Starring:
Date: June 28, 2010
Summary:
The eclipse affects everyone in strange ways. This is Alexandra's little peek.
"Unsettled"
New York City
June 27th, 2010
For the first time in months and months, Alex was home. Not the one in New Orleans, but the one that she'd made for herself in New York. The one where she'd been kidnapped - for lack of a better word - by two women who would turn out to be unlikely allies in the future. One, a captor-turned-coworker, and the other a government hunter-turned-jungle soldier had just helped web mythology sensation Mark Scotts and crew keep a village of Amazon natives and the spiritual leader safe.
To say it was life-altering would be an overstatement, but to say it hadn't changed anything would be a complete understatement. It was…enlightening to say the least. Awakening, mayhaps. You know the feeling though, the one after you return from a long, long vacation and life - your life - seems so boring, unsettled, and alien. Even though things are pretty much back to "normal" for Alex on the job and apartment front, that unsettled feeling had been running rampant. On top of that, there's one big event about to unsettle things even more…
June 28, 2010
Early-evening rush hour
The 28th had been as regular a day as any in the past six or seven months, back to work, back to the grind in navigating New York public transit system. Work, rountine as ever, had consisted of spending the day locked in an interior office with the only escape into the daytime heat coming at lunch. Even that was terribly normal. No, the real weirdness was to happen on the way home.
In one of those strange twists of fate, Alex had decided what the heck, it was a nice enough day there in the early evening to walk home. It was only a few dozen blocks, right? Plenty of sun, and nice enough neighborhoods to warrant walking back from work rather than sweltering in a subway or bus where the AC barely works.
At five or six PM, whenever Alex is able to swing leaving from the office after her first day back in forever, the sun is high in the sky but failing, temperatures dropping, and the evening turning out to be right pleasant for late June in the urban center of the entire country. For the first few blocks, everything is totally and completely normal: cars zi…crawl on by, other pedestrians bustle along to dinner, home from work, to museums, to parks, and to the corner markets, cafes, and delis.
Halfway home, things change. The eclipse, high in the sky, starts slowly at first. The sky gets dim, dimmer, dimmest until eventually, the total solar eclipse is complete. It could just be as simple as a cloud covering the sun, but when Alex looks up and sees the eclipse, her brows furrow a bit. "Odd…" she says to nobody in particular.
It's something that happens just infrequently enough so that newscasters and weathermen are allllll over it, but yet, there had been no notice at all about this one. None at all. The traffic that had been crawling along and the pedestrians that had been bustling along, all come to a complete stop. People stop and stare, squinting, until the corona becomes much too bright.
Later that night
Sitting on the couch in the apartment living of her apartment, Alex looks concerned. The last time she felt like this, she was in AP custody. The last time she couldn't feel even the rumble of cars through the pavement when walking down the street was…well, before she even discovered she had these abilities! Looking a bit strung out, she stands and starts to pace the place, one arm around her stomach, the other fingering a small silver cross about her neck.