Original (Other): Prologue
Title: Prologue
Series: Original (Unfamiliar)
Characters/Pairings: Eriana, Callan
Rating: G
Warnings: First-person POV!
Summary: Eriana summons herself a boyfriend... or at least a big doofy shark pal.
[For Caitlin, because I love you.]
Let's get one thing straight here: this was seriously not what I asked for.
First of all, I spent literally hours drawing that summoning circle. I can guarantee you have no idea how much trouble someone has to go through to find a big enough circular object to trace for something like this so that the end result is an actual proper circle and not a huge, fucked-up chalk drawing of a jelly bean. Our instructors usually have to have them custom-cut out of big sheets of plywood and hauling them around is awkward at best and splinter-causing and clumsy the rest of the time. Second, I'm not an artist. I spent a lot of time and effort doing things like measuring the distance between lines with a meter stick. It was not fun. It was tedious and really finicky, but if you mess up a summoning circle, there's a pretty good chance you're going to mess up everything else.
There is nothing like standing up to admire your work after spending a whole day on your knees on a cement floor and/or crouching precariously between two segments of a chalk drawing.
Good, I thought. It's perfect. I am a fucking miracle worker.
I waited for my entire life to get to this moment. I went through years of magic schooling, of notoriously difficult practical exams, of intense selection processes. I fought for good grades my whole life to make sure I'd end up standing right there in front of that summoning circle when the time came so I could finally, finally get what I wanted--a brooding dark overlord boyfriend.
And that is pretty much the absolute opposite of what I got.
When you spend all your school years reading supernatural romance, you learn a thing or two. The things I learned were that a) he would be hotter than the sun with eyes that reflected his experience and pain, and b) I would need to find my way to his frigid core, because he would be a Jerk With a Heart of Gold. I was up to that challenge, though. I was up to the challenge of getting past his efforts to lash out at me, because underneath all those muscles and that perfect face, he would need my love.
I was ready.
The casting went right. The circle was drawn right. I did every single thing right, I swear to god. Every single thing. The instructors purposely made the building as basic as possible so there couldn't be any exploding light fixtures or anything like that, but he didn't need it in order to appear perfectly. I wasn't waiting for some God of Pro-Wrestling to smash his way out of the concrete floor. I wanted my lord of darkness to appear only with the greatest dignity.
I planned only to call the perfect prince of souls, my fanged netherworld soulmate. I channeled only the darkest energy I could reach. My friends wanted functional familiars with cool or practical powers and junk like that, which was fine for nerdlords like my brother, but what I needed was proper sentience and a dark heart, on which I could base my completely flawless plan for supernatural romance.
I'll give him credit for the entrance, I guess. It was pretty good.
I don't even remember the actual moment he appeared. It seemed like the room had filled with fog before I had a chance to get my bearings back. It was perfect fog, too, the kind that rolls off dark waters and drifts softly over piers and crap like that. The fog crept up the windows and instantly turned into soft curling frost designs. He was a dark shape the first time I noticed him, and my breath caught. Dark. Massive. Mysterious.
"Perfect," I breathed. He stepped out of his self-made mist. He had a pretty good gait--not too forceful, not too casual, and when he got closer, I realized he had to be probably over seven feet tall. I stepped back without meaning to. (Bad idea when you're trying to prove to your angst-ridden overlord of pain that you're up to the task of fighting through his grim past, but I wasn't really thinking.)
As the fog cleared, I could see him a little better: broad shoulders, white hair, skin that was not really grey or blue, a face that was distinctly humanoid while still having a trace of... of shark? That scared me for a minute, because fangs are one thing and an entire mouth full of pointy gnashers is a totally different problem. But I'd read werewolf romance novels, I reminded myself. Nothing was impossible to tame.
"Familiar!" I shouted out, hoping I could prove my willpower and defiance to him. "I am the one who summoned you. My name is Eriana Corsair. Do you accept the terms of this summoning and agree to bond yourself with me?"
This is it, I thought. He will bellow his indignant defiance! He will bow to no human!
There was no bellowing. No hissing, no snarling, no anger, no cold disgust. He raised his strong arms above his head--I could see now that he was apparently wearing some kind of regal attire--and stretched. He let out a massive involuntary yawn.
"It is soooo good to be out of there!" The shark lord rolled his shoulders. Now that the room was clearing, his face was a lot more visible. It was definitely manly, alright, but something else, too. His eyes reminded me of... a seal, maybe? I could cope. They were still dark, anyway. I would give him a moment to compose himself and realize a mere human was asking for his power. Instead he thrust out a massive hand, easily bigger than my head. I looked from it back to his face in shock. What the actual fuck. Lords of ice and darkness don't offer handshakes. Lords of torment show their contempt for humanity! This wasn't contempt! This was... was....
When I failed to take his hand, he grabbed mine instead and shook it so hard my entire arm went up and down with it.
"Eriana, you said? Hey, hello! I'm Callan." I continued to stare in horror and disbelief. "Sorry, was the handshake not a good idea? They told me that was what you were supposed to do with humans, so I just kinda went for it. Are you okay? You look a little... well, small firstly."
"Small?" I practically shrieked. "You're the walking mountain!! Where's your contempt for humanity? Holy fuck!! You... you showed up in your perfectly rolling fog in your lordly clothes or whatever's going on there, and you were suppose to... to do something!"
Callan looked perfectly baffled. "Like what? I'm agreeing to your pact thing by shaking your hand because they told me that was a friendly greeting with humans, and if we're going to be partners, we should be friends!"
"Friends." I let out a shuddering breath. "Okay, listen. I could have had a magical fiery unicorn or a bird made out of light or something, but instead I wanted a sentient life form so you could stride in here and take charge! How much angst is in your heart? Because I'm willing to bet there's actually zero."
Callan stared for a second, but then broke into a great peal of laughter--hearty, amused laughter, not the wry sardonic kind. He was obviously not trying. "I can tell this is going to be good! No one wanted me to come because it was 'below my station' and all that, but I think this is a looot better than hanging around and doing a bunch of nothing. We're hitting it off pretty well already!"
"No. No, no, no, no. No. Stop. We're not supposed to be 'hitting it off'. We're supposed to be barely in tune with each other. Where's your contempt for humanity? Seriously! You come here from the pits of hell--"
"Styx. You were really close, though."
"Styx. Yes. Good. Correct me some more. That's what should be happening here! You're like eight feet tall! Don't take orders from a pathetic human! Assert your lordly birthright or something! Be angry that you're forced into magical servitude, I dunno!"
Shark Lord shrugged. "That's not why I came here. I don't want to boss anyone around. Can we just cut to the being friends part and go eat something? I'm dying here. We'll have lots of time to talk." He looked around, probably for the door, actively ignoring my obvious distress over his non-conformity. I tried to keep from screaming into my hands. Isaac was going to laugh at me until he threw up when he found out about this.
This was not how any supernatural romance started. Ever. As far as I could tell, he'd probably just want to be "pals for life" or something stupid and we'd spend all our time together doing whatever passed for frat boy activities where he came from, and maybe eating raw fish between... between playing GTA and guffawing about sports or something. God!
He jogged out the door ahead of me and it occurred to me for a split second that his attitude and his clothes didn't match. Maybe it was possible to be a super chill giant shark man and a lover of stuffy fashion at the same time, but I seriously doubted it. I followed him slowly, mostly dazed from the shock of reality being the exact opposite of what I spent actual years waiting for, but he didn't seem to notice.
The doors were pretty big, but he still had to pause for a second and then duck a bit to get through them.
"Whoa, hey! The sky up here is really blue!" Visions of the poison-purple sky of the netherworld I imagined briefly crossed my mind and I tried to picture this gigantic doof looking at home in a place that had rivers of the souls of the damned and whatever, but it was pretty difficult. The idea of Callan living in a grim castle made of skulls likewise didn't work as well for him as it had for my imaginary prospective love interest. "It's so bright! I like it."
"Yyyyeah, somehow the dark pits of the damned doesn't sound like a place you'd be into," I deadpanned as I locked the door. I was thinking about how soon my instructors would be coming in to investigate the potential damage I'd caused to the summoning arena. Probably not for awhile. They'd be happy to find everything intact for a change.
Callan looked over his shoulder at me, raising his white eyebrows. Look at those dumb white surferboy dreadlocks, I thought. Oh my god. How did this happen?
"Good guess. I was just getting tired of everything, pretty much. I figured if someone was looking for an other-world partner, I might as well give it a shot. Couldn't be worse than what I was dealing with before, that's for sure!" He grinned, and his pointy teeth interlocked perfectly like an anime character or something. Weird, but not altogether bad. "So tell me about why you summoned me!"
Great. Amazing. What was I supposed to do, tell him I summoned him because I wanted to tame his brooding heart? That I'd known him for a grand total of five minutes and was already super disappointed that I got stuck with a chillaxin' jolly shark lad instead of my dark true love? Well, no use in lying. I could mince words.
"Well..." I fidgeted. "Part of the reason is because someone at my magic level is expected to, but the other reason is I was kind of hoping we could. Date." But did I actually want to date anything less than my ideal magic boyfriend? I shunned the notion of absolutely everything else for basically my whole life, and the chances were that my instructors weren't going to be sympathetic if I said I needed to retry because the familiar I got wasn't angsty enough. Maybe I had to just take what I got stuck with and hope for the best. Maybe if things tanked I could attempt to find someone else who got a more desirable familiar that they personally weren't into dating. Hmmm.
I expected Callan to chortle and slap me on the back and maybe tell me about how 'bros don't date bros looool!!!!' (was there chatspeak where he came from?), but he shrugged again. "Yeah, I guess we could try it if you want! Gives us an excuse to go and do things, anyway, and I wouldn't say no to that. You'll have to teach me what passes for normal dating up here, though. I don't know what is and isn't different yet."
That was it. It was that easy. No huffing, no rejection, no disdain for humanity. This couldn't have been further from how I had expected my day to go. At least I knew if things didn't work out, he'd just shrug it off and continue being a jolly giant. That was reassuring. I had nothing to lose, and I could count on the fact that Callan would still want to stick around for fun either way.
"Hellooo? Eriana?"
Oops, spaced out. "Y-yeah? Uh, okay. We should probably go check in with registration, since you're stuck with me, but maybe we can... go do date things tomorrow night." I wondered if his idea of a date would involve doing something ridiculous like going to a wrestling match and eating gummy worms. Lame.
"Sounds good!" Ugh, so casual. It would take some getting used to. "Registration, then food. I'm still dying here. Which way?" I pointed in the direction of the most obvious paved walkway and he started off down it, looking around at everything as he went. If nothing else, he did seem kind of endearing. I could look forward to having a pretty rewarding friendship with him, most likely, and that in itself didn't sound so bad. Callan didn't seem like the type of... uh, netherworld inhabitant that needed much to be happy, and maybe he could tell me stories about his not-blue sky and why he had dreadlocks paired with what almost looked like regalia. That was something.
I smiled a little in spite of my misgivings. "Hey, hang on, doofus!" I called after him. "You can't get into half the buildings without me anyway!"
Maybe things would work out okay even without the brooding.
Maybe.