WHO: Alice Cullen WHERE: Streets of L.A. WHEN: Monday, May 30; early afternoon WHAT: Alice arrives! RATING: G STATUS: narrative; COMPLETE
The place Alice wanted to shop at – or, more accurately in terms of Alice, desperately needed to shop at because nothing else would do at all – for yet another idea she'd gotten for the wedding was a place in Los Angeles. This might haven been slightly problematic for most vampires, given how much sunshine the city received, but as always her foresight was on her side. A well-timed arrival in the city during a brief, rare overcast point of the day just before sundown, combined with the tinted windows of the Porsche and her normal caution with clothing when out in places that were risky, left her fairly confident she'd get just what she'd come to order without issue.
And this trouble was occurring over, of all things, a cake topper.
What she hadn't seen happening, because the choice had nothing whatsoever to do with her own decisions – or those of any other she knew, for that matter – was the sudden burst of sunshine that came as she wove through the streets, marking the outside time as something far different than it had been a moment ago. The traffic patterns abruptly shifting hadn't been expected either, but with her superhuman reflexes, Alice managed to avoid a car accident, surprisingly receiving only one blared horn in the process.
She could sense at once something was wrong beyond what had just happened, as she couldn't see her family anymore. Even when she wasn't focusing, flashes came to her day and night of their futures as those ends morphed with decisions made. Even at this distance, she still had that connection with certain clarity. Normally.
But now it wasn't there. It was as though something had simply cut all of that off. The easiest connection to find, and by far the most worrisome given that it was now failing, was Jasper. She couldn't see him. She pulled over to the side of the road, turning off the car as she closed her eyes and focused on those she was closest to one by one.
Edward was here. Bella too. And they were very close to her, by all appearances of both the intensity of the images and the frequency of them. That really shouldn't be the case, as they were in Forks. The rest... It was a difficult thing to define. Her visions worked outside the realm of what one thought of as reality, but not knowing what had happened, she had no frame of reference for feeling as she did. It was as though a curtain had been dropped between her and the others, blocking them from her, but not removing them entirely. She felt as though they were there just out of sight and out of reach, still there in some respect but not in a way she could see them. She'd never experienced anything like this before, save for what happened when the werewolves were involved, but even that felt nothing like this.
None of it made any sense, but she was about to get the answers.
Reaching beside her, she snatched up her cell and punched out a text to Edward's cell number, fingers flying over the keys with her eyes still closed. It was easier to do that than call, given that she was trying to focus elsewhere as well. She searched the images she had at hand for clues as to where Bella was right this moment, inwardly preparing herself for the next image being one of Bella in some sort of trouble. This was Bella, after all, and this situation was unknown.