ｃｈｒｙｓｓｉｅ

ｒｏｈｙｐｎｏｌ

Grayson wandered through the streets calmly. Beggars called out at him and strange old men watched him carefully as he walked down the streets.

Light from the street lamps illuminated his features, making his green eyes bright with an unearthly glow every time that he looked up.

His feet crunched against the leaves that had fallen in his way. The rain fell down in large droplets, running down his face and wetting his hair. The air was frigid.

He didn't seem to mind.

He saw two men brawling outside of a storefront. They seemed completely sober. One pulled out a knife and threatened the other.

Grayson shrugged and passed them. It was their own problem, and he didn't fancy getting involved.

He was in a bad part of town, that was no secret.

The buildings were tall and made of crumbling brick. They seemed to loom over him as he walked down the old, cobblestone street, threatening to fall on him.

Grayson wasn't scared.

He knew that he shouldn't have been wandering through such a seedy place in the middle of the night, but there was something that he needed badly.

He could only get it in the bad parts of town.

He turned a street corner. There was an old, shady-looking pub. You couldn't make out what the sign at the top said. There was raucous laughter coming from inside.

He wasn't old enough to go in a pub quite yet, but he doubted the owner would care. It didn't seem like that sort of place. After all, Grayson had been around there before. He recalled the clumps of teenagers with nose rings and tattoos on their wrists hanging around the pub, occasionally slipping each other whiskey from inside.

And if the owner did care... there would be a bit of a problem. Grayson didn't like being told no.

~

Chryssie was curled up in her bed, holding a mug full of chamomile tea.

She was one of those abnormal people that liked to drink tea to go to sleep. Or at least, her friends told her that it was abnormal.

"You shouldn't drink that, you're feeding into the stereotype," they had told her. "If anyone foreign ever met you, they'd think that all you did was drink tea and eat crumpets all day long."

They told her a lot of things. They had many rules that Chryssie didn't care to follow

Her mother wasn't home. She probably would spend the night at the office again.

It had been raining nonstop.

Chryssie took a book from her bookshelf and began to read it.

She was just finishing the second chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when lightning lit up her room.

She dropped her tea, startled, and it shattered on the wood floor, wetting the pages of her book.

"Bollocks!" she exclaimed, because there was no one around to hear her say such vulgar things.

She made her way out of the bed and carefully tiptoed around the maze of glass and hot liquid that was seeping into her brand new rug.

Just her luck.

She walked down the stairs, turning the lights on and trying not to trip. By the time that she had gotten a rag to clean the tea up, it had already seeped entirely into her rug and was starting to wet the wood floor around it.