Young Writers Society

December. It's the time of family, food, tradition, and culture - but really, it's about the holidays. Christmas is coming soon, but first...well, first there's Hanukkah, of course!

You awaken on the first day of Hanukkah in an unfamiliar place. A menorah containing only a single candle - the shamash - sits on the table in front of you. It's a small room, but homey, and entirely unadorned aside from the table and said menorah. The shamash burns brightly in the otherwise dark space. Around the table, you see several others - others who have gotten here exactly like you.

A note sits on the table next to the menorah.

Diamond tapped out her cigarette as she walked down the streets of Las Vegas, humming to herself. So far it'd been a pretty d*** fine day - there were no vampires to save, no contracts to hunt down, and so she'd really just been able to sit back for once and watch TV and clean her guns.

It, of course, changed drastically the moment she blinked and opened her eyes to find herself standing in front of a menorah containing only a single candle, across the table from a black-haired woman who was definitely not human.

Well, der'mo. So much for a normal day.

It's approximately fifteen minutes until Amelia's Psychology course in the building across campus when she stands up from her seat in the student lounge to close her computer and head to the printer to pick up her paper when it occurs. She blinks a few times, taking in her new surroundings and glancing around, confused at the people who seem to have appeared before her.

When he opened his eyes, he found himself standing near a table in an unfamiliar room. He looked wildly around for his most recent captor; the layout of this room looked nothing like the place he had been kept in last, but without Zogin having arrived, how could he have possibly gotten out? They must have brought him here, but he couldn't figure out why or why they had left him standing-

He felt a gun pressed up against the back of his helmet. "I want you to tell me who you are and why you brought me here," a very familiar voice said. He went to turn his head to get a good look at its owner, but the gun pressed up against his helmet even more than before.

"Zogin," he carefully said, deciding it was best to keep his gaze right ahead of him instead of trying to look back at his partner, "it's me. I don't know what's going, too."

She removed the gun, and he turned to face her. She was putting it in her holster now, and, if it wasn't for the other people present, she looked like she was considering hugging him - it had been nearly a week since they had last been together.

"You never turned your safety off," he commented. "You wouldn't have shot me, would you?"

She just gave him a look.

"Zogin-"

She dismissed his question with a wave of her hand, and he immediately fell silent. She gestured at the other people present in the room with a nod of her head, and he tried his best to figure out if they were friendly or not based on their appearances. Admittedly, he wasn't making much progress, so he decided to just be wary about them all instead.

Diamond looked around at the group with a raised eyebrow. "Oh, goodness. This again."

Tourmaline scanned the group for a moment before grabbing the letter and reading it through, the look on her face most easily described as the look of a cat when it's been unfairly dislodged from its seat.

Once Zogin realized that a letter was present in the room, she marched over to where the woman was standing. Something about her didn't feel right to Soul, but he didn't really think much of it - he was too busy fretting over the fact that Zogin had just jerked the letter out of her hands and was in the middle of reading it over.

"Soul," she asked, shoving the letter back into the woman's hands and returning to his side, "have you ever heard of Hanukkah?"

He shook his armored head. "No? What's Hanukkah-"

"I wasn't asking a rhetorical question," Zogin said, glancing back in the direction of the woman, the letter and the candle. "The letter keeps mentioning us being here because of something called Hanukkah, and I don't even know what that is."

"Oh."

Diamond hopped over the table to come read the letter herself to see what they were all discussing.

Oh good lord. They weren't kidding about Hanukkah.

"It's a Jewish holiday," she explained. "It celebrates the miracle of how one night's worth of oil burned for eight days in the temple after a war. You light one candle each night and say a prayer, and you light the eight candles with the shamash, the one in the middle there. Like this 'Mistress Shadow' said."

"Wait, sorry, what does Hanukkah have to do with any of this?" Amelia asked, standing up and heading to take her own look at the letter.

Zogin crossed her arms and frowned.

"Never heard of it," she declared. She never had liked holidays - they always had something to do with the angels, and seeing them get idolized day after day was infuriating.

Soul looked over at Zogin and the brooding expression on her face, then went over to where the other people were standing. He read over the letter once himself, then looked back up at the woman who had done the explaining. "What's Jew-ish?" he questioned, tilting his head ever so slightly to the side.

Diamond blinked. Well, this would take some explaining. "Something that's Jewish comes from the religion Judaism," she said. "Jews believe in the old testament of the Bible - that they call the Torah - and that the messiah hasn't come yet, basically."

"Still never heard of it," Zogin said, frown deepening.

Soul let out a quiet sigh in response; it was from a combination of wishing Zogin wouldn't do things that might offend other people and his frustration with not knowing what the woman was talking about. "What exactly is the Torah?" he hesitantly asked. After a moment passed, he snuck a glance over in Zogin's direction, but she had no answers. He resigned himself to waiting for the woman to reply instead. "And there's a messiah that's supposed to be coming?"

"The religious text of their faith. If I'm correct, it tells the story of the creation of the earth by God, his prophet Moses who relayed the Ten Commandments, the law of holiness, and so on." Amelia explained, almost as if she had memorized it, while simultaneously continuing to study the note. Amelia hadn't even registered that she wasn't the one being spoken to.

"What she said," Diamond affirmed Amelia's words.

"I still have never heard of it," Zogin said, impatiently tapping her foot on the ground. It didn't make any sense; how could there be a religion that she hadn't heard about? Better yet, why was there a religion she hadn't heard about? The masses loved angels, and the people here didn't look particularly demonic.

"Zogin?" Soul quietly asked.

She whipped her head around and stared at him. "Yes?"

"Maybe we're not on Arium anymore," he said.

"Of course we are," Zogin scoffed. "There's nothing left but Arium, remember? We're either on Arium or we're dead, and I don't like the second option as much as I like the first."

Soul crossed his arms, so she took it as a sign of a growing argument and marched over to right in front of him. She looked right up at him. "You know that this can't be something from Arium," he argued. "And you know that magic has to be at fault, or else I would still be sitting in a cell and you'd still be looking for me!"

Tourmaline broke out laughing as Zogin insisted they were on this "Arium."

"Darling," she said. "We aren't on Arium anymore. We aren't on that demon's 'Earth,' either, nor are we on Ethnu where I hail from. We're Between. Between realities, worlds, universes, outside of their flows of time and their parallels and paradoxes."