9Elisa thought that she'd been getting better at this kind of thing since she was exposed to that wonderful adventure. It had all started when she'd found out that she was late for school. Elisa dashed out the door, grabbing a bagel on her way out to the elevator in the apartment where she lived.
"Sweetie, you'd better hurry!" her mother shoved Elisa's book bag at her Elisa grabbed it and waved goodbye.
"Okay, thanks Mom! I'll see you tonight!" she shouted from the hall.
On the way down, Elisa tried to quickly groom herself, brushing her hands through the frizzy tangled mess that was her hair. She could never get it to look exactly right, no matter how hard she tried. Once she was outside, the bus had already left, so Elisa pulled out the wad of cash that she saved for emergencies and shouted for a cabby.
"Yo! Taxi!" she shouted, waving her arms almost completely covered by the gray sweatshirt she was wearing. A yellow cab pulled up to the curb. Elisa looked inside to see who was driving. It was a young man with long hair pulled back in a ponytail.
"Morning, miss!" he called with a cockney accent. "Hi" she said quickly "can you take me to S.K. High?"
" Sure thing li'l lady" he said laughingly. She pulled out her note pad and started to write. A strange flash of light made her look up. The sky, which had been an overcast gray, had suddenly turned a sickly shade of green. This, while surprising, was hardly alarming. The sky often turned green on overcast days. In her opinion, that was what clouds did when they got bored. Turned odd colors. But that was not the problem here. She could tell. There was something wrong.
"Well, that's not something you'll see every day, is it?" asked the cabby, staring out the windshield, looking up.
"Watch the road!" Elisa shouted, pointing to a large SUV that looked as though it was about to hit them.
"Bloody heck!" the cabby shouted in surprise, swerving out of the way. The SUV simply honked loudly at them as it went by, loud music blasting out of its windows.
"Tell me you're not making me pay extra for that!" Elisa said as they continued on down the street. The cabby shrugged. He could tell that this was not going to be any ordinary cab ride. Elisa tried again to pull her hair back into a bun, only succeeding in getting a huge frizzy knot at the back of her head. She simply put her hair scrunchie over the knot. It would have to do. Elisa looked again at the sky, which had gone from green to a deep shade of purple, which, truth be told, seemed to suit the clouds quite well. Elisa didn't quite know why, but she felt sure that at any minute, some UFO or a flaming comet would descend out of the sky and bring Armageddon on them all.
The cabby pulled up to the high school.
"That'll be $7.85, miss," he leaned out the window. Elisa rolled her eyes. No matter what the weather was, the cabbies always succeeded in charging their obnoxiously high fees. They'd only gone half a mile! Elisa grumbled incoherently as she handed over the money. The cabby nodded in response and took off, tires burning, as she got out of the car.
"That is the last time I ever take a cab," she told herself as she walked towards school. Before she finally went inside, Elisa took one last look at the sky. It was scarlet. Scarlet was not a common color for the sky on a normal day. But she could tell, this was not a normal day.
All through school, all anyone could talk about was the odd stuff going on outside. One boy even said that his terrier had been abducted by some strange men who said they were part of something called "The New Firm". Some CIA branch or something like that. Elisa didn't believe a word of it.
"Can you believe what they're saying?" she asked Sadie, her best friend, at lunch.
"I dunno," Sadie said, "Some of it doesn't sound all that outrageous."
"Oh come on! Strange guys in black suits abducting Tyler Greer's terrier? What are the odds of that?"
"Yeah, but there's a lot of weird stuff happening today," Sadie defended herself.
"Okay, the sky's gone a bunch of odd colors. That I know. But what that has to do with anything else, I don't know. God decides that today he'd like the clouds to be pink, and all of a sudden everyone flies off the handle."
"You don't know that!"
"Oh but I do!" Elisa took a triumphant bite out of her turkey sandwich, and spoke through a mouthful of food. Sadie leaned back a bit.
"Don't talk with your mouthful, dear."
"What?" Elisa asked, shrugging her shoulders.
"Didn't your mom ever teach you table manners?"
"We've discussed it, yeah," Elisa said, watching as Sadie rolled her eyes. The girls had been best friends for years, but lately they seemed to be growing apart. Sadie was prone to believe anything at all, while Elisa held her own on nearly every subject. It had become more and more of a problem lately. As the bell rang, Sadie got up and walked off, not even bothering to wait for Elisa.
"Fine, then! Just leave me here!" she called, trying to catch up.
"That is the general idea," Sadie turned a corner and was gone. Elisa watched her for a second and then shrugged her shoulders.
"Whatever," she said, and headed to her physics class.
As the day went on, the sky proceeded to change colors. Scarlet, Orange, and a very interesting shade of navy blue that Elisa liked particularly. It was that way when the final bell rang and Elisa got out of school, only to find that she'd missed the bus once more.
"Today is just not my day," she mumbled, digging out what was left of her cash wad. "Yo! Taxi!" A yellow cab screeched to a halt at the curb. Elisa climbed in,
"243 East Fourteenth," she told the cabby.
"Sure thing miss," he said. His voice brought Elisa's head up from her backpack.
"Oh no. Not you again!" she said.
"Well hello again to you, too!" the cabby said indignantly. Elisa rolled her eyes. It may only have been a half mile ride, but, she could already tell, it would be a long one.
As the cabby pulled away from the school, Elisa saw a black Lincoln town car with tinted windows pull up next to them at the stoplight. two of the windows were down. In the front passenger's side, a man in a black suit and sunglasses rode. In the back, a Jack Russel Terrier, slightly large for its breed, had its head hanging out of it, jaws flapping joyously in the wind. Elisa rolled down her window, and stuck her hand out of it. Odd. There was no wind. Not even the slightest little breeze. Everything was eerily calm, and yet, there was the terrier, head stuck out the window, jaws flapping as though the wind was blowing ninety miles per hour. The man in glasses saw Elisa looking at them, and quickly rolled up the windows, locking out all visibility. Elisa felt a drop on her hand, and pulled it back inside the window as a terribly cold rain began to fall from the navy blue sky. Elisa shrugged and dug out her notepad, describing everything in great detail. She had a feeling that this might become important sometime in the near future.
"Has anything else odd been going on?" Elisa asked. There was a flash of lightning, and the sky turned aquamarine.
"Oh, not in the usual sense. I've scraped me way through quite a lot of accidents today, though. All them people looking at the sky, I suppose."
"Has anything come out of the sky?" Elisa scribbled furiously.
"Nothing much. There was meteorite, but it was only about the size of an SUV."
"What?" Elisa dropped her pencil for a second, but quickly picked it back up again.
"Oh yeah. Not very big, meteoritically speaking."
"Well, did it hit anything?"
"Yeah. An old folk's home. Lucky for them they were all on an outing to the botanic gardens."
"How do you know that?"
"It was on the radio. Want a listen, do you?" the cabby flipped on the radio. A female reporter's voice was heard.
"Strange events have been going on all up and down Central City today. I'm at the site of one of the strangest yet. It seems that the Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton has escaped from the Museum of Natural History on fifty-second street."
********************* A/N: Reviews met with eagerness. This means that if you don't review, I'll do the most disgusting thing I can think of, just as soon as I can think of it. Look, you'll just save me a lot of time and trouble by reviewing, so please do so. Thanks!