UnEarthing Toroid

Part 3

Natalie Clark sat in her bedroom, perched at her desk and looking into the mirror. One leg was propped up on the surface as she was painting her nails, coating them cherry-red with a practiced distraction. She was talking on the phone, holding it squashed between her shoulder and her ear, chattering into it with the quick tones of someone catching up with a bestfriend.

"Eeeew! No way, that's so gross! He did not say that." Natalie made a face and shook her head. There was a slight pause as she waited for her friend's response, then she continued with her exaggerated outrage. "No, I don't like him. Ugh. Why should I?" ... "Okay, not being hideously ugly is not the same as being cute." ... "Because there's, like, no more cute guys in our school. Hunter moved away last year and he was like, the last of the hot ones. All the guys there now are like, ugh! There's Eli, but he's like, Mormon. I seriously need to meet some new guys. Not to be the 'my boyfriend goes to another school' chick, buuuuut..."

Suddenly, a loud crashing noise boomed through the whole house, followed by the screech of clanging metal and then the breaking of glass. "Shit!" Natalie flinched so hard that she dropped the phone and knocked over her nailpolish, making it puddle across the desk. The sound of concerned questioning noises came from the phone as Natalie bent down and frantically reached for it. 

"Marie? Yeah, no, I'm fine. I think somebody just broke into my house though. Ahaha~ I'm joking. It's probably my dad's secret boyfriend that I'm not supposed to know about." Natalie twisted a strand of auburn hair around her finger. "I better go check it out though. Brb."

Baron regained consciousness like he was in a John Green novel: slowly, then all at once. Mostly because the second he realized he was only semi-conscious, his adrenaline jolted him to his feet before his mind was even firing. Drunkenly, he spun around swinging his fists. "Whazzat? I'll kill you!" He tried to shout, but only mumbled, before his consciousness slid into place and he was able to register his surroundings.

He paused. There was no one else around him. It didn't look like he was being attacked. His left leg hurt pretty badly, but that probably had something to do with the knocked-over metal trashcans by his feet. He was in someone's backyard. There was a wooden fence and an in-ground pool, accompanied by a white-collar two-story house, looking wealthy and glamorous in all its' rigid conformity. Beyond the fence, there were rooftops from similar buildings stretching in either direction. This was clearly the kind of neighborhood that Baron would ordinarily not risk stepping foot in, lest some rich lady immediately call the police. How...did I get here? He glanced at the spilled trashcans again. Maybe I hopped the fence, then landed in the trashcans and knocked myself out? But...I don't remember coming to this neighborhood in the first place.

Time to figure out what happened was rapidly running out, unbeknownst to Baron, as Natalie jogged down the stairs and swept into the kitchen, reaching to open the kitchen door with a casual toss of her hair. She froze in shock when she saw the dark hunched figure standing in her yard, at the edge of her fence, looking down at flipped trashcans. It was immediately obvious what had happened. Natalie's skin prickled with fear, and she gripped the doorframe with white knuckles. Oh my god! A bunch of hoodlums are trying to break into my house!

Her reaction registered in a blink of a second, but she didn't have time to actually do anything about it, because as soon as Baron heard the door open, he turned around with his hands outstretched, and shouted in Common: "Don't call the police!!!" Real convincing, bud.

The second he turned around, Natalie stopped again, all the fear melting away into another kind of feeling entirely. Oh...They're like, hot hoodlums. After all, it was easy to see that this boy was her own age. Not some scary drug-lord adult. Just an edgy teen boy. See? Everything was okay and bad things didn't happen to people like her. Natalie leaned against the doorframe as flirtatiously casual as she could manage. "Oh. Hi~" She smirked, twisting a lock of her hair. "Can I ask what you're doing in my backyard, in the middle of the night?"