Something Strange
A Story Through Blog Posts
Chapter 1
What would happen if one moment you were doing everything you were supposed to and the next moment you found yourself suddenly nowhere near where you had been? What would happen if that place you ended up turned out to be right next to a child's bed? Exactly what sort of protocol was there in dealing with someone attacking you with a broom, a bat, a strange and unusual weapon as they screamed bloody murder and called you a burglar?
What would happen if the same exact scenario (with minor alterations) happened in multiple households at the stroke of midnight in one quiet little street?
Well, for Tristan Quicksilver, sitting in house number 13 and completely awake when he shouldn't be that was the exact kind of disturbance he saw in the force that fateful night. To be fair, though... in his case, he wasn't the one standing next to a child's bed. Tristan was that child in bed. One minute he was pretending to be asleep and the next he heard a thud. When he turned his light on, he found out there was a real live knight on the floor in his room.
Outside his window, he began hearing loud noises coming from all the neighbors' houses. He glanced at the knight. The guy was out like a burnt bulb and smelled like dog poo. Tristan looked out the window and gaped rather openly at what he saw. Various odd things were being chased out of the other houses on the block.
A witch flew out a window on a broom. A variety of sparkling lights flew out of a chimney. A few came back down only to spiral around and zip past Tristan's window leaving glitter and visions of fairies dancing in his head. "Wow..." Tristan gasped.
This was... going to be so cool! He had a knight on his floor. Sure, the guy smelled like stale beer and too much ladies' perfume, but there were fairies flying by his window and he could still hear the cackling of witches. And, okay, the neighbors seemed pretty upset - but this was awesome anyway.
Something Strange
A Story Through Blog Posts
Chapter 2
Tristan hovered over the knight as he woke up the next morning, slurping his orange juice noisily through his favorite blue swizzle straw. He had done his research and figured out who the knight was. Of course, that wasn’t too hard… Fairies, witches, princes, princesses, and all manner of crazy things had appeared in the neighborhood the night before. It was a memorable event, and so Tristan’s research amounted to grabbing the book from under his sheets and aiming the beam from his flashlight back and forth between the knight and the picture of the knight in the book he’d been reading until he determined that the knight could only be Black, a knight known more than anything for his many acts of getting in the way of various other knights and citizens on their quests.
Black, on the other hand, felt groggy and his vision swam as he struggled to focus on the odd shape above his face. He supposed it could be any of the women he’d gone to bed with the night before. Being labeled as evil certainly had its perks, because he was a hit with the ladies! But then, he also had a strange recollection of standing over a child’s bed for a moment. His vision finally cleared and he was quite disappointed to find it was indeed a child. The noise from the child’s mug of odd potion was as noisy as one of Merlin’s spells if it went wrong. The smell of it was worse than the noise.
“Hullo!” Tristan let his straw drop all the way to the bottom of the glass. If Black hadn’t woken sooner, Tristan had felt ready to go grab a stick of some sort and start poking him. “Do you speak my language? If you speak another language, there’s some really cute girls on my block that are bilingual.”
Black rolled to his front and pushed himself onto his knees, feeling dizzy with his hangover. He’d feel better as soon as he had a fat mug of ale. That always perked up his mornings. “In ordinary cases, I’d be all over stammering a few words of another language to meet those girls, but considering your age and use of the word cute, I’m left to think those girls aren’t my age.” Just Black’s luck, too.
“My mother is your age!” Tristan offered. “She’s single, too. Sort of.” Tristan had always wanted a father! How cool would it be if Black was his father?
Black wished the boy hadn’t offered up a puzzling comment like that. How could one be single—sort of? It was one of those things that made his hangover decide to point out a big, fat soft spot on the inside of his head, and then hammer on it a few times just to be sure it was really soft. “What do you mean?”
“You could call her a bar wench from one of your stories!” Tristan said. “Except you don’t want to actually call her that. That’d be a pretty big mistake. Just call her Elizabeth Quicksilver, or Miss Quicksilver. She’s always getting real mad if you use the wrong form of address. My teacher always uses the wrong form of address… so they don’t get along well, my mother and my teacher.” Tristan couldn’t even begin to describe how excited he was for this to happen. He felt like with the explosion of story-book characters, suddenly he might have that adventure he always dreamed about.
Black just wanted his headache to go away. “Do you have ale, kid?”
“It’s Tristan. My name. I don’t have ale, but I saw a magic hangover cure recipe on the television… Come on. I’ll make it for you.” Tristan thought for a moment and then decided, “But maybe take the armor off here. I’ll get you some clothes from Cecelia’s house and fill the bath-tub for you.”
Well, the situation could be worse, Black thought. If the kid had a magic cure to the headache, that would help. Of course slamming the door to the room shut as he ran out on feet that pounded the floor like drums didn’t help.
Something Strange
A Story Through Blog Posts
Chapter 3
Cecelia was decidedly not calm when she found someone looming over her bed in the morning. She let out a high pitched scream that was designed by nature to inform her father of something foul being afoot—and that he better come immediately because Cecelia was not against shattering glass in her terror.
The dim light from the window illuminated the screaming child in the bed and Red Hood knew she had to quickly silence the girl. However, the strange situation meant that she did not want to do anything too drastic. There Red was, standing over the bed of some young girl when not moments before, Red had been comfortably at home in the woods.
Cecelia scrambled away from the red woman when she reached for her. Her father wasn’t coming in, which certainly was not comforting. Of course, then Cecelia remembered that her father was away at his one-weekend-per-month with the National Guard. Cecelia’s mother wasn’t coming in because of who-knew-why. When all this was over, Cecelia determined she would have to figure out why her mother hadn’t come to investigate.
Red said hastily, “Please, child, hush! I am Red, and I am lost! Strange magicks have brought me here, and I fear for my safety if I am discovered.”
Cecelia let her screaming die down. The strange red woman had an even stranger accent. “There’s no such thing as magic. What’re you suggesting? You broke into my house and attacked me!” Cecelia wondered if there really was such a thing as magic… Tristan was always saying magic had to be real otherwise how would so many people from different corners of the globe be able to think so similarly that they could create many stories on the same subjects?
Red resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She really had not even come close to attacking the girl. However, she decided it was best to utilize every tool available to placate the child. “I am sorry, but you scared me as much as I startled you… Forgive me…”
Cecelia nervously bit her lip. This was all such a bad idea. Strange women didn’t appear in her bedroom via magic. How could they? Magic wasn’t a real thing! “Who are you? Like, who’re you supposed to be, I mean? You sound like a princess. Well, you sound like what Tristan says princesses sound like, if that even makes sense.”
“My mother called me Little Red, for she was Mama Red,” Red explained. “And this is not my world.” She added. “I no longer know where I am. Can you tell me where this is?”
“Oh… This is Rose Chocoo. It’s a private, gated community in Wisconsin. My father founded it when I was still in my mother’s stomach, and he gathered the best and brightest, to create a future against the impending zombie apocalypse. We’ll all be safe here inside the gates, as long as we don’t make any mistakes like in Resident Evil, or World War Z. But it really all depends on what the zombies are like—if they’re the fast kind, or the slow kind…” Cecelia was more than happy to have something to talk about that could bring things back to normal! Stranger or not, Red didn’t seem truly like she wanted to hurt Cecelia… right?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Something Strange © 2014 Jaimie Gross
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