When Olive opened her eyes again she wasn't where she wanted to be.
Relatively that would be in Jason's arms with a nice but rather commonly fantasised beach under them.
But when she opened her eyes she was bitterly disappointed, completely disappointed.
But also completely and utterly, scared.
That's because she had been kidnapped. The person who had kidnapped her looked like some kind of a vampire imitations' expert but look into his pearly whites and the fact that she had absolutely, no way of getting out of the complicated tying of her hands and feet and you would see.
Now is not the time to be dicking around.
She was being lifted by him and she could see his fangs, enlarged and engorged more than she would have thought vampires would have had.
'Help!' she screamed.
She was hit with something blunt.
That was her last conscious thought before she was, well, unconscious.
---------------
It was pitch black when Tar opened her eyes and she instantly knew that all was not well.
There were a lot of things to contribute to that but the only thing she was conscious about was that weird feeling underneath her skin. Like shivers except it went on a bodily scale that started from her head and ended in her nails. It was funny when it reached her foot and finger nails, kind of like they were a body part that went asleep but were still able to feel the straining, pulsing, shivering that was rebounding in her body.
Her feet and back, the only parts of her to be touching the rough ground under her felt slightly wet, that kind of wet you feel when you either been using too much pressure on them during your sleep or you wet yourself in a gravity-less space.
She did not ask where she was, she did not try to wonder either and she showed no signs of panic. There was no point. Frankly she had expected something like this in her life, she knew about the chances that one had to choose as they grew.
Tars had always been unique with her way of thinking; she had always been a pessimist at heart, always expecting things that were different from what she lived in. But she only had a unique mind because she had an avid imagination. She was only a pessimist to satisfy her expectancy. She only expected things to be different because the world was never how one thought of it.
She be lying if she said that she hadn't expected Zeal to feel as she did and she be lying if she said that she hadn't expected herself to fall for him either. To say that the latter had a better chance in her mind would be true though but she had already considered the probability of Zeal falling for her before she thought of her falling for him. Her mind liked to race on with opportunities and years of fantasy books and a side order of the always unexpected contents of Terry Pratchett novels had taught her the basics of what she should expect, not the flying horses or dancing ponies but the ordinary things in the world to happen.
Liz losing her job, Olive and Regina splitting, Tars using work as a means of escape and achieving solitude in the future, all very simple to guess as Liz was Liz, Olive was an angel, Regina was not and the fact that Tars wasn't made to settle with actual humans. But they were only possible to think about without flinching when one has already expected a lot of endings in all the books she read due to experience. Fantasy books were of course not her only morning with coffee addiction, there were thrillers, horrors, mystery, even romance though for the love of the almighty god that probably didn't exist, she didn't know why. She had mostly read them at the age of seven and ten, the years in which she was still testing out the boundaries of her interest (thrillers had too many unlikely outcomes, horrors didn't affect one much as she was able to sleep alone every single time, mystery wasn't really much of one when one had read the plot and the first five pages. For the love of god she still had not understood why she chose romances in the first place; the constant reverse harems, most not getting over it when the results are out and the tall, long, lean stranger was chosen, the handsome people that always had perfect bodies and made you fall into the delusional illusion of love, the girls that ate nothing, did nothing and thought of nothing.)
Her imagination was good, it was nice enough to ensure that she was nearing paranoid but not by a smidge. Something that would be impossible would be ruled out and something that was not just wasn't, her common sense ensured that.
But no one can really expect waking up alone and possibly kidnapped. Tars could admit to that at least, despite her pride in being near paranoid enough to be smarter than the norm. That is why Sloth was there.
Sloth looked out into the darkness around her and closed her eyes before opening them again as quick as she could. She did not tremble, did not cry and did not try to stand, considering the darkness it would be absolutely useless if she did. The Tars inside of her still wondered how exactly Sloth came to be.
Sloth did not care enough to get in trouble, she did not care enough to be scared, perhaps because there was the premonition that everything would be okay, it had to be otherwise she wouldn't even try. In the darkness there was no answer for that and even if there was, she had to get it herself and that was the reason she would try; to see if she could at all. Sloth was always simple enough with her needs. Now, she needed light, which was quite ironic because she would be quite comfortable in the dark.
But inconveniency was not much appreciated, especially in a possible kidnap.
And then, as if she was a celestial being, her thought born light.
A play on words on 'let there be light' indeed but somehow, she didn't even need to say it.
Tars was still not responding much to light though and that would be because the source of the light was slowly destroying her common sense.
'What are you?' she asked the thing in front of her.
The thing reminded her of one of the creatures inside an anime she saw once. It was Princess Mononoke or something and in one of the scenes, there were these creatures sitting on a tree. IT was small and slightly sinister looking with pale, chalky texture for its skin and wide, pupil-less, dark, blue eyes. It had no nose to speak off and Tars had the premonition that the folds on its cheeks weren't folds at all, but the corner of its mouth. The corners extended to the area five inches under the ears. Its ears were like one of a rabbit but smaller and more pointed and it had sophisticated curve to it. It was smaller than a cat but rather long, with a body that appeared as seamless as a jar made of china.
Small shoulders supported a long neck that stretched out delicately to support the head and the body seemed to be shrunk, not in terms of height but rather in thickness as it extended down until tiny, stick-like, toe-less like a chopstick feet watched her.
'How the hell do you balance?' she asked him in confusion.
The creature laughed, mouth opening widely, grotesquely but still, without any intention of harm.
She looked down again and found that it was not standing on the ground at all. The ground consisted of a smooth, polished front of rock with a few bits of dust and hovering above it was the creature.
She closed her eyes from the sudden glare that it emanated as it laughed and was surprised to see that despite that, she could still see the glowing. In fact, it was a lot clearer when she closed her eyes. It seemed that it was bright enough to go beyond her eyelids. The creature was lot more defined behind her lids, it was not at all white but rather transparent with a swirling white burst of colour inside of it that made it seem like so. It had been gently glowing when she first saw it and steadily continued to grow with light until she was nearly blinded. Its blue eyes seemed to be mocking her as Tars realised that the glowing was not from the body itself but the veins that seemed to be sucked from the ground and into the creature. When she felt the cooking of her hair she squinted her eyes shut and held her hands in front of her.
'That's enough.' Someone said and instantly the light stopped.
Tars opened her eyes and was very much disturbed that she was not alone after all; in fact, the things she had mistaken for darkness were just creatures that were not glowing. Now they were and in different colours and from mythical to hell if I know was how they were categorized inside Tars mind as she switched her view from one corner of her eye to another.
The left corner held a satyr and a snake the size of a truck with green scales and the other corner of her eye held a Pegasus in the colour of blue and two unidentified flying objects that seemed to have antenna's for eyes and mouths for arses… or so it seemed from first glance.
She snapped her eyes back to the front where the chopstick legged creature was grinning at her and beyond that… a unicorn hybrid with wings in the style of purple, same as the one on the right except without the blackish wings on its back or horn in the middle of its fore head.
Tars watched as the unicorn hybrid snorted and dissolved into purple gas before rebuilding itself into a purple woman with black hair and a unicorn horn in the middle of her forehead.
Tars looked up and saw that they were in a cave, a rather big one considering the size and distance of the stalactites hanging from the roof and glowing with what seemed to be fairy lights. She looked down again and classified the grinning chopstick legs as fairy.
'So, we gonna delve into the fantasy or…' asked Tars as she brushed herself off.