From Beyond, The Redhead Outlander : A French touch

Prologue

Aahhh, hello.

No, I fear this is no dream, my friend.

You didn't just stumble in here by chance, you wanted it, didn't you?

You expected a distraction, a comfort. Let me tell you a tale. Pretty fair deal, right? Shall we?

This is a tale about one girl, whose life seems at first ordinary, filled with many moods and opportunities, who with her mere existence can swell a wave, start a chain of events with momentous consequences!

Don't you want to know how a mere mortal and a timeless being end up captivating each other so much that they end up altering an already written destiny? I thought so...

It all started with an accident during a storm. Quite a storm, in fact. One, where the wind blew so hard and fast that there was no choice but for trees to bend and break. One, where the rain fell so heavily that it made the road slippery, blurred the view and forced drivers to slow down. One, where lightning burst in the sky, lighting up the dark sky. Where the storm roared so loudly that windows shook and could be felt in people's chests.

It was a storm where people would rather be at home than out on the road. And it was a storm that would cause the most brutal life change ever experienced by one girl especially...

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Like all rides in life, this one was no different from any other. The bus ran slowly, the driver driving carefully to keep the many passengers in his long, wide vehicle from being hurt by the weather outside. While the weather was extremely windy and rainy, it was perfectly normal. The Autan wind was a harbinger of the change of season. Spring was coming. Although... with global warming, it had already been spring, ahead of time by several months.

In this slow and crowded bus, only about ten people were wearing surgical masks. Mostly elderly people. Afraid of catching the endemic disease of the last four years. Sitting near the exit doors and a stop button, a young adult, barely out of her teens, was watching the cars passing quickly on the opposite side of the road. Occasionally her gaze fell on the screen of her phone, which she held in her hand, her fingers smoothly swiping across the screen to select a different song. On her legs rested a khaki cloth bag, decorated with badges and pins and various weathered designs; and between her legs was a grey wheeled suitcase.

The young woman was feeling tired and sleepy. And despite the few stops that separated her from her home and her parents who were expecting her with joy, she let herself be swayed by the vibrations of the bus and carried away by the rhythm of the music diffused by wireless headphones fixed into her ears and hidden by thick red curls.

No one could have foreseen the sudden and brutal road accident that occurred a few seconds later, least of all the redhead girl. This accident, which would only appear on the front page of the local and regional newspaper, would be the turning point in the young girl's sudden change in her life. In this accident, which cost the lives of several people, no one would notice the sudden disappearance of the young girl, whose skull was supposed to hit the window of the bus and die.

Instead, she vanished into thin air, along with her belongings, only to reappear far, very far away, and quite suddenly, with no sound or flash, like a candle flame blown out. Her back and hands scraped the pavement, as if she had been pushed. The girl took a sharp breath and winced slightly in pain. Her eyes fluttered quickly, adjusting to the sudden luminosity, before she focused on the joints of her hands, which were red and bleeding. Her pounding heart did not slow down once she realised that she was no longer on the bus and didn't recognize where she was.