Drats.

Well, I've gone and done it again. Someone *cough* is absolutely thrilled, of course, but I'm more dismayed than anything else! Another story! In the same genre! Kind of.

So, the skivvy is this: I was watching Monsters Inc., wrote like 500 words about some kid named Luke being taken to who-even-knows-where by a surprisingly cute and seriously terrifying Boogeyperson named Eira, and thought I'd be done with it.

And then I started wondering about the history of Jack-O-Lanterns for some God forsaken reason and ended up researching all kinds of things about Halloween and the like that eventually led to me making a plot about Luke and Eira that literally kept me up for three hours last night as I jotted down dialogue scripts.

And of course because I'm me, the cracky-humor vibe that was in the one-shot is suspiciously absent from the plot outline I've worked up! Guys. I'm incapable of writing something that isn't at least more than half serious! (Good thing? Bad thing? Do we care?)

What. Even.

Anyway. Here I am, doing a thing.

Wanna read it?

"We're the monsters under you're bed," she declares brazenly, peering up at him with half-lidded eyes in the most eerie shade of blue, her pupils mere slits, like a snake. Then, her pretty mouth twists into a frown as she seems to reconsider something. "Well, no. That's not exactly true."

He swallows, reaching for his inhaler. There's a person in his room that doesn't belong there and it's the middle of the night and he's pretty sure that she just came out from under his bed and Holy God what is he supposed to do with this knowledge? He could sell it to Wikileaks, or something. Like, the government needs to know about this. Is it a cult thing? Or is it, like-

Luke compresses his inhaler again, feeling his lungs expand feebly.

The girl - is she a she? - stares at his inhaler inquisitively, touching the tip of a pointed fingernail to the edge of the prescription label. "What is that?"

"Inhaler," he says absently, then catches himself, his mouth snapping shut. At this point, Luke is about 90% sure he's hallucinating. Incredulous, he blurts, "What are you?"

The girl, if it is a girl, appears rather affronted. Insulted, even. "Excuse me," she says snippily. "But I don't think I like your tone."

"I'm sorry," he hears himself saying and then slaps his palm over his mouth. Get it together, man. "But what, uh, I mean, are you human?"

Her nose wrinkles, eyes rolling with great exaggeration. "Technically speaking," she allows. Then she grins. "But humanity is so boring. What I am is much, much better than that."

Now Luke is offended. It must show because the girl wiggles more, pushing herself from under his bed, and for a moment he is completely horrified. He's pretty sure there are socks under there from at least middle school, which wasn't a good time for anyone in the body odor department and, regardless of her being strange and probably a hallucination, it's still mortifying for a pretty girl to be that close to his old gym socks.

"I don't mean it that way," she says as she stands, looking around his room like he's the weirdo and shrugging a shoulder in his general direction. "It's just that we're evolved in a way. I mean, Boogeypeople technically came first, but-"

"You're a Boogeyman?"

She looks at him like he's stupid. Unfortunately, it's not a foreign look. "Hey, equal rights, okay? We stopped being Boogeymen, like, at least two centuries ago. It's Boogeypeople."

"Right," Luke says, scrubbing his hand over the loose tousle of his hair. "Sorry. Again. No offense intended."

Her smile is sharp and - yep, those teeth are sharp too, holy crap. "None taken."

Luke nods nervously.

The girl walks over to his window, pushing the navy curtain to the side and letting in the glare of streetlights from his totally normal, completely average, human suburb of Connecticut. "Ugh," she says to the window. "It's so neat. How can you stand it?"

She's complaining about the cleanliness of his driveway. Luke is so far over his head.

When he doesn't answer, she looks back at him, her slit pupils catching the light unnaturally, reflecting it back at him in a brief blind of greenish-white. She hums, tilting her head as if to examine him. It makes Luke shiver in a so not good kind of way. "What do they call you? The humans?"

"Says Lucas on my birth certificate," he replies dumbly. "But I go by Luke."

"Not very scary," she comments, turning to prowl around the room again, all feline grace and scary as hell because he's noticing things, like how all her clothes are both neon and fur and leather, and like how there's this entirely unnatural pivot to her walk. And her bare feet.

"I didn't think it had to be?"

She plops down on the edge of his bed, smiling that sharp smile again. "It's okay. My name isn't very scary, either. Parents totally failed there, but Ma says there was a trend and so now I've got this flowery name that, like, totally doesn't represent who I am," she confides.

Luke is on the edge of a panic attack. He uses his inhaler again, coughing weakly. "Parents."

"Totally."

"Yeah."

"Anyway," she says brightly. "I'm Eira and I'm here to take you back."

"What."

She gestures to his room, the gore of gaming posters on his wall, and raises a very judgey brow, an arched firebrand across her forehead. "Come on, Luke," she says leadingly. "You had to know you weren't normal. I mean, you're related to Bloody Mary!"

"I'm what?"

"Let's go! You have an appointment!"

Luke is pretty sure that appointment is death as soon as she literally pulls him from the warm comfort of his sheets, pushes him onto the floor, and then drags him beneath his bed where they enter some kind of vortex and what even is happening to him right now?

His last thought before the flash of white is that he's totally going to fail that French test on Tuesday.