Animated - Prologue

So begins Animated.

Prologue: Long-Lost Rubber Ducks
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Just an ordinary rubber duck. That's all it was.

Or so Holly told herself as Mae nonchalantly placed it on the resort's guest services counter, directly in line with the hostess' watery, swamp-brown eyes. Its vapid grin of black paint seemed to challenge the uniformed female behind the counter even as her nasal voice droned out instructions.

"Now if you would just leave your keys-"

"There's also this." Mae cut in smoothly.

With a soft 'squeech-y', Marlow the duck's plastic yellow underside touched down on the splintered wooden desk.

The hostess swallowed the last part of her sentence, startled eyes flying from a point just over Holly's shoulder to meet Marlow's lifeless pupils. The elaborate, teased hairstyle stopped bobbing, the doughy face underneath freezing halfway through a polite smile.

"You can return him to the room now. Number 475, if you please. Though, I'm sure he wouldn't object to a change of scenery."

Mae patted the duck fondly. Marlow gave a firm 'squich-ah' as if in agreement.

"Whadda ya mean?" The hapless employee shifted her questioning look away from Mae to the other half of the duo. Unfortunately, she wouldn't get much help there. Holly had wandered away at the start of the conversation, injecting her perusal of the resort’s breakfast menu with a nonchalant air. Face deliberately turned away from the scene, she was biting her lip, desperately trying not to laugh at the woman's baffled tone.

"He just had something he wanted to see out here." Mae shrugged. "So I agreed to take him to the main lodge for a short outing."

Holly studiously kept her gaze fastened on a painting nailed to the lodge's almond-colored wall. A mountaineering man stood proudly against a field of white snow, his rifle-bearing arm flung back at an impossibly macho angle. An odd shaft of morning sunlight reclined across the glass frame, cutting his body off at mid-thigh. This gave him the appearance of wearing hot shorts, a detail that somewhat ruined his majestic pose.

Mae's reddish-brown curls leaned forward conspiratorially. "I think he was looking for his brother, Wade, but I didn't want to pry."

More silence. At least, Holly reflected, the employee hadn't called for her equally vacant-minded manager. And wouldn't that make a fine mess first thing in the morning?

"Go on, Marlow. No, no, glad to be of service, no worries. Well, thank you." Mae continued on, blissfully unaware - or unheeding - of the odd tableau the three humans and one bath toy made. She had Marlow carefully cupped in one palm and was holding him out for Teased Hair to take.

A navy-clad arm reached hesitantly over the counter and accepted the duck. Marlow squawked "chee-ya", which to Holly could have meant anything from "good-bye" to "help!" or possibly even "I love puddles!" Mae seemed unconcerned, though, so Holly took that as a cue to grab her sister's duffel and head for the glass doors.

"Would it kill you just once to lie and say you wanted to swipe it, but decided to put it back?" Holly hissed to her younger sibling.

"You'd rather I come across as a thief?" Mae countered as the two made a beeline for their car.

"Well, then, that it somehow got in your luggage, and you found it while rooting about for the room key?" Holly opened the trunk and threw all her bags in with one vicious motion.

"Marlow wasn't ashamed, and he was the one who had to subject to being manhandled by that desk clerk. Why do you get so upset over what people think of you?" Mae sighed, climbing into the passenger’s seat.

Holly launched herself angrily behind the steering wheel, buckling her belt and anxiously checking the mirrors. "Because what the world thinks of you can make or break you! You can’t just traipse merrily along, pretending everything is lovely and copasetic, when everyone you talk to thinks you’re stark raving mad!"

It was an old argument, never quite put to rest by all the years they spent trying to walk in each other's shoes. Holly's cheeks would burn red, half in anger at the attitude of those that labeled Mae as crazy, half in embarrassment at her sibling's attention-drawing antics. Mae would try to distract her, or tell her that no stranger's opinion mattered, least of all the fry clerk at that greasy fast food restaurant. And why that IQ-challenged jerk had such a problem with letting Violet the alien share a bag with Elvira the cow still mystified her...

A lock of reed-straight light brown hair fell into Holly's mouth as she suddenly turned to her younger sister, scrutinizing her suspiciously. "You didn’t happen to--tell me you didn’t--"

"Duck got your tongue?"

"Tell me you took no other prisoners from the resort, Mae."

Mae ignored her companion and got out the directions that would, hopefully, with a minimum of wrong turns and incorrect mileage markers, get them home.

At some point, Mae had erected a wall between them, the darker side to her power - and all the havoc it wreaked inside her - buried beneath layers of mirrored glass. Mae’s need to keep her out burned at least as strong as Holly’s desire to take the blockade apart, layer by layer. She could feel the other woman circling the outside of the metaphysical fortress. Sometimes tapping gently with carefully chosen words, as if seeking admittance, other times silently stroking the surface, searching for a weak spot. More often than not, Holly ended up hurling whatever she had in her formidable arsenal at the offending barrier.

"Maeve?"

"They're not prisoners if they ask to come along, now are they?"

The redhead mused over how long she should let Holly sweat, finally taking pity on her poor sibling when the other woman seemed likely to burst a blood vessel. Plus, she was using Mae's full name, a sure sign that lava was about to erupt from the fuming woman to her left.

“No, Mother, I was a good girl this time. I even remembered to wash behind my ears and not steal animated objects.”

Holly breathed a quick sigh of relief as their green sedan pulled out of the resort driveway and onto the highway.

“Just Ford, Marlow’s cousin. And, of course, Jane. She's a paper doll who got folded one too many times and needs...”

“Mae!”

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All material copyright AEW, 2005. Stay tuned for Chapter I.