Welcome to Gaia! ::

The best thing about the summer months was that it didn’t get dark for hours. That meant that Laney could give herself the option of ignoring the progress of the hands on her watch, and instead drag out an evening’s outing with Tara late into the night. By ten pm on any given night, it would still only have been an hour and a half since sunset, which meant they didn’t have to go their separate ways quite yet. Not bad.

The worst thing, most days, was (of course) the heat. Laney spent her time dressed in comfortable shorts and tank-tops that kept her relatively cool, but this put her at the mercy of mosquitoes at night, which left her itchy and spotted for days after. There was almost no winning either way — and sometimes Laney despaired of going out at all. Every so often, when she could stand to spend an entire night sitting on the couch without going crazy and ripping her hair out from cabin fever, they bypassed the whole issue of summer weather and just stayed in.

Tonight, though, they had gone out, and had had a rousing game of laser tag at the place that had just opened up across from the movie theater — and now they were going home, neither of them (by which Laney really just meant ‘Laney’) quite ready to pack it in and call it a night yet. Instead, the snowy-haired girl was weaving back and forth under streetlights down the empty street, hopping over occasional puddles and roger-rabbiting her way down the curb.

“Why do you suppose paintball became such a big thing when they already had laser tag?” she asked, hands tucked into the pockets of her skirt as she twirled along the edge of the sidewalk. “It’s messy and it hurts and you get bruises — I mean, who wants that? Where’s the appeal? You know?”

Sometimes — often — she talked just to fill up the space. This meant a lot of really inane conversations about things like the appeal of paintball.

There was something oddly familiar about going out with Tara when her friend seemed agitated and in need of distractions. Laney wondered, as she often did, if that feeling was yet another relic of memory from her lost time during the Barren Pines incident before her coma — or maybe just the shadow of a coma dream, or some other prickling of her subconscious mind — but there was nothing for it. Like so many other feelings she couldn’t quite pin down beneath her thumb, that one eluded her. If she spent too much time thinking about it, it gave her a headache.

Still, there was something enjoyable, nonetheless, about getting Tara out of her headspace for a little while and helping her to unwind. It was hard for Laney to understand everything about her friend’s moods — and Tara wasn’t always expressive about them — but she wanted to help, nonetheless, and she liked seeing a smile on her friend’s face. If this meant digging through a big trash dumpster and constructing her own home-made miniature golf hole for them to play on, then Laney did that, and if it meant laser tag, then she did that, too. Fortunately, no matter what ridiculous activity Laney could manage to dream up, Tara was an excellent sport about giving it a go.

Tara, Laney knew, was extremely patient with her.

“Thanks,” Laney nodded, spinning on her heel so that she could stick her hand in the bag and draw out a piece of candy. The M&M she drew out was orange, and the ‘m’ was only partly stamped on, so that it looked less like m and more like r apostrophe.

“You’re right, I guess that’d be a good reason,” she agreed, chewing thoughtfully. “Of course, I’ve yet to see it — “ She snorted a little at the mental image. “But you know what they say: Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit. To the age, its art; to the art, its freedom. Guess I’m not really one to judge.”

Laney continued her meandering dance down the sidewalk, pausing only every so often to check on her friend. “So, what about it? Do you want to wrap ourselves up like burritos sometime and shoot paint at each other? Could be inspirational...” She twirled in a large circle, arms extended as though waiting for inspiration from the heavens.

She wasn’t aware, at first, of the faint sounds of things breaking somewhere far away, or that the quiet tones on the wind were shouts muffled by distance. They all blended into the background, into the rustling honks and clatters of a city that hadn’t gone to sleep yet.

“Oooh, one of those human flypaper things,” Laney agreed, reaching into the bag of M&Ms and carefully fishing out four orange ones. She gestured grandly with one of the candies pinched between her thumb and forefinger, her voice suddenly sounding decisive and confident. “Oh, yeah, we’re definitely doing human flypaper. Aha — and then we’ll get discovered as visionary artists and we’ll have to give interviews where we talk about how our latest paint splotch represents the fractiousness of human social consciousness —”

The screams in the background were starting to become real, actual screams. The kinds of screams that were unmistakable as anything else except raw, human terror. Worse, they’d ring out, and then abruptly — with an almost gruesome suddenness — cut out into hollow silence.

“And . . . post-modern deconstructions of . . . the traditional . . . family . . .”

Laney’s voice fell and then finally trailed off into silence. She stopped in her tracks to look at Tara, fear pooling in her eyes and echoing in the pit of her stomach.

“Tara . . .” she whispered, reaching out on blind instinct for her friend’s hand.

They ran. Sometimes, human instinct was a very simple thing: screams coming from the east; therefore, run west. Laney, who was emotionally weak-willed and codependent, and had trouble acting against the approval of others, had never thought of herself as much of a brave person anyway -- and even if she had been, it wouldn't have been the sort of bravery that compels someone to run towards screaming crowds and other large-scale physical danger. She was just one person, with no particular skills in the arenas of fighting, espionage, bomb defusion, or anything else of that nature. Attempting to involve herself in something like that, for all that it might be slightly noble, would also be colossally stupid. Right? She was sure of it. So like any good coward, she did the wisest thing she could think of: she beat a very, very hasty retreat.

The two of them made a good showing of it. Neither of them had a particularly long stride, nor were they particularly athletic. Still, adrenaline is an excellent co-pilot, and Laney felt herself urged on by its whipcracks even as her throat and her chest began to ache and she felt her mouth filling with saliva she didn't have time to spit out. It hurt, but she ran.

For what good it did them, anyway. The screams weren't growing much farther away, and though Laney and Tara kept on running through their exhaustion, Laney could feel her stamina wearing out as the muscles in her legs began to feel gooey and insubstantial. She didn't think she could run much farther.

The good news -- and the bad news -- was that she didn't have to. Whatever was menacing the town had followed them, and was now overtaking them. A long, thin shadow blotted out part of the circular glow of a streetlamp they'd just run past.

Tara's quiet exclamation from before ran through Laney's head: Not tonight, not now -- and she wondered, in the midst of everything, what Tara knew that she didn't. What they would see when they turned around to face whoever -- or whatever -- was stalking them . . . and whether Tara would recognize it.

"Um . . . ?" she called out to her friend, whose hand she was still clasping tightly. Her voice was urgent, and what she meant with her 'um' was 'please be a dear and have a genius plan for what we should do now.'

Tara was, after all, the genius friend. Laney, she'd decided for herself long ago, was the loopy but devoted sidekick friend. She relied on Tara to always have a plan, even if that plan was 'hide behind a dumpster' or 'look for a fallen tree branch.'

Laney Sutton had lived for most of her life in a quiet, sheltered world. She had never witnessed anything supernatural that she knew of, or that she could remember. The world had, thus far, proven both disappointingly and comfortingly mundane.

But she believed.

To her own continual sorrow, Laney couldn't remember her life at Barren Pines, or the circumstances under which she had first met and befriended Tara Kavanaugh. She had only Tara's word for it, for what she remembered -- but that didn't matter. She knew what would have drawn her to a person like Tara anyway. Laney had always believed, had always known, that it was true, that Tara was her best friend. After all, why wouldn't she want to be best friends with Tara? So naturally she was.

And Tara was a broad-minded person with wild, brilliant, exciting ideas. If Tara said there were aliens, Laney believed there were aliens. If she said there were magic pixies who lived in the sewers and always had to hide from human eyes, Laney would've believed that too. And Tara or no Tara, there were some things Laney believed in that came from nowhere but herself, because she didn't want to face the possibility of living in a world where those things weren't true.

The universe was a fundamentally good place, and people were fundamentally good. She believed those things. And maybe there was something magical in that, in the idea of an innate goodness of things, of a grander design to which one small person might choose to contribute. Laney certainly liked to believe there was. So in a way, she'd always believed in magic.

And here was magic, in one way or another: not just in the way that Tara threw her arm up into the air, clutching something, and shouted a mysterious string of nouns that Laney couldn't make sense of, and there was a flash of light and somehow Tara changed before her eyes -- because Laney didn't understand the process of that, so she supposed it could just as easily be some kind of technology rather than magic -- but also because whatever this was, magic or clever machinery, it had come to them right at this moment, when they needed it most.

The point was that something was coming for them, and right when they needed a miracle most, the universe -- in all its goodness -- was providing one for them. That was all Laney needed to know.

"I trust you. I'll always trust you," Laney told her -- and even though she didn't know quite what Tara was, right at this moment, she meant it. Tara only ever had to be one thing anyway, and that was enough. She just had to be Tara.

Laney stepped back, and they both turned to face the thing -- or, as Aquarius realized, and Laney hadn't yet, the things -- coming after them.

The first monster they saw was a horrible purple icy thing, with the brief legs and hulking arms of a gorilla, three glittery black eyes like giant beetles perched on its face, and unseasonable flakes of snow and ice crystallizing and falling through the air as it breathed. It spotted them almost immediately. Laney's heart missed one or two beats as she stared at it in terror.

Laney stepped backwards with one foot, trying to put herself more directly behind Tara, but even so, she was as afraid for her friend's life as she was for her own. Laney wasn't willing to die -- a year of her life wasted practically-dead had proven that much to her -- but she wouldn't accept her friend's death, either. Tara had promised to take care of her. She'd given her word.

But she wouldn't be alone.

After all, there was a grand design to the universe, Laney remembered with conviction. And even one small person might choose to contribute.

But with two people . . . well, now. With a good friend by your side, what miracles couldn't a person do?

If Laney had known what kind of pressure her statements of blind faith were putting on her friend, perhaps she wouldn't have made them. But Laney, who had always slavishly devoted herself to her friends and smothered them with affection, had never really understood the burden that her dependent personality put on other people.

She cringed behind Tara, watching in awe as she threw a powerful punch, and then a kick, into the horrible monster's stomach. The first blow made an icy, crunching noise when it landed; the second cracked the monster nearly in half. It howled and staggered back, clutching at its fractured torso, nearly finished.

Tara, in turn, was left with half of her arm encased in ice. Laney put her hands to her mouth and gasped.

Two more monsters came forward to fill the space that the first had vacated. Laney wondered frantically how Tara could fight them all, even with her strange powers. What if Tara got hurt? Killed? How could Laney help her?

Laney didn't have any special powers -- but she had to help. She couldn't let her best friend do this alone. She had to do something.

Conscious of the need to hurry, Laney took a few steps back and began to look around for anything she could use as a makeshift weapon. Trash collection wasn't for another three days - maybe there would be something in a dumpster.

There was nothing. Laney had bent herself halfway over the ledge of a dumpster and was rifling through it, but there was nothing she could use. A soggy piece of cardboard. The moldy remnants of Chinese takeout. Someone's shredded paperwork.

"Ugh," she said, voice shaking, trying not to panic, "doesn't anyone recycle anymore?" Laney pushed herself back and dropped down to the ground, racing to the back of the alleyway in desperate hopes of anything else useful buried farther in the shadows.

Behind her, she could hear the signs of a struggle, and of Tara fighting for her life. For both of their lives. Laney couldn't let her down. Her pulse was racing along, and Laney soon found herself ensconced in the dark, hands pressed against the brick wall at the back of the alleyway. She stumbled to her hands and knees and began to feel around blindly in the grime for something, anything now -- because Tara was on her own, and Laney couldn't just abandon her, she had to do something, she had to help --

She didn't know what she was looking for. She was so worried she could hardly think. She should get out of the alleyway, she should look somewhere else, she had to do something --

Tara's harsh scream of pain reached her, and Laney felt herself go dizzy with horror.

"No," she called out, getting to her feet and running back toward the sound, even with nothing to show for her efforts. "No, no, no, not Tara, please be okay -- !"

Tears were clouding her vision. Images of a life without Tara rose up in her mind, a sudden flashing sequence of horrors, of turning to tell Tara something or show her something and finding her now there, of attending Tara's funeral, of talking to her family, of just not having her there, and how could Laney go on like that when she could barely motivate herself out of bed on some mornings --

"Please," she called out frantically, hoping that something somewhere was listening. "Please please please please please -- "

Laney called out for help.

And something answered.

Laney had called out to the powers that be for a weapon, and here, at her moment of need, a weapon appeared: floating in the air right in front of her, drawing Laney to a sudden halt, was a wooden distaff, gold-painted.

Magic. Just for her. Just because, with all her heart, she'd begged for the strength to change the world just a little bit.

Laney reached out for the distaff without hesitation.

She wasn't prepared for everything that happened. The rush of power, the transformation that came over her, and the sudden understanding that she was immediately quite different down to the marrow of her bones -- these things were complete surprises. But Laney didn't have time for them: Tara needed her.

No, not Laney.

A reincarnated being aligned with the far-reaching cosmos. A scion of an ancient and mystical landmark, a place of power. The Page of Hvergelmir.

She took up her weapon and ran into the fray.

Lacking any better ideas, and too far from being able to think straight at the moment for anything else, Hvergelmir ran at the third monster directly, barreling straight into it to knock it to the ground.

Both page and monster fell to the asphalt, Hvergelmir rolling away to one side and trying to get to her feet again. The monster wasn't very big -- about the size of a large dog. Screaming in panic (ever the elegant heroine), Hvergelmir ran at it again, grabbing the monster and throwing it at a nearby wall.

Aquarius, by sheer dint of will, had come up with an emotional second wind to carry her through this ordeal. Laney had no awareness of the dark, wretched place that that strength issued from, but regardless, she didn't have the same degree of focus at the moment as what Tara had cobbled together from repurposing her resentment for the universe. Laney was just running on adrenaline.

But adrenaline was a time-honored motivator that had won out and been honed through thousands of years of evolution, and it served her well. Neither of them was exactly at their most level-headed, at that moment, but they had enough determination to see them through.

There were two more monsters. If Hvergelmir really understood where they might've come from -- that these had been human beings, once, that in fact they might've been human beings just a few minutes ago, playing freeze tag at the new complex -- she might've hesitated even more in her course of action. But to her, they were just monsters, and all that mattered was that she and Tara didn't die. They had to win.

One of the last two monsters was round and sort of fluffy-looking, like a big, monstrous beach ball. No wonder it had taken longer to reach them. Laney ran at that one, hiking up her skirt and giving it a hard kick that sent it sailing into a telephone pole. It deformed and began to deflate, and she followed after, pounding at it with her fists inexpertly until it looked like a popped balloon, and eventually turned to dust and disappeared. That left only one monster for Tara.