((Note: The following is NOT a self-insertion. Anything typed from the POV of an OC is from THAT CHARACER'S view, not the view of their creator. That said, hope you liked the first chapter, and here's hoping you enjoy this one. ::Raven:: ))

--One: Silence--

When I first got into the whole "Emily the Strange" thing, I figured it was going to be one of those underground fads that flares up briefly before fading into smoke and graveyard babble. I'd spotted the self-titled book in one of those chain stores, hiding amongst self-help books and cheap horror novellas in the "New Arrivals" section. This was way back during my formative years, back when I was just a normal little impressionable girl with ribbons in her hair and a pair of round glasses fixed over barely-functioning eyes. I'd spent too much time reading in my dim room as a small child, so these glasses--prescribed when I was just six years old and a major factor in my subsequent isolation from my peers--were a necessity in my being able to see anything at all. I didn't even take them off when I slept; I panicked once after they fell from my nightstand one night and I was late for school the next morning because of the frantic search required to recover them.

Anyway, I credit my glasses for my initial discovery of Emily and all she represents. See, I'd taken my glasses off to clean them when their curved lenses captured the fire-engine red on a book cover. I quickly fixed the glasses to my nose again and turned to find the source of the red.

A swift leafing through its pages stirred something strange in me. Strange with a capital S, if you please. Suddenly, with the words "seeing is deceiving," the little girl disappeared, and a Stranger quietly stepped in to take her place.

I realize I'm being rather long-winded. Sorry about that, but I tend to get carried away with these things.

At any rate, I bought the book and secreted myself away in my suddenly very pastel-seeming room. In the swirl of reworked cliches and plays on words, I found hidden an insidiously sweet code, a mantra I later found in another one of Emily's texts: Be All You Can't Be.

Fast-forward eight years. I sat in my room once more, surrounded by posters and drawings and prints of macabre artwork. The walls underneath still carried the remnants of the heady scent of paint even though I'd covered the pink with black way back on my thirteenth birthday. My computer hummed contentedly as I went back to surfing the net, bored of my interactions with some chick on a message board.

The Emily site had sure gone downhill since I'd joined not long after its creation. Nowadays, most of the people who joined were wannabe Gawffs and so-called "Scene" drones who liked this stuff because of the "cute merch."

Amusingly enough, these people all seemed to think they were better than me. Any of them would look at my post record and denounce me as a "N008," not bothering to glance at the date I joined. Of course, they wouldn't know that I did my talking in private chats. Posting to the message boards irked me. Too slow.

I closed out of a chat with my best friend, Mira, and immediately the voice of my mom curdled through my bedroom door.

"Salem!"

Yes, through some miracle of creepy, my parents had decided to name me after the place where they met and were later married--it was a shotgun wedding, of course. Because my family is just that awesome.

I didn't respond, so mom tried again.

"Salem, dinner's ready! Get down here and set the table!"

I grinned and pushed my glasses back up on my nose. A click set my computer to Away, and I swiveled my chair away from the desk it sat on so I could extract myself from the pile of books and papers I'd accumulated into a fire hazard over the years. I tucked my black hair (dyed, because I'm not one of the ones fortunate enough to be born with it) securely behind my ears and undid the three locks on my solid-wood door. Never can be too careful, you know.

My mom scowled at my appearance when I finally did come downstairs. I could understand her irritation: I'd be pissed too if I was her looking at me. Paler than flour skin, black contact lenses, long-sleeved, high-collared black blouse and matching wide-legged trousers. No facial piercings or distasteful tattoos, but that blouse had once been powder blue. What has been dubbed the infamous "RIT affair" did not go over well with the powers that be, but at least it had saved me a shopping trip and given me something to do with the past three years' gifts from Grandma and Grandpa.

Again, I digress. I set the table like usual and sat down to yet another straight-from-the-box meal with my mother, father, and little brothers. The twins, as I called them (though in fact Thomas was two years older than William), chattered away about their days at grade school and how the bus driver went crazy and had to be replaced on short notice that afternoon. Nobody asked me how my day went, which was fine with me. I never really cared for small talk anyway. Then it was back to my room and into the depths of the Interweb for the rest of the night--or at least as much of the night as I could stand before I passed out at the keyboard.

While I'd been gone, an email arrived at one of my Hotmail accounts. I accessed it, recognizing the sender, and found a new mailer from the ESP. The subject was "Calling all Strangers," but that wasn't what really piqued my interest. What interested me was the time. 13:13. But I knew it had come while I was eating, and the clock read 18:35 when I'd gone downstairs. Either the sender was in a different time zone and my computer forgot to switch the times, or something weird was going on. I furrowed my brow and began to read.

Attention, Strangers! it began. So sorry to disturb you all this late. Though I guess for many of you, this would be early...at any rate, there IS good reason for this break in the scheduled flow of emails. All SOS members are urged to check in the members-only area of the Emily website for more information. Rest assured that new members will also be able to access these updates, so sign up if you haven't already! Live Strange. Emily.

Odd. That mod must have been in a hurry; that didn't sound like the usual mailers. I would've thought someone hacked into the account, but I knew from experience that the security on everything related to the site and the people who ran it was air-tight. I figured I'd better check the site to see what was up, and less than a second later, I was logged in.

At first, I didn't find anything odd. Nothing new under the SOS portion of the site. I was beginning to think that the account had indeed been hacked when I noticed a link on my profile page that I didn't remember adding. It was titled simply Seeing, and I clicked it without a moment's hesitation.

This brought me away from the member area and onto a page containing the details of an Emily product. I scrolled up and saw that it was her first book. There was another link at the bottom of this page, this one called Is, and I followed it at once.

I already knew what I'd find at the last page. Deceiving, the link at the bottom of the Oddisee page said. I smirked and clicked the link.

This page surprised me. It was completely black save for a section of white text and a bold ESP logo positioned perfectly in the center of the screen. The side menu for the site had disappeared, along with the links at the bottom and the usual copyright information. The only way to get off the page would be to close the window or hit the "back" button. But this thought could hold my interest for only so long. I scanned the text fervently, wondering what could warrant such clever measures.

Emily finished wiring the latest addition to her Oddisee and lit a candle over the keyboard. The machine hummed to life, but something was missing. So Emily added the soul of a run-over rabbit to her newly-incorporated Soul Power Generator and watched the silver haze spin round and round in the glass containment unit. The Oddisee whirred devilishly, and Emily started to work.

"It's almost done," she said to herself more than her cats, who had dropped by to see what she was doing. "I wonder what I should add next?"

I cocked an eyebrow at this little story. That was the great addition? A simple bit of prose like that was hardly worth my time. But then my mouse strayed below the text, and I accidentally clicked and dragged for a moment. This highlighted two letters: St. I started and highlighted the rest of the hidden text, pulse quickening.

Good work, Stranger. I wonder how many of you made it this far? Well, do forgive my misdirection. But to tell the truth, I wanted to weed out some of the lesser-worthy. I have something big planned, bigger than a book. Bigger than a cartoon or a movie. My Oddisee is almost complete, and that's when the REAL fun begins. If you want to know more, find me and riddle me this: What has Emily never searched for?

And I'll THINK about telling you. Maybe.

That was more like it.I grinned into my hand, a habit picked up from too many years of introducing random quirks into my behavioral patterns. This was going to be interesting.