I suppose I forgot to turn my alarm on last night again, because it was not what awoke me the next morning.
"Wake up. Sinead Ninebark of the North Forest Clan, wake up!" I heard a now familiar female voice say.
Suddenly, I sat, bolt upright in my bed, my open eyes looking at the alarm clock on my bedside table. 6:00am, the blue numbers on the clock glowed in the early morning light filtering through the cracks in the curtains.
"Time to get moving." I thought to myself, as I left my bed and started towards the bathroom.
With a yawn, I turned on the bathroom light. After using the toilet and washing my hands, I found my hair brush and started working on the tangled rats' nest that my hair had become overnight, as I was too lazy the night before to put it in a protective hairstyle.
I let out a frustrated sigh of annoyance at my past self for this oversight, while simultaneously trying to remember the location of my running shoes and keys. I attempted to braid my hair as quickly as I could, keeping in mind I wasn't even fully awake yet.
At least I didn't have to operate a motor vehicle or anything that really required acute brain capacity. At least not until a while from now, and by then, I would be fully awake. I washed my face and put on some deodorant.
I hurried back to my room, and picked out a sports bra, some underwear, a pair of running socks, an exercise tank and black exercise capris. I quickly got dressed, opened the curtains on my bedroom window and disconnected my cell phone from its charger.
Then leaving my room, I went down the stairs and to the kitchen. I poured myself a small glass of water, that I chugged and grabbed a small black cloth bag off the back of a kitchen chair.
I looked in the bag. There was an extra hair elastic and a plastic baggy with two maple syrup candies. I filled up my water bottle and put it in the bag. I took the bag to the front hall with me. I found my wallet and it, along with my cell phone were added to the bag's contents.
I found my running shoes in the closet and put them on. My keys were beside my sunglasses case on a small table by the front door. Sunglasses went on my face, and the case went- you guessed it- in the bag.
I slung the bag over my shoulder, unlocked the front door, left the house and used my keys to lock it behind me. The keys were the final thing to join all the other objects in the bag.
I set the bag down on the porch stoop and did some quick stretching. That done, I took a deep breath, and concentrated on finding a power source. It only took a minute, then I was able to levitate the bag along beside me and use a reality distortion spell so that it couldn't be seen.
The thing was, the bag was there; only the most powerful could make something truly invisible. But the way the spell worked, it made it so the bag was not visible as what it really was.
Seeing a bag levitating with me as I travelled on a public street would probably freak out any human. So instead, the bag was seen as what the viewer wanted to see or as whatever made sense in the given situation.
The bag may appear as a meandering butterfly to one person, a leaf blowing in the wind to a second, or a scrap of paper in the breeze to a third. The only ones who could see through my spell were those with magic or non-human blood.
There was no point deceiving any of them; no reason to waste talent or energy on hiding a bag that carried no more than the average items someone would take to the gym.
Now that I was ready, I jogged down the drive and started my way from the subdivision. My enchanted bag trailed in my wake. It was not long before I turned in the opposite direction of the heart of the city, towards the outskirts.
Here, the more rural roads were much more peaceful for running along. Sure, once in a while some idiot would honk a car horn at you, but mostly it was, sky, earth, birds, the occasional amphibian in the form of frog or toad and the slightly fresher air.
The route I took would lead me past a few farms that had cattle or horses. I would always smile and wave at them. The destination I ran for was a national park. It was situated about 20km from where I lived, give or take.
I like to run, it gives me a sense of freedom, like if I ever had bad problems, I could just get up and run and run, until I was so far away that they didn't matter anymore.
Although I knew that could never happen, it gave me a small sense of psychological security. I also like to run because it makes me feel powerful, confident and capable. I guess you could say that running is my exercise high of choice, so to speak.
By the time I reach the outer boundary of the national park, I feel a little tired, but also very alive.
I don't run all the way to the main entrance, but avoid it, like I do every other time I come here. I find a hole in the bushes that marks my hidden entrance to the park. I walk along my secret foot path until it joins a main hiking trail.
Off to my right, there is a rustling in the bushes.
I hear a high pitched, screechy fox whine. As I peer into the low lying shrubbery, I can see him rolling around on his back, belly up, talking non-stop while his tail moved like it had a life of its own. I hoped the vegetation could survive his antics.
"Hi!" I said to him. "I know what you want. But we need to keep moving. I was running a minute ago, and it is not good for my muscles to stop suddenly. Are you coming?"
His answer was to jump up, come over to me and continue talking to me. As we fast walked down the path, I told him about how we ran out of eggs and no one had been to the store, so there was no hard boiled egg. But that meant I would bring two next time just to make it up to him.