okseriouslywtf
Oh for the love of God, you guys keep me supplied with crack, whether you realize it or not.
My own Devil Wears Prada Halloween fic, kind of/sort of. I wanted to get this done before, you know, Halloween, but, uh... I went out and got drunk. So. Yeah. Anyway.
Contract
Pairings: None, really. Would be M/A if I continued, but that depends on how much I can drag myself away from Fallout 3 >_>'
---
Andy Sachs had a secret.
Actually, her whole damn family had a secret, a secret that went back as far as their bloodline first crossed over the North America. When the witch hunts went down, her ancestors apparently booked it long before suspicion could be cast on them. That's what Andy assumed, anyway, since she was alive, living in New York, and studiously NOT reading the books on speaking with the undead that her mother had packed in with the rest of her belongings.
Nothing terrible was going to happen, she supposed - her dad was none the worse for wear, and her brother was about as normal as a warlock-turned-photographer could be - but still. She wanted to live a normal life as best she could, and follow her dreams. Dreams that involved becoming a world-famous journalist, writing articles that helped change the world, brought injustice to light, and all sorts of other things that her blood couldn't accomplish...
Goals that were NOT on that list of dreams included such time-honored traditions as learning the family craft, or summoning a creature from beyond do accompany her throughout the rest of her life, or crafting a homonculus, or anything crazy like that.
She thought she'd be able to embark on her quest shortly after she graduated from college. Unfortunately, it didn't work out as well as she had hoped, and had to decide between Auto Magazine and Runway.
She chose Runway, which, years later, she had decided was simultaneously one of the best AND one of worst decisions of her life.
---
And so there she was, two years later, free of Runway and working for the New York Mirror -
- and running from a group of thugs who were currently chasing her down a dark, abandoned alley way.
Andy stopped for a second to catch her breath, and cast her gaze around the alleyway. There were a few dumpsters to her left, and a rusted ladder hanging down from a building fire escape to her right. She thought of jumping into the dumpster and hiding there till the gang gave up, but from the sounds of scuffling and hollering behind her, she didn't have much time. She glanced at her Jimmy Choos for a moment, cursed softly, and kicked them off. Then she wrapped her hands around the cold, sharp metal of the ladder and began to climb.
---
It was a well-kept secret that Miranda Priestly hated parties - she hated planning them, she hated attending them... hell, she even hated declining an RSVP; she had to make sure that she wasn't potentially offending anyone who was worth keeping the peace with.
She especially hated parties thrown on Halloween. Everyone seemed to go just a bit crazy, it seemed, on Halloween, and that craziness bled through every part of the fashion world. She was Miranda Priestly, Editor-in-Chief, however, and was honor-bound to go to every one of those events to see what designers would be displaying in the upcoming months.
She never dressed up, though. She would show up dressed to the nines, of course, in some number that Dolce and Gabbana had whipped up just for her, or something from an up-and-coming designer, but never in costume.
Never, EVER in a costume, seeing as how she was wearing one all the time, really.
Miranda walked past a few clackers on her way to the restroom, piercing them with a look as they struggled to get out of her way. She heard one of them mutter about "the Devil herself," and smirked a bit. 'If only they knew,' she thought a bit snidely, and dismissed them from her mind.
Then her lower back started to burn, and she staggered into a bathroom stall. The cold metal walls surrounding her were throwing off a dull red glow, and she fell to her knees as small strands of energy knifed their way through her skin.
---
"You can't shake us off THAT easily, honey," one of the thugs shouted from behind as Andy scrambled over the edge of the roof. "It's been a while since we've had someone as fine as you!"
She kept running, her chest heaving with the effort, trying to ditch them. She had just assumed that they were a bunch of drunk college kids looking for a good time, or maybe some punks who got off on scaring others during the Halloween festivities, and boy was she wrong.
When she reached one of the fire escape ledges, she paused to catch her breath, and see if maybe they had given up the chase. To her surprise, they were all following her, maniacal grins plastered on their faces - grins that displayed sharp fangs for all the world to see, if anyone had been up there with her. Their glowing red eyes twinkled with malice when they noticed realization dawning on her face, and they all began to howl with laughter.
That chilling noise spurred Andy from her shocked stupor, and gave her a shot of adrenaline that helped her climb the rest of the fire escape as if her life depended on it, partially because her life DID depend on it.
She stopped for a moment, looking around wildly. There was no way she could jump across to the other building in her current condition - her feet were cut up and bloodied from the frantic climb, and her limbs were shaking with a combination of fear and exhaustion. She lost her small handbag long before any of this had happened, so there was no way she could call for help. She looked over, and all four of them - big, burly men with strong arms and sharp teeth - had finished coming up the ladder.
"Why so serious?" one of them had asked her as they approached, and for a brief moment she rolled her eyes.
'You have to be kidding me,' part of her mind sighed as the rest scanned her environment for ANY way to get away from the creatures approaching her. She saw a maintenance hatch about twenty feet from her, and so she bolted for it, wincing as pebbles, glass, and assorted other debris dug into her heels. One of them lunged at her, and she barely dodged him as she skidded to the door on her knees, crying as the blacktop scraped huge gouges into her. She wrapped her sore fingers around the handle and pulled up with all her strength... just to discover that the damn thing was locked. Her mind refused to accept that, and so Andy continued to struggle with the door as four lumbering figures surrounded her.
---
Miranda's hands scrabbled uselessly on the stalls as she writhed. It didn't hurt - it never did - but it did take control from her momentarily whenever it happened.
"No one has summoned me in over two hundred years," she muttered to herself as she grunted, straining against another surge of energy. "No one..!"
She cast her mind out, trying to pick up any sort of trail from the arcs of fel energy that coursed through her veins. The only thing she felt, however, was fear and determination in equal amounts.
Fear and determination that she had tasted once before, not too long ago. Fear and determination that she had instilled, which was one of the few things she had regretted in her long life.
"What the --?!"
-----
Andy knelt on the rooftop, heaving terribly, as the four vampires surrounded her. She assumed they were vampires, at least - they didn't match anything else she remembered reading about when she was younger. One of them, a tall young man with fringed blond hair and tan skin, was taunting her. Well, she assumed he was taunting her - she had tuned them out as she tried to focus.
For all of her intellect, for all of her thirst for knowledge... she never wanted to learn about her family's bloodline, nor the power that came with it. She read everything of course, but only practiced what she needed so she could learn how to keep her powers in check. She wanted to make it through life and succeed by herself, without resorting to scrying or spells or demonic pacts or anything like that. And she had never been tempted to use anything like that, until her tenure at Runway. That, among other things, was one of the main reasons she had left.
After she left Runway - left Miranda in Paris - she never had an urge to use what she had learned... until now.
One of the blonde's cronies kicked her for her apparent inattention - apparently it wasn't as fun when she wasn't cowering in fear. Andy blocked out the pain and focused her mind on the forms and symbols she needed to draw. There was no time to draw them in chalk, or paint them in blood, or anything like that, so she began to envision the sigils developing on the only suitable surface on the roof: the skin on her back. She winced as her birthmark flared up and began to rearrange itself to match the lines of the summoning circle she cast in her mind.
The lines nearly broke as the lead vampire grabbed her by her long locks, lifting her up from the ground. "What's the matter, sweetheart?" he whispered, cold air resting between the two of them. "Don't tell me your heart gave out on you after all the chase you gave us?"
His words were little more than a slight humming to Andy, as she finished with the circle. She had no idea what she had summoned, but she hoped she was strong enough to survive it. She shuddered once, a full body jerk that somehow forced the vampire to relinquish his grip on her, and then she began to convulse on the ground. Her irises shifted in color from dark brown to a tawny yellow to a bright ice blue before they rolled into the back of her head.
The blood she spilled in her rush to escape pooled around her body, forming the circle she had cast in her mind, and then blazed into bright blue flames, and then, above Andy's prone form --
"-- hell? Who DARES to summon me? And during the annual Runway Halloween party, no less?!"
Andy's convulsing stopped, and she blinked until she could see again. "... what the hell?" She looked up to see the demon she had summoned to her side, and felt the blood drain from her face. "Oh no. Oh, no no no no no no... this HAS to be a bad dream. Lily must have spiked the punch or something. This entire episode has to be a bad dream. Seriously."
A slender woman in white floated before her, a red sigil burning on her lower back. Andy focused on that at first, and then let her eyes follow the ley lines running up the elegant spine, tracing the red lines through the silver feathery wings that sprouted from the demon's back. She shook her head once, then again as she focused on the back of the demon's head as it raised its hand and destroyed all of the vampires in one fell swoop in an arc of eldritch fire.
She'd recognize that perfectly coifed silver hairdo anywhere.
The woman dusted herself off, nodding once in satisfaction. "That's all," she muttered to the ash and bone that littered the rooftop, before turning to face her summoner.
"...well, well. You know, Andrea, I always knew there was something different about you. I just never thought it would be something like this," Miranda Priestly said, gesturing to the summoning circle surrounding the two of them.
Andy continued to stare at her former boss, mouth agape. "Miranda - you - what the - ohmygod -" At this point her brain shut down, and her body followed shortly after.
---
Miranda stretched her wings out a bit, looking at her former assistant as if she'd never seen her before. In a way, she hadn't - she had missed the power that thrummed through Andrea's prone form when they first met, apparently, or perhaps she had mistaken it for something else; something that reminded Miranda of herself. She had been right and wrong at the same time when she told Andrea as much back in Paris.
She knelt down and ran a slender hand over Andrea's prone form, checking her vitals. "Still a size four, I see. Impressive," she murmured.
Andrea continued to convulse just a bit, and Miranda carefully pulled back one of the younger woman's eyelids. Her irises were glowing a bright blue, the same glow coming from the borders of the circle.
The sigil still burned in her back, and only burned brighter when she gathered Andrea in her arms. "It should have faded by now," she muttered to the unconscious girl, stretching her wings a bit before wrapping them around the both of them. "It always did with those who summoned me before, the contract broken as soon as I finished off their foes...
"...but you've never done anything half-way, have you, Andrea?"
And with that, they disappeared in a swirling of silver feathers and mist.
-------
>__>
Author's Notes part 2: Ok, just to reiterate, Fallout 3 is amazing. I love it. It is such a survival/doomsday game. It's amazing. It has pulled me away from World of Warcraft like... like... I can't even think of a proper analogy. I am all over Fallout 3 like white on rice, for serious.
/end fangirl rant about Fallout 3
My own Devil Wears Prada Halloween fic, kind of/sort of. I wanted to get this done before, you know, Halloween, but, uh... I went out and got drunk. So. Yeah. Anyway.
Contract
Pairings: None, really. Would be M/A if I continued, but that depends on how much I can drag myself away from Fallout 3 >_>'
---
Andy Sachs had a secret.
Actually, her whole damn family had a secret, a secret that went back as far as their bloodline first crossed over the North America. When the witch hunts went down, her ancestors apparently booked it long before suspicion could be cast on them. That's what Andy assumed, anyway, since she was alive, living in New York, and studiously NOT reading the books on speaking with the undead that her mother had packed in with the rest of her belongings.
Nothing terrible was going to happen, she supposed - her dad was none the worse for wear, and her brother was about as normal as a warlock-turned-photographer could be - but still. She wanted to live a normal life as best she could, and follow her dreams. Dreams that involved becoming a world-famous journalist, writing articles that helped change the world, brought injustice to light, and all sorts of other things that her blood couldn't accomplish...
Goals that were NOT on that list of dreams included such time-honored traditions as learning the family craft, or summoning a creature from beyond do accompany her throughout the rest of her life, or crafting a homonculus, or anything crazy like that.
She thought she'd be able to embark on her quest shortly after she graduated from college. Unfortunately, it didn't work out as well as she had hoped, and had to decide between Auto Magazine and Runway.
She chose Runway, which, years later, she had decided was simultaneously one of the best AND one of worst decisions of her life.
---
And so there she was, two years later, free of Runway and working for the New York Mirror -
- and running from a group of thugs who were currently chasing her down a dark, abandoned alley way.
Andy stopped for a second to catch her breath, and cast her gaze around the alleyway. There were a few dumpsters to her left, and a rusted ladder hanging down from a building fire escape to her right. She thought of jumping into the dumpster and hiding there till the gang gave up, but from the sounds of scuffling and hollering behind her, she didn't have much time. She glanced at her Jimmy Choos for a moment, cursed softly, and kicked them off. Then she wrapped her hands around the cold, sharp metal of the ladder and began to climb.
---
It was a well-kept secret that Miranda Priestly hated parties - she hated planning them, she hated attending them... hell, she even hated declining an RSVP; she had to make sure that she wasn't potentially offending anyone who was worth keeping the peace with.
She especially hated parties thrown on Halloween. Everyone seemed to go just a bit crazy, it seemed, on Halloween, and that craziness bled through every part of the fashion world. She was Miranda Priestly, Editor-in-Chief, however, and was honor-bound to go to every one of those events to see what designers would be displaying in the upcoming months.
She never dressed up, though. She would show up dressed to the nines, of course, in some number that Dolce and Gabbana had whipped up just for her, or something from an up-and-coming designer, but never in costume.
Never, EVER in a costume, seeing as how she was wearing one all the time, really.
Miranda walked past a few clackers on her way to the restroom, piercing them with a look as they struggled to get out of her way. She heard one of them mutter about "the Devil herself," and smirked a bit. 'If only they knew,' she thought a bit snidely, and dismissed them from her mind.
Then her lower back started to burn, and she staggered into a bathroom stall. The cold metal walls surrounding her were throwing off a dull red glow, and she fell to her knees as small strands of energy knifed their way through her skin.
---
"You can't shake us off THAT easily, honey," one of the thugs shouted from behind as Andy scrambled over the edge of the roof. "It's been a while since we've had someone as fine as you!"
She kept running, her chest heaving with the effort, trying to ditch them. She had just assumed that they were a bunch of drunk college kids looking for a good time, or maybe some punks who got off on scaring others during the Halloween festivities, and boy was she wrong.
When she reached one of the fire escape ledges, she paused to catch her breath, and see if maybe they had given up the chase. To her surprise, they were all following her, maniacal grins plastered on their faces - grins that displayed sharp fangs for all the world to see, if anyone had been up there with her. Their glowing red eyes twinkled with malice when they noticed realization dawning on her face, and they all began to howl with laughter.
That chilling noise spurred Andy from her shocked stupor, and gave her a shot of adrenaline that helped her climb the rest of the fire escape as if her life depended on it, partially because her life DID depend on it.
She stopped for a moment, looking around wildly. There was no way she could jump across to the other building in her current condition - her feet were cut up and bloodied from the frantic climb, and her limbs were shaking with a combination of fear and exhaustion. She lost her small handbag long before any of this had happened, so there was no way she could call for help. She looked over, and all four of them - big, burly men with strong arms and sharp teeth - had finished coming up the ladder.
"Why so serious?" one of them had asked her as they approached, and for a brief moment she rolled her eyes.
'You have to be kidding me,' part of her mind sighed as the rest scanned her environment for ANY way to get away from the creatures approaching her. She saw a maintenance hatch about twenty feet from her, and so she bolted for it, wincing as pebbles, glass, and assorted other debris dug into her heels. One of them lunged at her, and she barely dodged him as she skidded to the door on her knees, crying as the blacktop scraped huge gouges into her. She wrapped her sore fingers around the handle and pulled up with all her strength... just to discover that the damn thing was locked. Her mind refused to accept that, and so Andy continued to struggle with the door as four lumbering figures surrounded her.
---
Miranda's hands scrabbled uselessly on the stalls as she writhed. It didn't hurt - it never did - but it did take control from her momentarily whenever it happened.
"No one has summoned me in over two hundred years," she muttered to herself as she grunted, straining against another surge of energy. "No one..!"
She cast her mind out, trying to pick up any sort of trail from the arcs of fel energy that coursed through her veins. The only thing she felt, however, was fear and determination in equal amounts.
Fear and determination that she had tasted once before, not too long ago. Fear and determination that she had instilled, which was one of the few things she had regretted in her long life.
"What the --?!"
-----
Andy knelt on the rooftop, heaving terribly, as the four vampires surrounded her. She assumed they were vampires, at least - they didn't match anything else she remembered reading about when she was younger. One of them, a tall young man with fringed blond hair and tan skin, was taunting her. Well, she assumed he was taunting her - she had tuned them out as she tried to focus.
For all of her intellect, for all of her thirst for knowledge... she never wanted to learn about her family's bloodline, nor the power that came with it. She read everything of course, but only practiced what she needed so she could learn how to keep her powers in check. She wanted to make it through life and succeed by herself, without resorting to scrying or spells or demonic pacts or anything like that. And she had never been tempted to use anything like that, until her tenure at Runway. That, among other things, was one of the main reasons she had left.
After she left Runway - left Miranda in Paris - she never had an urge to use what she had learned... until now.
One of the blonde's cronies kicked her for her apparent inattention - apparently it wasn't as fun when she wasn't cowering in fear. Andy blocked out the pain and focused her mind on the forms and symbols she needed to draw. There was no time to draw them in chalk, or paint them in blood, or anything like that, so she began to envision the sigils developing on the only suitable surface on the roof: the skin on her back. She winced as her birthmark flared up and began to rearrange itself to match the lines of the summoning circle she cast in her mind.
The lines nearly broke as the lead vampire grabbed her by her long locks, lifting her up from the ground. "What's the matter, sweetheart?" he whispered, cold air resting between the two of them. "Don't tell me your heart gave out on you after all the chase you gave us?"
His words were little more than a slight humming to Andy, as she finished with the circle. She had no idea what she had summoned, but she hoped she was strong enough to survive it. She shuddered once, a full body jerk that somehow forced the vampire to relinquish his grip on her, and then she began to convulse on the ground. Her irises shifted in color from dark brown to a tawny yellow to a bright ice blue before they rolled into the back of her head.
The blood she spilled in her rush to escape pooled around her body, forming the circle she had cast in her mind, and then blazed into bright blue flames, and then, above Andy's prone form --
"-- hell? Who DARES to summon me? And during the annual Runway Halloween party, no less?!"
Andy's convulsing stopped, and she blinked until she could see again. "... what the hell?" She looked up to see the demon she had summoned to her side, and felt the blood drain from her face. "Oh no. Oh, no no no no no no... this HAS to be a bad dream. Lily must have spiked the punch or something. This entire episode has to be a bad dream. Seriously."
A slender woman in white floated before her, a red sigil burning on her lower back. Andy focused on that at first, and then let her eyes follow the ley lines running up the elegant spine, tracing the red lines through the silver feathery wings that sprouted from the demon's back. She shook her head once, then again as she focused on the back of the demon's head as it raised its hand and destroyed all of the vampires in one fell swoop in an arc of eldritch fire.
She'd recognize that perfectly coifed silver hairdo anywhere.
The woman dusted herself off, nodding once in satisfaction. "That's all," she muttered to the ash and bone that littered the rooftop, before turning to face her summoner.
"...well, well. You know, Andrea, I always knew there was something different about you. I just never thought it would be something like this," Miranda Priestly said, gesturing to the summoning circle surrounding the two of them.
Andy continued to stare at her former boss, mouth agape. "Miranda - you - what the - ohmygod -" At this point her brain shut down, and her body followed shortly after.
---
Miranda stretched her wings out a bit, looking at her former assistant as if she'd never seen her before. In a way, she hadn't - she had missed the power that thrummed through Andrea's prone form when they first met, apparently, or perhaps she had mistaken it for something else; something that reminded Miranda of herself. She had been right and wrong at the same time when she told Andrea as much back in Paris.
She knelt down and ran a slender hand over Andrea's prone form, checking her vitals. "Still a size four, I see. Impressive," she murmured.
Andrea continued to convulse just a bit, and Miranda carefully pulled back one of the younger woman's eyelids. Her irises were glowing a bright blue, the same glow coming from the borders of the circle.
The sigil still burned in her back, and only burned brighter when she gathered Andrea in her arms. "It should have faded by now," she muttered to the unconscious girl, stretching her wings a bit before wrapping them around the both of them. "It always did with those who summoned me before, the contract broken as soon as I finished off their foes...
"...but you've never done anything half-way, have you, Andrea?"
And with that, they disappeared in a swirling of silver feathers and mist.
-------
>__>
Author's Notes part 2: Ok, just to reiterate, Fallout 3 is amazing. I love it. It is such a survival/doomsday game. It's amazing. It has pulled me away from World of Warcraft like... like... I can't even think of a proper analogy. I am all over Fallout 3 like white on rice, for serious.
/end fangirl rant about Fallout 3