Independent Puppets

Episode 10: Dark Before the Dawn [Part 1]

6:28 PM, June 29th 2019

"Okay, so I'll see you both later then." Inside the front porch of her house, Andrea turned around from just facing the front door and she said this to her mother, who was stood there in the porch's doorway holding this door open.

"Do you have everything?" Françoise Vanderpen asked her to double check.

"Yeah. And I just got a text from Eve saying her and Jen are on the way there, too, and one from Arthur saying the same thing."

"Okay then; see you tomorrow morning at around 10:30. Love you."

"See you, sweetheart." Andrea's father, stood next to the stairs a few feet behind the door to the porch, added.

"Bye, love you both. I'll text you when I get there." And with that, the half British-half French brunette gave them a little wave of her hand as a goodbye and she then opened the front door and stepped outside, closing it behind her.

Despite it being the middle of the Summer, the open air outside was balancing on the narrow line between being cold and being not warm as such but, for lack of a better word, intermediate, as expected for living in Britain. A gust of wind blew through the area she was in, at first only being a gentle one but very soon picking up its magnitude and turning it into a stronger one, although it passed as quickly as it had come; this gust of wind added to the ambient melody of the vehicles which were barrelling down the motorway off in the distance, creating an overall atmosphere of calmness and peace despite it being birthed from noise and the din of human activity.

Andrea grabbed her bike from off to the side in front of the outer wall of the house, mounted it and made her way down the street on which her house resided, clutching a plastic carrier bag in her right hand while carrying a rucksack on her back, with both sides of the pavement being mostly quiet except for one or two people walking down the street, heading for their own destinations, and the nearly undetectable sounds of our green eyed protagonist's bike wheels on the pavement.
Carefully, with one hand, she opened up the the home screen of her phone, proceeding to enter the texts section and then go into the texting room between her and Eve, using her thumb to do the work whilst she kept to the inner edge of the pavement so as to not get in anyone's way and she used the corner of her eye to watch out for anything happening in her surroundings that she might miss because of using her phone.

Meanwhile, Jenna was on her own bike with Eve alongside her, doing the same, and on that current evening, all 3 of the girls once again had the same destination: the AV club building.
It was only a few seconds later, before which the pair had been engaged in amicable chatter, when Eve's phone vibrated along with producing the audible sound of vibration at the same time - an indication of a text message which had just arrived.

"Hold on a second, Jen." She said, to which her bespectacled companion halted her bike and both of them went over to the inner side of the pavement they were on before Eve dismounted hers. After this, she took her phone out of the pocket of the coat she was wearing and opened up the flap on the front, turning on the home screen and entering into the texts section.
"I've just got a text from Andrea: she says she's on the way now."

"Okay." Jenna acknowledged with an ever so slight nod of her head. "By the way, do you think when we get there Markus and the others will have decided to drink the spare gin bottles today that Arthur bought for them last Sunday? If there's any spare gin bottles left, that is." She asked, adding a small chuckle at the end of her last sentence.

"I don't know, probably." The frizzy-haired blonde laughed partially in addition. "I mean they did seem to be very drunk that afternoon, so maybe North convinced them to go all-out with it. And who knows, we might even arrive to find them actually drunk from those spare bottles."