What in the world is going on? Part 2

Lorelei awoke with a start, but the sleep had partially taken hold and her mind was really muggy now. One last and final crystal, tiny but with sharp and jagged edges, formed near her feet, dropping softly onto the bed and staying intact, though she didn't seem to notice it. "Wha... oh. Don't scare me...." she yawned- "like that, I thought you were that other guy again, the one was was carrying me."

She squirmed a little, still overly tired, mostly out of it. "He was in the woods when I woke up; I didn't hear his name, but they were calling him bad or evil or something like that as they greeted him, but I didn't really hear his name. Then he was arguing with the assholes about my tattoo that I got because my missing dead family has it when people find them and about all these laws they broke and something about a payment and something like a Crescent Scorpion or something like that....it didn't make any sense to me, and then there was that awful smell like something was rotting and dead and people started screaming and shooting and he picked me up and ran. I was trying to say that earlier but then I saw a daydream of a one-armed neko in the corner. He yelled something about a cat as he was running and made this weird clinking sound, like he was wearing some kind of metal, and he had this weird triangle of chains or something on the side of his face I could feel because it was pressing against me. And then he put me down and made me start running and told me that if the cat catches me she'll kill me, and then-" She stopped all of a sudden and a confused look crossed her face. "Wait. Didn't he...."

She looked confused for a moment. "Wait. When I started running, it was right behind us, wasn't it? That's where somebody was firing a gun, and somebody was yelling something about a color, or making a duck sound, like Black, or Quack, and a woman's voice was calling out 'Lorelei', and when I was running the third guy went back into the woods and...." She stopped, then something else occurred to her. "In the clearing, when I still had my blindfold on and when I was still tied up, those jerks who brought me here, they said that I was a Merrow, and that was interesting to him, and he was yelling something about 'Lori's bloodline' or something like that. When they were harassing me at work, though, I never told them my real name, and they said my tattoo was..."

Lorelei looked at the doctor with a sudden clarity and a touch of excitement as she sat up a little. "They saw my tattoo and they said it was some sort of gang sign where they were from. That's gotta be the Crescent Scorpion that the old guy was yelling at them about, which means they're targeting people with that tattoo the people from my family who disappear get. I thought getting it was just symbolic, I didn't know it actually means something, and oh my god did they really come after me just because of some stupid tattoo, WHAT THE FUCK?"

A guard knocked on the door after fighting his way through the crowd and, shutting the doro behind him, he made his way over to Wong and handed him a note before excusing himself and reading. The note read,

"May or may not be relevant to Unknown: forest ranger Wikd Black just checked into the ranger station, grabbing a first aid kit and leaving. Ranger at station did not know about the situation and let him go after noting Wikd Black appears to have recently been fighting with some sort of large cat and had taken several severe-looking injuries. Wikd Black claimed he had stumbled across a sex slave ring with virgin about to be sold in the forest and was tracking the escaped victim, then left en route to hospital. Ranger at station radioed in the the other officers; Wikd Black's service vehicle found abandoned and whereabouts are presently unknown."

Lorelei sighed and closed her eyes. Her frustration started to come out in her voice a little now. "Sorry. Do you have a camera or something? This is the second or third time I've had to try and explain that I didn't do anything wrong now."

She thought as hard as she can, then started, "My name is-" she hesitated fro just a moment; she was comfortable with the lie, but somehow using her fake name and age always made her feel uncomfortable- "My name is Miranda Jessica Baker, and I'm nineteen. I left home about a year ago to look for somebody in my family who had gone missing. In my family we get a lot of runaways and missing people. I used to think it was normal, growing up, but I haven't been so sure about it for a while. I don't know what time or day it is or where I am anymore, at least not in a way that I really understand, but a week ago, to me, I was at my job in New Mexico near closing time when these two jerks were talking about women. They came up to my register and ordered cigarettes, and since I'm short, I had to reach up to get them, which means I had to turn my back to them. Well, because I had to reach, my tattoo showed for a second, the one I got for my eighteenth birthday because I just thought it was something symbolic everybody in my family who ran away or went missing seemed to have whenever their dead bodies were found, but nooo, according to those jackasses my tattoo of a scorpion with its tail raised, which apparently is called the Crescent Scorpion, something else I didn't know, apparently wherever they're from it's some kind of gang tattoo, and they must have had a bad experience with somebody else who had the tattoo, because they started making death threats and one of them even tried to leap over the counter and attack me. After they left, I called the manager, and then I was sent home for the week while the police looked into it."

She sighed. "When I was driving home, I made sure I wasn't followed, and when I got home I locked my apartment. I didn't go outside that week, didn't open the blinds didn't make any calls, didn't use internet, didn't do anything that should have let people know I was there. Then in the middle of the night before I was supposed to go back to work the next day, I hear a loud noise from my door. It's a straight shot hallway from my bedroom to the door, so I go out and see what the hell happened and I find out somebody broke my fucking door down. I turned right around and went back to my bedroom, intending to grab my phone and something to beat the crap out of whoever it was that had broken in, but as soon as I got into my bedroom, something hit me and I blacked out."

She made a fist and pulled a little at the handcuffs on her wrists and ankles. "And these piss me off, because next thing I know, I wake up blindfolded and gagged in the middle of the woods with my hands tied above my head and I'm still in my pajamas and a pain in my arm where it looks like I was poked with a needle a few times. I was still tired, so I passed out again, but then the next time I woke up, it felt coder out, so it was night, and there were three people arguing. Two of the voices I recognized as the assholes from my job, and the other one I'd never heard before, but he was yelling at them about all kinds of things, saying he wanted nothing to do with me and talking about drug-induced comas and kidnapping, and I can't even remember half of it. The assholes wanted him to pay them something, like I was just some product to be sold, calling me a Merrow, but then all of a sudden they were interrupted because it started to smell like something dead and rotting was there. That's when it sounded like some kind of very large cat snarled, literally, right above my head, because when it jumped I got his with a lot of leaves and branches. Somebody started firing a gun, and that third person they were calling Quack or Black or something like that yelled that it was the cat, so obviously it was something he knew about beforehand, and then he just lifted me up over his shoulder and started running."

She frowned. "It was weird. He ran for a few minutes, but he never stumbled once, and he ran in a straight line. He had to know exactly where he was going, and since I could tell it was night, my guess is he's somebody who's in the woods a lot at night. He set me down and pushed me, and then he told me to run because if 'she' caught me, then 'she' would kill me, so that meant that whatever attacked us had o be somebody he knew. When I was focusing on the scent of rot earlier, I suddenly had this really weird daydream about a really angry cat girl who smelled like rot because she was missing one arm and was snarling just like what I heard in the forest, but Ishiki was ju-" she stopped suddenly and smacked her hand on the railing. "DAMNIT! See what I mean? None of this makes sense! I have no idea what's going on, and then I'm having these random daydreams that seem like about some crazy and superpissed one-armed cat girl named Ishiki who wants to kill Lorelei Merrow for killing somebody called Ragnarok, but that can't even begin to be true because one, cat girls don't exist, and two, I've never heard of anybody called Ragnarok or Ishiki, and three, they seem more like memories, but if they are, they're not my memories, and that doesn't explain why every single person gets the exact same, and I mean the EXACT same dream about somebody who says 'My name is Lorelei. Today is the first of many with the man who saved my life.’ Nobody understands it. Nobody seems to think it's anything but coincidence. And when I tried to bring up the idea of ghosts or magic to my parents, they just got angry and spanked me and told me magic didn't exist and neither did ghosts and the idea it could be some kind of spiritual or psychic message was just stupid. I tried asking a psychologist about it, he seemed to think it could be some kind of genetic memory, but he'd never heard of genetic memories working like that before, so he said he wanted to run some kind of test to see if I was special, but that just sounded creepy so I told him to go fuck himself. Urgh! I'm sick of it! It's not my fault that this Ragnarok person is dead, so why some kind of imaginary magical one-armed cat girl named Ishiki that I've never met but somehow have a memory of wants to kill me is something I really don't even want to care about anymore at this time! I JUST WANT TO KNOW WHY THE FUCK I WAS KIDNAPPED OVER SOME STUPID SCORPION TATTOO AND WHY THE FUCK BEING A 'MERROW' IS SO DAMNED IMPORTANT!"

She sighed, and then, taking a few deep breaths, she raised her arms and pointed to the handcuffs. "I'm sorry. I'm fine now. Can you take these off? I have to go to the bathroom."

The guard outside the door heard, and although he seemed hesitant, he came in and unlocked the handcuffs. After that, he stood in place next to the door on the inside while Lorelei went into the personal use bathroom in the room and shut the door.

After she was done using the bathroom and washing her hands, Lorelei looked at her face in the mirror with disgust. It was the first time she'd really gotten a look at it. Not just her face, but all her exposed skin was a bit dirty, and just didn't feel clean. She started using wet paper towels to get as much off as she could.

Meanwhile, about the same time Lorelei went into the bathroom, a nurse answered the phone at the front desk. "Hello, this is-"

An almost frantic male voice answered. "About damn time I got through to somebody! Last night, a patient named Lorelei Merrow was brought in. is anybody alone with her?"

The nurse blinked. "I'm sorry, who?"

There was a frustrated snarl at the end of the phone. "THE BITCH I FOUND IN THE WOODS LAST NIGHT! She might be using a fake name, I don't care, but her name is Lorelei Merrow and she can't be in an enclosed space! She's releasing some sort of invisible chemical in the air that can temporarily boost magic and makes people's hearts come closer to the surface. If she gets emotional it'll start condensing and crystallizing, and if that gets in the system the effects are worse! I'll asking again: IS. SHE. ALONE?

The nurse paused. "I'm sorry, who is thi-"

"I KNOW THE MERROW CLAN! STOP FUCKING AROUND AND WARN SOMEBODY!" The other end of the phone sounded like it was thrown against something hard, and then the line went dead.

The nurse paused, not quite sure to make of that call. Then, on impulse, she picked up the phone and called the doctor in charge of the floor the girl calling herself Miranda Baker was on. "The patient who was brought in last night? Is she alone right now? I just got a very strange call that might help us identify her...."

Although it took her nearly twenty-five minutes, Lorelei judged she had gotten off all the crap she was likely to get off for the moment. With a sigh, she left the bathroom and went back over to the bed to sit down. "Sorry about that, and thank you."

When Lorelei saw the second doctor, she knew something was up; when he called her 'Miss Merrow' she knew by the look in his eyes that he knew. She sighed with frustration. "Okay, fine. My name is Lorelei Merrow, and I'm twenty-three, not nineteen. Honestly, I thought a fake name and age would seem reasonable given, oh, I don't know, somebody trying to kill me? I mean, with everything that's happened, you can't really expect me to just trust you, right? And how did you even find out, anyway? What, did my family put out a missing persons report on me?"

She ran a hand through her hair, and then sighed some more. "Look, I only left home a year ago because I want to know, alright? I had a hunch my dreams weren't just coincidence when my sister Miranda left, and if you look at my family, it gets even stranger. Every first-born child to the first-born child in a straight line going back to who knows when is a girl given the name Lorelei Merrow. Mine is Lorelei Amaya Merrow, because Amaya is a name that's been in our family a while. My aunt was named Amaya, and my grandmother's middle name, and it was her grandma's middle name."

She paused,then held up her hands. "I mean, seriously, what kind of family does that? Our family doesn't let go of names, and if you look at everybody who's still missing right now and hasn't turned up dead- my sister Amaya, my cousin Jessica, my uncle Zack, and about half a dozen others- and factor in that everybody but the Loreleis just wind up dropping off the radar, something isn't adding up. There's something we're not being told, and I left to find out what it is, okay? I'm not going- okay, you know what? I'm changing that statement. I absolutely refuse to go back to my family until I find out what the hell our dreams mean and where everybody keeps disappearing to. I've been looking for a whole year, and until that weird old guy from the woods, and those perverts who kidnapped me, I didn't have any leads. That means whatever's going on, they were involved. And even if it means facing down some angry bloodthirsty wild animal out in the woods, I am going to find out or die trying."

She sighed, then ran a hand through her hair again, then looked at the foot of her bed, where the last crystal was still sitting there. "And seriously! What the hell is that thing? I can accept the one-armed cat-girl was a daydream, or somebody else's memories, somehow, something like that, but earlier there had to be at least twenty of these things popping out of nowhere. If it's not some kind of CG, what is it?"

She reached over and picked it up, and from there, she started examining it. "I mean, it's solid enough, so it's not fake, but... OW!" She dropped it quickly, where it broke on the ground, where the shards of all the others had already mostly melted into small puddles. She looked at her finger strangely, where she had accidentally cut herself on one of the jagged edges of the crystal. "It's shar-"

Her eyes suddenly shot straight up and the upper half of her body felt like something hit it in the chest, and she fell back on the bed, unconscious. Her body lay still for perhaps three seconds, and then her chest jumped a little as her body lurched. Her arms and legs began suddenly twitching, and her skin began to change tone as the veins of her body starting to become more visible in her system. Her body at once gave a major convulsion, and her unconscious body fell off the bed and hit the ground with a thud. A semi-transparent liquid began to seep out of her pores, and within less than five seconds she was so damp it looked as though she had just stepped out of a pool with the clothes she was wearing as she began to softly moan and her arms began to move.

Her entire body, aside from being damp with a slightly greenish tinge from the moisture seeping out of her pores, had now obtained a slightly aquamarine hue all over in a pattern that made her skin look as though it had separated into scales. When she spoke again, her tone was different- stronger, calmer, and certainly that of somebody cruel, registering a mild surprise. "I'm awake...." Her arms moved, unsteady at first, propping herself up into a sitting position, as she examined her shaking hands and arms, a look of wonder on her face. "I am older than I expected, but I'm awake. And I have a female host." A slight smile crossed her face, then faded, and then her eyes shone with delight as her laughter began. It wasn't the laughter of somebody in distress, or happy; rather, it was more like the insane laughter of a sadist who had just discovered a new and extremely fun way to kill somebody. It made her sound like a psychopath.

Her eyes glanced up with eager desire at Wong and Paschalis. "Mages!" She reached behind her, then felt the metal, her laughter increasing a little as she lifted herself up, although still unsteady, onto her feet. "And this is..... a bed!" She looked around in wonder, like a child who had just gained sight and was brought into a museum for the first time. it was as though everything was new and fascinating. "And this is.... a hospital!" Sitting down, Lorelei's laughter finally toned down, and then, on her feet, she grabbed her shirt and yanked it off as though it was on fire. She dropped her bottoms in a similar hurried fashion, and started examining her own body. "Ragnarok spoke truth. This is by no means my own body. Her curse has worked."

With a wide and toothy grin, she spotted the puddles on the floor. "Oh? It seems my host has been feeling a little emotional. Such a shame, if all my elixir would go to waste...." She looked around and spotted an empty jar on the counter with the lid open, and then with a cackle she thrust out her hands, and all the liquid chemical shot up into the air into one solid and floating stream. With one finger she had it float around the room a little, and then she floated it neatly into the jar on the counter before relinquishing her control. "Ohhh, so much better. I imagine in this day and age there can't be much left; that much should easily fetch a small fortune, now shouldn't it?"

With a cackle, she flopped back on the bed with her legs spread apart and leaned back on her arms, looking at the doctors with a wicked grin and a cruel pair of eyes. "I am the vigilante assassin named Scorpion Merrow of the Crescent Scorpions, formerly Lorelei Merrow of the Merrow Clan. When the Crescent Scorpions annihilated the other members of my clan and the slavers who bound them, Darkness, Ragnarok, and Ishiki saved my life and granted me freedom. Ragnarok cursed me, as per my request, and those who bear my blood are blessed with my memories, my powers, and the secrets of my legacy. If I am here, then Darkness has found my host, and she has been awakened to the world of magic. Henceforth she will be immune to her own power, though I shall remain awake and within her as well. It seems my memories are buried deep; it does not appear Darkness has been regularly waking my children. While my host sleeps, to whom do I have the pleasure of watching over my helpless body as my memories gathered and manifested themselves into the superior creature you see before you?"

"Missing?" Lorelei threw her head back and laughed for a solid minute before easing up, then leaned forward with her head tilted as she looked at Paschalis with a serpent's venomous smile and the look in her eyes was akin to that of a sadist getting off on burning their victim alive and reveling in their screams. "Dear, dear, little Patchy, have you no knowledge of ancient and forbidden Dark Faerie curses? As the one I had Ragnarok cast upon my bloodline states, the firstborn of the firstborn shall always be a female, and she shall not die before giving birth to at least three children, though any children she tries to bear beyond five will be stillborn, and after the final child she will die within a year. As for the fate of those not blessed enough to be firstborn, they have not gone missing. Dear Patchy, quite simply, the curse requires two sacrifices for the sake of two lives. The lambs have merely gone in search of the lion, as their blood commands them to do."

She giggled, and then Paschalis a very sensual look. "It's a fun little curse, isn't it? I do so find it quite amusing, but I never did find out why Ragnarok was so terrified of it. If it hadn't been for that little something-something we slipped her, I don't think she would have agreed to it at all, and then, well, you know Dark Faeries aren't allowed to lie, so of course she had to go through with it. She wiped her memory of it after, but it was too late and the curse was already cast."

She smiled, and then gave Paschalis a very sensual look while leaning forward. "I just love saying the name of it. French is a very enchanting language. 'Malédiction de Grimoire de Sang Mémoire'....."

She stood up and began stretching, giggling as she did so. "As for my host, of course she does not know of magic. The second her awakening begins to take place, the powers she inherited through my bloodline begin to manifest themselves in a slow and gradual procession until they reach the point my memories have gathered enough to wake me. That she is twenty-three summers worries me far more than her ignorance." She stopped for a moment. "It also concerns me that you do not seem to realize what it is you are talking to, not who."

Having completed stretching with her arms, she began to stretch with her legs. "Hmmm... my host is not unfit for physical activity. This should be quite enjoyable in days to come." Her grin was wicked, and then she continued with her explanation. "As for what I am, while my soul does remain on this plane of existence, I am certain, it is not within this body. Rather, it is sealed into a spirit-house held by an Immortal who calls himself Darkness. The collective consciousness you see before you is the combined result of the memories I sealed into my bloodline, and there are many more yet to come forth. As it stands, many of my memories are deeply buried, while others were sealed until certain-" her sly eyes met Paschalis's for a second- "Ah, let's call them certain conditions for the moment. I cannot tell you everything, because even when the memories I have access to have all been retrieved and are separated from my host's, I will not know everything myself. There were things we did not want forgotten, but we did not want them remembered, either. While my formed consciousness will be in the back of her mind henceforth, acting as a voice in her head, I am nothing but a copy, specially conditioned and without existence before my awakening at her realization of magic. To each host, I am unique; without my soul free to travel between them, I am nothing more than the memories that were initially sealed away, before I had my first child."

Her arm suddenly twitched, and Scorpion's face turned ugly. "Tsch! My host is waking up. I must go dormant again until my memories have all been gathered. If my host's ancestors have not been awake since my own child before their firstborn, it may take as long as three weeks. Until then, you'll just have to deal with my host instead. Tah-tah, Patchy." She flashed him a nasty smirk, and then the body convulsed once more before collapsing on the ground.

It took about five seconds before Lorelei began to stir, and as she sat up with a moan, she asked, sounding sleepy, "Mmph... what... happen-" She paused, then her face turned red as she looked down at herself, halfway into a sitting position, then started screaming bloody murder. "WHAT THE FUCK! WHY THE FUCK AM I NAKED? WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO?!?" After that she kept shrieking at the top of her lungs for a good two minutes while trying to cover herself with her whole body turning beet red from embarrassment and curling herself into a sitting ball as much as she could.