7 - Phantom Call//Lea

When Lea woke up, she was lying on a new leather sofa. It was stiff and uncomfortable, matched only by the glares she was getting from across the room.

She tried remembering how she had gotten there, and bits and pieces of a strange dream came back to her. A dream where she was fifty times larger and two tiny masked figures had beat her within an inch of her life.

It wasn't too far removed from the two teenagers who were staring at her now. A blonde boy with a pair of glasses around his neck, held in place by a fraying string, and a brunette, hispanic girl who was holding tightly to a green crystal around her neck and staring at her with a fierce look in her eyes.

A violent look.

"I don't know who you two are, but kidnapping people is illegal," she said matter-of-factly. When she tried to raise her arm in accusation, she found that she was holding a red gem. She quickly tossed it aside and got up. "If you let me go, I won't report you to the authorities."

"You know what else is illegal?" the brunette girl said, nabbing the gemstone from the floor with lightning fast reflexes. "Destroying half of Downtown Paradox City."

"And theft!" the boy added, speaking vehemently. She noticed the flash of a blue gemstone around his neck, similar to the girls, obscured by the loose collar of his baby blue dress shirt.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said, her eyes moving from one to the other.

"You don't remember fishing through the box of a StairS Limited Edition..." the girl said authoritatively, suddenly pausing in the midst of her accusation. "You stole a red gem from a box of vinyl records that was outside our door!"

Though the accusation was serious, her words had revealed something more urgent.

"Oh my gosh!" Lea shouted, looking around. For kidnappers, they sure had a good sense of style. Though the decor was bare bones, all of the furniture looked like it came straight out of a catalogue. But no matter where she looked, she couldn't see it. "Where's my StairS Limited Edition Lalala Forever Vinyl collection?"

They both looked at her suspiciously, like she were crazy to be asking about a set of vinyls when she was currenly mid-kidnapping, but there was no way she was letting them get off the hook.

"Don't play dumb with me; it's the version that was printed in the Looga-Booga Records factory in Leipzig," she said. "They only did one running, and they used the wrong font on every single album cover. Owning it is the mark of an ultimate Europop fan!"

"I begged my brother to let us go on vacation to Germany entirely because I wanted to find some Looga-Booga Records misprints and I found the best one," she continued. "Oh my gosh, this isn't a kidnapping, it's a robbery."

"That's what I'm saying," the brunette girl replied, trying to keep abreast of the conversation even though she seemed lost.

"Wait, Leipzig?" the boy interjected. "As in Leipzig, Germany?"

"Exactly," she said, putting her hands on her hips in defiance. "We were just about to get on the plane when I finally spotted a small record shop in the duty free area that had two entire boxes just lying around. I wanted to get both, but I couldn't carry either on the plane with me so I had to have them shipped."

"It arrived yesterday and I was finally listening to it at the Lozenge Café when-" she stopped, her memory going fuzzy.

Had she really grown to ten feet tall and rampaged through Hip Café? That couldn't be real, it had to be a dream...

The two of them stared at her, then each other, then repeated the process multiple times before the girl kicked over an end table.

"That cost money!" the boy chastised, grabbing the table and setting it upright. His friend didn't seem too concerned.

"Of all the stupid vinyl CDs nobody cared about," she said. "You had to pick the one that had a rabid fan?"

"If I remember correctly Nora, you're the one who picked StairS," he said. "It's a dumb name any way. Why is the S at the end also a capital letter?"

"First of all, it is not a vinyl compact disc, it is a vinyl disc," Lea corrected. "Second of all, StairS means 'Soul to Soul over the air-waves', so of course they're capitalized."

"That makes less sense than the third quarter of the Mooar Shee," the boy said exasperatedly. "Anyways, we should probably apologize now."

"Apologize?" Nora said, "She used the Noiz!"

"She probably just brushed up against it accidentally, when it was inside the box," he insisted.

"How come it didn't turn us into giant monsters?" Nora asked.

"What?" she said, examining her body. Though it was all as it should have been and her legs were normal length, she couldn't get Nora's words out of her head. Had it all really happened?

"Because we're already bonded to Noiz," the boy explained before gasping at his own words. He rushed out of the room, leaving them both confused.

"Hey, Nora right?" Lea asked, getting up again. Nora instinctively grabbed her necklace, but didn't do anything more. "Did I turn into a giant sherbet teddy bear monster and destroy the Hip Café."

Instead of answering, Nora turned on the small TV mounted on the wall.