"Pain is unavoidable in the present time." Ellie spoke to herself as she stepped from the large metal doors of the school and began her walk home. Everyday Ellie took the same route home and today was like every other day; the smog settled and hung in the air and made it hard for her to breath. She took a cloth out of her jacket pocket and tied it around her face to lessen the effects; she had only been living in Exatropalis for a short amount of time and she had not yet gotten use to the great smoke that came from the factory that employed over three-fourths of the city.
"Pain is unavoidable in the present time." She said again, "What could he have possibly meant by that?" She knew nothing of pain, her childhood was well rounded and happy, her home life was perfect, and she had never experienced the loss of someone she cared about. How could pain be unavoidable if she had managed to avoid it all these sixteen years that she had lived on this planet. "Unless he meant physical pain." She had had her fair share of broken bones and falls in her lifetime, if that was his reasoning than he was most certainly true, but Ellie felt like that wasn't what he meant at all.
This statement continued to perplex her as she made her way up to the front door of her house and gripped the brass handle to pull the door open with haste as she slid into the decontamination chamber that was the front room of her house. She began to take off her ugly hip waders and her big burly jacket, along with untying the cloth from around her face, then she placed all of the clothes on a hook in the small chamber. Hitting a button, she was sprayed with air and a disinfectant until the scans appeared clean and then the white door in front of her made a beeping noise to open.
Once through the door she was met by a small white fur ball with its tail wagging like crazy, "Hi ya Talya! Who's a good girl?! Did you wait here for me all day?" she said in her special voice reserved for animals. The dog's tail wagged like crazy and the small ball stood up and jumped on her. "Use your voice." Ellie told her sternly.
"YES! YES! I waited all day like a good dog!" The dog barked with a happy grin.
"Good girl, Talya!" She said pulling a treat from her pants pocket and feeding it to the fur ball. Ellie had picked up the treat during her lunch hour at school and she was glad that she had. Talya waddled to the couch with her small bone and jumped up. Ellie let out another sigh and walked over to the big bay window and sat on the cushioned ledge, she's been sighing a lot lately.
Now that she could breathe she decided to look out the window at the view of the city. The city of Exatropalis was a particularly ugly city. The buildings which rose up into the air were metallic and rusted and the smog that laid over the city was thicker than the mud that covered the streets. All the sidewalks were cracked and rusted cars had been left on the edges. The smog was a gross brown mixture of evaporated chemicals that were used at the factory. When these chemicals in liquid form came in contact with the skin it ate away at it, but when breathed in at its gas form it mixes with the carbon dioxide in the blood stream and makes the body slowly shut down.
She still couldn't understand why her parents decided to up and move to this rusted pile of metal this country calls its capital city. She didn't mind it though, she didn't have any friends in her last town so she didn't have much to leave, but this place was ugly. Another sigh and she was standing up again.
"Talya, what do you think mom and dad want for dinner?" Ellie asked as she grabbed the handle of one of the cupboards and looked through it, "We have Mac and Cheese or Soup."
"Soup." The dog barked.
"Soup, it is."
Ellie took the can out of the cupboard and set it on the counter. She pulled a pan from the cupboard under the food cupboard and set it on the stove, turning on the gas and lighting a match to start heating the pan. Then, she pulled out a can opener and opened the can, pouring the soup into the hot pan. The soup didn't take long to boil and she poured an equal serving into four different bowls. One got put on the floor for Talya and the other three were place on the counter around the island of the kitchen.
