16-year-old Amber Talbot had a pretty good life -- straight A's, a job as a babysitter/live-in nanny for the Vasquez family and a somewhat stable social life, in spite of her prickly personality and her stubborn nature. All that changed when she met...
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Amber wasn't sure what to do. This was a strange sensation for her. She normally was certain what to do, she prided herself on that. And now... She didn't know what to do. She was standing there, crying her eyes out in the middle of a damp, dusty, lonely cave, far away from Philadelphia, from home. She wanted to scream out to the heavens, bang against the walls, anything, but God... She was so tired.
So, so, tired. She sunk down to the floor, raising her knees to her chest and placing her head over them. She sighed, looking up. She couldn't keep sitting there and whining, she had to get up and do something... But what? She sighed, staying in her position, staring at her toes. She fiddled with her necklace and began to recite facts that rumbled in her head, somewhat out loud, mythological ones as always - mostly reciting the story of Kronos from memory. The story of a man too stubborn to admit his fears of his offspring betraying him that he chose instead to eat his children, which lead to his one surviving son waging war against him.
Great, it seemed like stubbornness always followed her, even now. She was stubbornly sitting in the cave, head down, pretending that she was alright. That's when she finally gave in, groaning, looking up.
"Hey! Wizard! Where the hell are you!" She screamed, her voice hoarse as she stood up. "Wizard?! I just... I just want to talk!" And that's when she started walking around the environment. It was almost like as she walked, the room began to shift with her movement.
For a second, she was in the familiar train station she'd entered beforehand, then was walking back through the cave, then back to the tunnels of a train station, then back to the cave, graffiti formed on the walls and fell, tracks appeared beneath her feet then disappeared... It was like it was fading out of its illusion. The good news was, in spite of the darkness, because of her glowing veins she basically became a human nightlight...
Until she dropped from the dip of the floor. She screamed, but then stopped, when she landed suddenly. She looked up, seeing that the dip was more like a hole, causing her to land at the bottom of a stone cavern. She looked around, seeing that the cavern was covered in... doors. Real doors, like wooden ones from houses, sliding doors from shopping malls, old, rusty brick doors that Amber had only seen on medieval castles in high fantasy movies... She felt around, quickly grabbing her phone to get some more light, noticing there was no reception.
Of course there was no reception, she'd fallen into a hole. She sighed, quickly looking over her shoulder as she turned the phone's flashlight on. Nothing seemed to follow her, but the doors seemed like the one's she'd seen in the vision she thought was a dream or a hallucination. Amber looked around, eyes wide.
"Where do these lead?" She asked, to no one in particular, especially considering the Wizard was taking his sweet time responding to her. The doors appeared somewhat familiar... She recognised ones that looked like the subway doors. The stalls in the school bathroom or that lead to the janitor's closet. The wooden door she remembered that led into her old 'house' – or rather apartment – in Chicago. She gripped onto her bird wing necklace and looked at the wooden door. Should she dare?
