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Press Chapter 7

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Chapter 7 – The Spirit of Fate

A burst of green sleeve and then the sound of glass shattered into the cold, abandoned room of the fourth floor apartment. The glass fell across the wooden floor in four solid pieces, while the pane slid up and in slinked the young Isla McCormick. She was silent as a vase sitting in the corner, and she remained quiet until she cut the silence with a "hello?" to check if anybody else had invaded the abandoned apartment. Home invasion had become something of a habit for the young, red-headed girl. She cited it as just another task for the overall mission. It was for the greater good, part of her undying mission of justice and all that qualifying, superhero lingo Isla would use so she would have an excuse if someone asked her why she was doing what she was doing. She was as straight-minded as a bullet when it came to this mission she had taken up. It was a personal mission, you see, but it was not so personal that there wasn't an inkling of justice provided by the completion of the mission. Hearing a sound in the hallway next to the abandoned-for-renovations apartment building, Isla darted into an open cupboard. She fit in the cramped space with ease and, for once, she did the opposite of her usual cursing of her tiny body. A beam of light shone with laser-like precision against the sliding closet door, and a man with a grey, bald head poked his face inside, looked around and then closed the door. A clunking sound sneaked its way out of the lock as the tumblers fell into place.

Isla was now the temporary owner of a freshly abandoned apartment, and it had only cost her the risk of cutting herself on the glass. She sighed with relief and, with the wickedest of grins, set to work creating her temporary base camp. She pitched her stuff to the corner of the living room and started emptying the oversized backpack until she found her Grier-tech tablet PC and the Book of the Five. The cover of the book was still somewhat warm due to its leather binding, but the pages were crisp with the emanating cold. The reception Isla gave the newly stolen book was more than warm as she opened it to the chapter about Time and witnessed the words stay perfectly still on the page. She watched them to make sure they did not start moving. They didn't even wobble in the slightest. This was good -- no, great news for the freezing cold Isla McCormick. She grinned, shivered and heard her teeth as they began to chatter from the cold. The sub-zero temperatures had penetrated the room, and the girl had been outside for too long before she found the new apartment.

Four hours passed, but not wrapping herself in the thermal blanket she carried, nor plugging up the hole in the window, did anything to deter the cold from eating at her skin. She needed to stay awake; she needed to keep moving, so she began pacing the room while reading through the book. When that wasn't enough, she began exercising. She would do handstands, squats, backflips all while reading through the book. She had been going at this pace for about an hour, and she had only managed to read the first three paragraphs, and even then all she could grasp from reading them was that Time was not to be messed with or else… She needed to mess with it to complete her mission; however she was too cold to try it or even read through the book. Either way she wasn't even able to think about time. Time, as it was, was such a conundrum to her and she had even fixed Grier's old time travel equations.

How long had it been anyway? How long had it been since she started this viciously cold journey into the labyrinthine streets offered to her by Lion City? How much time had she spent so far from yet so close to her home, Grier Tower? How long ago was it that he had died?

Her mind stopped thinking as she stopped pacing around the frigid room. How long had she been doing this? Something sharp in the back of her mind said that had been three months, but it felt like a greater amount of time than that. How old was she now? She was fourteen. No more, no less. When was it that she had liberated the school from those aliens? Was that last year? It was last year, of course it was last year. That was when her and Terri came together as a team. That was when she met Mark, her best friend and fantastic wizard of water magic. That was when she met Connor; the jerk. She knew he changed into his werewolf form just to mess with her. Jerk. But that was all one year ago, right?

As her mind fumbled with the questions it was juggling, the room began to shudder and shake. The apartment gave a great sigh before it let out a shrill howl of pain and began to split apart. Isla, in mid handstand, clambered to the floor as she witnessed in horror as the floor kept rending itself apart. There was an ecstasy of pain as she smashed her knee on tile flooring, and she swore but kept moving. Whatever was happening, the girl needed to get out of the building. Isla, who had been blessed with rather quick reflexes, jumped over the crack and landed next to her bag near the back window. The apartment still rocked and rumbled about until, with a gruesome snap and a slapping boom, the half of the apartment Isla was in, and only the apartment she was occupying, gave way and tumbled down to the ground. She made a valiant effort to save herself and her belongings when at the last second she leaped from the collapsing building. It was not enough as she missed the ledge she was grabbing for and began to tumble down through three floors of rumbling rubble.

At this point one would think that the girl was dead. Not so. The red head was more than a match for a falling building as she used a magnetic boost to attach her belt buckle to a nearby water pipe. She felt the clean metal of her belt buckle clunk and clang against the pipe, and that was her cue to let loose a gentle sigh of relief followed by a roar of victory. It was too bad that, at the exact same time, it was also the rest of the apartment's cue to come crashing down on top of the young girl. She tried to avoid it, but it was like a mosquito being squashed beneath a massive textbook. And there she lay, dying in the alleyway connected to Bulloch Street.

She was cold. She was hungry. She was bleeding. She was maybe dying. She couldn't tell right now and, honestly, death was not currently on her agenda. Her blurry eyes automatically surveyed the destruction, as she looked for any victims of the blast. She could not see anybody but herself in the pit. Further surveillance of the area would lead her to conclude that only the apartment she was in had been affected. Unbelievably, the section she had taken refuge in was not home to any load bearing columns or struts, and with the information that no one else but her was involved comforting her mind, she let allowed herself a moment of relief. Of course, it was now that she began to weigh her thoughts upon the reason why that section of the building had fallen. There was no reason at all why the building came apart like that. The ground was stable; the building was solidly built by the Grier construction company, and that meant it was solid. Then as she looked up at he spilt apart section, she noticed that the fracture was not jagged as it would be had it been ripped apart by an earthquake. The section that collapsed looked like it was cut off by a very sharp blade. And it was at this point that Isla was content with the fact that fate was just out to kill her. The planets were aligning in the wrong way for her, and this all accumulated into one big mess of consecutive disasters. This was oddly calming to Isla, as she realized that she was the target and not the citizens of Lion City; but that calmness lasted until her hazy eyes fell upon the massive chunk of wall that currently engulfed her lower body. Panic blasted through her like a Jooma space cruiser careening through the atmospheric barrier, and she tried to free herself. Luckily, the young girl could feel her feet struggling underneath the block of cement, but she could also feel the gushing amounts of pain that rushed along her lower torso. She was sure that something was broken at this point, but that was neither here nor there, when she began hearing sirens. Someone sensible had taken the time to call the fire department and alert them to the destruction of the Isaac Street apartment complex, but that meant bad news for Isla. She could be taken to jail, or worse, for what she was doing.

Because of the snow storm piling six foot high snow drifts on the ground, Isla soon began to see Grier patented VTOL crafts with spotlights begin to make their way to the empty lot where the destruction had landed. Isla was not getting caught, and she strongly refused to have the mission end in such an anti-climactic way. She owed it to everybody to keep trying. So needless to say, though I'll say it anyway, with every last bit of her strength and mental willpower being propelled by adrenaline, she projected a sound blast powerful enough to heave the slab of wall off her body and thirteen feet toward the apartment building. She rolled her way toward a nearby fence and managed to slither her tiny body through some cut links.

It wasn't until now, when she was safe from prying eyes and noticeably not dead, that her thoughts turned toward the pile of rubble the fact that everything she was carrying was most likely buried. Her tablet PC would probably be a piece of scrap by now, her coat was probably torn to shreds (which was too bad since she had been planning on returning that when all of this was over) and who knows what happened to her two copies of The Book of The Five. She would most likely need to do a search, in the morning when she had the strength, and strength was not something she had right now. Strength was failing the poor girl, but she knew she needed to let it. She had not suffered a concussion, and she did not seem to be bleeding heavily, so she slid herself toward the nearest bit of shelter – that being a large, overhanging planter with a few blankets draped over a small balcony – and hoped she would be okay in the morning. In the morning she would get up, check herself for any major injuries, as she was certain she had them, and get back to work. Under the planter, the girl wrapped herself in one of the, luckily, hanging blankets. While there, her body lulled and her mind caved into an oblivious sink hole of unconsciousness. Fear did not spread throughout the girl's dreams, as she slept a solid fourteen hours from eight in the evening to ten in the morning. One could easily cite the exhaustion she felt, or the fact that she had taken such a critical amount of damage during the collapse of the apartment, but either way the girl slept until her body and mind had recovered enough.

* * * * *

As she awoke promptly at ten in the morning, and with a hazy mind from the mild blood loss and the battering she took due to the fall, she went to work surveying her surroundings and more importantly, her body. What she found as she awoke was that her surroundings had changed and that her mind had shifted into desperate survival mode. It was freaking her out, to say the least and to say the most she wanted to scream and destroy the closest thing to her that wasn't a load bearing wall. Isla took the time away from bringing her new surroundings to a collapsed heap of slag to look around the room. She was in a warehouse and the windows were, oddly enough, glowing bright as sunlight streamed through them. Where she lay, the concrete floor ended in a smattering of hay, tree branches from the Pleasant Point Park tangled into a frame, and various scraps of blankets, clothing, and other such fabric that made up the strange bed she was in. Her body was covered by a gaudy, hand-knit quilt that was beginning to tatter on the ends but was in decent condition despite itself. She shook her head, and her matted locks wafted around the back of her neck and her face. Then, as if she had been shot in the knee, she reached down to her left leg and checked the broken bone she knew she had suffered. As she rolled up her bloody pant leg, she was surprised to see her leg looking as if it had not been touched. She begrudgingly removed her snow-soaked shoe and sweaty sock to check her foot fully expecting to see her foot swollen and bruised, but lo and behold it was as unmarred and adorable as it had always been. Isla thanked her good luck. Maybe she had made her way into this warehouse in a conscious-wavering stupor...

And then what? Constructed this bed she was laying in? Did she steal the sheets from someone's clothing line nearby and then did she break some branches from a park that was four kilometers away to build a frame? Yeah, right. As her mind leaped from scenario to scenario, she whipped the blanket off her legs, wrapped it around her body and paced over to the bright windows. She had no idea what time it was or where she was within Lion City, but she knew it had to be close to where the apartment had crumbled to dust. She was still wracking her brain over the incident, when she looked out of the nearest window. The dirt-stained glass, with a wipe, revealed the lot she had crawled away from and she watched as the fire department, police department and the disaster relief workers treated the disaster site like a doctor slicing up a cancerous tumor. Isla sighed and realized that they would eventually find her bag, her stolen coat, her tablet PC, and the two very important copies of The Book of The Five crushed amongst the rubble. She let her head plunk thoughtlessly onto the glass and made a low, disgusted, hissing sound. "Well at least I have my health... and nothing to show for it," she said to no one. She just needed to hear a voice, and hers was the only one in the room. At least, that is, until she heard –

"Oh... Y-yeah," and she whipped her body around. Her eyes went massive with surprise. She had not heard another person in the room, but she was just answered wasn't she? You heard that too, right? With a calmness usually reserved for a deer who is ready to explode into the nearest woods at the first sign of danger, Isla kept her guard up. Cautiously she scanned every – single – last inch of the room and noticed nothing but what she saw before: a relatively empty room with a nest covered in blan... wait a nest? The voice was garbled and wobbly just like his, and then she got excited. So excited she could have exploded and caused the warehouse to collapse, but she didn't. No, what she did do was ask into the seeming nothingness, "T-Tomo? Are you... Is that... Who just answered me?" A moment passed. And then another moment. Finally she watched as a figure began to loom into existence from thin air. It stood next to the nest and its back was turned as the being appeared head first. She saw a tousled mess of hair  followed by two dark, longish ears and a pair of green shoulder blades.

Excitement overtook her. She leapt across the room in a burst of pink, abandoning the blanket on the floor where she had stood. She couldn't see his face, but she didn't care! She knew it was him! It was him! It was him! Her trajectory landed her in a full body tackle into the figure, her body colliding with its shoulders. She wrapped her hands around the figure's chest in order to hug, but then reeled back in shock as she felt something strange. Two soft globes of flesh adorned the chest under the shirt, and it freaked her out. And, now that she was looking at the creature, the ears were still long but they were all wrong, and the posture wasn't slack enough. This was the worst thing ever. Thoughts raced uncontrollably through her mind and battered her brain like meteors hitting the surface of a fleshy, sentient planet. The first thought was 'Is Tomo a girl now?' The second, most surprising, thought was 'Would I be cool with him being a girl even if I'm not into that kinda thing?' The third thought was, with expletives deleted mind you, 'Who the heck is this!?'

"Who in the blue blazes," - trust me you don't want to know what she actually said - "are you and what have you done with Tomo!?" She screamed at the top of her lungs at the sleepy girl. The girl recoiled a little and turned around to face Isla, and that was where the creepy, uncanny similarities to Tomo really began but then ended at the same time.

Her face, while not entirely shaped like Tomo's, was round around the cheeks but then pointed toward the chin. Her eyes, though they had pupils, were a smoky grey colour and the iris seemed to spread large throughout her eye. Her nose, while not as long as Tomo's, was sloped and peaked in much the same way. Her ears, though they were in no way as ridiculously large as the mouse-kid's, actually extended far off her face with an almost elven quality to them. Then there was the skin tone. Tomo, though his dark markings made up a large area of his skin, was mostly white. This girl that sat in front of Isla was dark-skinned, though not quite black, but had bright white markings under her eyes and on her forehead. The markings made up three triangles that pointed toward her nose and made her face seem thinner than it first looked. The girl stood up with a gentle ease and Isla noticed that her hands and feet both ended in monstrous-looking appendages each with a set of small claws. The tail, oh of course there was a tail, was nowhere near as long and swishy as Tomo's. In fact, hers was long but remained in a hanging position. The tail looked useless, but on closer inspection, one could witness it curling around itself as if it was prehensile.

"Okay that's messed up," the frazzled Isla McCormick said as she unfrazzled herself long enough to foster a retort to the strange girl standing in front of her. "Not that I'm... trying to be rude or anything but, who and what are you?" And as the gears in her mind turned harder, turned faster, "Oh! And uh, thanks for saving my butt from freezing back there and giving me this bed. Also are you a ghost or a demon or something?" The girl fidgeted with her clawed hands, and she turned way from the bedazzled Isla. She gave a slight " – is was a bad idea" and began to melt back into thin air. Before she could fully dissipate, Isla jumped to her feet with new found agility and surrounded the girl with a pink, glowing sphere of anti-gravity. Surprise shook the dark-skinned girl's features while a snarky smile cracked across Isla's. The strange girl managed a "Uh-um" as a response to being lifted into the air so suddenly. It was not something foreign to her, mind you, but it was shocking that the effect was so pink and came from such a tiny source as Isla.

"Alright! You can disappear all you want Creature-feature, but now that I've locked onto your energy source," a blatant lie to make her sound more dangerous and awesome, "I can track you anywhere you go! Now tell me, and I won't ask you again, who are you?" Again, the strange girl fidgeted as she tried to think of a way out of the question and a way out of Isla's bubble of floating magic. She thought of a plan involving kicking the bed-headed red-head in the face and jumping out of the far window and running until she could not continue, but that might make things worse. She recognized that she was at a heavy disadvantage: especially if the girl could lock onto her energy signature like she said. Turning invisible wouldn't matter. Instead, she broke, and from the dam that was her mouth flowed a flood of words:

"Okay. Fine. I j-just... I saved you and I healed you because... ah, what's the word," then she swore in a strange language, "you looked like you needed help. So I helped you. There! That's it. I'm a helper. I helped you and now you're being a jerk and I'm starting to regret helping you. Sheesh, you humans and your weird ways of doing things. This is why I stay detached you know!" The assault of words shook Isla's expectations. For a moment there she thought she had stumbled upon a femme version of her boyfriend, but this was not the case. This strange, mouse-like girl, was talkative and kind of a bitch about it. The red head let the bewilderment subside and, though she didn't want to, dropped the anti-gravity bubble. The dark-skinned girl fell to the floor with a thud so gentle that it was almost playful. Isla sighed and let out, "I'm sorry - and I'm rarely sorry - I've had a rough few months, you know? I'm Isla by the way. Thank you for what you've done. I could have died but I didn't and-" the other girl jumped up from the floor at Isla, but curled at the last moment and grazed past her curly head by mere inches. Her feet hit the floor once as she made another leap, this time a full thirty feet, and landed on the window sill. The extremely agile girl arced her arm and crashed her clothed elbow through the window pane, and with a pause showing a brief thoughtfulness, she turned to the amused-yet-annoyed (because this was a classic Tomo move) Isla and spoke "You can call me Kayachak Keme... Err. Kay, is fine," and she sprung from the broken window, leaving glass trailing behind her twinkling in the sunlight.

Isla rushed up to the window sill to watch the girl jump away. It would not have been hard to miss, but the expression on Isla's face read easily with a deep adoration of this girl. She was intensely intrigued by the interesting mouse-girl and the way she mimicked those few Tomo-esque behaviours, but she was more amused by the way the girl, Kay, had appeared in her life. She needed to know more about this girl. I can't describe what it was that the young, pale, girl felt or what she thought, but whatever it was it led her to the conclusion that Kay needed to be followed. That she needed to know more about this strange girl. She sensed there was something more to this than the girl let show, and the mystery was just too tasty a carrot for Isla to ignore. Isla checked the landing imprints in the snow, used her knowledge of physics, kinetic forces and mathematics and, against her better judgment as she was sure this would end poorly (plus she had no time to spare), followed after the girl. It was freezing without her gear, and she was absolutely lost in her beloved city without her new copy of The Book of The Five, but that feeling, the one that no one could really describe, turned her away from her task at hand. "It'll be a quick trip," she reasoned, "a minor detour then back to the mission," as she briefly became a glowing pink kite to the running girl.
Guess who's back from a long hiatus involving school!? Yeah it's me with another chapter of Press. I really like this chapter, and I had a lot of fun writing it so I hope you all enjoy the story here.

This is where the ride starts to get messed up, kids, so hang onto your butts!

See you, space cowboy!

*Kaowas
© 2011 - 2024 Kaowas
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Checkz3's avatar
It's nice to see Isla following her curiousity into God-Knows-Where again. Though, I find it pretty interesting the people and things hidden within the city limits. Makes me want to run away from home so I can have adventures with whatever's in my neighborhood.
*looks outside*
Or maybe I'll just keep reading this where it's nice and comfortable. ^^;

Anyways, can't wait to see/read what's next! :D