Hidden Relics

Chapter 1: Midnight Mysteries

Vivian sighed dramatically, flopping down on her bed and covering her face with her arms while her IPod pumped out songs from her mixed CDs.

Well...I cleaned the clothes and trash. Now I just need to get all this clutter cleaned up, Vivian thought to herself. She'd been cleaning her room for the past four hours, and now she sincerely regretted leaving the place as such a biohazard three weeks ago. She stared up at the bare white ceiling, deciding to take a little break.

She still had to put all of her possessions in their rightful places, wash the dishes that had collected dust and dead bugs in her absence, vacuum, dust...

Maybe she'd just do it tomorrow...

No, because if she put it off she would never get it done. And this needed to be done. She didn't think she could live like this—she'd nearly killed herself three times today alone trying to walk through her room. It needed cleaned: desperately.

Groaning, Vivian sat up to continue along with her cleaning, wishing she was done. She'd already ate dinner thankfully, so she'd be free to clean until she was done, and hopefully that would be soon.

Despondently she went about her task, doing her best to not really think about it. She dusted her two dark brown dressers, one tall one on the south wall and one long one on the west wall, her two light brown medium sized bookshelves placed side by side next to her bed on the north wall right under her three windows, and her white desk pushed up against the east wall. she pulled her old toybox—that was actually a clear tote with a white top—which still housed some toys off of the light blue rug in the middle of the cherrywood floor, taking the time to vacuum the rug before she put the toybox back, placing a black and multi colored spotted cloth over the lid so it would act as a coffee table. she put her nine inch wide, two inch deep red candy bow in the center, frowning at its lack of contents and making a note to get more sweets. She picked the mail and magazines out of her hot pink mushroom chair in the far northeast corner, putting the papers and magazines in their respective places and picking one of her fallen posters—her Star Wars original trilogy characters as a rock band one—off of the floor and putting it back up on its spot on the black walls.

Near the end of her cleaning, she cheered up since it was almost over and happily cleaned her dishes, finished her organizing, pulled her white curtains shut, and flopped onto the bed once more.

"Ouch!" she yelped as she landed on something hard. Then her eyes went wide. "Oh no!"

Frantically she scrambled off of the bed and whipped around, snatching her Luke action figure off the bed.

"Please be all right, please be all right, she mumbled as her nimble fingers quickly inspected the figure. Thankfully, she found no fault, and she breathed a sigh of relief. "Good...I'd be devastated to have broken you," she said grimly.

She got on the bed much more carefully now, exhausted as she lay down, placing the Luke figure on her pillow with care even as her eyelids drooped lethargically. She happened to catch the time—about 9:00 at night—before her weariness caught up to her and she knew no more.

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Vivian's mother came in at about 12:50 to yell at Vivian for still being up, but paused when she saw the girl passed out on her bed, not even under the covers, the vacuum cleaner still in the middle of the floor. With a sigh, Shana coiled up the wire and wheeled the vacuum out of the room, coming back in to tuck Vivian in. She rolled her eyes when she saw the little Luke figure on the pillow, but didn't displace him, waiting until after she'd tucked Vivian under the covers to put the figure right beside her hand, leaning it against the edge of the pillow. With a sigh, Shana made her way back to the ceiling fan light in the room and clicked the light off, moving carefully to the door and heading to bed herself.