Young Writers Society

The Lockets

It's an average day for your character, whatever that may look like. Perhaps it's in the morning, or at dusk, or at noon. Whatever the time, the character at some point in their day sees a locket lying near them, almost if someone had just left it there. It it simply designed: cool silvery metal with a medium-sized chain make up most of the necklace, and there's a little locket in the middle, maybe about the size of a quarter. When worn, it goes down to an average adult's chest area.

However, the strangest part about the locket isn't its appearance. It's that when touched, it will teleport your character in a snap to a blank, square room, with a door on one wall. There are no other openings. And there's a faint light coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once, so that people can see perfectly, but there are no obvious light fixtures.

And your character is not alone. Others from other places have been suddenly transported to this room just like you, each in possession of a locket necklace identical to yours. And when these lockets are opened, in a flash of light, an individual power will be granted to your character. This power will help them through whatever they go through next.

What will they go through next, you might ask? You shall find out.

"Hey, Jeff. Look at me." Bailey tilted her friend Jeff's chin upwards so that he was looking at her. "Don't you dare worry about that math test. Because if you do, I'll eat your lunch for the rest of the school year, okay?"

Finally, Jeff's face split into a smile. In return, Bailey's eyes brightened just a bit more. She let go of his chin. "Do what I say, mister!" She waggled a finger at him as he went back to chowing on his sandwich.

They had had math the class before lunch. That's where they had found out about the unit test. Bailey passed with a B, which she was pretty dang excited about. Brett got an A, like always. Mak just managed to get a B-, which Bailey celebrated in the class by whooping just a bit too loudly. Enough to draw stares, which Bailey basked in with a big smile. And Jeff... well, Jeff barely passed.

Even when they got to lunch, Jeff had still been hung up on it. Which is when Bailey had decided to step in.

"I'm just glad that I still have a B in English," Mak said from the other side of the table. She fiddled with one of the many bracelets on her left arm. "I swear, I could kill Ms. Watson!"

"As we all could, dear friend." Bailey patted Mak's arm. She was sitting on top of the table itself, so she had to reach down a bit to manage it. "As we all could. But alas, if we flunk English this year, next year will suck even more life out of us. And I'm already way too pale." She pulled up one of the sleeves of her long-sleeved shirt to expose her freckled skin. Today, she was wearing a pink long-sleeved shirt, jean shorts, tennis shoes, and knee-high blue-and-green plaid socks.

Mak chuckled. "My uncle works at the tanning place, you know. The one down the street. Just go there." She fiddled with her bracelets again.

"Yeah, but who said I didn't like my skin to be as pasty as it is?" Bailey stretched her legs into the air until the entire cafeteria could see her socks. She leaned towards Brett. "Hey, are you gonna eat that donut hole?"

Brett drew the donut hole towards him, like a dragon hoarding gold. "Yes, I am. Don't you dare touch it."

Bailey's mouth broke into a smile. "We'll see about that!" She made a lunge for it and Brett pulled it away, laughing as Bailey nearly lost her balance on the table. She made another grab and he darted his hand away. He dangled the donut hole in front of her and yanked it away just before she could grab it.

Brett waved it in front of her, like her was a snake charmer. "Come and get it," he taunted playfully.

Bailey kept on trying to steal the donut hole for the rest of the lunch period. Mak and Jeff rolled their eyes a great many times during the sequence, but they were smiling at Bailey's antics too. Bailey herself was grinning like an idiot by the time the bell rang, signalling that lunch was over.

As they walked out of the cafeteria, chatting and laughing, Bailey's foot stepped on something hard on the floor. She slipped, nearly falling. "Oop," she yelped before catching herself with her other foot.

"You good, Bailes?" Brett called as the friend group slowed to wait.

"Yeah." She looked down at what she had stepped on. There, put slightly to the side, was a locket made out of what looked like polished silver. Bailey hunched over it. "Cool."

Her friends came over. "Just leave it there," said Mak, tapping her shoulder lightly. "It's been on the floor of the cafeteria, for god's sake."

If it was something like a napkin or an open tupperware, Bailey might have listened to her. But this was something special. It was a locket necklace, shiny and well manufactured. (It looked that way, anyway.) It probably meant something to someone.

"I'll take it to the office," Bailey said, reaching down to grab a hold of it. "Maybe someone'll find--"

As soon as her fingers hit the metal, the world around her vanished. The floor underneath her turned from grimy tile to smooth and hard metal. The walls of the cafeteria changed to featureless gray walls in an instant. The smell of cafeteria pizza disappeared.

"--it there," Bailey finished. Her eyes wide and her hand still on the necklace, she slowly stood up, spinning a few times. One of the walls had a door in it, but there were no other openings. There weren't even lights, although she could see perfectly. She wasn't in the cafeteria anymore. Not even close to it.

"Did I just teleport?" Bailey asked to no one, her voice coming out squeaky.

Her thumb rubbed the locket. The locket. She had touched it and then suddenly... here. She raised the piece of jewelry up to her eye, in a daze. It looked unassuming, but...

Bailey looked at the necklace with awe. "It just teleported me."

Queenie was awake, her eyes closed, her fingers wrapped around the grip of her dagger and hidden under the covers. Someone was in her room.

She heard no footsteps, and her floorboards didn't creek. There was no telltale click of a door closing or a shift in the lighting. No, it was something else that tipped her off. She couldn't quite explain it herself, but there were eyes on her. Tracking her breathing, watching her movements.

She shot out of bed, her hands connected with fabric, heat. With her own momentum, she slammed the person's back against the wall, her blade to their throat.

A breath. The face before her processed.

"What the hell, Briar?"

The girl was blank-faced as always, monotone. Those amber eyes like the lights on an AI, Power on.. "You overslept." There would be more inflection if the words had scrolled across the black-and-white screen of AL33.

Queenie dropped her sister and tired the blade in her hand. She would put it away as soon as Briar left. There was no way Queenie would make the mistake of turning her back on that tricky little brat again.

"Thanks," she rolled her eyes, "Get out."

Briar tugged the wrinkled from her shirt, that plain white button-up she wore every day, despite how easily they tore and stained, and looked down at the immaculate thing. A pang of resentment hit Queenie as Briar looked away from her. Two years younger and cocky enough to take her eyes off an opponent.

Or, that was what Queenie would like to think.

Really, Briar just knew that Queenie wasn't an opponent. If Queenie tried something, it wouldn't be a fight.

Briar finished looking over her shirt and left the room, her steps absolutely silent. She left through the door, which was unlocked. Hadn't been that way when Queenie went to bed.

With a roll of her eyes, Queenie quickly got dressed and hurried through her routine. It was 7:22 when Briar woke her up. Enough time to get to school for homeroom.

She picked one of the motorcycles for this trip, and got to school just in time for the first bell to ring.

She sighed.

On-time, sort of.

She got to class.

Soon enough, it was lunchtime and she was at her usual table, with her usual crowd. Min was telling some boring story about finding some flirty texts on her boyfriend's phone, but Queenie was playing the engaged friend. You should break up with him. The familiar sentence was repeated four times over the course of the conversation. Min was making excuses, in a backward kind of way. "I mean, yeah, he messed up, but I really think we're stronger than a few words, ya know?"

That's the single dumbest bit of logic I've ever had the displeasure of hearing.

"Yeah, I guess," Queenie sighed, lifting her hair over her shoulder and tossing it behind her back.

Min gave a sigh of her own and balanced her chin on her hand, "Anyway, have you decided who you're going to ask to prom?"

"What makes you think I don't expect someone else to ask me?"

"Because they're too scared," Min said jokingly.

"Aw, are you scared of me, Minnie dear?" Queenie joked.

Min laughed and waved her off, "Naw, you know I could destroy you in a heartbeat," she joked back.

Wanna bet, Minnie dear?

Queenie laughed and shook her head, "Yeah, 'course you could, football star."

Min laughed and rolled her eyes. Abruptly, Min's smile vanished and her voice turned to a rushed whisper, "Pretend to get something out of your bag," she hissed and returned to an approximation of normal, smiling and chatting about a topic she'd clearly just made up on the spot to the kid sitting next to her, who played along as soon as he saw what she was so panicked about.

Queenie ducked down to dig in her backpack, peeking from behind her curtain of hair at what got Min so riled up. She rolled her eyes. Queenie's ex. Of course. Was there anything Min cared about more than this social nonsense?

Still, she played along. Because it was her role. It was who she was to these people.

So she rifled around in her bag, waiting for some signal from Min or for her ex to try to talk to her. She'd memorized the contents, which was apparently an obsessively neat thing for a student to do, according to Min, who had low standards. Thus, the boyfriend. Queenie did find something unfamiliar, though. A flash of silver at the bottom of the bag. A heart, pendant? No, locket. Where'd you come from?

She took a pencil from the side of her bag and poked it with the eraser - checking that it wasn't one of Briar's little tricks. When nothing happened, she pulled the bag into her lap and, ignoring Min's desperate attempts to 'subtly' tell her to get back to looking busy, took out the locket.

The sound of the cafeteria vanished, like someone had just hit mute on the whole room of rowdy teens. Scratch that, it was the power button.

Queenie flew to her feet the moment the blank walls processed in her mind. She did a mental check for her weapons, the ones she could feel against her skin. All there. Either her kidnappers were only good with whatever knock-out drug they'd put on that locket, or there was something else going on.

And that's where she spotted the other girl.

The other girl with the locket. Identical to the one Queenie had.

Queenie snickered, "Got the little greeting card too?" she asked, holing up her locket by the chain.

Today was going to be the perfect day. He knew he was going to end up helping out in the village again, but today was going to be his first break in ages. He’d swing by and get some ice cream from the farm on the very edge of time, maybe even read a book, and definitely have an impromptu karaoke session with himself in his home.

He got one step into that plan, and was about to start the book part when a strange locket appeared on the ground at his feet.

He paused mid-lick of his vanilla ice cream.

The locket itself wasn't weird. It was actually kind of nice, and something he'd wear. But he could have sworn that there wasn't anything on the path when he was a few feet away. There was a little girl running further down the road, so maybe that was the reason it had appeared seemingly out of nowhere?

"Hey!" Kaito called out. "I think you dropped your locket!"

The girl paused and turned back to stare at him, wide-eyed. Kaito faltered. He had been here for almost two years now, but he still hadn't gotten used to how the villagers looked at the man they thought was their god.

"I don't have a locket," the girl quietly said. She looked around, a shy expression on her flushed face, and then promptly darted down the road.

Huh.

Well, if she didn't own it, then it was fair game for whoever saw it in the street. And Kaito was the only one who had noticed it, so he had dibs on it.

He licked his ice cream.

With a little bit of thought, he made a little strand of water come out of the ground and grab onto the locket. He unclasped it with the same jet of water as he started to walk down the road, ice cream dripping down the side of its cone and onto his hand.

Just as he clasped the locket together around his neck, he took the last bite out of the cone - the ice cream having been finished seconds before. The water disappeared, and the locket fell right onto his chest.

The world suddenly disappeared around him.

He was somewhere different, now. It wasn't the village. It wasn't anywhere he recognized, either. It was a room with a single, ominous door - ominous door because it was the only defined thing in the room - and Kaito really didn't like it.

"How did I...?"

He stared down at the locket on his chest and hesitantly poked it - almost expecting to end up somewhere else. But he was still in the room when he looked up. Even more surprising, there were people there.

Two girls who both looked normal. Was that the new trend these days? They hadn't gotten players in the village for awhile. Wait, was this some kind of mini-game he had never heard of? A brand new Hunger Games? Were they going to try killing him?

He backed away from the two girls and immediately bumped into the wall behind him.

"Please-Please don't kill me," he said, holding his hands up in mock surrender. "I'm friendly. I'm not going to make you lose this game. I swear. I'm just your friendly neighborhood player."

Wait.

What was he doing? He had magic. He could protect himself with his water if they attacked him! All he had to do was make some appear right now to scare them off - they'd think it was some weird glitch.

But when he imagined some water droplets appearing in a ball in front of him, nothing happened.

He screwed his eyes shut.

He thought really hard on making the water balls appear, but there was nothing there when he hesitantly peeked a single eye open.

"Come on," he whispered. "Water, where are you? I really don't want to die right now! I'm too young to die!"

"Anna," Logan called out in a soft tone, knowing not to be loud this time of night. Despite the pummeling rain.

"Yes, Lo?" She turned to face her, and Logan threw her arms around Anna's neck.

"Come back."

"Always," She hugged back, squeezing tight. They stayed like that for a few minutes, Logan beginning to tear up. It was only when the fog began to settle over the grass that Anna gently pulled away. She pressed a strand of brown hair behind her lover's ear. Leaning in, she whispers a comforting word or two, wiping a lone tear off her face. Logan nods and Anna pulls up her mask, followed by her hood, and slips into the night.

Making her way down the narrow path was more difficult when the fog settled, guided only by the light of her flickering lantern and the feeling of her hand on the wall. It was nearly an hour before she found the bottom, and even longer before she found the fence. She clipped her lantern to her belt and covered it with her cloak, crouching low and moving along the chainlink.

She found the hole dug under the fence when she tripped and fell right in the muddied water. Cursing to herself, she reaches underneath it, and pulls the chainlink up slightly, placing her lantern on the other side then crawling through herself.

She picks up her lantern and crouches, clipping it to her belt once more and crouch-walking to the massive pile of scraps, from old cars and barely working coffee makers to pieces of sheet metal and tin cans.

Anna searches until she finds a beaten up generator, and begins to take it apart. She takes everything that might be useful and continues to move along, filling up her bag slowly.

She's working on getting a rather large sheet of metal into pieces small enough to fit in her bag when she hears footsteps and the chatter of night watch guards.

She pulls off the glass top of her lantern, licking her fingertips and pinching out the fire. She pulls out her pistol and slips in the broken window of a rusty car and lays down across the seat, ignoring the pain of the center console jutting into her abdomen. Attempting to breathe, she notices a shine on the floor of the passenger seat, when her eyes adjust to the darkness, she can tell its a pendant.

And it looks like pure silver.

She wraps her palm around the chain and brings it up to her face to get a better look, and the world morphs around her. The room she's in is painfully bright, and she covers her eyes with her arm, pushing herself into a sitting position.

"Hello?" She asks, not able to make out much while sitting on the floor, blinded by light.

Bailey looked around, her jaw still slightly slack. First she had teleported here with the locket. Then suddenly three other people showed up. All with the same locket as her, as far as she could tell.

Bailey held her own necklace up to her eye again. She had put it down to take a look at all the people who had suddenly showed up. Two girls, one boy. The boy was muttering something about... water? Bailey didn't really know. She didn't know any of the people who had appeared with her.

She looked at the locket. It shined innocently.

Bailey shoved it in her jean shorts pocket. She might have wanted to wear it around her neck like the boy was wearing, but it had been on the floor of the cafeteria. Nasty stuff went on the floor of the cafeteria.

"First of all, calm down, blue boy," Bailey said, turning to the boy backed up against the wall. She smirked as much as she could, considering the circumstances. She was still a little shaken up from the sudden change of scenery. "I'm not going to kill you. I wouldn't know how." She yawned. Somehow, she was still tired from her lack of sleep the night before. "I'm Bailey, by the way," she said, stretching. "Beautiful and utterly confused." She fixed her lips into a friendly smile, making eye contact with the boy and then the blonde girl who had talked to her earlier.

Then Bailey's eyes flitted to the girl sitting on the floor, who had one hand over her eyes. She seemed to still be adjusting to what was happening. Bailey walked over to her and lifted her arm up until she could see into her eyes.

"Hey, c'mon. You heard me introduce myself, right?" she asked. She tried to smile in a friendly, non-threatening way. "I assume you have one of these too?" She took the locket necklace out of her pocket and let it dangle in front of the girl.

...She had talked.

She had talked, and had looked Kaito in the eye.

He frantically rubbed his eyes, desperately trying to make sure he wasn't dreaming. He pinched himself for good measure, too, when the rubbing proved useless. He had to be dreaming, right? This couldn't actually be happening, right?

So why did this feel so real?

"You-you talked!" he exclaimed - only vaguely aware that he was interrupting a conversation. "You spoke and didn't have the white text over your head!"

Queenie eyed the crazy kid. First kidnapping? She was tempted, oh so very tempted, to say something like that. Unfortunately, no one seemed to recognize her. Revealing something like that would bring up some questions she wasn't in the mood to answer.

"Hey, hon?" she said to the boy, "You're in the real world. See? We can all talk here. You're talking, I'm talking. It's nothing to freak out over." She kept her tone gentle, though she would rather have been sarcastic. Gentle won people over better, though, so she'd have to stick with it for now.

Anna snatched her arm back from the girl, blinking rapidly to get her eyes to adjust to the light as she pushed herself up, she slipped her pistol into its holster. She held up the necklace, showing it to her, then put it on, hiding it underneath her clothes.

"It's mine," She said, backing up a bit, realizing how close she'd been. "and I have a girlfriend, so none of that flirting stuff." Anna places a palm to her head, attempting to rub out the headache that the sudden influx of light caused. She pulled her bag of parts closer to her. The clanking of the metals inside almost soothing.

"That is definitely something to freak out over," Kaito protested. If the girl's gentle tone was meant to calm him, it wasn't. She didn't understand. He was supposed to be the only person like him. All of the players spoke in text. If she was here and she was talking, then that meant that either a) people were getting brought into the game or b) this was somewhere else.

Kaito wasn't sure what one he hoped for more.

He looked around the room.

"...Where are we?" he asked, glancing between the other three people in the room. Someone had to know where they were, right?

Bailey stepped back from the girl who had the bag. Sometimes you come on too strong, she reminded herself, looking down and clasping her hands behind her back. You barely know these people and you're already in their face?

Bailey wished she could help it. But sometimes she forgot that people were strangers and she confronted them like old friends. She would act all wacky and without a care in the world, and then people would walk away from her. And she'd be left... alone...

SNAP OUT OF IT! Bailey screamed internally at herself. She hated when she started to self-doubt. You have friends! You are liked! Shut up with all of this negativeness!!

She turned to face the rest of the group, putting a smile back on her face. She had already put herself out there as a strange, confident girl, she reasoned. She might as well continue with it. Except maybe a teensy bit dialed down.

"I don't know where we are," she said, in response to Blue Boy's question. "All that happened to me was I stepped on a locket, then I picked up the locket, and bam! I was here." She looked around. "Based on what I see though," she said, "we're in a room. A featureless, gray room. With a door on one wall." She shrugged. "That's what I'm thinking anyway, you know?"

Queenie rolled her eyes, "Thank you for the observation," she muttered under her breath. She turned away from the other people, who, if they were useful, could prove that later, and went to try the door.

She opened it carefully, first listening through it - regretting the fact that the people she was trapped with didn't know how to keep their mouths shut long enough for her to get a better picture of what was going on in the other room - then pulled away.

Thanks to her new noisy companions, who didn't even have the decency to be doing something useful, she couldn't hear a single thing from behind the door. All she knew was, it was quiet.

She always hated quiet. She usually got shot at when things were quiet one room over.

So she kept her body behind the door as she slowly opened it. Once she saw what was behind it, she opened the door all the way.

Well, that was a new one.

"Hey," she said to the group, "Who cares to go swimming?"

From the water-filled pit on the other side of the door, the circling sharks seemed to tauntingly echo her question in their eager silence.

Because all her life needed was to get a bit more Scooby-Doo.

Anna stood to her full height, not much, to be fair. But she was average height at least. She peered in from a decent enough distance to, hopefully, not bother Queenie, but so she could still see in.

"Oh. Joy" She moved a bit closer, hoping that it would appear as an illusion upon closer inspection. It didn't.

Kaito peeked through the door and immediately gulped.

There was water. That was normally a comfort, but he couldn't use his power right now. And, even more terrifying? There were sharks. Kaito knew close to nothing about sharks, but they looked really hungry.

Hungry enough to eat an entire person.

Stepping back, he took a very nervous breath. The sharks were the only way to go. He couldn't let himself starve or dehydrate to death in a room.

But, again: sharks.

As he silently panicked behind everyone else, his hand went up to fiddle with his locket. He didn't really mean to open it up, but his fingers accidentally pried it open. A second later, there was a bright flash of light.

He blinked the spots out of his eyes.

That was...weird, but Kaito wasn't going to focus on it right now. The sharks were definitely the more terrifying thing to deal with. He felt like he was on the verge of having a panic attack. He hadn't had one of those in a long time, and he really didn't want to have one now.

He took another deep breath.

Then, his voice as quiet as he could make it so no one would notice he was singing, he started to sing the first song that came to mind.

In a corner of this room where I kissed a
purple butterfly on my right shoulder,
I learn the emotion of grief,
as the piano emits an echoing tune of dissonance.

In a corner of this room where I kissed a
purple butterfly on my right shoulder,
I learn the emotion of grief,
as the piano emits an echoing tune of dissonance.

I'm having a-

He paused.

There...There was a purple butterfly flying right in front of him.

It had fluttered through the doorway that led into the shark room, but he hadn't seen it earlier. And now it was landing on his right shoulder. Maybe butterflies were weightless - it didn't even feel like it was there-

A loud, obnoxious piano note rung out in the room.

Kaito winced at the note. It was so off-key-

Wait. Hadn't he just been singing about a butterfly and a piano? He reached up a finger to touch the butterfly; it miraculously didn't fly away. But his finger did go through it like it was some kind of illusion...

Had he finally lost it? He couldn't have made that happen by singing right?

Okay, time to try a different song. Whatever happened only happened when he sung about it, so he just needed something that had a visual aspect to it. Not a feeling.

Just by being with you
My digital heart flutters
Like a quantum particle breeze
My heart trembles

Just by being with you
My world opens up
Like the wings of an angel
Will my heart take flight?

He glanced behind him.

A pair of angelic wings glitched into existence like they were in some kind of digital program - his hand still went through it when he tried touching it, but he had definitely created that.

He stared at the wings.