It was unfulfilling.

Trudy had spent eight months working as a journalist for a company which undervalued her. And she had just recently reached her limit. That was why this evening was spent preparing for her big day tomorrow, where she'd storm into her manager's office and demand to be payed the same as her male colleagues (if not more, for her work was evidently better). It would run smoothly, and she'd get what she wanted.

Realistically, this was not at all plausible. It existed in her head alone. She wasn't deluded enough to make this a genuine intention; rather, it was a fantasy that coexisted with a million others. Like the one where she would uncover the leaders of TNM in a gripping expose and would be invited as human representative on the IBOT instead of that greasy man Marco Gave. Or the (albeit less ambitious) one where the owner of that new café that took her on a detour on her way to work noticed her, preferably without her having to do anything. Or the one where the Core Worm would finally come back and tell her what it meant when it told her, at ten, how they would rip a hole in reality and save the true Themars. That last one was just silly though and wasn't as important as considering how best to make the owner glance her way whilst also maintaining her wish to be invisible and unnoticeable to avoid discomfort. All her fantasies kept her sane on dreary evenings like that very one, where the rain slashed her latticed window, slid between the cracks of the colourful path trailing to her peeling front door, knocked on that like the guests she never had. She tried to keep her house colourful and lively in the absence of much other joy. She hadn't any friends; she liked to convince her coworkers or whoever asked that it was due to the location of her home – outside the city in a quiet area, mostly inhabited by old people, with so few buses that she rode her moped in and out of the archaic-style city – but really, she didn't bother at all. It did bother her, of course. She didn't want to be completely alone. She just... didn't have the skill set to make friends. People thought her rude for being quiet, or strange for being independent. Or they'd think that anyway should they try to talk to her, because she could be blunt. It was a trait she liked about herself and didn't feel the need to change. It kept her strong. Stable. Stubborn. It was okay, though, because Trudy knew that one day soon having friends would be more of a problem than a benefit. Hopefully soon, she thought to herself. It had been too long.

Under colourful drapes and hanging decorations and dotted lights clinging to the beams across the ceiling, Trudy tapped the wrong end of her pen against her chin and daydreamed of an ideal world until her stomach was begging her to be fed. So, with an inky beard and a frustrated gut, she descended to the kitchen and lit the stove. Food was scarce, because Trudy didn't enjoy planning her meals. She liked to cook as little as possible, simply because she wasn't good at it, and being clumsy as she was increased the risk of burning her hard-earned house down. So when the necessity rose – such as on a day so rainy that the chance of her going out to get something wasn't even there – she resorted to canned food or pasta. Or both, concocted unusually, as was her choice today. A jar of green pesto nearly gone, a dust coated can of sun-dried tomatoes and a can of peas landed beside a pot of water she had set to boil, any danger neglected for her attention was directed towards her phone. She scrolled through a sea of emails. Trudy's inbox was perpetually neglected and unorganised. A mass of ads squandered the majority of her space, and here and there were emails from the many coworkers who had been victims of her favourite lie – "I don't actually have a phone, only this laptop" – sadly, they always found a way to bug her. She made sure to give attention to the emails her elderly neighbour sent. Perhaps the first person in years who was even close to being her friend. Not that she was sure when the line from acquaintance into friend was crossed. Trudy had just tapped on her neighbour's email to seek the signs of friendship – was 'you are welcome any time' an indicator? - when the boiling water spluttered, spewing droplets of red-hot liquid onto her arm. With a yelp, Trudy stumbled back, bashing her lower back into her small dining table. Her phone never left her hand, its grooves digging into her palm as she whammed it face-first on the table edge. Immediately she rose it to her face to check for did so before she had even finished falling. The movement threw her bottom-first onto the tiled floor. On top of it all, the pot was boiling over and dripping down the oven onto the floor. The pasta had also decided to spill, and a few pieces were now happily trying to cook in the steaming puddle that was gradually amalgamating. Trudy sat for a moment and looked on at her mess, then checked her phone – no cracks. But that wasn't the saving grace she had hoped it would be. The prospect of cooking had suddenly become extremely unappealing. Cleaning up, starting over... sometimes her desperate desire to avoid making her own food eclipsed her distaste for driving across town in her pyjamas. With a resigned sigh, she rose ungracefully to her feet, switched off the stove, batted the fleeing strands of dark hair from her face, and made for her raincoat. She gave her appearance a once-over in the ornate mirror that hung proudly over a dresser in the hall. Her hair was long now, longer than she had let it grow since she left home at sixteen. It was just past her shoulders, a deep brown, and brushed against its will. It was perpetually frizzy, and often she thought she looked like a witch from old human legends. Against her face, it made her pallid complexion stick out like a full moon, exacerbated by her dark, unruly brows. But she smiled at it all, content in her looks, and tucked her face away in the hood of her brown raincoat.

The rain made its presence immediate. As soon as the door had opened a crack, Trudy's face was speckled with cold drops of water. She zipped her pockets tight, protecting her phone, card, and reusable bag as she stormed forth to her moped. The street was dimly lit; on these late January evenings, you wouldn't be able to see the rain unless you looked at it passing by beneath the light emitted from the lampposts. It was a bumpy old road, and the streets were unusually maze-like, but soon she broke free from the trappings of the suburbs and emerged onto much newer, smoother, and wider road. The buildings rose taller around her as she made her way, from the rickety old houses she loved to slightly less rickety buildings, old-types that had been improved for both safety and cosmetic reasons. Pubs boasted their usual bustle of people – some with signs flapping in the wind decreeing themselves as 'Themar-friendly'. Trudy thought it would be better put to have 'virtue-signalling' instead, knowing that the owners were reluctant as any human to integrate Themars into 'their' world. At least it is some sort of progress, even if it is flimsy. Too often had she argued this point and had been met with "Well, would you prefer they didn't bother at all?".

The pubs were the first signs that she was getting close, anyway. Soon they neighboured small boutiques, then antique shops, then charity shops, until round the corner and down the hill she went to the supermarket tucked behind the church. As she turned, she noticed a gathering of people emerge from where they had been obscured by the grand old stone building. A building, she thought, that definitely rejected them, for even if they weren't visibly Themars, they wore leather biker jackets proudly bearing the letters 'TNM' over a variety of typically dramatic biker-gang designs. Skulls and angels and staked hearts, some even bedazzled with small, round gems undoubtedly rhinestone, but all with that familiar logo. Themars, Not Monsters. A true enough sentiment. But the group itself was a very prominent group of radicals, labelled terrorists in some places, slowly gaining worldwide influence. For about a year, they'd been targeting a series of seemingly random places, from national monuments to primary schools. The TNM believed in Themar superiority and responded to the adversity Themars faced on the daily with violence, manifesting in direct attacks on humans. Lately, as the news proclaimed excessively, the TNM seemed to be seeking one of the many elusive 'Doors' that were meant to separate the human-dominated world with another, identical realm – the only difference being that the other realm housed the millions upon millions, maybe billions, of pure Themars supposedly banished centuries ago by God. The Doors hadn't been general knowledge until a few years ago, and not much was yet known, but the potential of millions of pure Themars accessing earth, not just those with Themar attributes, had multiple effects. There were those who considered Doors a blasphemous lie, disrespectful to God and His Say those hundreds of years ago. And those who trusted the science and had hope for an age of peace. And those of the TNM or their sympathisers who saw the doors as an opportunity. They wanted to find them and let the unknown in. Trudy, though she looked on their plan as pure idiocy, – the Core Worm, though it had no knowledge of the TNM, wouldn't allow it to happen – still feared the TNM above all else. They'd kill her for standing, and she'd never been ready to die.