The Butterfly Effect

Chapter 1

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"It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world."

Chaos Theory

Every event since the dawn of creation, the explosion that spawned the milky ribbon of shimmering specks in Earth's night skies 13.6 billion years ago, the fusion of dust and gas 4.6 billion years ago that produced the blazing giant that nurtures the planets of our solar system, the collision of small particles bound by the force of gravity that created our mother Earth 4.54 billion years ago, the first drop of water that sparked the existence of life in this planet thousands of centuries ago—every event, no matter the magnitude, coincided to devise a complex network of effects that led to this precise second.

And Raven wasn't exactly very grateful about that at the moment.

First, she had awoken that morning sprawled out on Kory's couch with the worst (and first) hangover she'd ever had after her so-called friends had convinced her to attend a bar with them the previous day to "mend her broken heart" after he who shall not be named had shown up at her footstep to ask for her hand in marriage and reopened an already healed wound. Needless to say, it wasn't the most rational decision Raven had taken.

Then, after the initial shock of her situation, she had scrambled out of Kory's apartment without so much of a warning (considering all of her friends were slouched in odd places of the room snoring and drooling all over themselves) to catch the bus to her job.

Alas, she had spent the bus ride to Wayne Enterprise Headquarters sandwiched between an overweight guy who smelled faintly like cigarettes and a creepy forty-year-old man who continuously tried to place his palm on Raven's thigh.

When she had finally arrived at her destination, she had hurried into the third elevator to the right of the main reception area (an odd move considering she always took the stairs) precisely seven minutes after her shift was supposed to begin. Any second later and the messy blonde with the oh-so-typical troublemaker grin plastered on his expression would not have been able to stick his arm inside the elevator doors to prevent them from closing.

Lastly, had it not been for the recent, on-going maintenance issues for all the elevators in the building, perhaps the machine wouldn't have malfunctioned and abruptly frozen mid-way to the thirty-sixth floor of the building.

And now she was here—suffering from an intense headache and thoroughly famished considering she hadn't had breakfast this morning nor dinner the previous night, not to mention plopped down in front of an irritating guy who kept trying to start a conversation with her.

Raven admired her life, she really did, but at the moment, life wasn't being exactly generous to her.

"Can I at least know your name?" the aggravating idiot insisted. "I'm Gar."

She massaged the bridge of her nose gently in an attempt to soothe the aching inside her skull. "Raven," she deadpanned.

"Are, uh... are you okay?" he stammered sheepishly. She internally smiled, feeling glad that her ability to intimidate people could also affect morons like him. Alright, so perhaps she was being too cruel in her judgment of him, but to her defense, the pounding in her head prevented her from making any kind of reasonable thinking at the moment.

"No, I'm not," she gritted her teeth. "But I'd be more than fine if you'd just shut up."

He stayed silent for a few minutes, and just when she began to believe that he may have miraculously teleported out of her plane of existence, he spoke, "How long do you think we'll be in here?"