~Epilogue~
"Stop sulking."
I grimace, glaring at the bright computer screen. "I'm not sulking," I grumble, scrolling uselessly through Youtube, looking for a distraction, but not finding anything worth distracting myself with. Maybe I should have just stuck with watching reruns on TV.
My reply gets a snort of disbelief from Nero, who is on the couch behind me while I am sitting at the small desk with his laptop. "The mission failing wasn't any fault of yours, or anyone else's for that matter. If there was a doorway to Faerie, we would have found it," Nero assures me, but the reminder makes me scowl.
The mission was a bust. After three days of searching with breaks only for eating and sleeping, Vepkoadur finally decided that it was time to call it quits since there were absolutely no clues. In fact, we could have passed right by the doorway without even knowing it, as it is not like they have giant neon signs hanging above them. They do not even always look like doorways. Sometimes, the portal is just a space between two trees or a weird circle of mushrooms.
Hands suddenly slide over my shoulders and a chest presses up against my back where the chair is not between us, surprising me since I did not hear him get off the couch. "If you would really rather watch videos as a distraction, at least watch something funny to improve your mood," he suggests, giving me a chaste kiss on the lips before placing his hand over mine to direct my fingers over the laptop's mouse pad.
No longer really interested in the videos and eager for another kind of distraction, I lean up and try to kiss him again. However, the look of confused surprise on his face makes me stop. Turning my attention to the screen, it takes me a second to realize what video he is staring at.
Girl becomes statue after statue comes to life.
Though the image advertising the video is kind of small, there is still something eerily familiar about the girl in it. With a sick feeling in my gut, I click on it and watch as a brunette woman is talking to a statue of a man holding up a giant globe. It is impossible to make out her face since she is facing away from the camera, which is shakily held while the person behind the camera outright laughs at her and someone else nearby mumbles about 'the crazy New Yorker getting drunk in the middle of the afternoon'. It is rather obvious that the video started out as someone just wanting to make fun of someone else for doing something weird.
However, then the woman puts her hands on the leg of the statue and a police officer takes interest. The officer starts to walk over to her, asking for her to come down off the statue's pedestal. Instead of doing that, the woman only continues to talk to the statue in a mumbled voice. The officer is starting to get annoyed and says something into the radio on his shoulder, now only a few feet away from her. He does not get to take another step, though, as the statue suddenly turns from dark bronze to a shiny gold, startling everyone but the woman, who just leans closer to it.
Suddenly, the now-gold statue fades to take form of a human-sized man, who is now half-kneeling like the statue was. All of this happens in a second and the giant globe, which had remained suspended in the air, suddenly falls now that there is no fifteen-foot statue to hold it up. The woman puts her hands up to help the man catch it before it crushes them, but he seems to do just fine on his own when it lands on his shoulders and he barely even flinches. That is, until the woman pushes him out of the way and the globe falls a little more, landing on her shoulders instead, causing her to fall to her knees.
While trying to catch the globe, the woman turned and is now facing the camera, but there is only a split second, allowing her to say one last thing to the statue man, before she turns gold, and then the statue of a man returns, growing back up to its original height before turning dark bronze and remaining still, leaving no sign of the woman. The man at the foot of the pedestal looks around at all the gawking faces before vanishing without a trace.
Nero and I remain silent for a moment, both in awe of what we just saw, and horror. Finally, I ask the question that is on both our minds, "Was that Heather?"
[AN: Aaaaand...that's a wrap! The next book, How to Be a God, is up, so please go check that out. Hope you guys all enjoyed the story!]
[EXTRA: There is now a one-shot for Wendy posted in Come and Get It (One-shots).]
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How to Catch a Fish (ManxMan)
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