Scenery flew past beyond the sheet of glass, the grass becoming a flat blur of lively green peppered with yellow below a sky blue backdrop. Clouds and trees were rare but did occasionally fly past, startling daydreamers with abrupt shade and a brief surprise of unique colors; it would quickly vanish behind them, leaving the onlooker stunned.

The passenger herself was too bored to be stunned. She leaned against the window with one cheek pressing against the glass, her gray-green eyes staring blankly at the world outside. She was pale, with jet black hair that fell in a straight curtain behind her; a dark gray beanie hid her forehead. She wore jeans with ripped knees and a white-blue-stripped t-shirt, not to mention a straight-lipped frown on her face.

A woman's quiet voice spoke up from the front seat. "We're almost there, Esther..."

"Great," she stated back, her words eventually turning into a yawn. More of her head hit the windowpane and she blinked tiredly.

"Don't fall asleep on me, now," she scolded lightly.

"I'll try..." she yawned again. "But it's a losing battle."

The driver bore a smile unseen by the teenager. Her honey-blonde hair curled backwards around her ears and behind her neck, bouncing whenever she turned to look at something. Her perky face was a sharp contrast to the teen's blank expression.

By then, a distant cluster of buildings had come into sight and the grass was thinning out to be replaced with farms and empty lots. A few warehouses popped up from the overgrown weeds. Not many people were out and about, save for a few joggers and the occasional incredibly lost biker.

Just outside of the town, there sat a wide, one-story building of white concrete. It had been painted over with white and decorated with little trails of various animal footprints—dog and cat paws, lizard claws, bird feet, a snake's trail—in bright, standout colors. Wire pens stood out along several sides of the buildings, containing large dogs that turned curiously towards the car driving past. A glass door let in a brief view of a waiting lobby half-filled with caged animals.

"What's that?" the girl wondered out loud.

"Well," the driver started, letting out a tense breath, "let's just say that Medina has a serious stray animal issue."

"Lost dogs?"

"Lost dogs, lost cats, lost birds, lost rodents, lost reptiles. They were here when Medina was founded and we've been struggling against them ever since."

"So that big building is, what, the vet?"

"It's the pound," the woman corrected gently. "The black hole of Medina's budget, too. They're constantly overcrowded, I hear, and their tenants escape terribly quickly. Or maybe it's just that our strays have gotten smarter around humans over the years..."

The teenager's eyebrows rose in disbelief, hiding under her cap. She didn't know a whole lot about stray animals. She'd never met an alley cat or stray dog up close before. But then suddenly being relocated to a town that was apparently overrun by them...wouldn't that mean there was just a lot of alley cats and trash-sniffing hounds at night?

"So...this the central for crazy cat ladies, or...?" the teenager trailed.

"Not exactly," the woman denied again. "We do have a lot of pet owners here—it's practically the law to have an outdoor cat at the least. But most people here are perfectly normal. What's really odd is that nobody knows exactly how or when all these guys showed up; some of these breeds are incredibly exotic. The council can't answer it."

"...huh. Would I notice anything?"

"Maybe a few begging dogs on the way to school. And this car has an uncanny ability to attract parakeets. I'll come out after shopping and find a whole line of them perched on the mirrors!" she chuckled.

Older and newer buildings alike moved past them as the car slowed down. They were stacked without much pattern, like a child's building blocks, into patchwork rows of stores and apartments. A few more cats than normal loitered about in the small, dark alleys between buildings.

People in a rainbow of ages walked along the streets, bustling about to their own things in the afternoon rush, alone or in groups, on foot or bike or the occasional skateboard. Many walked dogs. The radio, quieted down but still present, piped a pop tune into the vehicle, somewhat overrun by the motor's hum and the large-town-din from outside. A perfect scene of beginning.

A ringing punctured the calm, originating from the front seat's passenger side. The woman noticed it, took a hand off the wheel to rustle about in her bag for a moment, and pulled out the device making it. She answered it, holding it against her ear with her shoulder as a prop. "Hey, I thought you were still at work?" she started.

A voice chittered back, blurred to the girl from her seat in the minivan. It sounded like a man's.

"I'm bringing Esther home, you know that," she explained. "Did they let you off early?"

More chittering. Maybe this place used parrot vocal cords in their phones.

"...well, I wouldn't say it's out of the equation, but it is a rare thing to happen," she chuckled. Her laugh made a polite smile tug at the teen's lips.

"Okay. See you at the house," she finished. "...love you too."

The woman hung up the phone with a tap and set it back down, turning her head to address the girl in back. "We're almost there, Esther. I'd ask if you were excited, but..."

"Excited for what? Living with you guys in this crazy town? Or getting out of this car? Or a thousand other things that I'm willing to list?" Esther joked.

"Anything, really. I honestly do want you to like it here," the woman sighed.

"You won't hear a complaint from me. Even if I get a cat climbing in my window or something."

Esther really couldn't complain. Aunt Bell and her husband (she was probably going to be calling him Mr. Higgin, wasn't she?) were kind enough to be taking her under their home in the first place. They were the closest relatives to where her immediate family lived—up there in Nebraska—and were the go-to for staying close. She had to stay close.

Eventually, the world stopped flying by as the car stopped next to a two-story house on the outside of a neighborhood. It was connected to one of the town's main roads, almost smack-dab in the middle—with little elbow room to spare between houses. The siding was colored light coffee and the door was green-brown; the windows were somewhat small and framed in white, two peering out from the top floor while two looked out on the bottom. A few shingles were missing from the dark brown roof. Three bikes hid in the alleyway.

"Well, this is it," Aunt Bell sighed. "A little busted up and broken, since it's an old house, but...it's home."

Esther stayed silent. A lightweight object slapped the back of her shoulder, and she whipped around to find its origin. It was then that she spotted the towering wall of lush green that made up the forest across the street; a leaf from it had slapped her shoulder. "Nice...forest," she muttered.

"Medina's woods? Yea, they're right outside the neighborhood," Aunt Bell answered. "There's a good biking trail that goes through it, a beautiful scenery route if I do say so myself."

"Sweet. I love biking," she perked. "'Cept I need to take off my hat when I do it, sweat increase and all."

"Do you always wear that had?"

"Yup. I keep my bangs under it. And my bangs suck, so I need to hide them constantly."

"They can't be that bad."

"No really, they look bad. They hide my eyes and make me look ridiculously gothic."

From inside the house, a young girl stared on. Her hair was dirty blonde and framed her small face with thick locks; her hands clutched a rather dirty, stuffed animal duck. She was short and quiet, probably four years old or so.

She looked through the window, surprised at the foreign person standing next to her mother. She watched quietly as they unpacked several bags from the van; she folded her arms and sat them on the windowsill, then put her chin upon them.

Was this the guest they were going to have over? She looked strange. She'd never seen someone so pale, and with such dark hair. They would look scary if they didn't have that tiered-looking smile.

Claws clicked on the hardwood floor and a large dog pawed out from behind the living room couch. The girl didn't even need to look up for her hand to find its fur; her fingers ruffled the thick, black scruff between its upstanding ears.

"She has hair like you, Axel," she mumbled.

The black German Shepard sat down in response, silent. A name tag hung from its black collar, next to a house key that was safe so long as it hung beneath the dog's jaws. Axel looked out the window with an evil eye towards the dark-haired girl approaching the home; his sense of premonition was screaming against her. She seemed vaguely familiar.

When they entered, her scent hit him. Herbs. Smoke. A world outside his own. His nerves went on edge and he sprang for the door, barking sharply and startling all three onlookers.

"Heynow!" the teen yelped.

"Axel! Down!" Aunt Bell shouted.

The dog didn't even flinch. He threw himself onto Esther, pinning her down with all the weight a full-grown hound can manage.

"ARGH! DOG!" Esther yelped, turning her head franticly to avoid the sniff-down.

Axel kept relentlessly probing, sniffing every inch of her face with a wet nose and crushing her chest with his weight, barking the whole time. Almost like he was searching for something on her person. ...scratch that. Demanding it.

"I've got him!" a male's voice shouted, and eventually Esther could breathe again. She lied flat on the floor for a good amount of time, registering the fact that she had not been killed by suffocation.

"I thought we had Axel tied up?!" Aunt Bell questioned.

"I locked him up in the bathroom—Marie must have let him out or something!" the man groaned. "Axel! Stop it!"

The girl at the window shrunk down in her seat as the man and the dog had an inter-species verbal fight; Axel barked and snarled at Esther as she propped herself up, staring with wide disbelief at the mad dog before her, the man's scolding flying far over his head.

Aunt Bell helped her up as Axel was dragged off to a different room in the house. "I am so, so sorry," she apologized frantically, "Axel can get so overprotective at times around new people..."

"Nah, it's—it's okay," Esther whimpered, breathless. "We had a crazy lab—a Labrador, I mean, not like a science lab—back home that tackled me all the time. I'm just a lightweight, that's all."

The girl peered up at Esther when she was back on her feet, her stuffed duck clutched nervously behind her back.

Esther looked down and offered a smile. "Hey. Marie, right? Nice dog you've got there. Very...very friendly."

She stared back, mute.

"Marie," Aunt Bell started, "this is Esther. She'll be staying with us for a while."

"...hi," Marie peeped quietly.

Barking from the hall dragged the three girl's attentions to where the man emerged from the first floor's bathroom and had a minor fight with Axel with the door; he managed to slam it shut and breathed a loud sigh of relief. "Sorry about that, Esther; guard dog and all."

"It's okay, Mr. Higgin," Esther stated levelly, waving her hand as if to shrug off the terrifying incident. So apparently she was going it formal. She could do this. Probably. The dog might be a tough spot.

"He just needs time to get used to you, I'm sure," he muttered, running his hand through his hair. "Something just might have set him off."

"I did have a dog back home. Maybe he smelled her...?"

"Who knows? Animals can be pretty unpredictable at times." Especially in this town.

Mrrroooowww

Esther was shown to a room barren of personal effects—barren of almost everything, really, save for a bed with summer sheets upon it and a dresser. A large window, its glass warmed by sunlight, let a wide pool of light occupy the floor from the east; the other walls were empty and painted a pale lavender. Most of her stuff wouldn't look good at all against it.

A door on the room's left flank was propped open to reveal a clean, white bathroom; the door to the hall was still open behind her, and she nudged it with her heel to close it.

Esther took a deep sigh. She dug her hand under her hat, scratching at an itchy spot on her scalp and coming away with a bit of dandruff under her nails; she examined them with mild disgust before wiping them off on her pants.

The Higgins had left her with the three fair-sized boxes she'd brought and this empty room, Aunt Bell mentioning "dinner at 6:30", probably to let her come to terms with it and its lavender walls—which, now that she looked, had tiny pinholes from past nails or something similar. She could reuse them to hang up that old poster she had. Hide that baby color under a solidified sheet of her kind of thing, why not?

Stepping into the room, she noted idly how her sneakers squeaked on the floor. The hardwood floor. As far as she'd seen, there wasn't a single carpeted spot in the whole abode. She imagined Axel would scratch it up; her theory was proven with the many white lines etched into it. But at least hardwood didn't need a vacuum cleaner. So hey.

And frankly, she was still a bit concerned about Axel. Never had she set off anyone or anything that much for it to attack her. Would that happen more in this town? It was smaller here. She could get noticed more frequently. She didn't enjoy getting noticed.

At random, she approached the dresser and opened the first few drawers. Nothing but one or two lingering paper scraps and lint. "Sucks that there's no closet in here," she muttered, turning back and fetching the box labeled Clothes in sketchy, still-stinking marker.

The door slipped open again and Marie's wide-eyed face poked into the room, one of her hands still clutching her toy as the other gripped the edge of the door. She watched, as still as a porcelain doll.

Esther noticed her after a few moments and spoke up. "Hi again. How's dinner going? It's starting to smell good down there."

Marie didn't say anything, but apparently took the polite approach as a hint to enter the room.

Esther stuffed the last pair of solid black pants in and shut the drawer closed, shoving the empty box away and approaching the next one. "So, are things pretty quiet around here save for Axel? Any weird neighbors I should be alerted to? Or stray cats?"

Marie said nothing, staring after her silently.

Esther fixed a strange look on her. "...oookay. Yea I dunno kid this isn't going to work out if I'm the only one talking."

"Sorry," she peeped.

"'S okay," Esther shrugged. She set the box on the bed and started digging through it, surprising herself by finding two coils of paper instead of one. "Oh. Uh. I forgot I had this one. I wonder if I can get away with putting up both of them...or should I hang 'em up in the first place? I mean, I'm only going to be here for like half a year or so. Don't wanna get too comfortable."

"Only half a year?" Marie repeated.

Esther set the posters together on the mattress to think about their life as she untangled a metal lamp's cord from within the box. Looking around for a moment, she settled upon condemning it to the bedpost and plugging it in. "Probably. I'm sticking with you guys until my dad can figure stuff out back in Nebraska."

"Ne-bruh-ska?"

"That's what the boys around my age call it," she snorted. "Things got pretty weird when my mom up and left without telling anyone. Then they got weirder when my brother went chasing after her."

"You have a brother?"

"Yea. His name's Oliver."

"Oh...where'd he go?"

"Probably the same place my mom ran off to." After a fair amount of digging, Esther pulled a glass lava lamp from the depths of the box and cradled it in her hands. "...how long have I had a lava lamp?"

"What's a lava lamp? ...is it made of lava?" Marie asked, approaching and tapping the glass.

"No. But it looks cool when it's on," Esther stated, setting it on the floor.

Marie went to her knees to look at it, eventually working up the courage to fish behind it for a cord. Finding one, she scooted to the wall outlet and plugged it in—right below the normal lamp. It flipped on soundlessly, displaying an inactive puddle of wax in blue-tinted water. She lied flat on her stomach, propping up herself on her elbows, while Esther scattered her stuff around the room.

Eventually, the lavender walls enclosed a teenager's domain, littered with effects of varying importance and knowledge of them actually existing—finishing with a dark gray rug spread across the floor.

Similarly, the lamp had turned into a colorful aquarium of floating, round shapes that bounced off each other, separated, and merged into a hypnotizing display. Marie had run off with it at some point. The little thief.

"There. That looks decent," Esther muttered, flopping on the bed and bouncing back a few times thanks to the rebound of the ancient springs. She would text a friend and say she wasn't dead. But she didn't have one.

...a phone, not friends. She had friends. Well, actually, they were more like "very well-known classmates" than friends—yea, that came out wrong. She wasn't a complete introvert.

At least, that's what she told herself. She didn't enjoy having attention. She didn't know what to do with it. She flinched on stages and stuck to the edge of the schoolyard, spoke quietly to large audiences and talked frequently to herself.

...but she could do with a few friends.

A draft hit her face, a summer breeze carrying the scent of local trees and civilization musk. It would normally be ordinary...if she had opened the window in the first place.

She tensed up and slowly turned her head to the side. The bed was against the east wall and had an overview of the whole room, so she kept still and took inventory.

The window was open, all right. But the only other difference in the room was that a floorboard had been removed; a striped tail stuck up from it.

A sudden understanding of the stray pet issue hit her.

Esther approached the animal with a cardboard box and not an extensive idea of what to do. She got directly over it, after a stealthy pad across the hardwood—which was thankfully not creaky in the slightest. She got one hand free and prepared to strike.

The animal tensed up, its ears flicking behind it in the darkness. Its nostrils flared, taking in the scent of insulation—and herbs, smoke, and that unidentifiable other-worldly smell.

Esther's hand lashed out.

The cat looked up.

Screeching, hissing, yelping, and grappling on both sides of the spectrum ensued.

The cat was obviously a stray—it was bony and thin, with a lean little build and very sharp claws. Very sharp. It should require a license for them. It fought her by flinging itself exchanging between her arms, raking its needle-claws on the target, and then switching when she tried to catch it.

By the time Esther realized she was losing this fight, she was on the floor, grappling with a cat that was attempting to separate her ribs from her body.

She pried the beast off her chest and latched her fingers around its torso, keeping still while it wriggled between her hands. Pity spiked in her. Then she considered her bloody hands and threw the cat into the box, where it landed with a claw-padded thud.

It glanced up at her with a wide, green-eyed gaze before she snapped the folds shut and shoved her weight against it, holding it down through the cat's lunges against the cardboard. It yowled out at her in a squeaky tone.

"Quiet, you darn cat!" she snapped back, rubbing the battle wounds. Some of them smeared blood on her palm.

The cat settled down after a fair amount of fighting, falling deathly silent. Esther set a heavy book atop it and glared into it like she could impale the little monster's soul with her eyes. "I didn't know this room already had a tenant," she muttered. "I should probably take care of that."

"Mrrrooowww..."

"Shut up."

She turned around to face the hole in the floor, sitting cross-legged while considering it. "I need to cover up this, too. How'd a cat pull off a board without any thumbs?"

A hiss escaped the box and it buckled underneath the book threateningly. Atlas Shrugged held firm.

She was about to summon one of the Higgins for advice on how to deal with stray cats when a shine of gold nailed her in the eye, originating from deep within the floor. Like a gleam of treasure's last call for help before being succumbed by darkness once more.

She was silent for a long moment. "...huh," she muttered. "You found something, didn't you, cat?"

The cat fell silent. It then began to scratch against its confinement frantically, which she ignored entirely in order to reach into the insulation. It rubbed at her fingers with a fluffy touch, lightly coating them in sawdust; the itch was worth it when she pulled out a book.

A thick book.

A thick, old book with a leather cover and parchment pages, heavier than the cat struggling in the box. Odd symbols in golden paint rimmed the spine and the cover's edge; black, worn lettering labeled the front.

The cat finally burst from the novel-pinned-box in a streak of off-gold fur and leapt out the window. She turned her head briefly in its direction, watching its small shadow flicker from the window and skitter across the neighboring house, and shrugged it off nonchalantly. "...eh. It paid for the trouble it caused."

Then she turned back to the book and opened a page.

Mrrrooowww

"Axel" huffed an irritated sigh, blowing back his lips and revealing tightly-pressed jaws lined with ivory teeth. His front legs were folded over each other and stretched out before him; his body laid limply on the off-white tile of the first floor's bathroom, a dormant streak of black fur and lean muscle.

Agitated thoughts raced in his mind, circulating around a very particular smell. A stench he knew all too well from past experience, a mind-scarring, terrifying, humiliating experience. A smell of herb oils, scented smoke, and a rainbow of elements, all rolled up in a ball and smeared all over that foul houseguest.

And now a fair amount of it stained his paws, too. As well as his snout. Disgusting.

He couldn't do a thing about it, what, with his owners' determination to keep this "Esther" and his lack of an ability to evict her. So he would just need to keep them from that smell and make sure it wouldn't be used against them. Whatever it took. This was his family, and Mirror Realm help him, he was going to keep them from going through what he'd been dragged through should it kill him in the process.

A low growl stirred itself in his throat and he rose to a sitting position, glaring up at the ceiling with all the mercy of an angry guard dog. She was up there, he could tell. The shuffling of items proved that. Now if only that ceiling wasn't there and she would fall right into his grasp.

A scratching at the window caught his attention. It was set adjacent to the ceiling and beamed down a blurry, late-afternoon ray of sunshine into the bathtub below it. Well, usually, anyways. Right now it was occupied by an off-gold tabby cat that was peering in at him with a serious, frightened expression.

Axel stood up, jumped into the tub, and propped himself up on the side to stretch up and nudge at the window latch. Metal clicked off metal and the cat shoved the window open with its head, staring down at the German Shepard before it with concentrated focus.

Most people say that animals cannot maintain communication between two different species. Then again, a lot of people tend to be wrong half the time, and they would be stunned by what ensued.

The cat told a tale in panicky meows and low yowling; Axel interrogated with the occasional sharp bark and not-as-occasional growling.  He seemed to hold some sort of authority or other over the cat, as it would shrink back and listen quietly whenever he spoke.

Near the end of their talk, Axel hopped back onto the floor and tugged out a book from the white shelf in the small bathroom. Holding it between his teeth, he shot a quizzical look at the cat.

It stumbled, then "Mraaaw"-ed in unhappy confirmation.

Axel growled to himself and slid the book back, proceeding to bark a set of commands at the cat.

It pulled its head out of the window and jumped from the side of the house, scampering across the lawn like the horrors of the Base Realm were after him. (He of all "cats" would know what such horrors were.)

The "dog" growled to himself. He craned his neck to glare at the ceiling again, imagining the girl stinking up that accursed text as she peered through the pages. That magic-filled book would only further barrage his nostrils.