City of Fate

Late afternoon

Emelia doodled on her Trapper Keeper as she half heartedly listened to her teacher drone on, lecturing about the Magna Carta. It was hot today and the heat made her feel drowsy. She looked over at Mason who was meticulously taking notes, if nothing else,
he was good for taking notes. She couldn't concentrate, all she could think about was how weird this day has been. She unconsciously doodled on, head lying on her outstretched arm. The teacher clearing her throat awoke Emelia from her musings.

"Ms. DeShaw,  please tell the class, what was the purpose of the Magna Carta?" The teacher scalded, obviously noticing Emelia's inattentiveness.

"Um, it was a document signed by king John of England guaranteeing English political liberties?" She asked the class, knowing damn well she was right, she frequently spent many nights breathing in the dusty air of the public library, the smell of old paper and the glue used to bind the books omnipresent, in search of knowledge. Either that or playing City of Valor with Mason and Carol and the rest of her crew. She never could fight the feeling that she was supposed to know something, but could never quite figure out what she was missing among the tomes.

After the teacher nodded approvingly Emelia turned to stare out the window. She saw buildings looming overhead and cars chugging by. She could hear nothing, but she could imagine the sounds and smells of the city, the honking and the exhaust, pretzels and sirens. The thoughts lulled her back into a daydream state. She stared blankly around the scene outside the schoolhouse window. Her stare passed by a group of dumpsters behind an adjacent building, in a shady patch between some unevenly stacked pallets, she saw it. The same person as before, an ethereal, pale women, almost white hair unaffected by the breeze that blew the ever present trash around. She seemed to be staring straight at Emelia. With a start, she looked away. When she looked back, there was nothing there. Her teachers lesson faded into the background, a distant buzz. Her heart pounded as she stared intently on the spot where the apparition had appeared. 

She suddenly jumped up and ran to the window, her heart beating a dirge inside her head, and bolted for the window. The rest of her class stopped dead and stared as she crazily, frantically looked this way and that. The teacher cleared her throat loudly and Emelia stopped abruptly, snapped back to reality by the noise and slowly sat back down, looking around at the gaping students around her. The bell rang suddenly, for the end of period, erasing all thought of the brief outburst. Emelia embarrassingly gathered her books, shuffling them into a single pile, cheeks red with the thought of all the other students talking about this incident. She couldn't wait to get home and get online to play C.O.V with her crew, always an escape from the awkwardness of her real life. As she finished gathering her things she looked down and saw the doodle she had been unconsciously drawing and gasped, dropping all her books but one. On the cover of the book was the dark sketch of a spectral woman in an alley, the words "Osto-o Amarto" scribbled above the doodle. Mason looked at her sympathetically and she ran out of the school thinking that she couldn't run fast enough to get away from the day she has been having, thinking only of getting home and sliding on her headphones and into the virtual world she found to be much more palatable then the one she lived in. As she ran down the block on her way to Taekwando class she didn't even noticed the women, the one she has been seeing all day, in the alley watching her as she ran. Worst of all, she had no idea that the next time she did notice the women, her life would be changed forever.