The flash of light was instantaneous; one minute she was walking down a lonely dirt road, and the next her pupils were trying to counteract the effects of effective blindness. Her flight instinct kicked in first, and she quickly scampered out of the vulnerability the middle of the road afforded her. It wasn’t a moment too soon. A terrible sound grinded along past her, with a velocity that almost precluded her from hearing the dopplering echo of unnatural machinery; a roar that sounded as if it was trying to conquer Mother Nature, one dirt road at a time. Her sense of sight slowly came back, to see a pair of red eyes slowly disappearing off into the distance. Covered in mud and god knows what else, she got up, collected the items that had spilled out of her clothed basket. “Mother is going to be so upset with me… I hope the loaf of bread wasn’t ruined…” she mused to herself as she continued walking along, this time along the more safe embankment next to the road. She hated walking this way, because all the toads next to the pond saw her, and would catcall. In fact…
“Heyyyyy pretty lady. “S’why’dun’kom’doooooooown’t’my’pad?” one croaked at her. While most would be thrown by the lack of a complete syllable, she understood exactly what it had said. One did not live in an area for years without becoming acquainted, if not versed, in the vernacular of the land. Especially when a lack of said knowledge could result in some very dangerous situations. She continued walking along, pointedly refusing to make eye contact with the toads, which were all eyeing her with very lecherous eyes.
“Liff’ben’har’s’why’not’kom’doooooooown’pret’ladi?” another one practically yelled at her. In response, a shadow emerged from her location on the embankment. It traveled straight for the toad, smacking him straight in one of his two bulbous yellow eyes. A vile string of properly enunciated curses followed, and then the toads gave up and switched their attention back to the flies just out of reach. But their attention span was short, and it wasn’t long before we were scanning the road again, for femme and femme alike. However, the girl was already out of sight. That was ok; we’d seen her many times before, and she wasn’t very nice. After all, she threw a rock at one of us!
Finally past the challenges this daily walk to the grocery forced upon her, she approached the door of a smallish hut. A soft red had been lovingly painted across it, interspersed with a mellower taupe. She reached for the handle of the door, and stopped. Looking down, her pretty dress was completely trashed. She couldn’t bring this inside; it would break her mother’s heart… and then her mother would break her. Instead, she walked over to the garage, opened the door as quietly as she could (making a mental note to oil the hinges again, for late night escapes), and slowly rested the dress down on a bench in the corner of the room. She’d be sure to restore it to its former glory; right now she had a house full of worrying family to set at ease. Sighing, she closed the garage door again, and opened the door…
“She’s back! She’s back!” was the chant that approached her ears, and it made her smile despite her rather ragged appearance. Two smallish critters (one, a chipmunk, the other, a ferret) ran up and tried their best to take her off her feet. She was able to stand, barely. However, she dropped the basket of slightly dirtied goods. She’d have to have a talk with them in the next month; they were really growing.
“I told you she’d be back. I don’t think death itself could stop h…” a grown otter walked through the doorway separating the entrance hall from the rest of the house, and stopped. “Goodness, but he could do a damn good job of trying. What happened?! You look like you went for a trip through a working camshaft!” she exclaimed as she ran over to the girl. Suddenly all business, she ordered the two littler critters to get towels and a warm cup of soup. Then the otter gently picked up the girl (against meager protests) and set her down on the sofa, all the while picking leaves and other debris out of her fur. “Now, you’re going to sit down and tell me what happened from the start…” the otter’s voice began drifting in and out… obviously, the girl was becoming quite drowsy. The events of the day had taken their toll, and now the quiet nurturing of her mother was relaxing her to a point that she could no longer keep her eyes open. The last thing she heard before falling asleep was her name. “…Terzy…”

Terzy awoke to a calming light emanating from partially closed blinds. The light told her it was almost midday, but her internal clocks were telling her it was closer to nine in the morning. She stood up, and almost immediately fell back to the bed again. The adage of standing up too quickly for one’s own good had been proven once again. She lay in the bed for another couple minutes before steeling herself to try again. Successful at this endeavor, she walked over to her room’s closet to pick out today’s clothes. Feeling upbeat and perky despite the dreariness of the day before, she chose a freshly mown lawn for her shorts, and a calm blue sky for her shirt. She then walked back to the main foyer, intending to get her bearings on the events. Her mother was sitting on the couch, obviously lying in wait for her return to consciousness. She beckoned over to her daughter to sit down, and when Terzy did so, she gave a sigh.
“We’re moving,” was all she provided to the girl.
The girl, who had become used to the constantly shifting surroundings, also gave a sigh; however, this was a sigh of warmth. “That’s all? Were you afraid I was going to refuse to go anywhere?”
She got a warm and loving look as a response. “You’ve always been the resilient one. I just don’t like the prospect of breaking it to the other two. They’ve really warmed to this place, and we had just gotten settled. Did you know that I got the last box unpacked a week ago?”
Terzy of course knew (how could she forget? Her mother had been bouncing around the house and mentioning it at every spare opportunity.), but she decided to pretend once again that she hadn’t. “Really? That’s great!” A pained look greeted her this time. “Look, mom, I know you care about my well-being. But I’m fine, really! I just ran into a little trouble on the road back; nothing I couldn’t handle.”
The otter got up and began pacing back and forth… and then began to swell. Terzy knew that a rant wasn’t far behind. And indeed…
“You are my daughter. No one should be forced to endure such trials! When you came back last night I honestly thought that you’d nearly been killed! It took me three hours to scrub the mud off you. Did I mention that you were unconscious? What kind of mother sends her child out to get groceries and resigns to scrubbing mud off her child’s unconscious body? Not a good one, I assure you! And every day, I hear the chainsaws. They get closer and closer to us! You were muttering in your sleep about evil machines. I bet one nearly ran you over! All we hear is that damn buzzword ‘progress’. Every day the world is getting ‘better’ because they are ‘progressing’ further; they’ve made ‘progress’ in restoring order to chaos; they’ve ‘progressed’ to the point that they can now house uninhabitable land. ‘Progression’ is the natural order of things, they say…”
Terzy began tuning it out… she couldn’t help it. She knew her mother meant for the best, but once she got on a soapbox, she wasn’t leaving it anytime soon. ‘She’d make a good politician’, the girl mused to herself, while still nodding at the appropriate times; after all, the one thing her mother hated more than anything was lack of attention. Finally, she began to wind down…
“…So we’re moving. I’ve already begun to pack, and I need you to help. Where are you going?”
She had begun to walk to the door, and stopped. “Don’t worry, mom, I’ll help when I get back. Right now I would like some time to myself to think.”
The last thing she heard as she walked out the door was her mother going “You had all that time you were asleep!”

Terzy hopped across the road. The same road that last night had offered such peril had undergone an impressive transformation. The sun shone bright and warm, as beams of light played across the girl’s face in a distinctly welcoming manner. She stayed on the road for about ten minutes, encountering all manner of friendly fauna. Then she left the road for a barely-visible path. The fact that she couldn’t see the path didn’t bother her… Terzy had known of this place since she was seven, and she could probably make it here even if she were blind, missing a leg, and suffering from an extreme cough due to disease. Not that she was. Pushing undergrowth that had long since learned to yield to force, she spent about five minutes in impermeable thicket, before finally emerging.
Upon doing so, her breath was stolen from her. Not that this was anything different from the norm; she just loved the beauty of this area. This place looked like what one would see on a “Wishing you the best!” Hallmark card… if Hallmark had hired Mother Nature herself to pose. A small pool of water sat to the left, enshrouded by trees and berry-emitting bushes. To the right, rays of sunlight danced through the pollen-laden air, as honeybees drifted lazily from flower to flower. In the center sat a limestone-shale rock, about two feet high, five feet wide, and covered in Micah. One could run their fingernail down this rock once and fill a vial with glitter. When the sun got exactly two-thirds of the way to the horizon, the sunbeams would blast across it, and a geodesic expansion of color would overwhelm anyone who was lucky enough to be in the vicinity.
The girl walked over to the rock and sat down on it. She fully intended to spend whatever time was needed to come to terms with the move; for, despite her reassurances to her mother, the move really bothered her. After all, she’d never be able to come back to this place when she needed a quiet place to meditate. She’d never be able to run through the wild grain fields, letting them brush past her, almost as if Nature was giving her a petting. She’d never… GZRHHGHGHGHHHHRRRRRRrrrrrrrrr
A wild noise tore through her meditation, and threatened to tear through her mind and body too. The girl awoke from her thoughts with a start that sent her careening off the rock onto the dirt below. Climbing to her feet, she saw hundreds of birds fleeing from the apparent source of the sound, cawing to each other in an incredible panicked interest. The girl herself, ignoring the warnings throughout her to get away, ran towards the sound, about equal in the curiosity and fear departments. She got about a hundred feet closer to the sound before she saw it… flashing metal teeth, wielded by a brilliantly unnatural-suited figure with glowing yellow eyes. As she watched in horror, the figure revved the mysterious-sounding device again, bringing it to bear on the raccoon girl…