Catching Water (Discontinued, rewrite in progress)

Prologue

Bethany's Point of View

I guess my story started when I had the last nightmare in the orphanage. It wasn't exactly strange for me to have nightmares; I always saw things at night. I've seen it all: an overload of green light, the sound of furious crashing waves, strange men (Always strange men!), and one time, an enormous serpent. I don't know how, or why, or what exactly is happening. I tried to stay awake once, to avoid it, but I guess that I'll never be that lucky.

That night, it was this:

An underwater cavern slopes below me, its passages twisting and turning out of sight. Schools of shimmering silver fish swim past me into great corals of sunset and greenish hues. Somehow, I'm able to walk after them, even though it should be impossible. Looking up, I can see the surface of the ocean, glistening above me like a mirror made of velvet.

"He is angry, my lord." A voice says. Whipping around, I find the source is a dolphin. Standing with him is an odd man, what we would call a mermaid, except his skin is a green color. He looks angry. I grimace.

"This is all father's fault! If he hadn't-"

"You know that he can't control himself when he takes an interest in someone." The dolphin interrupted.

"But two someone's is a bit out of hand! Now uncle is angry at all of us and that can destroy the world!"

"We can only hope for the best." The dolphin says. The mermaid man frowns suddenly before yelping "We need to get out of here! We're too close to the surface."

I see what they're afraid of when a torrent of air bursts through the water

I wake up, groaning. The orphanage caretaker, Miss Jones, yells up at me.

"Bethany! Get up! You may not have school, but you still have your duties." She yells. I pull on my clothes, and get out of my bed. I grab a piece of bread from the cupboard, while everyone else gets a breakfast of eggs and bacon. I grab my bag, and head out into the town to get groceries, eating the bread.

'Bethany, run!' a voice says inside my head. I jump, not understanding what was going on. First sign of insanity- 'Listen to me. You need to run. NOW!'

Everything seems to go slower. Everyone around me screams "FIRE!" Glancing around, I search for what everyone seems to be scared of. I grab a fire extinguisher, and slowly turn around. But I don't see any flames.

Instead, I find myself facing the weirdest thing I'd seen in my life. From the waste down, his structure looks normal: A pair of human legs. Hairy human legs, but normal nonetheless. Okay, scratch that, it wasn't normal. He was only wearing a pair of bright white underwear which I found greatly disturbing.

From where his bellybutton should be, fur sprouts, his upper body resembling the shape of an extremely angry bull. As if the angry bull look wasn't enough, from his head sprouted a pair of menacing and to-the-point sharpened horns. And it was looking straight at me. Yelping, I spray the whatever-it's-called-liquid at the bull, drop the fire extinguisher, and start listening intently to the voice in my head.

'Turn left.' The voice instructs. It gives me directions, but I can't seem to shake the cow man. I run as fast as I can, feeling my adrenaline eventually wearing off. Soon enough, I have a painful stitch in my side, but I keep going.

I eventually approach a hill with a tree, panting. There's a car there already. The cow guy picks it up and throws it several yards, and a lightning bolt hits it, forming a sizzling crack. I wince. A boy, this crazy man with furry legs (You'd think I'd be used to this by now!), and a woman get out.

"Get past the tree!" the woman shouts to the boy. But he doesn't listen to her instructions, insisting "Mom, I'm not leaving you!" The woman can't get past the tree, because of some kind of barrier that makes me think that the bread I had this morning had been contaminated (Although it was stale. It probably had). The cow guy caught the woman around the neck, even when she tried to dodge. I can only watch from where I stand as she explodes into golden dust. It's dark out. How long had I been running? It was morning when I left.

The cow guy turns to the guy with the extremely furry legs, and the boy gets its attention by shouting at it. The good news is that it turns away from Mr. Furry. The bad news is that the boy looked like dead meat. I make an extremely stupid decision, running out in plain sight.

"OI!" I scream. "COW MAN!" The boy and Mr. Furry notice me for the first time. With nothing but my fists, I walk up to the cow man. He roars, charging at me, both horns pointed at my chest. I brace myself, closing my eyes and bracing myself until-

CRACK! His horns fly off like magic, landing in front of the boy. The cow man hits me in the stomach, and it feels like I've been hit by a train. The little food I had today makes another appearance, and I collapse on the hill, feeling woozy. I watch as the boy picks up the horn, and stabs the cow man under the rib cage. I fight to keep consciousness as the distraught boy grabs my wrist, stumbling a bit before grabbing onto the furry guy. The last thing I remember is being dragged past an enormous pine tree before losing consciousness.

A/N

Hello, and welcome to the world of Bethany Rose if you haven't read this before. I am working on editing this story as well as writing it, so there's bound to be quite a few changes. I was having a problem with my older version of this: It wasn't showing up in the search index or on my profile when I wasn't logged in. That's where this comes in. It'll take me a bit to post all my old chapters, and then I still am going to edit them after that, so bear with me. Happy reading!