You slam and lock the door to your apartment, feeling like a slightly more mobile iceberg as your feet and hands flail about whilst trying to take off your shoes; a task which would normally be a breeze to accomplish, but wasn't so with fingers that felt at least twice their normal size. Just as you feel about ready to rage quit, your left sneaker flies off, almost causing you to fall, and, during a quick readjustment (which sees you bumbling around even more in the process), your right hand barely manages to slip into your pocket and grab the contents. Finally, a mere thirty seconds after arriving, your one-man tango ends with you haphazardly tossing two keys and a wallet down onto the carpeted floor, then extending your arms as far out as the entry way's walls would allow, then braced yourself, more than prepared to let the warmth of the apartment work its magic on your chilled body.
However, after a shiver-filled moment or two of the exact opposite, you decide to take a quick peek at the thermometer to your left. You know for a fact that it should be warm; at least seventy-four degrees (if the dinky, old device was to be trusted), just like you set it before you left, not really caring all too much about how big of a dent such a decision would put in your wallet just so long as you were warm, but it feels more like it should read somewhere down in the forties. Glancing towards the bottom of the small plastic panel showed that it was, in fact, in the "on" position, which made the apparent malfunction make even less sense.
Heaving a heavy sigh of defeat, you lean back against the front door, knowing that you'll soon have to bring this up with the complex's landlord, Miranda, whom everyone seemed to get along with just fine except you. There could be any number of perfectly reasonable things that continued to keep the two of you from having a healthy friendship, but you assume it's just because she's an ass, and would not find it hard to believe if she thought the same (only about you). In an attempt to get your mind off the subject, you silently reflect on the sudden and rather intense change of Colorado weather, listening as the gentle hum of the air conditioner finally kicks in, signaling that there should only be a few minutes separating you from the heat you so desperately craved. A small smile works itself onto your face when you think about not only the coming warmth, but how crazy it is that someone like yourself somehow managed to make it from the parking lot, then up three flights with nothing more than two damp socks, a moist pair of pants, and an unfortunately soaked shirt; in other words, a much better end result than practically every other snowstorm you've lived through.
You stand up a bit straighter, about to perform a few more checks on the system, but your stomach demands otherwise, practically yelling at you after skipping breakfast and having nothing more than a soda for lunch. You'd much rather starve than go talk to Miranda, but, you know, that whole "living" thing tends to trump everything else in the end, whether you like it or not. Before taking your first step towards the kitchen, which sat a mere twenty-five feet or so from the door, you swing your arm up over your head, and it brushes against the vent, which was currently pushing out a constant supply of hot air; nowhere near enough to warm up as quickly as you'd previously thought, but enough to (hopefully) have the place feeling normal again within an hour or two. You don't really know, but at least the damn thing was actually working.
You don't bother picking up your feet as you walk, trying to force the carpet into absorbing as much moisture from your socks as possible, but it doesn't seem to want to work at all. Several rapid and random images of the food you wish you could be eating flash through your mind, but you remind yourself that, even though you usually have more than enough money leftover from bills and such to splurge on a meal somewhere nice, like Taco Bell or Subway, you don't actually have to. However, your stomach grumbles anyway, and you pick up the pace for the last foot or so.
Unfortunately, all the time spent walking could've been put towards doing something infinitely more productive, for arriving in the kitchen didn't bring about all of the goodies and snacks you expected it to, something you can attribute to your seeming inability to not shop until just before you're completely out, despite walking by several aisles of food every damn day in a store where you're even give a small discount on almost everything. You glance over at a little black clock that hangs above the sink, and find that, even though it's almost dark outside, it was only six minutes past five. You grumble and open the fridge, pulling out a water bottle before turning back and heading to the couch.
Sitting down and cracking open the bottle, you stare ahead at the television, its black screen reflecting your whole figure. You take a moment to look yourself over, wondering if anyone liked (or even noticed) the new shirt you had bought just two days before. It wasn't anything special, so you'd understand if they didn't, but still. You take a sip, put the cap back on, then lay your head back and close your eyes, wanting to now focus on nothing more than kicking back and waking up warmer than you currently are. Your muscles relax after a day that seemed to drag on longer than it really did, and, after a particularily hard exhale, you feel yourself drift to sleep, the howling winds outside singing you a rough lullaby.
***
You eyelids flutter for a second before opening fully, after which you blink a couple of times to get back in to the swing of things. The wind still hasn't died down, but the clock now reads somewhere around a quarter past six, and the room is considerably warmer, so you are totally alright with everything outside. You stand and stretch, hearing at least two pops of your spine, then give your chest area a quick and lazy scratch. You grab your water and begin heading back to the kitchen, but stop when you swear you hear a faint cry.
Like any rational person would do, you stop and listen, waiting for whatever it was to sound off again, but, when it doesn't after a moment or two, you shrug it off and plant your bottle on the counter. Opening the fridge, you decide to keep dinner simple and grab two eggs and some butter, then look one cabinet to the left for a pan to use. Putting all four things down, you start up the left burner, and pull out a little knife to cut just a bit of butter off the rest of the stick.
Putting said butter into the pan yields results almost instantly, but, just as you begin to search for a spatula of some sort, you hear a knock. Now, a knock is something almost everyone expects every now and again, but this time was different; the knock came from your small balcony, which sat up on the third story of the building. You freeze, and seriously contemplate just up and leaving the house as fast as humanly possible, but some sick need to know draws you away from the buttery pan and towards the sliding glass door back by the couch.
It takes a moment for you to extend your hand and grasp the handle, but, as soon as you do, you pull back and decide to roll with something much safer; just checking through the blinds. Aftter another moment of intense internal debate, you pull aside one blind, and gaze out in to the cold night.
Nothing pops out immediately, but a quick glance downwards startles you worse than anything before; it's a creature of some sort, black as night, save for an odd and bright green thing around what you can only assume to be its stomach, and what looked like hair that was a most interesting shade of blue. You bounce back away from the door, and your mind instantly begins trying to process what it just saw. Did some undiscovered species just happen to land on your patio? Was it even still alive?
Unfortunately, the only way to answer any questions required you to get even closer to the whatever that thing was, which is something you didn't particularily want to do, but, you figure there's nothing you can lose anyway, so you swallow your fear and crawl back to the door. Your thumb slowly snaps the lock open, and you slide the door itself open even slower. The winds howl as if they want the door to remain closed, but you press on, seeing now that the creature is much closer than you originally though.
A cautious hand sticks out and places itself upon the creature's neck, or what you assume to be the neck. It's soft like silk, which suprises you, as the thing looks to be coated in some sort of latex or leather. The blue-ish hair, you find, is equally as soft, if not more so, than the hide. Running your hand up along the creature's neck reveals that it has a pulse, which causes you to tense up more than you already were, yourself now fully prepared to dash away in the other direction.
It exhales, and you freeze as it turns its head slightly to look in your direction, momentarily locking eyes with you, and you can't believe you didn't recognize what this was earlier; Queen Chrysalis, ruler over the Changelings, sprawled out on your third story balcony in the freezing cold. Your hand shoots back to your side, and, before you can close the door, you swear that she barely manages to whisper something along the lines of "Help".
Well, great. You're starving, it's cold now thanks to the door being open, and you've got a cartoon character on your patio. A sane person would bolt in the opposite direction, but you aren't entirely sane. Still, you have the nagging sense that something isn't right, like this is all just some weird dream brought on by fatigue that brought itself out of nowhere. You look back towards the door, where Chrysalis has now rested her head on the stone lip leading back inside, her eyes half-lidded but still focused on you, giving you something that looked like sleep puppy-dog eyes.
"Damnit," is all you can bring yourself to think as you reach back out to grasp the door handle.