Modern Day Fantasy

Rose arrived at the dumpy little apartment building and hurried upstairs so she might have time to write Amy a quick report of the night's events. Amy's written reply would always be (Rose could recite it verbatim fromt he number of times she'd read it) "While I respect your choices and do not object to you using my body, I do not wish to be informed of any illegal activities you partake in."

Ya, right. She'd write that, but Rose knew Amy secretly enjoyed every single little detail of every single little note. Rose was inside her head after all; it was pretty hard to keep a secret from someone inside of you. Rose sat down with a pen and paper and began to write:

Amy-

Kicked ass tonight! First rescued a homeless Alter from a crazed, killer Alter. She was blowing shit up left and right- could've blown me to bits! Bashed her over the head with a computer monitor, hahaha! Met up with Aslan (guy from work) and bought the homeless guy some food (owe you $10.50!!!). Would write more, but it's 4:53 A.M. and I promised.

-Rose

Okay, so maybe she wasn't exactly "crazed" or "killer", but it sure sounded cooler that way. Rose left the note on the little table Amy ate at and hurried off to her bed to return her body. Though Rose could exchange places with Amy at virtually any time, Amy preferred to wake up in bed rather than at the table. In a brief moment, Amy's bright, dyed pink hair lay upon the pillow where Rose's blonde locks had been. A new pair of eyes flittered open, and a slightly smaller, more delicate hand turned off the blaring alarm.

Amy yawned and pulled herself wearily out of bed. She bathed, brushed her hair, got dressed, and prepared for her day as slowly as she could without being late. As she started to walk out the door, she feigned a little gasp and pretended as though she ahd only just remembered Rose's note. This little facade had become a daily ritual for her. She tried to appear as though she couldn't care less about Rose's notes, tried to act like it was last thing on her mind, but it fooled neither her nor her Alter. She grabbed the note and read it out of her peripheral vision on the way to the trash.

Amy left her building and began her walk to school in the cool morning air, her mind buzzing with images of Madame Rose battling murderous Alters.

The dark-haired youth meandered mostly through alleyways, only occasionally having to take the street. The city was quietest at this hour. Though plenty of the population was still out and about, most were not morning people, and all the hoodlums and hooligans had by now gone to bed. Though the relative quiet was nice, the steadily increasing daylight was not. Matt only seemed to get sleepier and sleepier with every step, while his dark passenger was buzzing around the back of his head like an angry bee in a jar.

He encountered no trouble along the way. He passed some promising-looking garbage here and there, but for him it was much too late for dinner and much too early for breakfast. He was too tired to collect food in a bag for later and drag it along with him.

Finally, he made it to the warehouse he had slept in the day before. It was as good as abandoned; though there were crates inside, no one had touched them in months. He crouched by the truck entrance where there was a small hole at the bottom. He stuck his fingers through the opening and pulled the door up just enough to crawl under. The darkness inside was a relief from the growing daylight, but he had to get to the park near where he had come from so that he wouldn't be late meeting Rose in the evening. Shuffling to a little fort he had constructed with crates, he grabbed his Legos blanket from inside the fort and then crawled back out of the warehouse with it, pulling the door down closed behind him. He wrapped his blanket around himself and gave a soft sigh. Now for the trip back. He glanced up at the sky, having to squint to do so. It didn't look like it was going to be an overcast day.

Don woke up and stretched. He felt oddly well rested, which happened from time to time. Usually when it did, it means that Aslan had been out for most of the night. This didn't make much sense to Don, but he didn't argue, he liked the extra sleep. Don checked his computer for a note, and one was indeed there from Aslan. He always used some weird font that Don could never find, and wrote with the most perfect grammar, which annoyed Don. But he had grown used to it, as he had grown used to most of the things Aslan did. Don read over the note, which went in brief detail about what he had done last night. He tried not to think about the last sentence, as he wasn't sure what Aslan meant by it. What did Don do that was special?

Why did you have to kill the man stealing the purse? thought Don. He knew that Aslan could hear him, but Aslan couldn't reply. Sometimes he would answer Don's thoughts in his nightly notes. He walked out of his room, and got ready to make breakfast.

Waiting for a reply, Henri pocketed the cellphone and began down to Mabel's apartment. She flicked Rose's hat around her hands, observing what she thought was a horrible fashion sense, then letting a smile crack her lips as she put it on. "Sure is wacky," She sighed as she stepped through the dark and empty halls of the apartment building. Making her way into Mabel's tiny living room, she plopped down on the couch and ran her fingers through her hair. Her eyes were drifting lazily across a pile of old magazines and comics on the coffee table, but her vision was elsewhere- it was gliding over the dawning city. Humans, waking up for the day ahead, and soon Mabel would be too. She would go about her day as normal, completely oblivious to all of the nightlife and battle that had taken place just hours before...

Henri was viciously jealous of Cain. Not only was his human fully aware of him, they even communicated freely and helped one another. Meanwhile Henri's human couldn't even come to turns with what she did... She wanted that sort of bond with her other self... She wanted Mabel to know and think about her. Shuffling through the pile of miscellaneous objects on the small table, Henri lifted Mabel's small digital camera and turned it around to point at herself. Pressing down the button, she took a single picture and, clasping the camera close to her, slowly began drifting to sleep.

Isaac stood up and looked at the clock. It was eight o'clock in the morning.

"Well, it seems I have pulled another all nighter. I suppose some coffee will do me well." He sighed as he left the apartment. As usual, he would need to go down the street to the local coffee shop. When he stepped outside, he squinted his eyes at the bright light of the sun. "Ugh..." Cain sighed.

"Damn...You look like a drunkard with a hangover." He commented.

"Shut up idiot. It's because of you that I look like this..."Isaac said in a grumpy tone.

"It wasn't me that forced you to stay up all night playing computer whiz..." He said. Isaac sighed, and was happy to see the coffee shop up ahead. He entered it and ordered a small black coffee. When he received it he took a seat outside, and pulled out a small personal computer, scanning over the Novo Ruina Project.

"To think, that Regen Corp. was developing something like this...It makes me curious just how much they know about the truth of Alters." Isaac said, reading over the project data. "A weapon to forcibly remove an Alter from a human, interesting..."

"You think that it all ends as smoothly as that? Get real, think about it. A Alter and their human share a psyical and a psychological bond. If you try to separate them like that..." Cain started.

"You would...kill one or both...What the hell could they be planning with something like this?" Isaac stared at his coffee, unsure the answer. He sat there, continuing to drink his coffee, thinking about the matter at hand.

Don crossed into the kitchen, and turned on the oven. He felt like making pancakes today, mainly for John. Pancakes were his favorite breakfast food, Don could care less about them. Don opened the pantry, and searched for the pancake mix. There was all kinds of stuff in the pantry. Mac and cheese, fruit, baseball cards, and a picture. Don saw it almost everyday, it was a picture of Jadis. He felt an uneasy pain, a pain that didn't feel like it was from himself. Don looked at the picture, and stroked her blond hair as if she was there with him.

The slamming of a door behind Don snapped him out of his haze. Don turned around and saw John, dressed in the same dirty jeans and orange shirt that he had worn the night before. I really need to get him new clothes... "Hi, Don," said John with a wave. His vibrant blue eyes lit under the light as he tossed his long, dark brown hair away from his eyes.

Don put the picture back in the pantry, and found the pancake mix. "Hey, John," said Don.

"Making pancakes?" said John with a wide grin, grabbing an apple off of the counter.

"I knew you'd be happy," said Don.

Aslan had found John on the streets two months ago, and brought him to Don's house...without Don's permission. Aslan said that it was the "right thing to do" and that he felt something special in John. Don was rather angry at first, but he kept John off of the streets, and the two grew a sort of father-son relationship, even though John was only five years younger than Don. However, John never told Don anything about his life, except that his parents had kicked him out. So Don figured that John was a new soul, in a sense.

John opened up all the windows, like he usually did. The sun seemed a bit dimmer than usual today. Hopefully it just hadn't come out of the sky yet.

Mabel's eyes slowly blinked open, gazing toward the ceiling with wide green attention. She touched her hand to her cheek, feeling a damp couple of drops there. "Was I... crying?" She muttered aloud, sitting up as her camera clinked to the floor. Looking around, she realized she had been moved into her small living room. It wasn't too big of a startle, but at least a little unsettling. "Is it too much to ask, to wake up in my own bed?" She lashed out at the nobody there, shaking her head some as she turned and lowered her feet to the floor. Glancing down at the camera, she picked it up and observed it for a minute, before quickly dismissing it and walking into her room.

On her way she almost tripped over something, looking down to find a white and red-ribbon'd top-hat. ~What? Please don't tell me this belongs to...~ The thought of her other self walking around in such a flamboyant item... As Mabel scooped it up into her hands, she looked at it closer, mumbling "An-i-me?" with a wide smile spreading across her lips. With that notion she practically skipped into her bedroom, toting the hat along with her until she stopped dead in her tracks. "The gang violence paper!" She spat out, running to her computer and nearly crashing into the chair as she did.

It was her average school day- silent and boring. Amy sighed heavily with relief as she finally left for the day. To make matters worse, she could feel Rose almost like a headache, like she was dancing around her head trying to get out. It was clear she was anxious, which usually meant she had some sort of business with her organization that night. She didn't fully understand (nor did she really want to) what exactly it was Rose was fighting for, and she didn't understand on any level why meetings with her boss made her so nervous. Regardless, the effects of Rose's anxiety trickled down into Amy's life and hindered her as she attempted to work on an English paper.

"What on Earth are you doing in there?" she thought, struggling to concentrate. Eventually she gave up on the entire essay- it was almost 5:00 anyway. She closed her eyes and let Rose take over her body.

"Finally," Rose muttered aloud. She quickly dressed in her standard outfit (minus the hat) and hurried out the door to where she'd planned to meet Matt. As she walked, she wondered if he were as nervous about Nemesis meetings as she was. He seemed so relaxed about everything, except maybe loud noises... but surely even someone like him was intimidated by Silvance's power. Rose knew his eight-foot radius like the back of her hand.

The walk to his intended park was uneventful. By the time he got there the sun was high enough to beam brightly down on him, and people were out and about less sleepily than earlier. It made his heart race a little, passing people chatting with each other and with cell phones as they walked. He held his Lego blanket tightly around him as if in the hopes of blocking the sun and the city out. It was so bright out... His dark passenger seemed to writhe in his skull like a burning snake, very unhappy with the daylight, giving Matt a headache.

Making it to the park near where he would meet Rose the next night, he found his cluster of bushes, pushing his way through them to the small clearing inside where he would be well hidden. Wrapped in his blanket, he collapsed there and curled up. He pulled the blanket over his head to block out the sunlight as best he could and was asleep in no time. He would remain asleep there until sunset - if not later, considering he had been up so long into the day.
He was vaguely aware of a Nemesis meeting his Alter reminded him of just before he fell asleep, but didn't much care if he happened to be late to it. The leader's power was not lethal to Matt's dark passenger as it was to most people - but it was a very considerable inconvenience he worked hard to avoid, though one that he could eventually recover from nonetheless. But Matt wasn't worried about promptness. If his Alter was concerned enough to take over and get them to the meeting in time, that was up to him.

Moriko sat in class and frowned looking outside, a collage student at her age. She sighed softly and looked back to the teacher her hair falling in her eyes. She seemed quiet as usuall taking notes and reading from one of her books. The voice in her head, Mana was talking to her about the current math course how it seemed to make no sense. Moriko answered her Alter with the answer, how long had she known about herself? For almost a year now, since Aegis recruited her. She played with a bell on her shirt looking at the window again seeming to space off, she had already done the notes, and soon class was over. Not a moment to soon. She bolted out of the room before many people noticed and she ran down the hall and out of the building altogether. She had her kendo stuff with her so it was obvious where she was going. She skidded to a stop infront of the dojo she attended and stepped inside. "Kiseki-senpai, I'm here." She said softly now standing before a striking young woman.

Pale skin and long black hair tied up in a ponytail, wearing kendo pads and Hakama already. She nodded to Moriko with a soft smile. Haruka Kiseki, With the alter Bells. She sighed softly and watched Moriko run into the dressing room to change, practice always started with streching and Kendo, then martial arts and then Kyudo. "Ok so start streching." She said as Moriko stepped back into the room, looking adorable in her pads and Hakama. The other students were mostly boys and older girls who thought she was just a doll. One of the older girls was Moriko's friend, and when Moriko spent time over her house the girl dressed Mori up in all sorts of dresses.

After a bit Moriko started heading home but stopped in the park, she was holding her violin case infront of her, she remembered the first part to a Dir En grey song and took her violin out and played the first part to "Cage." Then she stopped and started playing a ciolin coposition called "Ave Maria." She smiled her emotions expressed through every note, it was obvious she loved music and the violin. Mana seemed at ease when music was played to, so the Normal side, and the Alter side were more like partners then anything.