Title: Poet and Lauren's Trip to Oz Author: Derien Nada Rating: PG so far (and I think it will stay that way) Pairing: Poet and Lauren (duh) Warnings: Some femmeslash. Probably you're more in danger of being bored than squicked. Disclaimers: Poet Norse Blue and Lauren Scavenger, being real people, belong only to themselves, and offered to let their names and vague descriptions be borrowed for this story. Oz may belong to the estate of L. Frank Baum, but I had in mind Gregory Maguire's "Wicked" and Robert Heinlein's "Number of the Beast." Arnold "Ace" Rimmer belongs to Grant Naylor. I'm making no money from this (or anything else for that matter), so suing me would be a big waste of time. Derivation/Reason for existing: Work in progress, written for the Red Dwarf Slash Society's "Slash the Slashers" challenge/game. Many Thanks To: My Muse and Beta, Eor.:) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Part One: Getting Lost (In which Lauren gets off at the wrong stop, and Poeie stays too long at a party.) Lauren drifted out of her doze as her stop was called. She hadn't had enough sleep the night before, and after a long day at Uni the familiar rock of the train had sent her head nodding almost as soon as she'd sat down. Often she spent the trip talking with her boyfriend, Zeralot, but apparently without his company she'd lost the struggle for consciousness. She had no idea how long she'd dozed, sitting up, but she had a crick in her neck and the car was empty of all other riders. Now she hurriedly slung her backpack over one shoulder as she stood and braced herself against the train's stopping. The brakes squealed and doors opened, and she stepped smoothly out onto the platform and walked several feet before a feeling of disorientation hit her. This was not her stop. In her sleepy daze she must have misheard the muffled announcement. She turned quickly, shouting "Hey!" at the train as it pulled away, and for her trouble only got her mouth filled with a hank of her own hair, floating in the breeze of the train's passage. Apparently she'd emerged from the last car. Funny, she could have sworn she'd boarded into the second car. She looked around, trying to figure out where she was. The shelter of the platform was lit by a lamp which appeared to be an authentic oil-burning hurricane lantern, and a sign below that, swinging in the breeze (which wasn't dying down with the train's leaving) pronounced this stop to be "Horse Bridge". Well, that explained why she had thought she'd heard her own stop - it sounded almost the same. Only, where in the heck was "Horse Bridge"? She'd never heard of it. She sighed, adjusted her backpack on her shoulder again, and stepped out from the shelter into a nasty wind. As she descended the steps (lit by another hurricane lantern hanging on a post by the bottom stair) she looked around. The last light of the day was fading and the sky was cloudy. Dimly, in the light of the lantern, she could make out trees, though there was a little open meadow around the train platform. A small tree next to the platform tossed, violently in the wind, it's leaves turned upside-down. Looked like a thunderstorm was whipping up. And her lost, no idea where. Just lovely. Ah, but there might be a way home, soon - she could hear another train approaching, from the opposite direction. She could hop on that one and backtrack to a stop she knew. Turning to look up the tracks to her left, she saw the tornado and her reflexes flung her body to the right in the next moment. As she tried to mold her body tightly into the corner where the ground met the steps she heard the rip of the platform shelter being removed, then there was a sudden silence. She lifted her head, curious, and looked up, only to see something large and dark and very solid descending quickly. She covered her head over with her arms as a solid, woody, crash and a sound like shattering windows filled the world. Then silence, again. Not trusting it this time, she kept her head covered a few moments more, but heard nothing else. Then a muffled female voice let out an impressive string of curses in what sounded like French. This voice was emanating from the rather dilapidated house which was now sitting a few yards away. It was a very odd-looking house - it appeared to be only one room wide, but at least four times longer. She scrambled to her feet, brushing dirt and twigs off her long skirt, and approached it. Incredibly, the oil lamp at the bottom of the steps was still lit, and it cast weird shadows among the litter of broken boards which used to be a front porch. "Hello?" she called. The string of epithets ran down, but apparently only because the cursor ran out of wind and needed to recharge, as they began again in a moment. "Hello!?" she called louder. She stepped through the front door and began to work her way toward the back of the house. The floors, a litter of furnishings in the weak light filtering through the windows, were as treacherous as the porch. As she approached the source of the cursing she realized that whoever it was probably was screaming at the top of her lungs, and that a lot of the words were actually in English. When the female voice ran out of wind again, Lauren screamed, "Are you okay?!" A shriek came out in return. "I'm stuck! In the closet!" "Okay, I see the problem." A piece of the ceiling had come down and was blocking the door from opening. "I'm working on it." She looked around for something to push the fallen plaster and lathe up, and seized a board which had obviously recently been part of a bed-stead. "But are you okay?" "I think so." A pause. "I seem to be able to wiggle my toes." Another pause. "Hey... does your voice sound familiar? Who's out there?" "My name's Lauren Scavenger. And who - " "Lauren!? Lauren, it's me, Poet!!" "Poeie!?" Lauren had the long board jammed up under the lath, and now gave it several kicks to wedge the ceiling up higher. She pulled the door of the closet open. "Poeie, really!?" It was, indeed, a rather disheveled Poet Norse Blue. She looked as though she'd been wrapped in a feather tick and stuffed in a closet for a while, then had a bit of plaster and lathe ceiling collapse on her head, probably because that's exactly what had happened to her. She stepped out uncertainly on her long legs and nearly fell into Lauren's arms. Lauren steadied her, and began to brush grey plaster out of auburn hair. "How did you get here, hun?" "Took a wrong turn at Albuquerque? How did ::I:: get here? I think I just rode a frikken house down a tornado. How did YOU get here? Where is here? Am I in Oz? I mean, I must be - I rode a frikken house down a tornado." "Oz? In a manner of speaking, I guess - Australia. I took a train. Uh..." but now that Poet brought it up, that would explain a few things. Oil lanterns, a town she'd never heard of... but how...? "That is... I got on a train in Melbourne. But maybe I'm not in Australia anymore. But how did you come to be closeted, hun?" "Heh." Poet smiled, and began hesitantly, "Well, I... I was at a party. Um... the tornado sirens sounded, and I guess the house had a bolt hole. It's an old house, lots of the older houses were made with them. I heard everyone yelling and running. I was, um... in the bathroom, actually. I got a little banged around when the house first lifted. Then it was a bit wobbly walking, but I could move around the house, and I started looking for good padding and a small space to wedge myself into with it. I honestly thought it was hopeless, I was done for, but... Anyway, when the house landed and I wasn't dead, but I couldn't get my legs up to kick the door open, because I'd wedged myself in so well, that just seemed so ... unfair, I guess. Ridiculously unfair, that I should survive such a thing as being carried by a tornado and then die because I'm stuck in a closet!" Lauren didn't say anything. She couldn't. It hadn't struck her before, how close she had just come to losing her friend. They didn't end up seeing each other that often, anymore, as their schedules were no longer in synch - it was amazing enough that they had ever been in synch so that they'd spent so many hours talking, considering Poet lived in New Orleans. That this friend who she'd been lucky to get to know in the first place, and who had helped her come out the other side of so many moods relatively unscathed - this friend could very easily have been dropped to her death, minutes ago, mere yards from where Lauren had crouched, and her unaware...? That was horribly unfair. This didn't proceed through her mind in so many words, but all in one rush, which left her with her arms tightly around Poet. After a moment Poet murmered, "I can barely breath, dear. I'm okay. Really." Lauren had to pull her head back a little to look up at her - their faces were at very close range. Poet gave her a gentle smile, and the small amount of light coming through the hall window caught the green of her eyes. "I'm glad it was you who got me out of the closet." Lauren chuckled, appreciative of the attempt to change her mood. Then something nagged at her brain. Something had changed. She looked around. "It's getting lighter. That's ..." she had been about to say 'impossible,' but changed her mind. "Odd. I had thought the sun had just gone down. I must have been mistaken."