It’s way too early to be talking to new people. Besides, have you met me? I’m super awkward.

 
Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 1st Generation
Characters: Arashi Mayako
Race: Human
Age: 93, physically about 29
Current residence: Atheria City, Eresiel
Final Word Count: 755 words
 

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I can’t really claim that I had a great childhood; it wasn’t terrible, but it certainly wasn’t good either. I was just one of plenty others that had their path set out for them and following it was the only option. Either you followed that path or, well, you ended up a slave to someone else. This was something that was reminded to me quite often from a young age and I suppose that it’s all right, in the end.

I mean, it’s not really all right, but it was so long ago that making a fuss about it now would be pretty stupid.

As we were younger, we could get away with a good number of things, but it still was never really great. We had a good number of rules to follow but, as long as we kept to those rules, we could do as our hearts pleased.

I’ve always been a bit—more than a bit, to be honest—of a loner. I was awkward around the other kids, and I liked to keep to myself. With that in mind, my main means of ‘escaping’ the cliques that inevitably formed when the others were awake was to stay up much later than any of them and, then, of course, sleep in later. This is something that actually helped me with the job I was later on given to earn my keep, so I can’t really complain.

I do faintly remember one morning, though, I had gone to bed even later than usual, only having crawled into my bed an hour or so before I knew the rest of them would usually get up and, even as I did listen to them getting up as it was a large, open room and none of them were overly quiet, there was one that came up to my bed, shaking my shoulder.

Surprisingly, I didn’t get mad at them, I don’t think I could have. I did mutter grumpily about the fact that it was far too early to be disturbed, doubly so when they whispered at me that they wanted me to meet their new friend. I remember how quickly that made me pull up the blanket over my head so as to quit being bothered.

Oddly, this is really the main part I recall. I don’t remember what happened after I pulled that blanket up. I’ve never been one to sleep comfortably while having my head covered but I must have been tired enough to drift off because as I next remember it, I’m waking up and it’s closer to noon. It wasn’t a very long sleep, but I think that my body knew not to miss too many meals and since I usually slept through breakfast, I wasn’t stupid enough to let myself skip through dinner.

It wasn’t as though we had access to food as much as we wanted. We had three meals a day and if we missed them, we were shit out of luck. They did set out some snacks twice during the day, but kids are ruthless and, in these cases, it was very often a matter of first-come, first-serve. If you didn’t come around fast enough, you didn’t get any.

I do somewhat recall that there was someone by the table where the food and the snacks were. They made sure that we only took one, but it didn’t stop some from going back to the end of the line and, well, whoever was on ‘watch’ duty didn’t seem to care much. Only one snacking item was being picked up at once and that’s all that mattered so yeah, a few tended to hog and if you came about too late, you just had to deal.

Being the awkward kid I was, I tended to be very often shit out of luck but that’s fine. My metabolism was fairly slow back then—it still is now, to be frank—so even if I only did get two meals a day, it was fine by me. That changed when I started working, I needed more energy to hold me through, but I learned to stretch out my meals and I learned to find food when I was outside as well.

It’s weird that I remember at least part of that particular morning; it wasn’t rare for new kids to come in, I just usually was never bothered about it by anyone else wanting me to meet the new kids. No one was in this place out of choice.

You have wings and I can tell they’re real. You can’t talk your way out of this one.

 
Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 1st Generation
Characters: Arashi Mayako
Race: Human
Age: 92, physically about 29
Final Word Count: 696 words
 

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On the rare morning, I’ll wake up and wonder at the world that surrounds me. I suppose it might be an odd way of looking at things considering how long my life has been so far and how long I’ve lived here but, at the same time, it isn’t all that strange. I grew up in a world that was human-centric. Up until the day I think I turned twenty-one, I didn’t really know about the ‘others’ out there. I was one who believed that humans were all there was on the planet. So to speak, of course.

Not far after my twenty-first birthday, I was introduced into the rest of the world. Putting it that way, makes it almost seems like it was a careful sort of introduction and that all was well and perfect in that meeting but that wasn’t the case, not really.

The proper term to use, I think, was that I was more or less thrust into this other world that I knew nothing about and I had to waddle my way through. I had to survive.

I was in denial for a while; I’m not going to lie. My hit turned out to be a werewolf but I took a few knocks on the head during that particular hit and I was sure that I’d imagined a good part of it.

It was only a few months later that my current contact sort of sealed the deal on my being unable to ignore the fact that humans weren’t all there was on the planet, as far as intelligent beings were concerned.

I don’t know how long she thought she was going to manage to hide the fact that she wasn’t human from me. She’d been my contact for a few weeks, I was in a new country, I was adapting to things as they were but I still was a little lost and she had told me that if I had any questions, I could ask her at any time. Now, I’m a pretty reserved person and I’d mostly been wanting to keep focused on the potential jobs but as I was having a hard time finding my way around, despite all the maps I’d found, I decided I’d drop in on her to ask her a few questions.

I mean, she’d offered, right?

So there I went, knocking and letting myself in and just… a flurry of feathers is more or less all I saw before she was staring at me wide-eyed from behind her desk. Now, there was nothing in that room to explain the feathers and while I was reluctant to do so, I let myself think back to a few other signs I’d ignored as being from an overactive imagination and I went right in with the wildest guess I could figure.

I told her I knew she had wings and that she couldn’t just talk her way out of that particular situation.

Amusingly enough, she did try to talk her way out of the situation but now that I was sure I knew what I’d seen, I didn’t really let her get away with it all and there we went. Of course, she didn’t just tell me everything about everyone, I think I still would have been there years later but she told me a little bit about the world I knew nothing about, she told me about how far back everyone figured all of it was connected and just, she opened the doors.

Sure, I didn’t cross paths with that many others in my hits. Most of my contacts were more interested in the death of mortals over the death of non-humans but I had a few that still popped up.

It was only when I made it into this particular haven that I really realized that there was just so much more to life than humans. I don’t think I’ll ever really get over that particular fact and who can blame me, really? The world is huge and that’s why, once in a blue moon, I’ll wake up and just wonder at the world that surrounds me still.

I’m not a safe person to hang around.

 
Timeline/World: Atheria – 1st Generation
Characters: Arashi Mayako
Race: Human
Age: 90, physically about 29
Final Word Count: 567 words
 

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I know that some people who were in my line of work used to be proud of what they did. They’d have a world of stories to tell to awe but all in all, I had no interest in telling people about how many lives I’d ended or which rich and famous death had been mine.

I did the job I did because I had to. Because it was the only thing I knew how to do and because it kept me from ending up a slave to someone else. I didn’t have any blood lust to sate and I had no desire to find myself bathing in the blood of my enemies, as I’ve heard mentioned a few times. That one grosses me out. I don’t understand how anyone would appreciate bathing in blood. I’ve heard about it and I’ve actually seen it. I had a contact who bathed in the blood of her victims and we’re not talking vampire or demon or anything of the sorts, no. She was a regular human just like I am and I still can’t understand what went through her mind.

The times I’d get scuffed up during a job, I’d be craving a shower with as much hot water as I could handle to get all the filth up. I might be a little obsessive compulsive about being clean but not to the point of that being a problem while the kids were growing up. At least, I’d like to think that it wasn’t a problem while they were young and even now. It was never brought up to me.

Just the same, that makes me wonder about the people who bathe in milk, those who bathe in just about anything but clean water. I might like to have a long soak now and again but all I might have ever dropped in there was a sprinkling of Epsom salt and rarely scented. I’m just a little odd like that and I’m not sure if it’s from the life I had to live before or just because I’m that way and I’m not big on having a ‘scent’ other than my own clinging to my skin.

The kids though, that was different. Bubble baths with bubbles so thick they could make a wall out of it and make crowns and castles and all you could imagine, little dabs of this or that nature-ish perfume on their sheets or in their room if they wanted, I let them discover what they wanted and what they liked.

Things were a little different with Tanner, his allergy to sugar made us have to rethink a lot of things. It wasn’t just in the things we would feed him; it was in a few of the things we used in our day to day lives. One of our first shower scrubs, for one thing. It was a whole new thing to learn about and we changed our menu about some until we could find a balance of food he could safely eat and food the others would eat without thinking they were being punished because we were withholding sugar from them.

I love my kids, even though they’re all grown up and out of the house at this point. It gave me a second chance at life, far, far away from what I used to be and I’m grateful for them all.

It’s an experiment.

Timeline/World: Atheria 1st Generation
Characters: Arashi Mayako
Race: Human
Age: 89, physically about 29
Final Word Count: 507 words

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I will not claim to be a grand master chef but every now and again I will find one of the old cookbooks from back when the world still lived and thrived, especially one from the country where I was born and spent most of my youth and I’ll experiment.

Most of the dishes I ever prepared were simple and—to me—quite delicious. I’ve never heard any complaints from around the table, well except just once, I’d prepared octopus and Tanner just gave me that look. You know the look, the one that’s a mix up between ‘what the hell mom?!’, ‘what did I just eat? gross!’ and ‘are you trying to kill me, mom?!’, so I suppose that’d be horrified, disgusted and sorta angry. To me, it was both hilarious and humbling because to this day, Tanner—whose intolerance for sugar—had required very careful consideration for his meals and since I didn’t like to make him feel excluded or different, what he ate, everyone ate.

So that particular recipe had been a little borderline, it had required tweaking but I recalled eating some when I’d been so much younger and it had been an interesting experience. I hadn’t loved it, of course not, but I certainly hadn’t hated it and I think that having tried it once again did remind me that tasty as it is, it was a recipe to only try every decade or so, most likely.

Now that we’re on our own and all of the kids are living their own happy lives with their loved ones, I dig up more recipes, I try other things, I’ve even tried my hand at other worldly recipes, still remaining within the general area of Asia but otherwise trying things I’d never dared before. Most recipes still get most of the sugar cut out of them or substituted for something else because old habits die hard but it’s fun. It’s a discovery in taste and in history, in a way.

I admit that some of the recipes are far more experimental than others. Using ingredients that I’d never heard of, ingredients that were hard to find before the world ended but we’re lucky enough that Tyron seems to be able to get his hands on anything, so long as we give him a little head start as to what we’re looking for. Some are best forgotten and never used again but a good number of these recipes are marked as being seriously delicious and are set aside to be tried again at a later time.

Tonight, takoyaki. Octopus, of course, but done in a much different way. These I’ve fed the kids every now and again and not one of them knew any better. I imagine that the other recipe just was too much in their face to be taken differently but I take the blame. I’m aware that some of the recipes I find are a little ‘out there’ and are closer to an acquired taste than anything else, I don’t mind.