[i](Country roads would be nice right about now...but gotta avoid the temptation...)[/i] The thought shot through the driver's mind as a free hand played with the dials of the radio on her dashboard, one hand on the wheel, working by touch, rather than sight. Each twist of the knob, whether quick, slow, long, or short, changed it to a different station. Or to static, if the area she was driving through held no station on a given frequency. Her phone charged from the jack, having run low during one of her brief pitstops. Unlimited data didn't mean unlimited battery power. Least her grandmother was willing to foot the bill, for someone who should have looked to be in their eighties, but looked to be in their late forties at most, she was pretty chill with modern technology. Even if the look on her face when Serene had declared her desire to drive west had been...less than happy. Perhaps the death of her father had effected Grandmother differently, but it had driven the young magitek user forward since the lab accident seven years before. Or perhaps it was the thought of Serene going off into danger, all the way across the country, from familiar territories, to a new turf full of chaos. The thought of what laid ahead made her glance up to the rearview mirror, even as her hand found a celtic radio station, stopping her hunting, a look of relief flooding her face. The music was part of it, but the rear view let her look into the truck bed, which was covered with one of those plastic things that made it look more like a weird van counterpart, albeit with strange windows, and where her power suit lay, along with that staff. Plus a lot of other stuff, like a sleeping bag, tent, parts of her "god"(or whatever it was she had summoned, she was pretty sure it was the Broken God she'd read about on an internet forum once, but it wasn't like she was an expert in extra-dimesional machinery), and other odds and ends. The seat next to her held a small box, snack wrappers and the remains of her lunch being its contents, one of the cup holders holding an energy drink. Thankfully, the high way she was on was mainly a straight away, and deserted at that for the most part, it let her take the time to well, think and mull over it all. She'd grown up idolizing her father, and while she'd at first believed that the age of the superhero was past, and that magic was dying out as a serious profession(even if her own self-professed technological magic was, in fact, improperly identified non-magical technokinesis), by the time she'd gotten onto the road to drive west, this had changed in her mind. Learning of Santa Celia, and going over her father's own records that were at her Grandmothers, she'd been able to plot a cross-country route, as whatever her father had done over the years, it had made him friends and enemies across the country, so she'd taken a route where when she stopped at night, it was at places that she'd marked as safe. From a small enclave of people who had to be former spies who her father had apparently been friends with, to giving a place that possibly was anti-witch a wide berth, she'd made her way across the country, sometimes it felt as though people were expecting her, which seemed odd, in all honesty, her father was [b]dead.[/b] And far as she knew, none of these people she had ever met. And yet, it was this strange kindness that had helped her, leaving the usually closed off wanna be hero wondering what kind of person her father really had been. She'd never known much about his life before her birth, and now part of her wondered what had really made him retire. Curiously, Santa Celia had not been a place visited by her father, most of his notes that did refer to the place said stuff about "climate not yet right, wait for the winds to call." Cryptic stuff like that, which made her wonder if he'd originally planned to help the city out, but that the time wasn't right, which made her wonder...if she was on the right track. She wasn't her father, that was for sure. Young, silly perhaps, maybe even a little crazy. But she had a chip on her shoulder, a passed on father to make proud. And as she passed the sign that told her the turn off to Celia's city limits was five miles ahead, her hand tightened on the wheel. A week of driving, had all led to this, the final approach to the start of her first, and hopefully not last, heroic tale. No tutorial levels, no extra lives, this was the real world. The sun had long since, and the moon was rising at her back...and on into the night she drove, to whatever chaos laid ahead in the villainous cesspool that was already rife with good elements trying to turn it from a vile den of evil into something...beautiful. Hopefully she'd fit in. Even if her magic was fake, and she had a serious case of eighth grader syndrome... [i]//Not my best, but I did try. Feedback always welcome.[/i]