3:44 PM, November 4th
The Wedge; Hub CityNormally she loved talking about
The Vampire Diaries with Clarissa on the way home. It was always a much-welcomed cooldown after a long day at school. As it were, it just served to distract her from the many cuts and bruises she now sported, disinfected and bandaged though they may be. She could still feel them stinging beneath their gauze patches.
“Later, Clare,” Karen waved to her friend as they stepped out of the train station.
“Later…I promise I’ll be there to have your back next time,” Clarissa reassured her, waving over her shoulder.
She would honestly rather there not be a next time. Just being around Kendra always made her day at least thirty-three percent worse than it had been before.
Continuing on her journey home, Karen was happy to see that the streets were fairly quiet this afternoon. After all the gang violence of the previous day, she had half-expected to find the neighborhood even more shot up than usual.
Aside from some homeless folk huddling around a burn barrel for warmth against the increasingly chilled autumn air, she was entirely alone. Now that she thought about it, it was actually kind of eerie here when there was nobody else around, and those hobos were just getting further and further away as she walked.
Pulling her coat closed, she released a visible sigh into the air when she passed by that old broken down bus that had been there for as long as she could remember. She had seen it so many times, and yet had never given it any real thought. All of its windows had been broken out, and an unlit burn barrel sat at its rear. Was it a leftover from back when this place wasn’t quite so bad?
"Huh?" Karen's brow knitted, a familiar yet out of place sound suddenly catching in her ear.
…Laughter.
More specifically, the laughter of
children. She could
hear them coming from inside…
“W-what the…” Her eyes grew wide as she instinctively backed away from the old bus.
The hiss of its now non-existent door opening now filled the area, the rumble of its engine now being clearly heard on the wind. And the voices….she could hear them so clearly. The children, the bus driver…
Shaking her head in disbelief, she finally regained enough sense to turn and run with every ounce of strength she had. She wasn’t even sure if she was going in the right direction now, all she knew is that her every instinct told her to get away from…from
that.
But there seemed to be no escape, no matter how far she ran.
Every sidewalk carried the joy, anger and sorrow of people that were no longer there. Every broken store window told the tale of someone that had met their end. Grasping at her head, Karen dashed into an alleyway, desperately wishing an end to the cacophony of unearthly noise.
“Nnngh...” She pressed her head against the graffiti-ridden wall, her heart about to beat out of her chest. “What…the eff…?”
Her brow was coated in a cold sweat. The sounds were gone now, as if they had never been there to begin with. Had she…just had some kind of episode? Was the stress finally getting to her? Maybe she should forget dinner and just take a
long nap when she got home. Her dad would survive.
Pushing herself back from the wall, Karen prepared to exit back onto the street when a startled scream from behind her caused her to freeze in her tracks.
Her first thought was, of course, that her hallucinations had returned…but as she slowly glanced over her shoulder, she bore witness to an old man being backed against the wall at the far end of the alleyway by some thug that looked only a handful of years older than herself. Now
that was something she could understand all too clearly.
Taking a few steps closer to the terrified senior and his screaming assailant, Karen instantly felt her heart drop into her stomach when she saw that the mugger was carrying a gun. She
had briefly entertained the idea of stepping in to maybe offer a distraction so the geezer could get away, but the gun changed everything. There was literally
nothing she could do now.
Pressing the barrel tightly to his victim’s face, the gangbanger demanded his wallet, but the old man stood his ground.
“Just give it up, you wrinkled sack of shit!” The mugger threatened.
The old man still didn’t budge. “I made it through Vietnam and President King. I won’t be intimidated by some wet behind the ears punk like you.”
Karen shook her head in disbelief at the old coot’s stubbornness. Bravery was one thing, but that was just being foolishly prideful. He would just get himself killed at this rate. Didn’t he have children or grandkids that cared about him? What was he even
doing here?!
“Last warning you old fuck, hand it over!” The thug snarled, his fist slamming into his gut.
Seeing the geezer double over and begin coughing from the attack, Karen felt herself moving towards the mugger against every ounce of common sense she had.
“Hey, back the hell off!” She shouted, virtually plowing into him with all of her strength. He barely even budged.
Swerving to face her, he stared down with apparent disbelief at the fact that a little girl had just tried to tackle him. She understood the feeling: she could hardly believe it herself. Stupid, so very, very stupid. Moreover, his shock didn’t last long.
“What the fuck? Get out of here, kid!” He barked at her. “You wanna get shot? Huh?”
Seeing him brandish the gun in her direction, she felt her blood chill. She had
heard and even occasionally
seen plenty of gun violence, but had never had it directed
at her before. For the first time in her life, she truly realized that she could very well die in this moment.
“J-just get away from him, asshole!” She demanded, doing her best to look as intimidating as a twelve year old could.
“Hey, what are you doing? She’s just a little girl!” The old man protested, grabbing the mugger by the arm. He responded swiftly by belting him with the handle of his gun, sending the geezer to the ground.
Reacting immediately by grabbing hold of his gun, Karen strained her muscles to their limit in an effort to pry it free from his grasp. The teen resisted her easily with his far superior strength, pulling back on the pistol.
“Let go, you little bitch!” He snapped, their struggle continuing until a thunderous
crack filled the alleyway.
Releasing her grip on the gun, Karen fell onto her back. No, it was more like she was blown off her feet. She couldn’t breathe in that moment, and the only thing she could see clearly was the horrified expression of the thug she had just been grappling with. Dropping her gaze, she saw that her shirt was now stained red.
Was that her blood? That was weird, it didn’t hurt at all. She always thought getting shot would hurt.
“No, no, no…FUCK!” The teen grasped his head in a panic, turning to flee despite the old man’s protests.
Crap…she was going to die, wasn’t she? She could feel an irritating heat from where the bullet had hit, now. It was slowly spreading. The old man was kneeling beside her, but it was hard to focus on him. Everything was so hazy.
Maybe if she closed her eyes for just a minute, things would be clearer…
~
Unknown Location; Unknown Time“Uaaah?!” Karen shot up into a sitting position. Staring ahead in a daze, she slowly reached up to feel her face.
“What…where...” she lifted a hand to needle the center of her forehead, trying to gain some sense of bearing. Let’s see, she went all cray-cray in the street and started hearing voices; then ran into an alley,
then decided to wrestle with an armed mugger…
“Oh shit,” she gasped, reaching down to feel her stomach. Her shirt was still wet with blood, but the burning sensation was gone. In fact, so was any evidence of a wound! She was completely uninjured, somehow. “But I
know he-”
Wait.
Where the hell
was she?
Shifting her gaze to the “world” around her, her jaw dropped. “Stars?!”
Thousands, perhaps
millions of stars covered not only the sky above her, but the furthest horizons in any direction she dared to look in. No moon, no familiar smog clouds or light pollution. This wasn’t
The Wedge. This wasn’t Hub City.
Lowering her eyes to the “ground”, she quickly noted that it was a solid, polished black. The stars easily reflected off of it, and running her hands across its surface gave her a feeling akin to marble. It also seemed to stretch on forever—or for at least quite a few miles—in all directions.
“Am I…dead?” She muttered, slowly pushing herself to her feet. “Is this some kind of afterlife?”
It was certainly unlike any she had ever heard of. No depiction of Heaven or Hell came even close to resembling this. That meant they were wrong. They were
all wrong!
“Hah, suck it, dad! I
knew all of that was bullshit!” She grinned.
That was mean, but she was just trying to stay in good spirits. “Pfft, spirits. Guess I
am one now, huh?”
“Right, so I’m dead,” she repeated that idea, trying to reinforce it in her mind. “Crap…I’m sorry for saying that, dad. Now you’ve lost both mom
and me to shootings.”
Lowering her head, she felt her eyes mist over slightly. As much as she complained about her father being needy, she never wanted him to have to go through something like this again. Karen could only imagine how he was going to take the news.
“All I’ve done lately is complain about him,” Karen muttered.
It was in that moment that a small light appeared on the otherwise immutable black surface. At first merely a single luminous rectangle in the abyss, a second and third were quick to appear. In a matter of seconds, Karen would find herself staring at a string of golden lights that stretched into the horizon. A path.
“Finally, some direction!” She smirked, following her own personal yellow brick road without hesitation.
And so she walked. For nearly ten minutes, in fact. Quietly, diligently, she pressed forward along the trail that had been so generously provided for her. Then she started to
run, as her frustration grew, for there seemed to be no effing end to this thing! “Um,
hello? Am I actually going anywhere—HUUAAH!“
As she briefly looked up to pose her question to the twilight sky, she felt her foot meet the naked air. Falling forward, she smacked face-first into the lighted pathway. Immediately popping up to grasp her aching nose, Karen glanced about the area. She was still on solid ground, from what she could tell, but behind her-
“A ledge...?” She muttered, peering over the edge. She could clearly see the trail of lights she had just been following, though they quickly began to vanish. It sure
felt as if she stepped off a ledge, but now she was looking down it.
Karen shook her head. "Forget it. Just keep following the lights."
It was really the only option she had.
And so many more minutes of walking ensued. Glorious, silent, crushingly
dull walking. Wherever she ended up, she would probably be covered in sweat when she finally arrived. Fortunately, she was paying enough attention this time to catch sight of the path abruptly ending at a rectangular alcove.
Unlike the ledge from before, the area she was standing on now continued on past this opening. The lights, however, were clearly directing her to go down into it. Indeed, when she stared down, she could see where the trail continued.
“Okay, so like before?” She questioned to no one in particular. Setting a foot inside the hole, she stumbled forward slightly as the world once again reoriented itself. “Yeah,
that’ll take some getting used to.”
She was now standing at the mouth of a rectangular, marble corridor that’s sole lighting was the path before her. This, of course, meant yet
more walking!
“Maybe I was wrong,” she considered. “Maybe this
is Hell.”
At least she did seem to be going
somewhere now. Deeper and deeper, to the point where she could no longer see the stars outside when she looked back. It was at this point, however, that a new light caught her eye: a room!
“Finally!” She exclaimed with a broad grin, charging forward despite her mounting exhaustion.
She emerged into a room that could best be described as resembling some kind of ancient temple, or maybe a museum packed with old artifacts? The floor and walls were still made of the same dark marble-like material, but there were now statues of various mythological creatures—gryphons, centaurs, the standard World of Warcraft crowd—and strange glowing orbs that clung to the walls and illuminated the vast chamber.
“Wowzers…” She muttered.
“Karen Hernandez,” a voice echoed through the room, causing her to yelp in shock, “continue to follow the light.”
"Where-" Her eyes darted about in a brief panic, but there was no one there.
After searching unsuccessfully for the source of the voice, she continued to follow her guiding light. There were hundreds, maybe
thousands of bizarre artifacts contained in viewing cases strewn throughout the enormous halls. Statues, suits of armor, weapons and things she couldn’t even
begin to speculate on.
“If this really is the afterlife, everyone was
way off,” she concluded.
While it probably still took several more minutes of walking, it no longer
felt as long thanks to the drastic change of scenery. Thanks to this, Karen was in fairly high spirits when she at last came to the end of her long trail.
She now stood in front of a vast throne made of the same black material as the rest of this place, except there were markings carved throughout it that shimmered with an azure light. More importantly, it was
occupied.
“Welcome, Karen Hernandez,” the scrawny geezer spoke, his voice echoing through the chamber. “Your journey is at last at an end.”
Lightning unceasingly crackled through his form, though it didn’t appear to harm him. In his right hand he held a golden staff tipped with the unmistakable symbol of a thunderbolt. Despite sitting in his throne, it was readily apparent that he was far taller than she was. In truth, Karen was scared shitless of this weird-looking old coot, but she wasn’t about to let
him know that.
“Well, it’s about time!" She folded her arms. "I feel like I had to walk for an hour or something to get here!”
“A final test,” he explained, “of your patience, of your willingness to confront a potential unknown. You failed the first time, when you fled the broken bus.”
Karen’s jaw went slack at this, her breath stolen for a long moment. “
You did that? That was effin’
terrifying! Test my ass,
anyone would run from that!”
“The spirits that inhabited that street were very much real, I simply allowed you to
hear them,” he explained. “To hear their joy, their sorrow, their dreams, and their regrets. I had hoped it would pique your interest, compel you to delve deeper into what was undoubtedly a mystery.”
“As opposed to nearly pissing my pants?” Karen muttered, before drawing a long sigh. “Look, I know I sometimes act older than I am, but I’m still just a kid. What do you want with me? Who even
are you?”
The old man smiled, showing a mouth full of crooked and missing teeth. “I am the Guardian of the Rock of Eternity and last wielder of the primordial arcane from which all magic can trace its roots. I am the wizard…
When he spoke his name, a bolt of lightning arced down to strike the extended palm of his hand, causing Karen to scream and fall onto her rear. The shadows at the edges of the vast hall had been cast aside in that instant, revealing the chambers truly monumental size.
“D-don’t just
do that out of nowhere Shazeem, or whatever you said!” She clutched at her chest, her heart about ready to pound right out of it. “And you didn’t answer the most important question! Why am I here?”
Standing from his throne, the incredibly sus old wizard began to slowly descend the steps towards her. Swiftly scrambling to her feet before he could get too close, Karen maintained a healthy distance between them. “I have been observing a myriad of individuals throughout this world in order to judge their worthiness to inherit my power and my throne. Out of all of them, I have chosen
you.”Karen snorted at this, to The Wizards evident surprise. “Now I
know you’re screwing with me.”
“You’re saying that you’re going to give
all of this to some rando brat from the worst slum in America over literally
anyone else in the world? Yeah, swipe left.”
Shazam leaned heavily on the golden staff he carried, closing his eyes. “The primordial arcane cannot be wielded by those without sorcery in their veins. You are no random child, Karen Hernandez. You are what is known in today’s world as a Homo Magi.”
“Homo wah? Sorry, I don’t really think about that stuff. Now, my friend Clarissa…” Karen recalled some of Clare’s more
interesting DeviantArt projects.
“…You have the innate ability to wield magic,” he clarified. “A gift that is preciously rare in this modern age.”
She frowned skeptically at this. “You know, I think I might have
noticed by now if I could cast spells.”
“Your sorcery is dormant and unrefined,” Shazam explained, a hand stroking his salt pepper beard. “And your potential is mediocre at best.”
Karen’s shoulders sunk a little at this, her arms dropping to her side. “Woah, nice. It’s like if Hagrid was all ‘Yer a Wizard ‘arry, but yer kinda shit at it too!’.”
Releasing a rumbling chuckle that caused the entire room to tremble, Shazam offered her a warm smile. “You need not possess prodigious talent to receive this gift…this burden. No, you were chosen for your benevolent heart.”
“Huh? What do you mean?” Karen tilted her head to the side.
“When you defended your friend at school to your own detriment, I decided it was time to test you, in spite of your youth,” he explained, a bolt of lightning striking out from the tip of his staff, only to shift into a crystal clear image of her “fighting” Kendra.
It then showed her fleeing from the bus. “As I said, it was a test that you
failed. I was disheartened by the knowledge that I was once again was unable to find a worthy successor, and my options were dwindling. That was when I witnessed your heroism in the alleyway.”
Karen’s stomach twisted itself into a knot when the image shifted to her confrontation with the mugger. What had she been
thinking? “That was really stupid. All I ended up doing was getting myself shot.”
“No,” Shazam countered. “The man you stepped in to save now lives because of your sacrifice.”
His choice of words caused a chill to dart up her spine. “S-sacrifice? Then…I
am dead?”
“You were on the precipice of death,” The Wizard corrected her. “I healed your wounds and brought you here before your life could fade entirely.”
Reaching down to run her fingers across where she remembered being shot, Karen averted her eyes from Shazam. “Um…thanks, then. I guess I owe you one.”
Mind you, her gratitude was somewhat tempered by the fact that she wouldn’t have been in that alleyway to begin with if not for his little ghost trick. Then again, that old man would have probably died if she had just gone home.
Gone home…
“Oh crap,” Karen yelped, “How long have I been here? I need to get home before dad gets back!”
“Fear not,” he gently squeezed her shoulder with a weathered hand, Karen having lost her initial aversion to the strange old coot, “time within the Rock of Eternity flows as I see fit. The world outside remains precisely as you left it.”
Her eyes widened at this, her brain taking a moment to fully process what he’d just said. “So wait, you can
stop time? And I’m going inherit those powers?”
Okay, she might just be starting to low-key love all of this magic crap.
“By greatly speeding the passage of time within the Rock of Eternity, the mortal plane will be seen to stand still,” Shazam explained. “But you will learn all of this in time. My ten thousand year reign is at last at its end.”
Pointing his staff directly at her, Karen didn’t even have time to scream before she was struck with a blinding flash of light. Staring down in horrified silence as electrical currents coursed through her body, her terror-stricken expression gradually settled when she realized that it didn’t hurt. Rather, in that moment, she felt
incredible.“Savage...” She whispered, staring at her hands.
“It is done,” The Wizard slumped forward, his once golden staff crumbling into dust.
Rushing forward to catch him before he could fully collapse, Karen quickly wrapped his arm over her shoulder. “Woah, take it easy! You look…well, even worse than you did before.”
“The power is yours…” He coughed, his form limp against her. “You need but speak my name with the intent to wield it, and you will become the new guardian of eternity...Lady Arcana. Yes...that is the name the power has drawn forth from your heart...”
His face was going grey at this point, and Karen could feel herself starting to panic again. “Y-you really are looking bad. We need to get you some kind of help or—“
“My time is over,” he interrupted her. “This new age of magic is
yours. Protect the Earth and its people…they…”
Karen could only watch helplessly as Shazam’s body withered and became dust just as his staff had moments earlier. Before she could even register that she had just had someone die in her arms, she was once again swallowed by a blinding light.
~
The Wedge; 3:55“…Guh!” Karen’s eyes shot open with a desperate gasp, the feeling of the cold gravel beneath her a familiar sensation.
“Stay with me, little girl,” the old man from the alley gently cradled her head. “I’ll call an ambulance, so just hold on!”
She could see the familiar grey sky above, could smell the burning rubber in the air. The wall graffiti of a bipedal moose jacking off onto a police cruiser completed the package. She was back in
The Wedge.
Had that all been in her head? A fever dream after she was shot?
She quickly reached down to feel where she recalled the bullet striking her.
“Don’t touch it!” The old man snapped, trying to push her hand away.
“…There’s nothing there,” Karen muttered. “It
was real...”
She began to laugh, much to the geezer’s apparent concern. Pushing herself up off the ground chilled ground, she broke into a full on cackle. “This is a hundo-effin’-p happening!”
“P-please, you need to lay back down, you’re—“
“I’m fine,” Karen cut him off, reaching down to lift up her shirt. “See? No wound.”
Seeing the old man’s eyes widen into saucers was pretty funny, but she couldn’t really blame him. She would’ve probably reacted the same way in his shoes. Since he seemed at a loss for words in that moment, she took that as an opportunity to pick her backpack up off the ground and start walking away.
“W-w-wait, don’t you want to at least—“
“Stay outta trouble, old man,” Karen waved to him over her shoulder. “The Wedge can be a
really strange place.”
~
Home; 4:22“Expelliarmus!” She jabbed her finger towards the stuffed bear on her bed to no effect. “Damn it.”
For most of the fifteen minutes she had been home, Karen had been giving her newfound magic powers a go. Which is to say she had been posing like an idiot while shouting random TV and movie spells. None of them had yet to work.
She
had replaced her bloodied shirt with a clean one by this point, and stuffed it in the washer. The last thing she needed right now was her dad seeing
that. Furthermore, she had removed the patches from the nurse’s office to see that all her scratches had been healed as well! Did that mean there was some kind of healing spell she could use?
“Hmm,” Karen scratched at her chin in thought. “Wait, he said I had to
do something first to actually use magic, didn’t he? What was it?”
“You need to speak his name with the intent to transform,” Samantha explained while lazily slouched across the dresser in Karen's room.
“Oh right!” Karen snapped her fingers. “Thanks, Sam!”
…
Samantha. Samantha the
cat. They had found her a couple of years ago when she was just a kitten who had been abandoned in the gutter outside their house. She was moody, and ate like a pig despite never gaining much weight. Still, she was a unique part of their family. Unique in that she was a cat and didn’t talk what the actual fuck.
“S-Sam, you talked!” Karen stammered, backing up into her dressing mirror. “Why? Since when?!”
“Since always,” Samantha replied, leaping down to the floor. “I could
always talk, I was just ordered to stay silent until now.”
Staring down at her once belovedly silent furbaby, Karen shook her head. “Ordered by who—no, that Wizard?!”
“Shazam, yes,” Samantha confirmed her suspicions. “He has been observing you—and ten other ‘candidates’—for the past two years. I was to integrate with your family and offer you guidance should you be chosen…which you were. So hi!”
Just when she thought the day couldn’t
possibly get more screwy, her effin’ cat turned out to be some sort of talking magical spy! She had confided things to her that she wouldn’t dare tell
anyone else, under the pretense that she was, y’know, just a
cat!
“I know this must be a lot to take in,” Samantha started.
“Aw, nah fam, we tight!” Karen threw her hands up in exasperation. “Thanks for letting me babble on like a
moron for the past two years, thinking you couldn’t understand how pathetic I was being.”
“Karen—“
“Don’t ‘Karen’ me! What were you planning to do if I
hadn’t been chosen? Just run away without a word?” She stared at the cat accusingly.
Samantha lowered her head. “Whether I stayed or not would have been my choice to make. That was a part of my deal with him. Personally, I would have chosen to stay.”
Karen scoffed at this. “Yeah? Why’s that? The free food?”
"Because while it started as something that was forced upon me, I came to regard you and your father as family,” Samantha looked back up at her.
Clenching her jaw at this, Karen glanced away. “Family doesn’t keep secrets from one another.”
“So do you plan on telling your father about everything that happened, then?”
Karen froze at this.
No.
No way was she going to tell him
anything about today. He could barely handle the stress of his job as it was. That’s why she hid her bloody shirt. She had never even considered telling him as a possibility.
Slowly turning to face Samantha again, Karen still carried a frown on her face. “…I just say that old Wizard’s name, then?”
“With the intent to transform, yes,” Sam confirmed.
“Fine,” Karen pursed her lips. Facing the dressing mirror, she drew a long breath.
It happened too quickly for her to properly perceive. That same flash of light that the Wizard’s staff had shot into her once again washed over body with a thunderous crack. When she was once again able to see in front of her,
the mirror no longer reflected Karen Hernandez.“Wha...but...I’m...I’m
big,” Karen noted, easily able to tell she was taller than before. But that was the least of her changes. “I’m
snatched!”“And you can fly,” Samantha added.
Lightning perpetually coursed through her new body, and she could literally
feel the power surging in her muscles. It was like an Adrenalin rush multiplied by a thousand, and in that moment she felt as if she could literally do
anything.
“I feel like a Goddess,” she blurted out, only to blink in surprise at her own words. “Erm, okay, narcissist AF, Karen.”
Samantha released a breathy snicker at this. “That feeling isn’t without reason. You have the might of six Gods running through you right now.”
“Six?! S-so what, am I like, possessed?” Karen stared in dumbfounded awe at the black cat.
“No. You are in complete control of your faculties. It is merely their powers that have been copied onto you, just as it was with the Wizard,” Samantha explained.
Staring at her hands again for a moment, she watched the currents of electricity dance between her fingertips. Turning to look at Samantha over her shoulder, Karen grinned. “Which Gods?”
~
4:48, The Wedge, Spring GroveSamantha had suggested she wait before putting her powers to the test. Said she needed training, experience with using them.
Karen kind of understood her point after a failed attempt at flying. Said attempt had ended with her taking a face-dive into the brick wall of the alley behind her house, with the wall coming out far worse for it.
So maybe flying
could wait...
But
come on! How could she
not at least pay a visit to the guy who shot her? It wasn’t like she was going to badly hurt him or anything, just scare him into thinking twice before he tried to mug someone again.
She recognized his colors. He was one of the
Spring Grove Boys.
She had never entered
Spring Grove herself before, so this area was unfamiliar to her.
Her outfit would naturally make her stick out in
The Wedge, or well, anywhere, really…so to remedy that, she had taken one of her mother’s
old hooded long coats. It was in-season, and so it made her look mostly normal…though the bust and hips were really tight, while the waist was loose.
Sorry, mom.
An unfamiliar young woman walking alone in Spring Grove was likely to find only the very worst kind of trouble. It was something Karen would never even think to do before today. But now things were different. Now she felt
untouchable.
The hard part was finding the mugger. He could be anywhere in this rundown neighborhood. She didn’t even have a name, but she
could at least recall his face. To a slightly disturbing degree, in fact, as if she was seeing a photograph of him in her mind. Apparently that was one of the abilities given to her by the goddess Mnemosyne
Maybe asking someone was the best solution, one of the Spring Grove Boys.
That was a
lot easier to do, after all: she just had to follow the sound of the music.
Indeed, soon enough she was standing in the driveway of a ramshackle house with three members of SGB huddled around an Audi. It didn’t take long for them to notice her.
“Damn,” one member of the trio stood, eyeing her from head to toe. “Haven’t seen
you ‘round here before, baby. You lost?”
“Nah, I’m looking for someone,” Karen explained.
“Well you found ‘em,” he grinned, sliding an arm around her waist.
Suppressing her unease, she continued. “He has stringy blond hair, green eyes, scar on his left cheek. You seen him?”
“Baby, don’t worry about him,” his hand slid down to her hip, his two friends now sharing his lurid smile. “We got all you need right here.”
Karen finally smirked at this, her eyes shifting to the Audi. “Is that
your car?”
“Ayy, fuck yeah it is. You wanna go for a ride?” His face seemed to glow with excitement at her apparent show of interest.
“No,” she replied, smashing her open palm down onto the hood. The Audi was immediately slammed down into the pavement of the driveway, three of its wheels popping off and rolling to the side. For a brief moment the car alarm went off, only to quickly die with a defeated groan.
“What the fuck?!” The thug staggered away from her, reaching into his over shirt pocket for a gun.
Lashing out to seize the pistol before he could even properly aim it, she crushed the cylinder and any bullets inside as if they were made of thin paper. Releasing his grip on the weapon with a scream, he turned to flee only for her to grasp the back of his shirt and throw him to the pavement.
Placing her foot on top of his chest to keep him from moving, she narrowed her eyes at him. “Where is he?”
“You fuckin’ bitch!” One of his friends came up from behind her, smashing a wooden bat over her head. Turning to glare at him, she simply raised her hand and gave him a slight smack across the face. Well, it felt slight to
her at least.
The resulting crack was reminiscent of a gunshot, the thug spiraling through the air and into the side of the house, caving in the vinyl siding before falling to the ground. A small pool of blood began swelling beneath his face, causing Karen’s heart to drop into her stomach.
“I—“ Karen’s jaw fell slack. “I didn’t mean to hit him that hard...”
The remaining gangster was already running down the street, paying no mind to the fate of his pals, and leaving her alone with the man she still had trapped underfoot.
“H-hey, be cool sis, don’t hurt me!” He held his hands out to the side. “T-that guy you were talking about, his name’s Lenny Wilkes, but everybody calls him
‘Scabs’ because he’s got—“ he seemed to think better of continuing that line of conversation, “well, that’s what we call em’.”
Lifting her foot from his chest, Karen quickly turned without another word to check on the man she had struck. Placing a pair of fingers to his neck, she was thankfully able to feel a pulse. Gently picking him up off the ground, the other thug looked on in confusion but dared not offer a word of protest as she left with his friend.
~
Home; 5:28“So you didn’t find him?” Samantha questioned her, the cat’s tail wrapping around her body as she sat on the kitchen floor.
Karen shook her head. “I know his name, but...well, after I ended up hurting that guy, I just focused on getting him to the hospital. I’m honestly just glad I didn’t end up
killing someone.”
“That’s why I said you needed
training, Karen,” Samantha admonished her. She then exhaled, a strange motion to see from a cat. “Well, hopefully you’ll listen to me now. That
is why I’m here, after all, to help you learn how to wield your powers.”
Resting her face on one hand, Karen—having returned to her normal self—nodded slowly. “Fine, alright. I guess since I’m Sailor Moon now, I should listen to my cat.”
“Good,” Sam smiled...or at least Karen got the impression she was. Her mouth didn’t really work like that. “We’ll start tomorrow. After your day, you could really use a rest.”
Karen snickered at this, nodding. “RT.”
Wait. Wasn’t there something she was forgetting?
“Aw, crap! I haven’t even gotten
started on supper! Dad’ll be home in less than half an hour!”
~
The month of November would then pass in apparent silence, with the world—on the surface—continuing with its mundane existence. But to those attuned to the forces of magic, they would have already noticed a dramatic change.
The laylines had been flooded with arcane energies once more. Spells that once took days or even months of preparation could now be cast in moments by those possessing the correct skills. The Magi, whose magic worked through the subtle manipulation of the trace amounts of magic left in the world around them, would find that their unique abilities now granted them a potential that far outstripped any firearm.
And within the shadows, old and horrible things not seen since time immemorial began to stir...their intent for mankind yet unknown.
