CHAPTER ONE - ZOO: part 1

                                    

                                          
❯ though she be but little, she is fierce 

                          
- a midsummer nights dream, William Shakespeare
                          
[FARREN]
                          
Crestfallen clouds hovered over the city with a lazy essence. They trapped London's air in grey-toned weather and to worsen the mood, rain glumly made its presence known as it began to beat against every exposed surface pitilessly. 
                          
A restless teenager, as any other, was tucked into the shelter of a coffee shop to avoid the wind that rapidly adapted into rain. Her light and thick hair formed idle drapes over her moody face, the black cap on her head was useless in taming its unruliness. 
                          
Farren hated cold weather even if her residence in the country that dished it out consistently was the tiniest bit ironic- her planet was hardly ever swallowed by cold weather, no, its suns would beat down on the unearthly surface at every passing second of time, ripples of sunlight were her friend throughout childhood as they frequently danced on her skin.
                          
The thought of her planet, in a pleasant way, rarely surfaced in her mind anymore and unconsciously, she pulled at the braces that held her straight jeans up; the black material was rough against the soft pads of her nimble fingers. Farren had kicked one leg up to lean on the opposite thigh as the balanced her beaten journal on her ankle. 
                          
She could only glare at the empty page tainted only with the date, a useless date at that.
                          
January 22nd, 2007.
                          
Her nose wrinkled and her eyes set into almost-slits- Mondays were bad, Thursdays were better. She still didn't fully understand why her ship had so incessantly insisted on that date in particular. It wasn't her birthday, it wasn't some big special event- yeah Robert Pickton was accused of being Canada's worst serial killer –but she was in London and her ship's alarms had blared in the way it had when it detected familiar energy, bringing her closer to anything that emitted energy familiar with her own kind. 
                          
Usually, she would be bristling with excitement, with hope and it would be expected too because she was so young- too young to be out in the universe all alone but she'd met a lot of dead ends. By now, her hope was dimmed and she gripped onto its remainders solidly but also loosely, she didn't want to bring it too high. 
                          
Monday, January twenty-second of two-thousand-and-seven. It wasn't interesting. The weather was dully predictable, workers rushed to jobs they hated and her hot chocolate was still grossly over-prices- artisan coffee shops would be the death of her finances. Yet, it was so mundane, so typical.
                          
The copper key looped onto a silver chain around her neck glowed- still a hot-red. A scalding warmth that indicated she wouldn't be leaving any time soon.
                          
Honestly? It was an annoying mechanism that was rooted to almost all of Fawlayten technology. Her ship detected a strong form of of energy bleeding through that particular era of London, England. And it wasn't just that year- it was several others for a long time and she- like any other stubborn alien two-hundred-and-forty teenager, ignored it.
                          
Instead, she'd assumed a job in two-thousand-and-five London, working in a quiet fish and chip shop. Stephen Marlon had employed her because she was a quirky regular, one that reminded him of his daughter with her dance-like steps and scarlet-cheeked smile. And Farren, planet gone, ship frankly just agitating and the very last of her kind decided it wouldn't be such a bad idea to play human for a while- she did look the part anyway.
                          
To that ignorance- childish and silly –her ship almost, literally, blew a fuse. It wasn't so far advanced as to have a properly melded conscious but it did have an air of thought, enough to be furious at its pilot. It'd gone into a massive strop and it was times like that, that Farren despised how much of her personality was absorbed by her machine.