New updated version of chapters one through two are here! Plot's more or less the same for both of them, it's just some details that have been altered, but still might be a good idea to read them anyway... never know when a small detail will be important later on ;P

In every city on the planet, there is a place whose lights have long since gone out, or where lights never glowed in the first place.

Sometimes this place is an empty lot, nothing save flat dirt and concrete. Sometimes it is an office building set for demolition. Sometimes it's an abandoned warehouse, empty save for dust and old crates and the occasional homeless man making himself at home for the night.

In this particular city, in this particular place so easily shadowed by the gleaming light bulbs and towering skyscrapers of downtown that lie in the distance, it is not a warehouse, nor an office, nor an empty lot. Here, a dilapidated structure sits, almost measly in comparison to the steel and glass grandeur of it's distant neighbors. It's hard to tell exactly what this place may have been – there's nowhere near enough radiance here to see anything save a shape in the dark mist of this wet night – but it is small and squat, with only two stories, and what little space it seems to cover is taken up by a shape that is less than uniform.

Then, there is a light. It's a very small light, a dim beam breaking through murk to alight upon one wall, miraculously clear of graffiti, and the corner of a window, clouded by dust and covered by thick wooden boards. When we follow the beam, we find it to originate from a flashlight, held in a small, trembling hand, and if we look closer, we find the owner of that hand to be a girl.

She is a young girl, and very thin and gangly, not even old enough to have grown into her own limbs yet. Round eyes barely reflect light back at us, and are an indiscernible hue, and the rest of her is equally ambiguous, the nighttime painting her figure in monochrome, but we can see a short bob of dark hair, mussed and tangled, loose pajamas, and what seem to be slippers on her feet. She is not dressed for a foray into the ruins of the modern world, unless the mostly empty drawstring bag she is clutching to her chest hides a hammer, prybar, lockpick, or grappling hook.

But this girl does not seem to care, and as she approaches the building, we see her wipe something away from her eyes, and hear a sniffle. She is crying, and mumbling a child's equivalents of profanity in a meek little voice that pierces the darkness about as well as her flickering flashlight. The noises are soft, muffled and almost inaudible, just like her footsteps as she walks around the building's perimeter, looking for something.

She finds what she was looking for in the form of a door. Unlike the other openings into the building that we can see, this door was clearly boarded up in a hurry, the wooden strips crooked and poorly fastened. The girl sets down her light to tug on one board, and it comes off in her hands after a few strong pulls. She removes each board, the occasional sniff the only interruption, until the door is uncovered, and she pulls it open with a creak, releasing stale air into the world.

The inside of the building is darker than the outside, the bulbs hanging from the ceiling having been switched off long ago, but the flashlight picks out a short hall, adorned with posters, and a room beyond, and after a long moment, the girl walks inside.

The interior is not large enough for her footsteps to echo. Beyond the short stretch of entrance hall, the room we caught a glimpse from outside is fairly wide, but any flat surfaces that sound may bounce off of is severely hindered by the clutter of furniture. Tables stand along the wall, with tilted surfaces and sporting old abandoned drawings that match the figures from the posters, a projector sits abandoned, and film reels sit quiet on the wall. Above the girl's head, strange black pipes shine with the dull gleam of dusty glass, drips of dark liquid staining the wall beneath a crack in the curved surface.

The girl stands for a moment, eyes wide in surprise – or perhaps wonder – at the room before her, temporarily distracted from her earlier disquiet.

"This looks like an artist's studio," she murmurs. When nothing save silence responds, she slowly picks her way across the room to the projector, and, after a moment, turns it on. There is still a film mounted, and it plays animated figures across the wall – one short and chubby with horns, one tall and even ganglier than her with a snout. The animation loops over and over, and after a long few moments of staring, her eyes gleaming with reluctant enthusiasm, the girl shakes her head and murmurs denial of something in her own mind before switching the projector back off again, along with the oddly distorted music it played.

She turns it off in time to hear sounds. Overhead the pipes are creaking, making strange noises, and the soft drip of black liquid from one of many pipes has become a thick, viscous ooze down one wall.

"Hello?" She calls. No one calls back, but the creaking seems to retreat down the hall to the right of the door, and so she follows it, holding fast to her light as if it were a lifeline.

The sounds die. She follows the pipes, regardless, through a little winding hallway adorned by yet more tilting desks and cut-outs of one of the characters from the animation, past a chart on the wall, until she turns around yet another corner and finds herself standing in the strangest room she's ever seen – huge, vaulted, stacked high with shelves and barrels, the floor sunken into the ground as if a shallow sinkhole had opened below it. In the middle of the room, lit by the faintest beams of moonlight filtering through the slats of a window high up the wall across from her, a yawning pit pierced the floorboards, decorated only with massive chains descending into the dark abyss below.

"I wonder what this room is for…?" she mutters. There is, of course, no answer, and with a shake of her head, the little girl turns around to go back the way she came, tension beginning to ebb out of her body.

It returns abruptly when a quiet sound reaches her ears – the sound of pattering, oddly wet footsteps, from the hallway ahead of her. She freezes.

"H-hello?" She calls again, nervously. Her flashlight trembles in her hand, and with similarly quaking legs she takes a hesitant step forward.

She turns a corner, and something dark and shiny darts across her vision. The little girl shrieks, dropping her flashlight, and it rolls away to thump lightly against the wall, painting her in too-bright light and casting everything around her into even deeper shadows.

From that deep darkness, there is what is most definitely a snicker, and the girl shudders.

"W-who's there?" She whispers. When there is no immediate response, she slowly inches forward, reaching down to reclaim her flashlight.

And just as her fingers close on the little device, there is the most quiet of noises just behind her, and something snatches her bag away with a cackle.

"H-hey!" She whips around to find nothing save a rapidly disappearing blob of black, bubbling goo on the wall behind her. Heart pounding wildly, she snatches up her flashlight and scours the floor for her bag, only to find that it, just like that odd vertical puddle, has also vanished. Visibly upset by this, she drags in a shuddering breath, biting her lip to stop it from wobbling and squeezing her eyes shut.

Then there are more pattering footsteps, and her head whips around in time for another black blur – or perhaps the same one – to race across her vision. She yelps, leaping back, and in the dim glow she watches in astonishment as the blur, smaller than even she is, disappears into yet another vertical puddle along with the faintest flash of periwinkle blue – the same color as her bag.

"H-HEY!" She shouts, shockingly loud. "Give t-that BACK!

A familiar snicker echoes somewhere in the darkness, the sound as oddly wet as the footsteps, and the little girl whips around, brandishing her flashlight like a weapon in trembling fingers.

"This isn't funny!" She cries. "G-give me back my bag!"

"Pfff, nah."

The gurgling voice catches her completely by surprise, and with another shriek she whirls around, her flashlight beam slicing through the dust in the air and then settling like a very dim flashlight on a small, dripping figure, standing in the middle of the hall like it had always been there – a small dripping figure that this little girl, as young as she is, knows shouldn't exist anywhere but on the silver screen.

The black and white creature grins – actually, it's more of a smirk. "What'sa matter? Never seen a cartoon before?"

The girl stops gawping, and squares her shoulders. "G-give me b-back my bag p-please," she stutters.

The smirk grows wider, and one gloved hand begins twirling the bag around on one finger by the strap, at frankly ridiculous speeds. "Hmmm, hows-about another nah? "

"Please," the little girl repeats, more insistently this time. Pie-cut eyes roll at her… somehow.

"Geez, what's so important about this bag of yours, anyway?" The bag stops twirling, and the creature makes as if to open the bag. The little girl makes a desperate sound and lunges forward before it can, grasping desperately for her belongings only for the being to jump away with a cackle, disappearing into another odd blob of wet that appears and then disappears on the wall.

"Ha, you got some fire in you! What's in the bag, girlie?"

The girl stiffens. "N-nothing important!"

"Aw. c'mon, there's gotta be something important in here, way you're acting!"

"T-there isn't! Give it back!"

There's a dissatisfied hum, and then a rustling of fabric. The girl looks even more desperate now.

"D-don't! There's n-nothing in there to look at!"

A snort, and then the sound of paper rustling instead of cloth. "A sketchbook 'aint nothing, don'cha think?"

"D-don't look at it! Put it b-back!"

The voice doesn't answer again for a long few moments, save another hum, and then there's the sound of ripping paper. The girl shrieks.

"Geeze Louise, relax! I just tore out a page, that's all."

The creature drops seemingly from nowhere, landing with a sploosh in front of the little girl again, and holds out her bag and the sketchbook that was inside of it. The book's cover and the bag are both liberally smeared with black handprints, fingerprints, and drip marks, but otherwise seem unblemished.

Slowly, the girl reaches out to take her stuff back, only for them to be tugged back before she can.

"Nuh-uh-uh!" A finger wags at her mockingly. "I wanna know what's so important about this sketchbook of yours first! Don't get me wrong, your drawings are great, but are they really that important?"

And with that, the girl suddenly stops looking so upset and simply looks… shocked. Shocked and vulnerable, almost heartbreakingly so.

"You t-think t-they're… great? You… you don't t-think they're a waste of time?"

"Pssh!" The white hand waves airily. "'Course not! Who told'ya that load of baloney?"

She does not answer, and after a moment, the creature's mischievous smile twists into something that looks a little more painful.

"Soooo, 'ya gonna tell me what that's all about, or do I have to keep this?"

It's not certain how long they have been talking, the girl and the strange creature that drips black onto the floor. It has been a long time, that much is certain, for the girl's eyes have dried and, though she still stutters, she seems strangely at ease at her unusual companion's presence, despite the earlier conflict between the two. Her bag having been retrieved, the girl is smiling, though shyly, and sometimes laughs at something the creature says or does. The creature itself seems cheerful, over-exuberant in a way that only a cartoon character can truly pull off, but if one looks closely, one can see a fine vibration of tension in the way it moves, the way it smiles.

When, finally, the girl gets up to leave, clutching her belongings tight against her chest, the being's smile becomes even more strained.

"Hey, where're 'ya going? Don't just walk away from me!"

"I'm sorry," she says, and she seems genuinely sorry, eyes scrunched up with remorse. "But I have to go back h-home."

The creature scrambles after her as she begins to walk, a note of desperation entering it's voice. "B-but you can't just leave! I still haven't told you about that epic prank war I started once!"

"I'm sorry," she says again. "But my p-parents will be worried about me."

"They don't sound like they'd miss 'ya at all!"

"They would," she insists quietly. "And m-my little brother, too. H-he'd miss me."

There is a moment of silence, during which the creature looks around, desperation even more prominent as it seeks some way of convincing the girl to stay. A crinkling of paper catches its attention, and it looks down at the stolen drawing in its hand before looking up at the girl again. Its smile warps, twisting down into a frown. It's not even bothering to pretend to be cheerful anymore.

"Please?" It tries, and the girl stops, because this creature had yet to use the word please the entire time they had been speaking, and she turned back to see that expression sprawling across it's face. Seeing her eyes get drawn to the paper it holds, it offers it to her with shaking fingers.

"I-I'll give 'ya this back if you stay!"

She stares for a bit longer, hesitating. Then she smiles sadly, reaches out, and gently pushes the paper, and the hand holding it, back towards the creature.

"Keep it." She says. "T-that way I have to come back to get it." She holds out one hand, pinky finger extended. "I'll come back. I p-promise."

The creature says nothing for a long time, black eyes wide and pleading, but when the girl's sad expression doesn't change, it looks away –

And the world glows red.

"Liar." it growls, the paper crumpling in its hand, viscous black pulsing in time to some eldritch heartbeat. "You never came back."

With a swirl of color, the dream that was also a memory popped like a bubble.

In a low-slung bed in a small apartment, a woman with dark eyes and hair that now sports a myriad array of colored streaks bolts awake. She lays there for a moment, looking up at the ceiling of her room, limbs flung out in a sprawling tangle across her mattress and hair falling into her blinking eyes. For a moment she seems confused – then the details of the strange dream of childhood imaginings come rushing back, her eyes widen, and she leaps out of her bed and dashes across the narrow hall to her roommate's door.

She bangs on it, hard, once, twice, and calls through the wood to the possibly listening ears beyond, until the door creaks open a fraction, and bleary eyes blink at her.

"What?"

She grins, a look of practiced mischief twenty years in the making.

"I've found a place for our studio," she says.