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What a crazy crowd!
Aura the Phoenix pushed her trolley of children's toys down a cramped, pathetic excuse for a street. People were trapped in that street by their own free will; thousands of colours, millions of sounds assaulted the toymaker at ever slow push of the rickety wooden cart.
Aura worked the only stable toy station in the whole city, and her spot in the Bazaar was never taken by anyone with half a brain and the will to live.
Not that Aura was violent, or anything.
Just a little...possessive.
Aura was getting really sick and tired of having her dress stepped on by unwashed feet and muddy shoes. It was the colour of the city now, like all her other garb - a disgusting shade of smog, mud, and general filth.
It used to be blue, like her hair-ribbon that was struggling to break free of her wild red hair. In fact, her hair ribbon used to be the flowered hem of her lanky garb.
A man that looked like a bear and smelled like a boar suddenly stood in front of her.
"Excuse me, sir, can you please move?" Aura shouted from her end of her trolley. She hated men. They were so much more difficult to deal with than women.
His lopsided grin and crazed look shot fear through her, reminding her in every way that she was weak and he was strong.
"Sure, ma'am, I'll move."
Aura blinked in confusion. His look had been malicious. His very tone and gaze was malicious.
Why, then, was he moving aside like a perfect gentleman, straight out of Princeton?
Aura gave him a shaky smile, and pushed past him as quick as her sore feet could carry her.


Man, she thought to herself, I wish I could say that that was close, but it wasn't, really.
She pushed on ahead, confused and frustrated with the slow ebb and flow of people, making it impossible to distance herself from the man without him following quicker.


After a few long minutes that took turns tripping around her head, she finally relaxed a hair. She was fairly close to the centre of the city, and that was where her place in the Bazaar was waiting for her with the comforts of friends and familiarity.
A gunshot pounded loudly over the dank of people. Aura judged it to be about a block, behind her.
Firefights were so common in this part of the city that she merely moved to the side of the road, into one of the bigger tents that (by simple coincidence) held large rifles. The crowd of people rushed past her, screaming. Some were running in the opposite direction, away from the sound, screaming women. Some were running in wrong direction, toward the shot, burly men. Children were frightened and being tugged away by their mothers.
Except for one, she noticed. There was a little boy tottering around, looking confused and frightened.
The man who ran the tent followed her gaze.
"He's going to get trampled, poor little tike," the man said, obsessively polishing a large, shining barrel with a filthy rag that looked as old as Aura felt.
Aura looked at the boy, who had just gotten shoved into a muddy puddle, and looked sad and scared.
"Can you please watch my cart for a moment?"
He looked at her with benevolence. "Sure."
Aura nodded her head thankfully to him, and walked to the edge of the road.
On three. One.
A woman shoved her past rudely with her large bulk.
Two.
Another gunshot, and more screaming, louder than the bullet.
Three.
Aura dashed out, trying to find ways through the people, like a rat in a moving maze that could close and kill him at any second.
She was bustled and pushed, smacked and whacked, and it took her nearly a minute to be able to find ground to step in without getting flattened.
But then she was stuck in the middle of the overflowing river, and felt like she was drowning in the overwhelming smells and touches.
Great. I'm going to become Aura pancakes. Special today, town’s toymaker turned into healthy breakfast food. One time offer.
She pushed against the porous wall of people, finally given a break and a small step.
Why couldn't the idiots who designed this city have made another route out of that place? Why must this tiny little path be the only way to safety? Aura grumbled, her eyes trying to find the boy over and over and over again.
With another push past people, her scrawny body made it to a mud puddle (where she knew he had to be close to).
She was booted rudely out of the way on her next attempt to move forward, and fell into the puddle. The resulting splash made everyone steer clear of it (especially the ladies).
There he was! Muddy, poor, frightened, confused.
Aura didn't wait for anything. She grabbed him, lifted him up. His tiny tearstains on his cheeks were not only from fear, she noticed with a twinge of sympathy as she inspected him. His hand had been broken, probably by some idiot running from the sound like a cow.
She held him close, and wondered how in all hells was she going to make it back?


Then, just as she was about to give up and sit there, in the middle of the road, in a mud puddle, a gunshot ran loud and clear from the rifle shop she had come from.
Screams, drowning out a gurgling cry.
Another shot. More screaming. Hysteria.
Aura was confused.
What was going on?
Weren't those pistol shots?
The child in her arms did not cry out to the sound, his looks of worry and befuddlement drowning out any fear that could have been shown. Had he ever heard a gunshot before?
Why were they coming from a rifle shop?


The only good thing that came from gunshots so close was that the few footsteps back to the rifle shop were clear of people faster that a drought.
She stood there, in that puddle, holding the child, wondering what she should do.
I don't value my life. If I go in there, I could help someone, whose life is more important than mine.
But, this boy? He has his future.
Doesn't he?


She went to the tented shop, leaving the toddler outside like a bike.
There was a dead man there. The kind man, still holding his dirty rag. A hole in his head.
A wave of nausea at the blood on her cart, in his matted hair.
And the killer?
The large, burly man who had frightened her was there, fighting with a scrawny young female...who has a pistol in her hands.
"You, there, get out of 'ere! She'll kill you!"
It took Aura a few seconds to recognize that the frightening man was on her side.
She was stiff with shock. "Wh-what?" No words seemed to have any meaning.
"Go!"
"Oh?" The woman, wearing a torn red dress, turned to Aura, eyes wild and pupils dilated. "I would never hurt another woman! All men--" she kneed the burly man in the gut, causing him to double over, "--must die."
"Wh-wha--"
Bang.
The burly man's blood spattered the tent, her cart, the woman's blonde hair.
The woman cackled as he fell, stiff as a dead man.
Aura stared at the blood with wide eyes. Dead.
Dead.
Why?
Why was this crazy woman after men?
Why wasn't I kinder to the man, helped him before he died?
Suspicious of him, of all things?


Then, suddenly, she noticed that the woman rigid again, pointing the pistol at something behind Aura.
Bang. The tiny bullet whipped past her, cutting her leg, smacking the ground without effect.
"H-Hey!" She had the indignation to say.
The woman didn't notice her anymore. Whatever was behind her was more important.
So, Aura turned around.
Oh God.
Kill me now.


It was the boy.
He had wandered into the shop, for reasons no one would ever know.
He was standing behind her, a confused expression on his face.
No fear,
no anger,
no pain. "Whe--"
And that was the expression he had when he fell to the ground, a second bullet shredding through his skull like fire through paper.


"All men shall die for their sins against women. By my hand."
The woman cackled, and laughed, and chuckled, and Aura never got the joke. She tore herself at the woman.
The death of a child...


She woke, without realizing that she had slept. She was in a bed with white sheets, looking up at a white ceiling.
This wasn't home.
Where...?
A lady, wearing a red cross, stooped over her.
Oh.
I'm at the hospital.
"Dear, you need to wake up." She was brisk and sharp, then hazy again.
Blackness.



Then the fog left, and there was the boy. He watched her, a confused expression never leaving his dead eyes, proclaiming innocence and ignorance, and fear.
The woman, a hole in her arm, a hole in my arm.
Her shard of a mirror, long as her arm, showing Aura her face alone, pocked and bloody and filled with holes.
Showing the woman's cackle.
Showing the boy. The child who never had a chance at anything. Anger.
The shard grew smaller, and the boys face grew bigger.
Unable to hold it.
Small as her hand, the dead eye watching her. Run from death, little phoenix.


Wake up.
"Wake up!"
Question.
"Wake up!!"
She opened her eyes. The nurse was there, shaking her awake.
"You're awake?"
She nodded, slowly, the back of her neck aching with stiffness. The IV tube on her wrist was itching.
"You can move. That is good." She turned away, large backside with red cross on white.
Aura glanced at the white light coming from the wall. Window.
There were bars on the window. On the inside.
"Why are there bars on the window on the inside?"
"Your medicine, please drink it all and all the water."
Aura was forced to drink the medicine, and drank the water without complaint. Medicine tasted horrible.
"Why are there bars on the window on the inside?"
"Protection." The stiff nurse snapped, and carried a tray out of the door, which she locked.
Aura sat up, the monitors on her chest cold and annoying. She tried to take them off half-heartedly.
Then, a sudden fear overcame her. How was she going to pay for the IV fluids? The medicine? She assumed that.
Aura had barely enough money to keep up the toy stand and give herself necessities.
She popped off the electrodes, slowly wiggled the (rather painful) IV out of her arm, and slid off the side of the bed.
She tried to stand up, and managed it (barely). Just as she decided that she really couldn't do much more than go to the bathroom, the strict nurse came in, followed by the technician and a doctor.
Upon seeing her, the nurse looked smug, and rather angry.
Upon seeing her, the tech looked annoyed.
The doctor, however, smiled. Aura thought he looked familiar somehow. She took an instant liking to him.


"GET BACK IN BED!" The nurse screeched at her, or perhaps she was talking normally and Aura was too drugged up to notice.
She complied, flopping over it hap-hazardly.
Damn that fluid in that pouch.
Must've been laced with some sedative.
I'm sleepy.
She shook herself awake.
The doctor was shooing off the technician, telling him to watch his monitors. The nurse was trying to half carry her back to bed.
The doctor turned to her, and said
"We can move you out of this room and into a better one really soon. For right now, I want you to sleep. "
He turned, and then seemed to remember something by the door.
"Oh, these are your belongings." He placed them on the bedside table.
The nurse followed him, after replacing all of the things Aura had desperately taken off.


Aura listened for the lock of the door, and then turned to the remains of her clothes. She searched the pockets, looking for any money at all.
Her fingers closed on a long and jagged piece of glass. At least, it felt like glass. Maybe it was plastic?
She hoped to God it was plastic.
She withdrew her hand, opening it to find her nightmare. The same size, the same shape. Couple of extra jags here and there.
She threw it into the trash can, old fear awakening.
Ten minutes dragged past.
She drifted off to sleep.


"Medicine call."
She was waken by a different nurse, one that was obviously with child, and very bustling and happy.
Aura took her medicine without complaint, and watched this new nurse leave.
Then she realized she was clutching the broken glass in her hand.
She choked down a scream, and tried to throw it.
But then, it hit her how stupid she was being.
It's just a piece of glass.
It's not part of my dream.
In fact, I can look in it, and see what I could see.


Aura did just that. Her own fearful eyes, the pupils tiny and wavering, watched back at her.
Just as she was about to tear her eyes from the mirrored glass,
her eyes changed, from green to boy blue, and the lashes grew short, and the pupils grew wide, and the expression vaguely confused.
No! He was there, in the mirrored glass.
She couldn't say how she knew this.
She couldn't even say how she knew they were his eyes, and not the drugs.
But she knew. It had to be his eyes. His dead eyes, changing from hers to his to hers to his...


Aura couldn't throw it away. She grew too attached to it, in a fearful way, in phobia. She told herself that she just liked it because it was mirrored and beautiful, but when she remembered those innocent eyes...


Why didn't I take the bullet for him?

Screaming woman was NOT on Aura's alarm clock.
Her eyes flew open in fear and shock, and the world span, the lights dancing togething in a mad tango, the bars on the window flying off and flashing neon colours.

And there was something long and thin on her leg.
And it was attached to a demonic looking body, curled up next to her, on her hand.
Was it the crazy raver lights making its skin psychedelic? Was it the night lights making its skin purple?
Oh God, what the heck is that? Why is it so warm and living?

Aura was trapped, between a rock and a hard place.
If I move, it'll attack me.
But if I stay still, it'll attack me.

I can't move.
She was rooted there, fear growing.
It'll take my soul and eat me.
It'll force me to eat poison.
It'll make me pay for not taking that bullet.

The child! Those innocent eyes, they could protect me from this monster!
With her free hand she groped around the blankets. Could she have dropped it?
She hoped not. She knew it moved at night, watching her.
She didn't want it to be like a spider. Like the ones you see during the day, and are too afraid to pulverize them, and they get away and you don't know where they are.

She wondered why this bothered her so.

Then the body moved, and Aura had to bite down a scream of terror.
The body rolled over, and by the light of the dancing flourecence, she could see that it was very, very small. Weren't demons supposed to be huge beasts?

It also seemed to be a he. What a strange child-demon.
He's sorta cute, in a frightening horrific way. Aura relaxed a few hairs.
The bed rose a few feet off the air when she said that to herself.

And he stirred, and opened one milky eye, glowing with a demonic light.

Aura let out a petrified squeel of fear, and shook from head to toe in fright.

To her surprise, he looked up at her with an expression of vague confusion.
His eyes were groggy, as though he had slept a long, drugged sleep. Aura felt a twing of sympathy toward this creepy creature, knowing that those cause the wickedest headaches.
He opened his mouth to get in a breath of air, and wheezed slightly. He rolled over, right onto the rest of her arm.
Aura's fear was reignited, battling with that sence of loving little ones. He was rather adorable in the way that he was clutching on her arm with his multicoloured fingers, possesively.

Tiny sounds, vibrations, and then, "Wh-Wh," two barely audible consonants.
Aura screamed loudly.

The rooms walls bounced off her scream, taunting her. 'No one can hear you, girl.'

The child-demon sat up in a fright, his tail whipping off her legs in a flash.

Aura felt sorry that she had screamed. "I-I-I.."

"Huhn?" He asked her, crawling nearer, those creepy eyes glowing.

"Wha-what'syourname?" She tumbled out, swollowing her fear to have it return again.

"Ruli?" He answered in a bewildered, high, childish voice. He didn't seem sure that that was his name.

"I'm Aura." She said briefly, forcing back a grin at that tiny little voice. "I'm afraid of you."

"Wh-wh-wh-why?"
Oh man, I said that out loud?! I must be looney. They'll chuck me in the looney bin. Aura didn't seem to notice that she was in the looney bin.
I'm starting to like this child.

"Because you're scary." Her vocabulary took a plumet.

"I 'm?" He looked at his arms and hands, a familiar, childish act. Aura smiled. Her fear was receding into the night.

"No, you're not."

He just stared up at her, a confused look in his large shining eyes.

Clang.
Clunk-click.
Smash!

There! That stupid bar broke the window by itself.
Aura nodded to herself, holding the twisted, cracked, rusty bar in her hand. She gazed out her shattered window, breathing in the familiar city air.

Ruli watched her, a tiny figure on the huge bed, with an idly curious light in his swirling eyes.
His skin prickled, the colours dropping to a pale hue all-together.
What was Aura do-ing?
Break-ing glass are not good with the Emery.

Aura threw the bar onto the floor in a mad glee, trying to punch a larger hole in the battered, mirky window.
She could feel, like a sixth sense in her mind, Ruli's apprehension. He had witnessed Emery first-hand.
But she held her ground against the toddler.
She was finding that harder to do with each passing day.
He was so innocent.

"Ruli, I need to breathe again." She whirled around in a circle, scanning the whole white room with her eyes as she had a million times, and it has always been the same tedious venture for her weary eyes.

Ruli gave her a skeptical look, his tail batting the bed, rumpling the mussy quilt.

"Stop that."
She punched the window around the hole she had made with the iron bar, trying to make it bigger. However, it hurt, much like when you try to kick something in a fit of anger.

"Tat touble." He said to her anxiously. The Emery didn't like anything broke. And she didn't like him, or Aura. That he knew to be true.

"I don't care, " she said loudly, reassuring herself of this. She pulled back her other fist for another swing, and...!

Footsteps.

Aura stopped her vain destruction of her knuckles.

She thought she could hear footsteps.
And she wasn't quite sure (if she ever was) that they were coming toward her room.

Maybe it was the doctor.
Or worse, Nurse Emery.

Maybe it's for that old lady with skitzophrenia next door.
I hope it's for her. She never gets anyone. I get more people in here a day than she has had her WHOLE TIME HERE!
And that's how Aura's fears and midthought ramblings of the injustice of the Health system led her to forget (for the moment) that there was anyone in the outer hall at all.

Baniru inched away a little, trying to find an exit. She couldn't tear her eyes away from this child, but she couldn't stand to watch him anymore either.

"Ba...Ba...ban...bani ni ni niru ru uuu ...u."

The woman could barely fumble over her own name.
And the scary part was, was that she was forgetting. She was losing herself. She could barely remember her own origins, anymore, let alone Karma or anyone else.

The woman just stared at him dumbly for a few seconds. She just stared and stared, eventually all that hope within her eyes was dampened and put out.

"Who are you?" she asked kindly, sweetly, as if she were another person living in another time.
"Who am I?"

"What is this place?"

At once in response to such a noise, Baniru fell to her knees in a quaking whisper. Clinging to cover her ears, she cried out too. But it was of different nature, origin, and likeness.

It was a scream of fear.

Everyone in the room seems to halt into silence at the utter of such sounds. They all gawked blatantly at the two, the smaller one upstairs already too thin of voice to be of any importance.

"GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT" Baniru cried over and over swatting at nothing in her line of sight. The room doubled and swerved, shuffled itself over and over like a new deck of playing cards.

Meanwhile, Karma saw the opportunity and was trying to help himself out of the window. It was ajar just a bit, and he was trying to wiggle his pudgy little self out of it.

He found out all too soon, however, that he was too fat to fit through the window crack.
Now that just made him angry.

She couldn't hold it. Her whole body was throbbing with every heartbeat, every gush of adrenaline, every flow of emotion. It was coming, she was going to change.

Baniru gritted her teeth, trying to keep her eyes from slitting into gold asphyxiations. It made her gain a peculiar look, the kind old disgruntled men get when they're trying to watch TV, and a young whippersnapper is across the street blaring music from a portable boombox.

She felt her teeth start to lengthen and rearrange, and she knew she couldn't hold it anymore.

Karma, on the other hand, was trying to push himself out the window. He was stuck in a backwards position, legs completely outside into the afternoon air. His middle, however, was stuck securely by the window pane.

He frowned. What the hell.

With a ravenous cry, Baniru grabbed her hair in frustration, trying to rip it out. Her canines grew longer. The shirt in her back split in half to make room for elongated spinal bones. A tail slithered it's way from her pants, the scythe on the end looking dangerously...dangerous.

Her eyes were lost to the gold, the gold of the desert, the heat of the past. Small horns elgonated out of her ears in a grotesque fashion- and while she was watching her hands, those grew elongated too. Very sharp looking nails- it was not unlike how the Hulk transforms, save for the bulging muscles and obliterated clothing.

A trickle of blood began to run from her head down to her nose.
Things that popped out of your skin tended to cut it, after all.