; she was in danger, herself.

She knew that Void creatures were to be feared, but the chances of her being noticed was, in her mother's words, 'as likely as your father changing his mind. But really, just don't attract attention, and the things won't even see you. They're half-dead and half-blind."

Jessica couldn't think of anything that she had done to make them notice her. But once they had caught sight of her, they wouldn't look away. She stared back, not daring to even breathe. It was the most intense staring contest she had ever been in, and she had had one with an enderman. If it had been a real staring contest, she would have won a thousand times; all the monsters did was blink at her, while she was too afraid to do anything. They started inching towards her, which quickly became running. They started tripping over each other just to get closer to her, but Jessica didn't see it, because she was already running, smart girl that she was, with her heels chasing each other. Her feet made a tiny slap in comparison to the pounding of then hundreds of feet behind her. Jessica was faster than them, and she knew it. The biggest problem was she had no idea where she was going.

Her home town was a confusing place. Due to her 'lord and masters', the 'Saviors', the town itself existed, which Jessica thought they took too much credit for, but they didn't seem to have thought that making the houses almost completely identical would be a problem. Either they were really uncreative and boring, or they saw it as a joke. If they meant the latter, Jessica sure wasn't laughing.

The only difference between the houses was the numbers on the door, which Jessica could never memorize, especially when she needed it. Her house was either 2096, or 2069…or maybe it was 2960?

Jessica couldn't think straight. Her heart was pounding and her mind was spinning, but a lot of times it felt the other way around. She had no idea where to go, but she at least knew that the first number was 2.

She had just barely made it to house number 2000 when she realized and remembered; at every thousand, there was a wall, or rather, a gigantic door, that closed after curfew. Curfew was around 7:00 PM. She checked her watch, and a surge of panic ran through her. She had two minutes.

It gave her some hope as she was just reaching the wall, but then she saw them, closing, closing, slowly. The doors were closing up on her. She looked up, and saw the two guards at the top. One was whispering in the ear of the other, who was hurriedly closing the two gigantic doors below them with a crank. Both had the same glint of fear in their eyes.

Jessica panicked as the door closed too small for her to fit through. "No! No, please!"

The one turning the crank stopped, cupping his mouth so she could hear him yell, "I'm sorry!"

The other one swatted him upside the ear and hissed, "Keep cranking, man!" The other obeyed as he continued, "The kid's a goner. We can't let those things into Sector 2000; we've got important people in there. Just close the wall. It'll probably be a while before anyone finds her body. When they do, we closed the wall at seven exactly, and never saw the girl. Got it?"

"I…I…"

"Never saw her."

He swallowed. "Yeah, sure."

The door closed with Jessica still outside it. She pounded her fists against the grated stone, digging into her smarting hands.

Jessica's mind blurred as she whirled around. She sank in despair and in body until she was sitting on the rough gravel. She could barely breathe and her lungs burned ablaze, aching with a kind of emptiness, she was cornered with her only way of escape having turned on her, and she knew that any angels around wouldn't be much of a help. The voice, for them, wasn't whether or not to help, but rather to let a child die or to die themselves, and sadly, their answer obvious.

She barely had seconds before the pain would hit her. She did the best job that she could at making herself as small as possible, curling into a ball and had barely half a second to wait before it hit her. The waves and floods of pain hit her, and hit her hard.

The creatures of the Void were empathetic, Jessica soon learned, when it came to pain. The main reason that everyone was afraid of them was because they could share their pain. And everyone knew that no one suffered more than the creatures of the Void, always hungry, always thirsty, never helped, never aided, never wanted, never sated. The want and the need, that's all it took. Slowly but surely, it devoured them and left them in the dark, in the Void, and made the monsters in more dangerous, even less sane. The creatures of the dark that had started out in the dark eventually ended up back in the dark, with only one master to bow to. They didn't like him, of course, but no one really liked Danny, the Brother of Bedrock. It wasn't exactly a relationship of affection, but the creatures of the Void obeyed their master, and thus avoided utter destruction, and that's what mattered.

'M-Master isn't stopping us! Master isn't stopping us!' One of the voices screamed with glee.

And sadly, it was right. The creatures of the Void didn't stop, and the only thing that could possibly make them stop was their master. He had to know, of course, what his soldiers were doing at all times, so he knew that Jessica needed help. But he hadn't told them to stop. He was just watching, just watching…

A voice stuck out among the others, maybe because it was almost soft. All of them were harsh, and cruel, and loud, but this one was so quiet she shouldn't have been able to hear it, but she did. She hadn't left her position on the ground, her uncomfortable curled up state, but she felt something cold almost gently push her hair out of her face. 'Oh, what an innocent child. They love it, you know. The sweet sanity, the bitter pain. They love to savor the taste of it. They'll take every single part of you, Jessica Isick, and it starts with your name. Your won't remember your name tomorrow, if you live that long. If you don't, well…' Jessica almost felt the shadow fall over her as the thing leaned in enough to whisper, 'I've been promised the remains, which I admit, won't be much…but the blood will be mine. The blood screaming in your veins, screaming for a way out, for an escape…'

The thing kept whispering to her, but at that point, she wasn't listening anymore. All she felt was the pain, washing over her. Who was she? She was no one. She had to be no one…but how could she be no one?

Abruptly, to the point that she almost didn't believe it and needed a moment to register what on earth could be happening, Jessica realized the pain was simply gone. Just like that, all the hunger, all the want, the cold, the silence, the dark, the echoes, all of it was gone.

Except there was screaming all around her. Someone was screaming. Everyone was screaming. All of the pain that the creatures of the Void increased, she could tell, but she could no longer feel it. She didn't dare move until the screams ceased, and the silence was louder than anything else. After a few moments, she dared to truly listen.

She was suddenly aware of how uncomfortable the gravel was. Yet when she tried to get up, her hand landed on a stiff body. She jumped back, to find that she had touched a dead creature of the Void. Remains of black blood had gotten on her fingers.

That's when she saw him. The one who must have been causing them all to scream, the one holding a black and white, razor-sharp halo, the one with sweat on his brow and black blood dripping off his fist. She couldn't register a lot else of what he looked like, except his eyes were a bright, marvelous, endless, deep purple that truly only belonged to the enderpeople.

He extended a hand towards her. "Hi." He said, as if they weren't surrounded by tons of dead creatures and covered in blood. His voice was so human, so calm, so normal, it took a second for her brain to remember that she was supposed to respond.

"Hi." She muttered, and, instead of taking his outstretched hand, got up on her own. She tried to remember one of the 'bad' words that her dad had said, to try to make herself sound a little more sure of herself. "What the hell was that?"

"Well, that was trouble." He gestured around for effect. "Unhappy guys with very unhappy faces."

"And you just killed them." Jessica observed, before noticing something else odd about his wings. Every angel had a pair, of course, but his… "Why…why are your wings so black?"

"Oh, you noticed." He sighed. "Well, that makes this all very complicated. See, I'm a Dark Angel."

Jessica suddenly realized that she was far from safe, and that maybe her situation had gotten worse. She couldn't wrap her mind around it. "A…a Dark Angel. The Angels that…that kill stuff. For fun."

He frowned. "Well, that's one way to put it. I guess, yeah." He sighed and flipped his halo around, the rim of it white but the rest of it being pitch black. It was tainted with dripping, dark blood. "I really wish you hadn't noticed. I didn't want to have to kill you."

Jessica didn't wait. She backed up fast before she whirled around and started running, nearly tripping over herself in the process. The Dark Angel let out another sigh and then threw the halo with accurate aim. Halos were designed to lock onto their targets, so running had to be useless, but Jessica hoped-

.