Friendo’s Intro, Day 0, 9:05-ish
Friendo had woken up at 8:26 and 23 seconds precisely, to find that it was raining. Rain dripped down the window panes somebody had decided to squeeze into the top of the basement walls, mixing with the decomposing leaves at the bottom of the window well to make pasty wet leaf-mush. Friendo had rolled over and gone back to sleep.

He woke up again at about 9-ish to an odd tapping noise, but his sleep-clouded brain told him it was just the rain dripping and he rolled over and tried to go back to sleep.

By exactly 6 minutes and 47.6 seconds later, the tapping still hadn’t stopped, so he finally gave up on getting more sleep, rolled out of bed, threw on some clothes that looked clean enough, and went to see what the tapping noise was.

It is often hard to pinpoint the location of strange noises, for head towards what seems like the direction the sound is coming from only to find that it’s actually coming from where you just were. So it took Friendo a good five minutes or so to realize it was coming from the window. When he did, and he spotted the rain-soaked dragonfly, he quickly cracked the window and let it fly in before slamming it shut again to stop any pasty-wet leaf mush or spotted lanternflies from tumbling into his room.

The dragonfly landed on the floor and coughed up a scroll. We all know what happens next. After some deliberation Friendo filled out the scroll and packed his things, then turned to the dragonfly which he had named Snorkle and let it lead the way. Snorkle led the way upstairs to the kitchen, and then landed on the freezer door handle. Friendo obediently pulled the freezer open. Snorkle darted inside and grabbed the frozen microwaveable breakfast sausages and dropped them into Friendo’s hand. Friendo loved breakfast sausages, so if this dragonfly wanted him to eat them he would gladly do so. He poured three of them onto a plate and stuck them in the microwave, then took them downstairs to his basement to eat on his couch. The dragonfly seemed fine with this, and it settled on the couch next to him while he ate the first two in one bite.

While he ate his sausages, Jay, who had also been visited by a dragonfly, followed his own dragonfly outside and onto the roof, where he launched himself and his hang glider into the sky and disappeared before Friendo came back upstairs.

Before Friendo could eat his final sausage, Snorkle darted in and stole it.

“Hey!” said Friendo, but before he could get it back the dragonfly had dropped it on the floor and zapped it with a strange multicolored burst of lightning.

The strange lightning seemed to have done something to the sausage, for it began to grow. It grew and grew until it was about three feet long and a foot in diameter, and then it lifted into the air. And then it shook itself and whinnied like a horse.

All right. Friendo’s sausage had grown dozens of sizes bigger and become animate. He could handle this. He’d always wanted a sausage-horse.

Now, Friendo knew exactly what to do with a sausage-horse. You ride it, of course. So he swung himself onto its back (but not before throwing a blanket over its back to keep him from getting sausage grease all over his pants, because even for a person who likes sausages that’s kinda gross) and faced his dragonfly.

“All right. Where to?”

Snorkle turned and zipped up the stairs, and Friendo galloped up after it on the back of Link, which was what he had named his sausage-horse. Snorkle led them right out the front door, and Friendo was too absorbed in his sausage-horse to notice either that it had stopped raining or that Jay’s crutches were lying abandoned on the front lawn. Snorkle rose into the sky, and apparently sausage-horses could fly because Link followed the dragonfly into the air. Snorkle headed out over the top of the forest towards the rising sun, and Friendo urged Link after the little insect.

They flew for what felt like quite a while to Friendo, but it was really about five minutes because Friendo just had a short attention span. Getting bored, Friendo started seeing what tricks Link could do. He managed to pull off a barrel roll, although he almost fell off, and then he swooped down low over the treetops. This was causing them to fall behind, and Snorkle glanced back at them and glared a little dragonfly glare, but Friendo and his sausage-horse didn’t notice.

It turned out trying to fly close to the treetops was a bad idea, because they almost ran into a branch. Link dodged to the side and they nearly escaped safely, but it carved a huge chunk of meat out of the bottom of the sausage.

Apparently Link couldn’t fly after being ripped in half by a tree branch, because the sausage-horse began to nosedive, straight toward a tree. At about this time, Friendo started to scream, because that is what humans usually do when speeding directly towards a large solid object. Hang on… Was there something in that tree? It looked like a girl with a pair of fluffy wolf ears and a tail… But there wasn’t time to investigate because he was about to crash into her. Still screaming, he wrenched Link to the side, narrowly avoiding both the tree and the girl (who was Reuby, though he didn’t know it at the time).

He briefly stopped screaming and complemented himself on not crashing, but then realized he was still speeding towards the ground, which was just as large and solid as the tree, so he started screaming again. What he was too busy screaming to notice was that down on the ground, right where he was about to crash, was a certain person with antlers and wings, who he and his ruined overgrown magic sausage were about to land on top of.

~~~

I'm rather proud of myself, I managed to make this one shorter than the last few. It's only two and a little bit pages long, as opposed to four pages.

I also just realized that I have been forgetting to involve spotted lanternflies in a few of the last intros. Each CBer was supposed to have an encounter with one. Whoops.

Also, there's only one intro left and then we start the main story! Yeah, if I ever do another ski lodge I'm definitely not doing intros.

My goodness, how the time has flown. It's been a week now and I haven't had any time to work on this.

My plan is to get all the intros out before summer. Over summer break, I'll be on hiatus, so I'm trusting you all to top it, if you can. When I get back I'll continue the ski lodge.

Bluebird’s Intro, Day 0, about 9:00
For those who don’t know, the CBer formerly known as echo/Echo Hallowswift/Bluebird has recently left CB. However, her character will remain in my ski lodge, and she will remain in our memories. <3 :D

~

Tap.
Tap.
Tap.

Bluebird’s eyes snapped open. Or at least, Bluebird tried to snap her eyes open. They stayed firmly shut.

Bluebird panicked for a moment. What had happened? Why couldn’t she open her eyes? But then she remembered the nasty case of bacterial conjunctivitis she had come down with a few days ago. Her eyes were merely crusted shut with the thick yellow discharge they had been producing the last few days.

She sighed and fumbled to the bathroom of her apartment, felt around for her washcloth, got it wet with nice warm water, and wiped away the obnoxious eye-crusties. She then carefully opened her eyes and picked up her little bottle of eye drops the doctor had prescribed for her eyes, and tilting her head back, she carefully put one drop in each eye.

With her eyes taken care of, she paused and sorted through her dreams from the last night. As she had learned in her Foresight & Prophecy elective in school, for Seers, dreams often had visions woven into them, little glimpses of the future. Unfortunately, as she had also learned in school, for whatever reason a Seer's inner Sight relied on their eyes just as much as their outer sight. If one’s eyes were infected with, say, a nasty case of bacterial conjunctivitis, it would negatively impact one's ability to have useful visions. All she could remember of her broken bits of dreams was a vague sense of adventure and new friends in the near future. She sighed, frustrated. Normally she could remember detailed information from her dreams that might be hinting at something in the near future.

Tap.
Tap.
Tap.

All of a sudden, Bluebird remembered why she had woken in the first place. The mysterious tapping, which seemed to be coming from her bedroom window. She hurried to her window and threw it open, sticking her head out to investigate. Unfortunately, it was pouring buckets outside, and her magnificent blonde hair got soaked. Bluebird also noticed a beautiful black and silver dragonfly, which hovered in front of Bluebird’s face for a second, and then flew past her into the room. Bluebird pulled her head inside and slammed the window, shaking her head in a futile attempt to get the water out of her hair, then turned to face the dragonfly.

This was clearly a special dragonfly. Bluebird felt it in her bones. Besides, black and silver were unusual colors for a dragonfly.

The dragonfly’s special-ness was made even more clear when it vomited up a scroll, along with some chunks of its last meal.

Bluebird ripped open the scroll and read it. She thought for a moment. Her dreams had promised adventures and new friends, no matter how vague they had been. She might as well go on this adventure and see where it ended up.

So she shrugged, filled out the scroll, threw on some cleanish clothes, and packed her bags. Five minutes later, she turned to the newly christened Starchaser with an expectant look.

Starchaser turned and zipped to the door of the apartment. Bluebird opened it, and the dragonfly flew out into the hallway and headed for the elevator. Bluebird chased after Starchaser (after carefully locking her door), and by the time she caught up, the little insect had already hit the button to summon the elevator, and the doors were sliding open. Bluebird stepped inside, Starchaser hit the button for the ground floor, and then they were on their way down. In a few minutes, the doors slid open, and Starchaser led Bluebird out of the elevator, out of the lobby, and down the street.

The thing about New York City is that it is absolutely infested with Spotted Lanternflies (well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it does have a big problem with them). On the short walk to wherever Starchaser was leading her—which turned out to be the subway station—Bluebird squished, mashed, swatted, and otherwise killed at least fifteen Spotted Lanternflies. By the time they arrived at the station, Bluebird’s practical-but-pretty black hiking boots with silver shoelaces were splattered with bug guts.

The subway station was, surprisingly for Bluebird and unsurprisingly to us, empty. Starchaser settled on a bench, so Bluebird shrugged, sneezed, and sat down as well.

A few minutes later, after Bluebird had committed the patterns of the floor tiles to memory out of boredom, a rumble came from down the tunnel and a train’s headlights were visible. Bluebird stood, and Starchaser lifted off the bench. The rumble got louder and louder, and the headlights got brighter, until suddenly there the train was in front of them with a screech of brakes.

The doors opened with a quiet shuff, and there was nothing to do but get on. So Bluebird stepped in, sat down, and waited. In the end, it’s all about waiting, isn’t it? Waiting for the subway to leave the station, waiting for Bluebird and all the other participants to arrive, waiting for somebody to die, waiting for all of the rest of them to die. We all know that’s what will happen, don’t we? And now we’re just waiting for it. But anyways, now the doors were closing, and the subway was starting to move, and it was time for more waiting, waiting to arrive at wherever she was going. Bluebird noticed that the subway seemed totally empty, but she wasn’t as surprised by it anymore, not as surprised as she had been to see the station was empty. Her mind hadn’t really had a chance to catch up with all that had happened since she had woken, and now that she had a chance to just sit and rest on one of the grungy subway seats, she was wondering if this really wasn’t such a good idea after all. But there was nothing she could do about it now.

She figured she might as well do something while she waited. She took out her silver dagger and the small sharpening stone that it had come with when she bought it. It had been a while since she had sharpened it, and it had several little nicks in the blade. So she got to work on it, the gentle scraping of stone on metal mingling with the screeching of the train’s wheels, and by the time she had finished the train was screeching to a stop again. She stood up and got off, because what else could she do, and exited into a surprisingly pristine station. It was pretty small, just the one platform, and there seemed to be nothing else to do but to go up the stairs out into wherever in the world (or possibly out of the world) she was.

And if wherever in the world she was just happened to be a beautiful, vibrant, extremely green forest? Well then, it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that had happened to her today.

~~~

Alright. I'm going to be gone over the summer. I'll continue working on this once I'm back.

Hello Scuttles!! Just wanted to let you know that even though I haven't commented in a while I've been following along and your writing is sooo pretty and fun to read! The amount of dedication put into the intros is insane and I literally cannot wait for the main part to come out. I'll do my best to keep this thread topped until you return! See you after summer <333

* Announcement *

Hello, my pleasantly persistent and patient participants! I've had a bit of difficulty recently and the permissions on my school computer, which I use for CB, have been changed around and I can no longer access CB, at least for now, on said computer. I'm working the problem, and hopefully I'll be back soon, but until then my handy hardworking and helpful helper Jynx will be posting the parts, although I'll still be writing them (the character Jynx (who was invented by the person under the name of Jynx posting the story) will also be showing up in the story soon!). Please be patient while we get everything worked out. If you have any questions or other important or interesting information you’d like me to know (i.e. changes to your OC you'd like me to implement in the ski lodge) let Jynx know and they'll relay it to me. I hope to see/read/whatever you all again soon, and until then, happy CBing!
PS Did you like my awesome, astonishing, amazing, and abundant alliteration?