New World Daughter: Homecoming (Origin)

New World Daughter:
Homecoming

Part 1

"Female patient, approximately 5' 6", 120 lbs, age might be late teens or early twenties. Pupil dilation normal, blood pressure's stable at 138 over 89. Heart rate's 51," one of the physicians rattled off a litany of vital signs to the group of ER nurses gathering in the waiting room around the pale copper-haired girl dressed in black and lying insensate atop a gurney, "usually I'd call that a little low, but she has a pretty athletic build so that could be normal for her."

"And you said she was unconscious when your truck hit her," the scowling police chief asked a middle-aged, quietly panicking delivery driver waiting by the reception desk.

"I didn't hit her," the driver waved his arms in frantic protest, "she's the one who hit the truck! She came out of nowhere... yeah, I know, everybody says that. But I mean she really came out of nowhere. I was driving back into town from the farm in New Connaught, this white light flashed in the sky overhead and then she just fell out of nowhere and bounced right across the hood of my truck. It was all I could do to slam the brakes and not run her over!"

"Okay, but either way," the attending physician's assistant calmly interrupted them as she scribbled down notes on a clipboard, "was she already unconscious when you found her?"

"No, she was awake for a second," the flannel-shirted man muttered sadly, "she looked up at me and tried to say something, but I couldn't make any sense out of it."

"Like another language?"

"It sounded sort of like she speaking English. But the way she pronounced things, I couldn't understand a word of it. Then she passed out and I called 911."

The PA sighed and nodded wordlessly to both the driver and officer, and then called back over her shoulder to the rest of the staff: "we'll need to prep her for an MRI, stat. The witness said she had signs of confused speech, possibly aphasia before she lost consciousness."


My mother said I was named after the land of my birth, celebrated as the first Christian child of Virginia. I know not of that place, nor the grandfather she so often speaks of my having. It was he who led us to the New World, and it was he who crossed the ocean again to seek food and supplies for our settlement. Perchance the Almighty had a role yet for him to play, and so spared him from our fate - for he'd scarcely left our sight before unfamiliar shapes darkened the hillsides and emerged from the forests. They called themselves the Fir Bolg.

They are among my first memories, people shaped from vines and pumpkins, strange of form but noble of mind. They said they had crossed an ocean of shadows to escape the Red Caps and find their way back to the mortal world. We feared them for a time, but they had been people like us once, bewitched by dark spirits and seeking now only a sanctuary from their oppressors. We soon made peace and welcomed them as our own.

But the Red Caps followed.


"She has a mild head injury," the doctor breathed a sigh of relief as the technician finished sliding the prone girl back out of the sleek white MRI tube, "but there's no sign of brain damage. Frankly, that accident's probably the least of her troubles. The rest of these images show at least a dozen separately healed fractures, most likely scattered all over her lifetime."

"Look at her clothes," the PA murmured curiously as she leaned down over the girl, gingerly lifting up the edge of a black cloak between her fingers and then staring curiously over the young patient's dark tights and ash-gray tunic, "no labels, no synthetic fabrics, it looks like it's all stitched by hand. Where do you even get clothes like this? Maybe she's Amish?"

"Maybe, but then there's the broken bones, the scars all over her..."

"What do you think caused them?"

"It might sound crazy, but my first thought was that she's been through a war."


They were mere rumors at first, whispers of goblins in the treetops and burrowing through the ground. The Fir Bolg knew their portent, and warned us to flee the island, to leave them to their fate and save ourselves. But we had sworn we would protect them. Then one morning we awoke to a sky the color of sulfur, surrounded by forests drenched in shadow and alive with terrible unseen things. We thought at first the world had changed while we slept, but soon we knew the truth. The world was as it had always been; we were no longer part of it.

For a time, though, our lives continued much as they had, despite the amber sky and the wan, sickly crops its uncanny light offered. I know not how much time passed in those days, for our parents aged no more than the years they carried into this unearthly place the Fir Bolg called Croatoa, nor did we beyond the full blossoming of youth. Perhaps it's the nature of Croatoa that none should grow old within it. Or maybe this was another trick of the Red Caps, to turn the gift of eternal life into our prison warden. Later some of us began to seek death in other ways, only to find that it eluded us altogether. Unless, of course, the Red Caps wished it upon us.


"I figured Montague would be sending Percy," the police chief remarked, rubbing his eyes and gulping down another styrofoam cup of coffee as he looked over the young scarlet-haired woman in her matching black skirt and baseball shirt ensemble, tapping her fingers impatiently across the receptionist's desk as she glanced curiously around the waiting room.

"Ashley McKnight," she grabbed and briskly shook the befuddled man's hand before he could think to offer the greeting himself, "Percy's going to be a little late. He's busy being captured by the Banished Pantheon, but I'm sure he'll be right over as soon as he's rescued."

"Good lord!"

"Kidding," she raised her hands with a quick shake of her head, "I'm kidding! He's in Steel Canyon helping Montague clean up the whole mess with the Malleus Mundi. That's actually kind of what I'm investigating too. The report said the accident happened at 3:14 AM?"

"As far as we can tell."

"Well, that's when Dr. Bierce reported the first thaumaturgical spike. Looks like your suspect's off the hook: that girl probably really did fall out of the sky."

"Then where did she fall from?"

"Good question," Ashley chirped brightly, "and I'd say the first step to answering that one is running a DNA test and seeing if we can give Jane Doe a better name."

"Now hold on," the police chief ran his fingers back through his thin gray hair, "the university Occult Annex might be good with magic, but DNA tests take weeks, sometimes months. We've got cases backed up from last year waiting on the results from Washington."

"Contact SERAPH in Paragon City. They can have it ready in ten minutes."

"It's four in the morning... and besides, they're FBSA, super-powered affairs."

"Who sleeps in Paragon these days? More to the point, I'm pretty sure that this is a super-powered affair, and SERAPH's going to want to find out if this is their turf."

"All right, let's give them a try."


It may be that the Red Caps were busy with their other diversions, and so allowed us to imagine that we could simply continue to live our lives in peace. But eventually they came for us, just as they'd come for the Fir Bolg. At first they claimed that they were punishing us for trying to help the Fir Bolg escape their grasp. They soon forgot that lie, though, and instead gloated that they simply wanted new prey, a new sport to amuse themselves with.

And so they did.

Sometimes they'd drive us mad with rage, clouding our senses to make us rip each other apart, then laughing at us as we awoke to see what we'd done. Such tricks never truly brought death, but the pain and guilt never lessened for that. Imagine looking down to find your child's blood covering your hands, and their body limp and unmoving on the floorboards. Imagine being that child, comforted by the very arms that had torn you to shreds a few hours before.

Yet even that game was one of the more merciful they played. At least it granted the murderers and victims alike a few minutes of peaceful oblivion...


"We've moved her to her own room," the doctor explained to the the police chief and Midnighter pacing separately across the otherwise empty waiting room, "and the sedation should be wearing off soon. We also got the test results back from SERAPH and, well... Professor St. John-Smythe swears they're not a joke and that the only reason he was awake to call me is because the staff woke him up to verify it. You'd better take a look for yourselves."

The police chief happened to be the closest to the doctor, and he carefully took the manila folder from the white-jacketed physician's hands and flipped through the pages. In another moment, he'd furiously flung the loose papers to the gray carpet with a curse.

"Let me guess, some joker in Paragon thinks he can pull one over on us country bumpkins in Salamanca! Well you know what? This isn't just some stupid prank, this is impeding an investigation and I'm going to make damn sure they don't get away with this!"

"What in the world," Ashley just muttered to herself with quietly blinking confusion over the older man's outburst, and started scooping the pages up from the waiting room floor to glance over them herself... and then gave a soft, startled "oh" at the name circled in ink.

"He swore that it's not a prank," the doctor shook his head sympathetically, "they had to match the mitochondrial DNA against John White's wife Tomasyn and then cross-check the rest of it against the lineages referenced in the original manifest. He said they never would have found a match in a million years if they hadn't been using Rikti scanning technology."

"Well," Ashley said slowly and cautiously after a moment's awkward pause, "maybe I should call the professor myself, just to make sure he's the one you talked to..."

At that moment the glass hospital doors swung open to reveal a blonde pony-tailed man in a purple baseball t-shirt and dark blue jeans, his outline silhouetted against the faint scarlet hints of sunrise glowing along the otherwise cloud-swept rim of the eastern forest.

"If that report says what I think it does," he announced, "then it's true. It's really her."

"Gregor Richardson," the Midnighter explained to Salamanca's police chief, who'd welcomed the intruder with one silently raised eyebrow, "he's with MAGI."

"Don't any of you Paragon people," the chief muttered under his breath, "wear suits?"

"Technically I'm from New Haven. And if I'm hearing him right," Ashley shot an accusing frown at the goateed newcomer, "he's saying that... they already knew about this?"

"Well, knew, had a head-splitting premonition. You know how these things go."


In time the men were moved to fulfill their vows as husbands and fathers, to rise up and defend their homes and families from our enemies. We begged them not to do so, that the only comfort they could offer us was that of staying by our sides, but they heeded us not. My father Ananias helped gather and lead them into battle, to fight the Red Caps when they came to play their cruel games once more. They could not win, and our captors, driven into a rage by such impudence, struck down and killed every last one of them. But though Croatoa's power could keep death at bay, it could not bring the dead back to life. The Red Caps quickly came to regret so rashly depriving themselves of victims. So they redoubled our sorrows instead.

A handful of spinsters had lately confessed to us that they possessed a secret knowledge which would have seen them pressed with stones or burnt at the stake in less desperate times, but now might serve as a weapon against our oppressors. The men had hesitated to call upon their aid in battle, and for their pride they paid in blood. It was left to their wives and daughters to defend themselves with one final recourse: witchcraft, magic, sorcery.

We studied their art, and those crones quickly marveled at the speed and power with which some of the younger women learned to command the elements, to summon the wind and lightning to our aid. When the Red Caps returned after a time to renew their sport, it did all that was promised. Our magic sent the them flying like leaves before the wind, cursing our names as they fled into the shadows. And so our eternal torment instead became an eternal war.

A few of the elders said that we had paid a terrible price for such a victory, and that we were now damned. We heeded them not. After all, we'd already been damned.


"That's her," Ashley whispered by the sleeping girl's bedside, motioning for the MAGI liaison and Salamanca's police chief to keep their voices down as they walked into the hospital room to join the Midnighter and ER doctor. The girl's black uniform lay neatly draped over the foot of the bed, leaving her clothed in the white sheets, a blue gown and the electronic heart rate monitor clamped to one of her fingers and trailing back to a beeping readout screen.

"She's actually in pretty good shape, considering," the attending doctor continued with a welcoming nod to the two men before glancing back down at his patient, shoulder-length auburn hair fanned across the pillows as her pale freckled cheeks gradually began to regain a flushed hint of color, "she's a little malnourished and she could use some sunlight, but her vitals are good and her blood tests came back fine. Her body's been through hell, though. It's amazing that, with everything it's gone through, she hasn't suffered any permanent damage."

"New World daughter," Ashley whistled softly and shook her head in amazement as she glanced up to the others, "the first European child born in America, and here she is sleeping in a hospital in Salamanca. Talk about living in interesting times, huh?"

"From what I hear, she's the first missing persons case in America too," Gregor murmured back, "maybe this is the answer. The Banished Pantheon screwed up their ritual, opened up a hole in time and pulled her four hundred years into the future."

"But she was a baby when the Roanoke colony vanished," Ashley answered with a puzzled shake of her head, "she had to have grown up somewhere. And those injuries... I'm sure life was hard in colonial times, but I kind of doubt it was ever that hard."

"You said before," the police chief interrupted them from the foot of the bed, "that she showed up during the first tharmu... thrae... thermal spike that you heard about."

"Thaumaturgical," Ashley chuckled, and then she nodded more seriously, "right."

"So how many have there actually been?"

"At least three on my way here. Probably more since. Gregor?"

"Our mystics had counted five," he replied, "before I got to the hospital."

"So whatever brought her here," the police chief answered as he cast a worried glance out the window at the gabled rooftops of Salamanca, "it's still happening."


As I was born in the mortal world, I hold a place in the earth-born circle that rules our cabal alongside Mary MacComber. But as I was the last born, and so carry no memories of our home, there are some who feel my seat is undeserved. Perhaps it is for that reason that, while they govern through wisdom and guidance, courage in battle is the virtue that I find called upon most often. Sometimes I lead others into the din and throng of our endless war, while at other times I journey alone. I have never before failed to rise to such occasions, and so it was with a glad heart that I heeded Mary's call to seek out a rift in the sky that the Fir Bolg spoke of, to learn what I could of it and return at once with news of what mysteries it might hold.

It twisted through the sky like a serpent made of light and tore at the forest with fingers of howling wind that even my spells could never overcome. It was those fingers that snatched me from the hilltop I'd chosen as a vantage point, that carried me aloft in spite of all my magic and screams of protest, to throw me into the radiance of its maw and swallow me whole. I have known death enough times to recognize it as an old friend, and so when the light and the hills and the sky all gave way to darkness, I felt certain that death had come for me yet again.

But then I saw something else in the darkness. Dried leaves fluttered through the wind against an ebony sky sprinkled with diamond dust, crested by a shining pearl of light drifting silently above the treetops. My mother told me stories about them as a little girl. She called the ebon sky night, and the diamonds she called stars, and that pearl is the Moon. And as wonderful as I'd believed her stories, no words could ever have braced me for such beauty.

Then I fell, and something hit my head, and the world went black once more.

"Ms. Dare, can you hear me? We need you to nod if you can understand what I'm saying. Virginia, you have to wake up. Virginia Dare, can you understand us?"

Part 2

"You," the girl muttered groggily, blinking bright green eyes against the crimson flash of sunlight through the window as she lifted herself up against the hospital bed and looked slowly around at the pair of strangers standing over her, "you're not Cabal, yet you're human..."

"Is your name Virginia Dare," Ashley asked the girl with a slow, calmly reassuring tone, "my name is Ashley. We just need to know if you can understand us."

"You speak my name," Virginia answered with a quick, feral alertness, instantly crouching upright and shooting a suspicious glare at the woman, "as though you know it well."

"Well," Gregor said with a wry smile, "she kind of does. Your name's pretty famous. That's Ashley McKnight, she's with the Midnight Squad. I'm Gregor Richardson, a representative of MAGI. I'm with a government department that... erm, I mean a parliamentary, um, ministerial," and he suddenly shook his head in bewilderment and looked up across the bed.

"She's from the 16th century," he said to Ashley, rubbing the back of his head and casting a resigned glance down at the young woman still darting her eyes back and forth between the two of them, "how can anything we're talking about possibly make sense to her?"

"The Midnighters have a spell for translating languages. It's helping her make the transition to understanding modern English," Ashley quietly answered him, "she's speaking a 16th century Elizabethan dialect right now; the fact that we're not having to decipher every other word is proof that it's working. Just talk naturally and the spell will take care of the rest."

"Okay," Gregor shrugged, and then he turned his brown eyes back down to the wary girl still staring at them, this time with a friendlier smile, "well, the truth is, I've been painting your picture for almost a week now. See, I'm something of an artist, but I've also got this link with the Entities and the wires get crossed sometimes, so right now there's about a dozen portraits of a girl who looks just like you in my studio. And the mystics, hoo boy, they've been going on and on about Virginia Dare this and Roanoke that and Croatoa something or another. When it comes to omens, let's just say your arrival had some big screaming megaphones for..."

"Gregor," Ashley interrupted, "you know how I said talk naturally?"

"Yeah?"

"Maybe not that naturally."

"Oh," Gregor muttered sheepishly, "right."

"You're a seer," the girl in the bed murmured thoughtfully as she began to relax slightly and study the pair more curiously now, "you paint portraits as my grandfather once did, and as a seer you couldn't help but paint visions of my coming ...and you're male."

"Right, that's it exactly," Gregor replied with a sigh of relief, and then gave a sudden, badly-concealed double take at the non sequitur remark, and the awkwardly self-conscious realization that she'd begun staring at him more intently with the same leery, cautious fascination as a child at a zoo studying a caged tiger, "um, yeah, I guess I am..."

"I haven't seen one since I was a child," she answered simply, and Gregor and Ashley both looked up across her bed at each other to exchange puzzled glances.

"Virginia," Ashley finally spoke, "can you tell us how you got here?"

"There was talk of a rift in the sky," she said softly, "the elders asked me to find out what it meant, but when I found it, it lifted me from the ground and... and then..."

Her words died away as she stared at the window, her green eyes reflecting a cloudy twilight sky tinged blue by the sunrise... and in another instant she'd flung the bedsheets away, yanked the heart monitor loose and leapt to her feet in a giddy sprint across the room.

"It's blue! It's just like I dreamed," her voice a quick, happy ramble addressed to nobody in particular as she gazed out the window, "Mary and the rest of the elders said I couldn't possibly have remembered seeing a blue sky, and Katie and the other girls thought it whimsy for me to even speak of a sky the color of periwinkle, but it is blue, just like in my dreams!"

Her happy shrieks and giggles filled the room until she finally turned back around toward the silently watching pair of occultists, her freckled cheeks gleaming with tears.

"This is the New World," she asked breathlessly, "isn't it?"

"Yeah," Gregor answered with a growing smile, "yeah, it is. Welcome back, kid."

"But we have to tell you something," Ashley added reluctantly, "you've been gone for a very long time. The Roanoke colony vanished over four hundred years ago."

"That matters little," Virginia shrugged a little and beamed, "an absence of four hundred days would have left me as new to this world as that of four hundred years," and then her smile gradually began to sink into confusion, "but then how do you know of our village, or my name? We must be long forgotten, if so many centuries have passed in our absence."

"No," Ashley answered quickly, "you were never forgotten. You mentioned a grandfather who painted before... well, he spent his whole life hoping you'd be found someday. And ever since then, everyone's been trying to figure out what happened. Historians, archaeologists, scientists, they've been working all this time trying to find the Lost Colony."

"You kept looking," the freckled girl whispered to herself as she leaned dizzily back against the windowsill, her palms barely catching and bracing herself upright as her gleaming eyes stared down at the floor, and then finally lifted back up to Ashley and Gregor, "we'd long given up the world for lost, but the world kept looking for us anyway. And now..."

Her expression suddenly froze from blushing, tear-streaked exhilaration into a look of cold, wrenching fear, and then her emerald eyes hardened into fatalistic resolve.

"And now you're in danger as well," she said quietly as she looked back up at the pair, "the Red Caps will be coming. They won't countenance our escape."

"Red Caps," Gregor mused aloud, "I think I've heard of them. Creatures from Scottish folklore with red hats and beards, like goblins. Is that who you mean?"

"Such tales make them sound like a trifle," she muttered darkly as she stepped away from the window and back into the shadows of the hospital room, "they are a blight upon Creation, cruelty given form and voice. They are more powerful than you could ever imagine."

"Well, you'd be surprised what we can imagine these days," the Salamanca police chief sighed as he stepped out of the hallway, flipping off his cell phone and lingering uncertainly near the hospital room's open doorway, "I didn't want to interrupt, but we're getting calls from some of the farmhouses up north across the lake about strange creatures coming out of the mists and woods, and some of those creatures sound exactly like what you're talking about."

"Then it's begun," Virginia said, forcing her voice into a grim steadiness.

"I sent some men up there to check it out," the police chief continued, "but I just got off the phone and... well, I guess she's right, because they're not doing so well."

"Don't worry about that," Gregor looked over to the slight young woman with a sternly reassuring tone, "I'll call in MAGI Spec Ops and Ashley can get Montague on the line and have the Midnighters rallying around Salamanca in a matter of minutes. We'll protect you."

"You remind me," Virginia said in a small, thoughtful voice, "of my father."

"Oh," Gregor glanced awkwardly down at himself, "thanks... I guess..."

"The Red Caps killed my father," her voice suddenly low and seething, "steeped their hats with his blood, strung his entrails across the open field and wouldn't even let us bury him. You can not protect me, and you most certainly will not accompany me."

"Then what," Gregor asked after a moment's ringing silence, his own sense of authority eclipsed for a moment by the decisive fury in her words, "should we do?"

"All of you will return whence you came and wait there in safety," she said, her quiet voice contrasting the tightening clench of her fists as she slowly approached the hospital window, "I will do what my sisters and I have done since the day we learned our first spells."

She flung her right hand toward the hospital bed without turning her gaze away from the window, and a flash of golden light sent the blue gown tumbling around her feet to leave her dressed in her stitched black leather tights, her gray tunic and cloak again. Another thrust of her palm toward the window suddenly conjured the ventilated air inside the hospital room to life into a howling, whipping cyclone that battered and finally smashed the glass away, and then, as she flung her arms straight out around her and muttered an incantation under her breath, writhing streaks of azure lightning began to spark and crackle across her dark clothing.

"I will fight."

With that, she took a running leap for the window, thew herself through the broken panes before any of the three could make a move to stop her - and instantly flew above the stone courtyard of the university hospital to vanish into the clouds overhead, the stormswept November sky flashing with aerial bursts of lightning along the wake of her northward flight.

"I think," the police chief said after a long moment of stunned silence, "it's time to wake up Mayor Bower and tell him we've got problems." And without waiting for either Gregor or Ashley to respond, he stepped out into the hall again to start dialing his cell phone.

"Good idea," Ashley muttered distractedly, and then shook her head to clear her thoughts, "I'm going back to the Midnight Squad to tell Montague what we found, and to brief Percy on what to expect. Hopefully we can raise a protection ward around the university and create a refuge for the townspeople. If there's a storm coming, we'd better start battening the hatches."

"I should call MAGI and see how fast we can get a Spec Ops team out here," Gregor replied with a nod as he stared out the broken window a moment longer and then began to fumble with his cell phone, "I can think of a few mystics who might be able to help too."

"Have them contact Buck Salinger when they get here. He's sort of the Midnighter specialist on the Fair Folk. I doubt he'll want their help, but they'll both need it."

"Will do," Gregor nodded with a wave as Ashley slipped out the doorway and back down the hall, and then lifted the ringing cell phone to his ear as he paced back and forth across the glass-littered hospital room, glancing out at the misty dawn now and then as he talked.

"Hi, it's Gregor. Yeah, I'm checking back in from Salamanca. We have confirmation, it's definitely her alright. And believe me, that's not even the half of it...

"How did she get here? Well, actually, she didn't really tell us that part. She can use magic and, wherever she's been, she and the rest of the colonists were being kept there by the Red Caps. We should check the myths on them and see if they give us any clues. Be careful, though, it sounds like there's a lot more going on with them than the stories suggest...

"Did you say sixteen thaumaturgical spikes so far? This is getting bigger by the second. We'll need to call in a MAGI Special Ops team, and the Midnight Squad's bringing in someone named Buck Salinger. Whatever's going on in this town, she's just the start of it...

"...yeah, uh huh...

"...register her with MAGI? I think that's a little optimistic, Azuria, but...

"...well...

"...okay, I guess I can drive up north and see what she says. Can't hurt to ask, right? Keep your fingers crossed. With any luck, we'll see you back at the office."