Disclaimer: Midna and The Legend of Zelda are the intellectual property of Nintendo.

Entwilightened

Chapter 7

A pair of red pinpoints winked into existence, not so much illuminating the water-soaked night, as lending it shape. A ragged, homeless man seeking shelter from the rain was leaning against the opposite alley wall, using a sheet of cardboard as a makeshift roof. He awoke suddenly, groggily alert for danger. He glanced about wildly, looking desperately for the thing that had disturbed his slumber. He spotted the pair of red lights and relaxed slightly. Just some kind of radio or something. Someone had probably thrown it into the alley while it was still powered on and it had awakened him. Nothing to be alarmed about.

He began to settle back against the wall and froze. He held his breath and his heart thumped wildly against his ribcage. The lights had moved. In concert, no less. So either they were both attached to the same part of the stereo or…

…or what?

As the unfortunate man began to ponder just what the lights might be, he slowly, quietly let out a breath. The lights snapped over to point straight at him, and the breath caught in his throat. The two pinpoints weren't lights.

They were eyes. Two rings of red, surrounding black pupils flecked with crimson. Staring right at him. Raw terror gripped his lungs and throat and prevented him from making a sound.

The eyes rose, presumably a result of their owner standing, and approached the homeless man. Each step was punctuated with the heavy clump of large boots. Each step caused a painful contraction in his gut as fear seized his gut. He craned his head to meet the red eyes as their owner halted above him.

He never saw what happened, but there was a sudden, fiery burning in his belly, followed by a ghastly liquid squelching feeling in the same region. He gasped wetly and collapsed sideways, sliding down the alley wall.

A pair of boots stepped into his rapidly dimming field of vision. They were grey, calf-high and soaked halfway up the heel in blood. The last thing the homeless man saw before death clouded his vision was that not all of the blood was fresh.

A phone set to vibrate and then placed on a wooden surface makes a unique sound. It's a combination of a rattle and a buzz, set at just the perfect frequency to jerk a sleeper out of the land of Nod with the maximum amount of irritation.

This was precisely the sound that caused Alec to jerk once and thrash out of his bed and onto the ground. He untangled his arms from the covers and, eyes closed, and half on the bed, he reached up to his ringing cell phone and snapped it open next to his ear.

"Mmmrph?"

"Alec, where the hell have you been? We agreed that you'd meet me here at ten! I've been calling all morning!" Kiowa's voice crackled from the speaker, causing unpleasant throbbing sensations in Alec's skull.

He pulled the phone away from his ear, both to check the time and to mitigate the oncoming headache.

Eleven-thirty. Whoops.

He put the phone back to his ear and said, "Sorry Doc. Yesterday waa…" Alec yawned, "ah! Wiped me out. I'll be there in…" He yawned again, "Oh…twenty minutes or so."

"You had better be," the Doctor snapped. The line went dead.

Alec finally managed to get his eyes unglued and snapped them open, and immediately regretted it as light stabbed at his retinas. Wincing, he hauled himself upright and stumbled into the bathroom where he speed-showered and threw on some clothes. He returned to his room and grabbed a few items of importance. Wallet, keys, check. Phone…finally charged, obviously, and check. He dumped everything into his expansive pockets and made for the front door. He was halfway through doorway when he happened to look at the coat rack inside the entry hall, and spotted his father's keys.

Alec halted, momentarily gripped by indecision. His father was home, and would probably wonder why Alec had gotten to sleep at a reasonable hour the previous night, an unusual event to be sure. Alec knew waking his father was a dangerous venture at best. He settled on a note and stuck it to the fridge.

Dad, went to Doc's to check on a friend. Dunno when I'll be back.

-Alec

Having wasted enough time, Alec darted out the door.

Roger ran his finger over the edge of the envelope for the hundredth time, trying in vain to calm his breathing. It wasn't so much the contents of the envelope that made him nervous, or who he was about to meet. Instead, it was what might be done with the contents of the envelope once he revealed them.

One tissue, blood-stained, green, he thought to himself. What sort of thing bleeds green? Nothing! Nothing human anyway…he shut off that train of thought. He had been thinking about the contents of the envelope all morning, and invariably ran into that same dead end every time. The thing he'd carried downstairs the day before wasn't human.

So what was it?

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and cleared his mind as best he could. He was going to need all his wits about him if he wanted to deal with Fred.

Fred was had been his roommate in college, and had double majored in Biology and Chemistry, and then moved on to become a grad student. Now Fred was researching…something. It was incomprehensible and probably unpronounceable to mere mortals such as Roger.

The thing that made Fred so difficult to talk to was his inability to focus on a singular subject. Instead of conversationally starting at Point A, traveling until he reached Point B, then changing direction until he ended at Point C like most people, Fred would start at Point A, jump over to Point B for a little while, hop back to where he'd left off at Point A, and then after a short while, abruptly shift over to previously untouched Point Twenty-Seven before suddenly returning to Point B. He eventually got to Point C, but the journey was so mind-bending, most people got off very quickly, claiming whiplash or motion sickness. Roger had learned the trick to handling Fred when the two had shared a room, but it was nothing to be taken lightly.

He entered the science building, found his way to the appropriate door and knocked. It opened to reveal a beaming Fred.

"Roger! Glad you could make it, glad you could make it, come in and sit down, coffee or tea?" said Fred.

"Of course, thanks, coffee please," Roger responded, quickly falling into old habits borne of many conversations with his speedy friend.

Fred quickly filled a paper cup with coffee from the pot and handed it to Roger. "So what brings you to my office? Haven't talked in a while, never had much in common during school, but got along well enough. Probably not a social call. Need help with something?"

Roger leaned back, sipping his coffee, "Near enough. I've got a favor to ask of you. I've found myself a mystery substance that I'd like you to take a look at." Fred raised an eyebrow, "It's nothing illegal," Roger added quickly, "I hope." Fred's other eyebrow went up.

"You hope?" asked Fred, half-turning away and opening a new browser window at his computer.

"Well, I uh…found it under very strange circumstances," said Roger. He explained his encounter with the man in the elevator carrying a cloaked figure, editing out the part where he broke into the apartment. "So I swabbed up a bit of the stuff, and when I thought of somebody handy with a microscope, you fit the bill."

Fred cupped his chin and turned to face Roger completely. "You say it was dripping off the figure's fingers onto the ground and you found a trail of it…green and iridescent you say? Any more idea what the figure looked like? What was the substance's viscosity like before it dried? You're sure this isn't illegal? The head of the chemistry department would kill me. Do you have any theories about what it is personally? Iridescence likely result of high number of layered discrete chemical components, can't determine result of color without more data…" Fred trailed off into inaudible muttering.

Unfazed, Roger responded, "Yeah, dripping out of her coat or trench coat or whatever from the sleeves and from the bottom hemline. I assume it came from her hands or legs or something. It was definitely green, and definitely shiny. The figure was…well, I couldn't see the face, but the feet were poking out and they looked awfully grey…not pale, but an actual dark grey." Roger frowned in recollection for a moment, "Viscosity…like, how thick it was?" At Fred's nod he continued, "Pretty thick I'd say. Sort of like…" He paused.

He didn't want Fred to know he thought it was blood. The idea freaked him out enough, and he knew that if he scared Fred off, he'd lose his chance at getting to the bottom of the mystery. "Sort of like cooking oil, a little runnier maybe."

"Like blood?" asked Fred.

Roger gaped at Fred. "How do you do that?"

"Do what?" Fred asked, the picture of confused innocence.

"Nothing, nothing…but yeah. Like blood. In fact, that's kind of what I suspect it is," said Roger.

Fred didn't even blink. "Iridescent green blood, dripping from a cloaked grey figure. O-kay," he said, and rubbed his hands together.

"I know it sounds crazy—" Roger said, before Fred cut him off with a raised hand.

Fred leveled a finger at Roger. "No more out of you, my curiosity is piqued and I don't want you influencing any conclusions I draw. Let's get that bad boy under a microscope. One more thing, before I agree to this." he said, turning to face his computer once more.

"Of course. What do you need?" asked Roger, leaning forward.

"When referring to the figure, you used a feminine pronoun. Said 'her'. Why?"

Roger winced. He'd hoped that Fred hadn't caught that little slip of the tongue. He should have known better, for all his fast-talking bluster, Fred was as sharp as a knife. "Damn, noticed that, did you? Would you believe it's because I didn't want to call her "it" and I picked a pronoun at random?" Roger asked hopefully.

Fred turned and looked Roger straight in the eye. "Roger, I lived with you for two years. If you're going to use a neutral pronoun you use 'he'. Yes, I noticed and remembered that—in fact, we even had a conversation about it when you were drunk one night. Don't believe you remember. Ended with you stumbling into bathroom, shouting about unfairness of English language, throwing up and passing out. But I digress—what made you think of figure as female?"

Roger blushed and resolved never to drink around Fred again. "Uh, I dunno. It's just kind of a hunch, you know? I didn't get a good look at her face or anything, but the shape just seemed female, you know?"

Fred hmmmed and nodded. "Okay. Will take a look at your sample. Should have results for you in two or three days.

Roger handed over the envelope, and left the room feeling like he'd passed some kind of test. As he was going out the door, he looked down and realized he was still holding his cup of coffee. He downed the contents and threw the empty paper cup in a trash can. He rubbed the side of his face and made a mental note to pick up coffee on the way home. He had a hunch he was going to need it soon.

Apologies for the interminable delay. Between a combination of apathy, writer's block and business, this chapter took forever-and-a-half. Everything after the first scene got completely rewritten at least twice.

With any luck Chapter 8 will be along shortly, but with my track record, we'll see.