I do not own H2O: Just Add Water—that is rightfully owned by Viacom. I, however, own the storyline. Because if I did own H2O: Just Add Water, I probably wouldn't be sitting here at my computer writing this, now would I? ;-)

Summary: When a rare full moon takes a dramatic turn, causing the girls' powers to go haywire, can they make it through the night with friendship prevailing? Or will things take a turn for the worse?

Author's note: Takes place post season two. Season three has not occurred yet.

Chapter 3

"A Turn of Events"

RIKKI

"Okay, guys. Full moon officially up in three...two...one," Lewis announced while keeping time on his watch and super scientifically-advanced laptop. That boy had so many science programs installed on that thing it wouldn't surprise me if it figured out a way to grow legs and walk away. Well, there's a funny picture. Seriously, though. Even if my Algebra teacher saw so many numbers and charts, she'd run for the hills. God only knows she has to deal with drama-attracting, unruly high school teenagers all the time. Wouldn't surprise me if she suddenly decided to take a paid vacation.

Now if you've never been around to witness a full moon rising, you're not missing out. It's like the countdown to New Years', only it happens every twenty-eight days and once the clock strikes, there's no confetti, no fireworks, or kissing the first guy or girl you see next to you, as creepy and desperate as that is in the first place. And considering Lewis is the only guy in the room...ugh. Of course, let's hope Zane will be the one next to me when that happens. Okay, focus Rikki. He's not coming back till Monday. No point getting butterflies in your stomach just yet... Okay, that's better.

Anyway, life continues as it normally had since Cleo and I'd arrived; Emma and Cleo debating over which movie to watch, neither of the titles particularly registering in my mind as I absentmindedly flipped through some random magazine, none of the pictures or words jumping out as interesting enough for me to actually stop and give it a once-over. So I was basically staring into space while my hand moved on its own accord through the thin, glossy printed pages. Yup, that's me! Rikki the Bookworm all the way. Sarcasm implied, in case you didn't catch it the first time.

Lewis continued typing away on his laptop. I didn't normally find the subdued clicking and tapping an annoyance, but for some reason the noise seemed to linger in the air and echo in my eardrums once before fading away, only to repeat itself again. After all, typing on a keyboard required rapid succession of keys.

Whatever. I chose to ignore it to the best of my ability, as I often did most things Lewis-related.

Don't get me wrong; I totally consider Lewis a really good and close friend and everything, but sometimes his scientific side gets the better of him and he can tend to be a little... suffocating. While it's cool to try and view our whole mermaid metamorphosis thing as a scientific breakthrough, I still wanted to believe that there was magic to the whole thing. Yeah, I know what you're thinking: Magic? I read about that when I was five. Well, once you grow an orange tail, let me know what you think then.

"Okay, Rikki, you're the tiebreaker," Emma voice echoed in my head, bringing me back to this crazy thing called reality. "Which one?" Out of the corner of my eye I saw her hold up two rectangular movie cases.

"Erm... one on the right," I replied groggily—and completely at random.

"You didn't even look!" she accused. Totally true, but I didn't say so.

"Um...flip a coin?" I offered, leaning my head against my arm. "I don't know, they both sound good to me." I didn't even know what the options were, but knowing Emma and Cleo's tastes, I figured I trusted them enough as unpaid movie critics.

"Say, are you feeling okay?" Cleo asked suddenly. "You look a little pale." I mentally chastised her for bringing that up again, but really I was only cursing my own head for betraying me. I could probably wiggle my way out of her Mother Hen act for now, before everyone got concerned over nothing. After all, stretching the truth was one of the things I was best at. Well, that and lightening the mood. Both could come in pretty handy at a time like this.

I snorted in reply to Cleo's comment. "You mean paler than usual?"

Emma laughed. "She's got you there, Cleo." I narrowed my eyes at her, but plastered on a grin anyway. There was no doubt in my mind that if Emma found out I'd been going through the day feeling like I'd been hit by a freaking speedboat, she'd flip and go put on a nurse's hat or something. There was really no surefire guesses when it came to any of the Gilberts. They were as predictable as... well, our lives.

"You guys really should see this—it's incredible!" Lewis called from the kitchen counter, where he'd set up his little NASA headquarters or something close to. "The calculations in the diameter of—"

"Lewis," I said slowly. "Remember what we talked about earlier; English is a key language in this country. Practicing it from time to time might do you some good. You know, help you fit into society and all that jazz." I didn't even need to turn around to know that his face had just flushed an embarrassed shade of red behind the telescope lens.

"I'll keep it in mind," he grumbled. I merely shook my head in an amused fashion, but stopped when the movement further intensified the pounding going around in my skull. The room seemed to tilt for a second, then leveled out once more.

It was nothing, though. A good night's sleep and I'll be ready to swim around the world in eighty days... or however long the hell it would take. Beats me. Weakness was definitely one of the things I did not enjoy showing to other people, even if those people happen to be Cleo and Emma. I hate the insecure feeling whenever I let people in—and it annoys me to no end because no matter how hard I dislike it, I can never fully change it. Far easier to simply cover it up and leave it buried.

Just another one of my personal migraines, I guess.

"Maybe you should take a break, Lewis," Cleo advised. "I think all those numbers are getting to your head." Lewis didn't have to think about his decision for too long, a couple seconds max, before closing out his windows and claiming the seat next to Cleo. Ha, I knew he couldn't refuse an offer from his girlfriend. Sure, they'd been on and off a couple times thanks to Charlotte, but it was short lived. Anyone could tell they were close friends. Like, really close. Guess having a long history helps the relationship along, huh.

I wonder... Is there a history with me and Zane?

Let's see; I messed with his boat, we both couldn't stand to be within a close proximity of each other, he drove me up the wall for the longest time while he hunted mermaids, then helped us escape from Denman (which was his fault in the first place, might I add), and things kind of blurred from there... Hmm. Not exactly your average material for a romance novel . Heck, it's not even Titanic material—the boat was already kind of sunk at the beginning. More like we started at the beginning of the movie and rewound it chapter by chapter.

Of course, we did have a bunch of good times, too. There's no doubt about that. I don't know, maybe it was fate or something. I didn't exactly know what fate was anymore. Had becoming a mermaid been some kind of fate? Or just a coincidental event?

Ugh, all this thinking's making my head hurt even worse! Point being, it was the best thing to happen to any of us; doesn't matter how it happened, it just did. And Zane and I are good together; I make him happy, he makes me happy. We get each other. 'Nuff said.

"Aw, what kind of chick-flick is this?" Lewis grumbled. I still didn't know what Emma had ended up picking, but if it was to Lewis's disliking, that was fine by me.

"It's a romantic comedy, not a 'click-flick,'" Cleo said in an all-knowing sort of way that almost made me laugh out loud. But I don't think my head would've agreed with that decision. As Emma went over and dimmed the lights slightly, a sudden drowsiness took over. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes for a second.

When I opened them again, it had seemed like only a couple of seconds had passed, but I had absolutely no way of knowing. I mentally panicked for a moment. Had I fallen asleep? I usually don't go to bed this early. The others had their eyes glued to the television screen still, so I figured nobody had noticed; sometime along the way Lewis had abandoned the "chick-flick" and had gone back to his laptop. I couldn't tell what time it was. The lights were still on. I can't tell what time it is when I sleep with the lights on.

I checked my watch instead. Okay, so it had only been a couple of minutes, five at best. So why did I feel like I could sleep for a year?

There had been a dull migraine formulating against the back of my head for hours now; but as time gradually progressed, it persisted, and in fact, it had only gotten worse, hitting its peak at the approximate one hour mark after the moon had risen.

"Rikki, are you okay?" Cleo again.

I'd been doing pretty well in hiding my growing discomfort thus far, and don't get me wrong, my threshold for pain tolerance was quite high, especially at this stage of the game. I opened my mouth, fully intending to answer her, but suddenly, out of absolutely nowhere, there was a flash of white-hot pain that flashed across my skull as my senses slowly began to shut off and nothing but blackness swarmed in front of my eyes even though they both remained firmly open.

I had turned off all my connections with the outside world in an instant of time that had passed by so quickly, I almost missed it... and even though I wasn't exactly sure what had just happened to me, or for how long it lasted, I knew that judging by the looks on Cleo and Emma's faces when I started coming to again, I was starting to get the notion that it must have been pretty severe...

"Rikki?" My eyes first started focusing on basic blurry shapes and a few indistinct colors as my ears started recognizing only the dimmest of sounds once again... The first cognitive observation that I'd actually been able to piece inside of my mind was the fact that Cleo was calling out my name, begging my eyes to focus on her own as Emma exchanged alarmed looks from Cleo to me and back again before she started yelling something I still couldn't hear.

"Rikki look at me... can you hear me? Rikki!" Her voice sounded terribly panicked; shaking and rising in volume and inclination as she attempted to force me back into a state of attention by grasping onto my shoulders and shaking my body harshly so that I could literally feel my head rattling around inside of my skull.

"Cleo... Cleo stop, I'm okay, I'm okay." I pushed my body forcefully out of her grasp because I was terrified that if she kept shaking me at the rate she was, I would physically pass out from a combination of the extent of dizziness that I was currently feeling alongside the brutal pain in my head.

"What happened?" Cleo's response was intercepted by Lewis as he came scrambling into my room in response to Emma's persistence in calling out to him.

"There's something wrong." Emma broke her own analysis of the situation between Lewis's question and my own response before I could so much as open my damn mouth. "She just... I don't know... she kind of passed out... no, that's not right... she went sort of catatonic or something for a minute or so and then she was just... fine."

I continued to cradle my aching head between my two hands, still in too much pain to argue that I was just fine. I don't ever remember feeling this slammed around before. Well, there was that one time with that Tibetan statue crate, but that seemed minor in comparison.

"Okay, Rikki... what's going on?" His words pierced my skull, magnified tenfold as he shone a light directly into my eyes, trying to check the reactions of my pupils... but he might as well have been stabbing daggers directly through my brain or something the amount of pain it caused me...

"I don't know," I muttered, tears of pain stinging harshly across the back of my voice. "I've had this headache... all day long and it just suddenly got... it got really bad..."

Emma's eyebrows furrowed in the middle as she looked sternly at me. Oh man, here we go! "And you didn't tell anyone?" There was a hint of concern in her voice. I felt stupid now. Stupid and like I'd gotten slammed through a brick wall. Or maybe the brick wall part was due to the whole stupidity thing. I didn't really know anymore.

Cleo bit her lip. "Well, she mentioned it earlier, but said it was nothing, so I—"

"It's not your fault, Cleo," I told her, rather breathlessly. I didn't want her blaming herself for something that was entirely out of their hands. "I blew it off. I mean, it didn't seem... at the time... I just... I don't know." Everything was dancing in and out of focus. The room suddenly became uncomfortably warm, like a car heater turned all the way up, and I could feel sweat begin to dampen my neck and hairline.

"Come on, you should lie down," Emma advised and grabbed my wrist to help pull me to my feet. But as soon as our skin made contact, she jerked back like she'd been shocked. "You're burning up!" she exclaimed, then felt the need to elaborate further. "I mean, you're literally burning up." I didn't mention that to me, her hand felt like ice. I didn't know if it were because of the temperature difference or not.

Crap. I vaguely remember an incident similar to this one... It was the first time I'd been moonstruck, and I lost the ability over my powers. I knew my power was the most dangerous out of all of ours, and I didn't want to hurt anybody again. Especially not now. Damn it all!

The three of them exchanged nervous glances. Cleo was the one to break the silence. "Rikki, you didn't happen to get a peek at the moon, did you?"

I shook my head, but immediately regretted it a second later. I grimaced. "No, Cleo, I didn't see the moon." At least, I was half sure of everything at this point. I was pretty sure I didn't. Had I? No. Definitely not. If I had, I wouldn't even have a vague idea of who or where I was until the moon sets.

"You're sure?" Emma asked. She paused for a second. "Who's the owner of Juicenet?"

What? A freaking quiz at a time like this? Did she think I was some kind of impostor or something? You've got to be kidding. "Emma, I really don't think—"

"Just answer the question!" she commanded, not caring if the noise almost knocked me out again. I sighed loudly out of both annoyance and discomfort. "Wilfred; middle-aged, tall, dark complexion, used to wear that totally unflattering flower-print t-shirt—"

"Okay, okay, you're not moonstruck."

"Little slow today, Em?" I dished out the average everyday Rikki Chadwick sarcasm in an attempt to get Emma to relax a little. I felt bad; I knew that she was probably a nervous wreck right about now, and I couldn't blame her much. I've never done anything for Emma other than raise her blood pressure a couple of notches; Don't say it, I feel bad enough as it is.

In the end, I ended up on the couch—where I had initially started before somehow ending up on the floor. The ceiling started spinning, so I screwed my eye shut, trying to ease the pain resonating from my very brain as I picked up bits and pieces of a conversation. Lewis kept talking on and on, but I couldn't adjust my mind to what he was saying, couldn't understand it at all. It was like stepping from solid ground onto a roller coaster, and while I was still puzzling over one thing, he had gone on to something else.

Every sound became muffled, like it was coming from a million miles away. For some reason or other, that disconnected feeling made me feel alone, more alone than I had ever been. It was like being in a glass bubble and watching the world from it. I wanted to get rid of the feeling.

I moved my head, attempting to find a more comfortable position that would magically cure my head trauma, and the pain knocked me out.

The last thing I heard was my name.

To be continued...

End of chapter three! Whew, I worked hard on this, and there's going to be a lot more to come. My goal is to make this story ongoing for some time, and I have plenty of good ideas to keep the story interesting.

Thanks so much for all the reviews I've gotten. It means a lot to me. Your advice and encouraging words make my day! ^_^

Question for readers: Do you prefer reading in the third-person perspective or first-person point of view? Let me know on my profile poll or via review! Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated and will help me make decisions when writing for your enjoyment!

So it seems Rikki's headache has turned into something more severe. Will she be okay? What obstacles of the night will the others encounter? Why am I asking you all of these questions? Be sure to check out chapter four (currently in the works).

Too long? Too short? I accept ANY constructive criticism or ideas that you would like to see later on. All reviews are welcome!