"They did WHAT?" In a rather nice office, sitting at a rather nice desk, there was a sharp looking dark haired woman glaring purposefully into space, and she was beginning to have an extraordinarily bad day. "Yes of course I know which prophecy you're talking about, it's one of the first ones I ever did, but the thousand year event mark isn't until-" she flipped through a desk calendar the size and extradimensional complexity of which could make a NASA scientist cry, looked for a moment, and made an uncomfortable little startled noise. Yegads, how could she have missed that? "-until yesterday, obviously, but that was a good solid prophecy. All the niggling details that free will can have altered over the years are vague enough that it should all find a way to hold itself together perfectly well as long as the kid starts it off by-" There was an odd tension in the air that was almost a noise. The woman stopped and listened, then pounded one hand flat on the desk in outrage. "They did WHAT? They can't- It all should have... Stop, stop. I have to go see this for myself." She almost demanded to know who was in charge of this mess but stopped herself in time. Bad way to make it look like you've been paying attention to your own assignments, asking who's problem one is. "I'll handle it. Look, I know this thing inside and out, I've been waiting for it with my breath held for a millennium. I said I'll handle it." She stood calmly and waited until the tension faded and left the room feeling empty. Then she tore a book down from a shelf on the wall and sped out of the only door. For the moment that it was open there was a brief peek to the other side of something that was completely not a hallway, or even definite walls, and then the door fell shut. Dina, on the other hand, was having a nice afternoon. Or at least trying to. She sat on a bench at the local park with a pencil and sketchbook, enjoying the sun and trying to draw random bits of the scenery. Except when she let her mind wander her hand kept stubbornly slipping into drawing strange dark shapes that she was officially denying the existence of, and then the dusty dry smell of cement powder would sneak like a hallucination back into her sinuses and she would have to tear the paper out and start over. Stupid hand. Stupid nose. This is all your fault, the both of you. The crumpled balls of discarded drawings on the sidewalk by her sneakers were somehow accusing in their silence. She stepped on the nearest one. "This is all your fault." Dina looked up to see a complete stranger standing over her, glaring and frowning so deeply that it looked like the woman's thin face might crack. Dina dropped her pencil in surprise. "Excuse me?" "You little delinquent, do you have any idea the mess you've made?" "I'm not littering, I'll take the paper trash home and recycle it." The woman pressed a hand to her face and rolled her eyes skyward as if Dina was a complete idiot. "If only that were what I was talking about. You ruined the thousand year prophecy, girl. You broke the apocalypse." Dina opened her mouth to say 'I don't know what you're talking about', but only a guilty squeak came out instead. Stupid mouth. You're with the hand and the nose, aren't you. Traitor. She tried again. "I don't know what you're talking about, ma'am... I... I...." Dina blinked. "I broke the apocalypse?" "Yes, you bumbling idiot!" "...I'm sorry? I didn't know it was so fragile?" The woman raised an eyebrow. "I would slap you for being sarcastic if I wasn't so relieved you aren't gibbering hysterically and denying that you found anything strange." "Oh, get that a lot do you?" The woman ground her teeth together and briefly reconsidered her decision not to slap the girl. "Do you have any idea the time and effort it takes to set up something like this? It's been one thousand years since that monstrosity you saw was imprisoned. The descendant of the one who destroyed it was to be called to reclaim his ancestor's sword, releasing the demon once again into the world to take revenge on-" She had to stop then, because Dina was looking at her as if she were insane. The woman swelled up with irritation. "What?" "Now you're just messing with me, you have to be. That is the most cliched thing I've ever heard." "It wasn't cliche when I wrote it a thousand years ago!" "When you... right." Dina took a deep breath. This, this was what she had been trying to avoid. All this crazy fantasy-fiction isle stuff. "Lady, I'm going to need to see a little ID before I believe you any further." "Like what?" "I don't know, isn't this where you turn into an animal or a fairy or something to prove that you're not just a crazy person?" "Should I?" That derailed her a bit and she looked down at herself as if checking to see if there was anything wrong with her. She looked like she'd been caught wearing casual clothes to a formal party. "I'd rather not. I like human. It helps me keep the right mindset, and makes it easier to sit at my desk." Dina blinked. "You have a desk?" "Oh, am I supposed to just plan all these prophecies out on thin air, then, like some kind of wind spirit who doesn't know what day of the week it is nine times of ten?!" She gave a frazzled arm flail and then massaged the bridge of her nose tiredly, giving Dina had the sense that she had to defend herself on that topic too often. Suddenly she just looked like an overworked old secretary. Dina felt a pang of guilt and scooted over to one side of the bench. "Alright. Sit and explain to me why I'm an idiot and why preventing the apocalypse is a bad thing." The woman remained standing, but continued. "You didn't prevent it, you broke it. The way these things are supposed to go is that something evil gets out, bad events happen for a while, someone kills the evil thing, and the bad events stop. But you cut the beginning and thus the end right off by preventing Kyle from starting it. All of the other events still have to happen. Tell me, girl, how will the plagues and disasters know how to stop when there is no evil thing to kill? They won't, that's what! They'll just keep going on and on!" "But... but that doesn't make any sense. Why will there still be disasters if there's nothing to cause them?" "They'll cause themselves sooner or later! What, you think we write up these things for fun? Wars and plagues and fire from the sky? Bad things happen, and if you don't give them a time slot to happen in they'll just hit whenever they like. So we work them into giant legendary events in order to put an on and an off switch on them, to keep them from just running wild. We give them a place to vent in a controlled setting. We set up heroes to be capable of destroying the evil 'cause' when it's time for things to be shut back down. But nooo, you just had to mess with it. Now there won't be any way to tell the disasters to stop. And you knew you were tampering with it, too, that's the worst part!" "I thought I was doing the smart thing! Not... not...." Dina made vague hand gestures in the air, but a more articulate argument was not coming to her. After a minute she gave up and just sighed tiredly, head hung low. "Alright. So I broke the apocalypse. Now what happens?" "Well," the woman paused thoughtfully and looked like she was calling up a textbook memorization. "In the passage of disasters, it is said... 'the world will begin to show signs of the curse as disasters come upon the earth. There will be swarming plagues of insects, and strange diseases will afflict not only mankind but all creatures. The land itself will fall into confusion until the curse causes the realms to cross, giving beings from the other worlds entry to the earth. Then the Destroyer will come to prepare the way.' There's much more of course, but you pretty well ruined the rest of it. And there were such lovely characters too," the strange woman added wistfully. Dina snorted, feeling like she was playing along with some bizarre game. Was this what LARPing was like? "Wow. Not afraid to lay the theatrics on thick, are you." "It was one of my first works, I was new. We all write silly things when we're new." The woman cleared her throat uncomfortably, then took hold of Dina's forearm arm with bony fingers and started tugging her along. "Come on. You broke it, you're going to help me try and fix it." "Hey wait, I can't just up and go all over the place with some strange woman. Besides that obviously being a Very Stupid Thing To Do, my parents will wonder where-" "Ever wonder why main characters in legends don't have to worry about things like curfews, traffic tickets, concerned parents and so on?" "Um. Bad or at least oblivious writing?" "No, because I know how to do my job. If I say you won't have to worry about it, then you can be sure you won't. Now stop dragging your feet." The woman gave a hard yank on Dina's arm, the world swam into strange warped shades of blur and gray for a moment- and then she was somewhere else entirely. ~End Page Two~