Chapter Six

I reclined on the lounge chair next to the pool. My eyes focused on the sketch forming under the tip of my pencil. The soundtrack for The Greatest Showman belted from the invisible speakers of the I-pod on the corner table next to the chair.

The water of the pool shimmered like a mirror in the sunlight. Despite being surrounded by what looked like miles and miles of sun baked rock, the green handful of arches the house sat on regulated itself at a habitable and pleasant temperature. A bubble of paradise in the middle of a lifeless desert in some alien realm.

Two days ago Sasuke, Heero, and Draxum headed out to explore the alien desert, carrying four days worth of supplies and water in canvas backpacks. The mission was to slowly map out the region surrounding the strange house we lived in through a series of three to four day trips. They were going to collect samples of rocks Baron Draxum would later analyze through his alchemy to determine their chemical compounds when they returned, as well as map-out any riverbeds or major geographical landmarks to aid them in later trips.

"Lemonade, Miss Wilder?" Sebastian inquired, startling me, disrupting the torrent of thoughts I was mauling over while I sketched.

I let out a hiss of air, hand flying over my thumping heart and laughed uneasily. "Heheh…Uh.. Sure. Thanks."

I heard the sound of a glass cup being set down as I refocused on the drawing in front of me. I continued adjusting the chin and then began drawing the top arch of the eyes. I had been in the middle of drawing a series of facial expressions for my anime persona, Jerica. I'd been slowly revising her for several years now. Her name and looks and background story varied as I flirted with anime world after another. Of course, like most self-inserts or personas, she was far more attractive than me; far more skinner, far more outspoken, and willing to back up her statements with her fists. I guess, you could say, Jerica represented that boiling sea of indignation, that well of suppressed anger buried deep inside of me. Everything I've ever wanted to say, she declared unfiltered and proudly.

Sebastian's shadow invaded my peripheral while I worked. My skin prickled with his nearness. I tried to focus on the music and the sound of pencil on paper.

I stiffened as he leaned closer, watching the drawing take shape. "You truly are good at capturing facial expressions."

I pressed my lips together and tried not to scout away from his presence. In the manga, it had been amusing watching him give little regard to other characters' personal space, but experiencing this in person was quickly getting on my nerves.

The music cut off, wrapping up the last song of the soundtrack, plunging the pool patio into an awkward quiet that all had to do with my own discomfort of having the demon butler invading my personal bubble. Over the last couple of days, I had been keeping interactions with Sebastian at a minimum. You could say, the more time I spent with everyone the more I realized how misplaced my affections for certain characters were. Sebastian being a prime example.

It's one thing to fall in love with a fictional character who was a genuine manipulative demonic asshole, but entirely another thing to experience it in real life. I didn't care for manipulative people in real life. I kept such people at more than an arm's length. I engaged with them politely and tolerated their presence, but that was it.

"How long are you planning on giving me the cold shoulder?" Sebastian asked.

I kept my eyes focused on the paper in front of me. A subtle ache settled itself in the sides of my head. I noticed since I arrived, I've been experiencing headaches daily. Some were temporary and light, while others lasted for hours and were painful as hell.

I rubbed the spot behind my ears. "Who says I'm doing that?"

The pain expanded to the front of my head. I was going to need to go and find some Tylenol. That was another thing about this house. It was intune with our basic needs. It magically renewed anything we were running short on in the pantry and refrigerator. It seemed to know that one of the residents underneath its roof was a woman and thus had pads available in every bathroom. It filled the closets and wardrobes and dressers in every occupied room with clothing that suited the occupant's particular taste.

There was also the incident of my cherished I-pod appearing two days ago and mysteriously remaining charged no matter how much I listened to it. And yesterday, I discovered the medicine cabinet in the bathroom across the hall from my room contained my anxiety and depression medication.

"Honestly, Miss Wilder. I have been around humans for centuries," Sebastian replied condescendingly. "I know when a human is wary of my presence. For a woman who claims to be infatuated with my very being, your words and actions do not match up."

I groaned. Damnit, my head was aching. "Look. It's okay to love fictional assholes in theory. Their words aren't aimed at you. Their actions against other characters don't involve you personally, so it makes them safe to fantasize about, to write about, and swoon over. However, experiencing assholes in real life is another thing entirely. Their actions and words affect real people and their real feelings. Words hurt, they cut deeply and it's hard not to be resentful. I don't like real life assholes. I rather not deal with them at all."

"Humans are so contradictory in their ideals and actions. That is a very hypocritical statement, don't you think?" Sebastian baited, a mocking grin on his face.

I frowned at him in displeasure and remained quiet for a long moment, before closing my sketchbook and taking a long sip from the lemonade before setting it down. "And you've just proven my point. I have a headache. I'm gonna find some Tylenol."

I stalked past the demon and climbed the set of steps that lead into the in-screen porch. I headed for the upstairs bathroom across the hall from my bedroom. I took the Tylenol bottle out of the medicine cabinet and turned on the faucet to fill up the plastic baby blue cup that had been sitting on the counter of the sink.

After taking the Tylenol, I walked across the hallway into my room and shut the door. I flopped down onto the bed with a groan. My head was pounding. These daily headaches were horrible. They came and went of their own accord. Sometimes, they only lasted a couple of minutes, other times it was a steady pulsing throb that lasted for hours.

The one I was currently experiencing lasted for most of the afternoon. I shut the blinds over the windows and tried to sleep the headache off. When I woke up from my nap, the headache hadn't lessened. I choose to take more Tylenol and lay back down. The clock on the wall next to the nightstand said it was around 4:30. If the headache didn't subside by 5 or later, I was planning on opting out of dinner.

I figured nobody was going to miss my presence at dinner. Thranduil didn't get along with Alastor or Sebastian. With Sebastian, the underhanded remarks remained at a minimum during conversations, but with Alastor, they straight out insulted each other like teenage boys in a piss-off contest. I suspected Thranduil would rather have his meals somewhere else than the dining room. The only reason he endured such blatant disrespect was on my behalf. He was trying to keep his word and stay relatively close-by when Alastor or Sebastian was present.

I couldn't say I felt unsafe around either demon. Just uncomfortable. Like the kind of uncomfortable that came with not really knowing the person you're suddenly and magically became roommates with, and despite being exposed to them through different forms of media like source materials and fanart and fanfiction, I couldn't honestly say if there was any potential for friendship between us. Of course, I could also say that some of that discomfort extended from the knowledge that both of them killed without mercy and didn't lose a single ounce of sleep over it.

Speaking of sleep, Sebastian didn't need sleep to function like the rest of us. I really don't know what he did at night while we were tucked away in our beds. Did he go off on his own nocturnal expeditions? He had superhuman speed after all. He was able to cover large distances in mere minutes. Did he go on a cleaning spree every night after all of us retired to our rooms?

Just like in the manga, he was as enigmatic as always.

I wonder briefly if that enigmatic nature might dissolve if I went out of my way to interact with him. As much as I hated to admit it, Sebastian was right in his observation that what I said versus what I did was hypocritical. Of course, I wasn't overly fond of his double edged comments and obvious condescending attitude. The term "gaslighting" came to mind immediately.

"Skipping dinner now? You must really despise my very presence to resort to hiding upstairs in your room."

Speak of the devil….

I had been laying on my back, my eyes closed, trying to wait out the throbbing inside my skull. It hadn't gotten any worse, but it also hadn't gotten better either. "Headache," I replied quietly.

"A headache? Perhaps eating something would alleviate it," Sebastian said. His voice sounded closer. "I notice humans tend to develop headaches from numerous circumstances; Dehydration, poor eating, illness, distress."

Oh my god! Stop, I thought miserably as he listed the number of reasons why people ended up with headaches. "I've been getting headaches since I came here, okay? I'm not sure if it's stress related, maybe shock from having my life suddenly and traumatically changed, or if I ended up with some kind of weird trans dimensional bug or illness. Most likely it's severe stress related."

"My. My. Your constitution is worse than the young master's," Sebastian replied with bemusement.

"Sebastian… Just stop… Okay," I said, rolling over and pulling the blankets up to my chin, putting my back to him. "I get it. You think I'm an inconvenience. An overly emotional woman, who cries at the drop of a hat. What I say and do contradicts themselves and I haven't done much or proven to be especially useful since I've been transported here unlike the rest of you. Thank you for belittling me. You can tell the others to eat supper without me."

A long silence followed, before the blankets were suddenly yanked off me. I let out a shriek of surprise and whirled around to gawk at a rather irritated Sebastian. His eyes glowed eerily in the dim light of the room.

His eyes closed as a creepy smile spread across his face. "Are you done feeling sorry for yourself, Miss Wilder? If you truly want to be of use, I suggest you start with how you're acting. There is a meal waiting for you downstairs to eat. It is rude to leave the others waiting while you sit up here wallowing in self pity. As for the headaches, I think I could research some remedies to resolve it in the library."

I opened and closed my mouth as I struggled to express my indignation of his treatment of someone who was going through the process of grief for losing all that they had known and understood as well as dealing with one hell of headache on top of it. Anger and hurt made my chest tighten. I wanted nothing more than to throw a pillow at him in retaliation.

"Y-You…"

"As for whether you've contributed anything of worth since you've arrived… You have contributed valuable information and a possible motive for why our mysterious captor decided to collect each and every one of us and yourself," Sebastian said, placing the blanket at the end of the bed. "Although it is a rather strange plausible motive. It is a starting place. Now, I suggest you come downstairs and eat something with Mister Alastor and King Thranduil. I will find things to keep you busy this evening and tomorrow if you feel like you don't have much to do."

"So glad you could join us, sweetheart," Alastor greeted at the dining room table after I begrudgingly gotten out of bed and followed Sebastian downstairs silently fuming.

I kept my mouth shut as I sat down. I didn't trust myself at the moment. Sebastian's actions while they proved useful in getting me out of bed left a bitter taste in my mouth. Incredibility and resentment churned in my stomach, making the sharpness of the headache worse. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to hurl obscenities at the demon butler.

I didn't think my actions was necessarily unreasonable. This wasn't a horror movie with a fast pace plot where every move and every scene demanded a life or death choice. I was transported to some strange and obviously sentient house with eight deadly fictional characters, trapped in some weird alien realm surrounded by an endless desert. Okay, when I put it into context, it was a life or death situation with real world consequences and high stakes and I needed to cooperate with the eight deadly beings around me and figure out how to escape from this strange alien realm intact and alive. Fuck.

Maybe I had been acting unreasonably. Maybe I should have been more in control of my emotions if I wanted the others to treat me like I was a grown competent adult with more emotional control than a toddler. Was I really that emotional run down? Had working forty hours five days a week with children during a global pandemic really zapped me out of my ability to compartmentalize?

Emotionally I had been spent on the first day, so I guess the hysterics was understandable. I got sick on the second day with vertigo and my first massive headache. I had been dealing with headaches daily ranging from light to all out painful. The house we lived in was sentient and we had been violently transported to some alien rocky realm with no signs of life outside the temperature control bubble that surrounded the property. I had been ganged up on the third day by all the guys except Alucard because I had been withholding what might be considered important information and a big possible connection between us all. That was my bad.

I barely touched my food, my mind going into overdrive. With the headache, it was becoming impossible to focus on what Alastor or Thranduil was saying. I rubbed the front of my head, the pressure just underneath my skull becoming unbearable.

I excused myself, leaving my plate mostly untouched and started heading back to bed. The floor titled underneath my feet. My vision doubled, making the walls and the furniture blurry and distorted.

"Sweetheart, you okay?" Alastor's voice sounded far away as I held out my hands, reaching for something to grab onto. It felt like my head was going to split in half from the pain alone. I've had horrible headaches before, but nothing like this.

Someone caught me. I didn't know who, but my ears picked up on the tone in their voice. "She's been having headaches. I hadn't realized how bad they w….."

"We sh… et…. r…"

The panicked voices faded away as everything went black.

"Jessie…"

"Jessie Wilder."

"Miss Wilder."

"You need to get a grip on those emotions."

"Jessie…"

"You've surrounded yourself with some of the worst people to walk the earth, but that doesn't mean their behaviors apply to everyone."

"That is a very hypocritical statement, don't you think?"

"The house is rebuilding itself."

"Jessie… Jessie…"

"Do you hear that?"

"A human girl?"

"Jessie…"

"You are absolutely terrified to be here!"

"Are you going to be brave and go investigate, little human?"

" Stuff like this isn't normal where I come from!"

"Jessie..."

Images and voices assaulted my senses. A delirious swirling whirlpool of faces and voices echoed around me in a torrent of noise. My head pulsed like a ticking time bomb. Pain consumed every fiber, every tissue. The pressure inside of me slowly climbed towards critical levels.

It felt like I was being literally torn apart from the inside out. I wanted to scream, but as I opened my mouth no sound came out. My name echoed around me in the colorful tornado of images and voices, thundering through me like pounding drums.

Stop!

Just stop!

"Jessie…"

I wanted silence. A brief reprieve from all the insanity! I was drowning. Overwhelmed. My mind fracturing into millions of pieces. Bright flashes and color exploded behind my eyes.

"Jessie, you need to wake up!"

Everyone just shut the fuck up!

A crash brought me back to my senses. My eyes snapped open. Immediately, I became aware of lying on something soft yet firm. The headache was miraculously gone. I stared up at the stucco ceiling as I laid on the couch in the back den.

Another crash disturbed the quiet of the den, followed by an angry feminine voice, "Don't fucking touch me!"

The sounds of things breaking and shattering came from closeby. I turned my head to find Thranduil pressed against the wall near the entrance into the dining room. A destroyed chair hung halfway out of a wall. Cracks spiderwebbed outwards from the jagged hole and the glass in the window near the wall had been shattered. The curtains laid strewn across the scratched floor.

"What?" I slowly climbed to my feet. Thranduil visibly tensed. His sensitive elven ears picked up the sound of me sitting up. His ice blue eyes slowly turned to me as I climbed to my feet and crept up over to him. "What's going on? What happened?"

I heard something like a wall crack and then give way as Thranduil gave me a very strange look. He didn't answer for a long moment. A expression crossed between apprehension and befuddlement consumed his angular facial features. "It appears your headache was a prelude to an infliction of an unholy nature."

I furrowed my eyebrows. Dread churned in my stomach, an icy pit clenching my insides. "What does that mean?"

Thranduil nodded towards what lay beyond in the dining room. "Perhaps, it is best to see for yourself."

Another crash resonated through the tensed air, followed by a distinct splash and feminine string of coughing and colorful swearing, "Motherfucker! You asshole!"

Whose voice was that? There was a ring of familiarity in it, but I couldn't exactly place where I had heard the voice before. The angry tone reminded me of myself, but there was a distinct difference in the pitch.

I moved to peek out around the corner, curiosity fueling my actions. Thranduil's hand on my shoulder stopped me. I craned my head to peer up at the Elf King. His ice blue eyes studied intensely me, before he silently moved ahead of me, leading the way into the destroyed dining room.

My heart sputtered in my chest. My breath caught in my throat upon seeing the dining table split in half. The windows facing the in-screen porch were shattered, glass scattered across the porch carpet and embedded into the cushions of the toppled over wicker furniture. Scuff marks on the wooden floors indicated that there had been a struggle between Sebastian and Alastor and whoever the voice belonged to. The sliding doors laid in pieces across the rumble of the porch, the far wall facing the pool torn away like somebody had been sent flying through it. The pool patio tiles gleaned wet. One of the lounge chairs was halfway sunk in the pool's choppy waters.

My eyes caught a glimpse of a black blur and then the ground underneath our feet shook. The rhonadran bushes and garden flower beds were violently ejected as somethings was thrown into them.

Thranduil stopped at the edge of the pool patio, keeping a hand displayed at the side, signaling me to stop and stay behind him.

My brain refused to understand the scene before me.

Fire.

A woman on fire or made of fire hovered high in the air above the torn up landscape.

Red energy radiated off of Alastor's profile, engulfing his red-on-red ensemble in an infernal glow. Strange symbols spiraled into existence in the air around him.

A bright glowing portal of fiery yellow and orange opened up under the levitating woman. Inky black tentacles rush out of the glowing portal. A preternatural roar ripped through the air.

An unnatural wind picked up and hit us as the black bumpy textured tentacles of the unseen levithan shot up to try and grasp at the fiery spirit above the portal. The woman on fire dodged and darted out of reach and then summoned a barricade of fireballs, showering them on the flailing tentacles. The beast inside the portal howled.

An black whispy form shot into the air and collided with the woman on fire, sending them both spiraling through the air and then crashing into the ground. Earth and foliage flew as the two profiles of black and orange-yellow tore through the flower beds and bushes.

I watched astounded as the figure engulfed in black was sent flying backwards. They somersaulted through the air and landed gracefully on all fours mere feet in front of Thranduil and I.

Stunned, I watched as the being in black stood up to their full height. Black and purplish-blue energy danced off of their body which took the form of a slender man. "S-Sebastian?"

The figure turned towards us, revealing piercing eerie fuschia eyes set in an black face with extremely sharp features. The demon's hair flooded around his face like it was made of nothing but black mist.

I let out an unhinged laugh as Sebastian spun back around and flew across the destroyed garden to tackle the woman on fire, cutting her off from directly attacking Alastor. "H-Holy fuck! We're in the middle of a freaking anime battle!"

The orange and yellow flames mixed with blue-black wispy tendrils as the two struggled for dominance. The sound of powerful blows echoed through the air. The fiery woman got the upperhand and blasted Sebastian with a blinding tornado of light and fire that engulfed his black figure and cut a fiery path through the garden.

I watched in awe as the woman lifted off the ground and flew up and up.

A gunshot rang through the air.

Pain and light exploded behind my eyes. The last thing I saw was the fiery profile of the newcomer taking a nosedive towards the ground as darkness swallowed up my senses.