[hr][hr][center][h1][color=#9900cc]Aislin Carter[/color][/h1][img]https://media.giphy.com/media/IdrJtr9aIpjtS/giphy.gif[/img][/center][hr][hr]Aislin never glanced up from her phone. As the bullet pierced her in the shoulder, she didn't even scream. As if falling into a deep trance, Aislin slumped over, no longer breathing. Her heart struggled to pump blood to the rest of her body, and her eyes had a glassy quality to them, as if Aislin's very soul had vanished. Had her parents been home, it likely would've been a horrifying nightmare, an incident not all too unlike what had happened on April 2nd of that very year. 

Her mother, a professor of biomedical engineering, had not yet returned home that day. Her father, one of the few remaining members of the idle rich, was entertaining research proposals in London. It was only Aislin in the house, and in the midst of her sleep, the front door of the house creaked open. An intruder, determined by the police two days later to have been one of her mother's students, entered the home, armed with a gun. 

The intruder found dear Aislin, yet she had been ready. Fighting a man armed with a gun with a baseball bat, seven rounds went off in the struggle. One of these rounds hit her assailant in the chaos, paralyzing the man for life. Another hit Aislin in the temple. The ambulance never came. Instead, Aislin was evacuated via helicopter to the nearest surgery, unresponsive. The bullet was successfully removed and it seemed Aislin would recover.

But Aislin didn't wake up. Within two weeks, she was declared brain dead, and discharged to the supervising care of her mother, a doctor in her own right. Her parents' plan was to keep Aislin alive as long as they could, so that they might one day live to see her wake. And miraculously, almost the second Aislin was brought into the house, she did. 

Yet she did not gasp for air on this occasion. She did not open her eyes. She did not move an inch, lying limp like a rag doll on the couch, an inch near death. Without either the removal of the bullet or the use of the life support system in her bedroom, her body would most surely expire. Time was not on Aislin's side.