The White Rabbit (Part 1)

        It was pretty late.
	On the corner of late night and early morning, I found myself breathing the wafting vapors of rural smoke and drizzling rain. You couldn't see the moon, but the overcast sky was a myriad of dull blues and reds. The city was sleeping silently and I felt for all the world like I was a lone man drifting through an abandoned metropolis, listening to light pitters and patters of water touching down onto the earth.
	There was a place in town that never closed and its unfortunate employees could be seen at all hours of the night, eyes sunken and dry, waiting for patrons that might never come. I couldn't stand waiting in line when all I wanted was canned coffee, so the only logical thing to do was wait until it was an ungodly hour of the night and nobody in their right mind would carry money on their person while walking around, the functional equivalent of yelling "please mug me" until some shadowy vagabond happily complied, and go shopping.
	The building was like a sanctuary of corporate consumerism, its flourescent lights shining beacons of needless spending, visible from blocks away. As I step through the oversized parking lot I noticed a white, furry thing laying in the middle of the asphalt. It was lying in a puddle of blood, soaking into its fur, not moving. A rabbit. It must be someone's pet that fled from its owner, only to be torn to bits by a stray cat or some other prowler in the night.
	The building was empty save for me, the lighting that was destroying my vision and a mile of processed food and sugary drinks. There were of course the zombie employees, but their pale, sickly skin and dead eyes resembled no living person. I paid the nearest unliving employee corpse and left with my can of wakefulness.

	I shook off the shilling powder that fell from the ceiling of the building to resist its psychotropic influence, and as I began to leave the area my eyes were drawn to the blood puddle from before. The rabbit was missing. Whatever attacked it must have come back to drag it off, perhaps I'd scared it away when I was walking into the parking lot, and in the middle of thinking that I felt something soft underneath my foot. There it was, barely breathing, clinging to life, and I was one thoughtless movement away from finishing the job. It wasn't very white anymore-- much of its coat was now the rust red color of dried blood.
	Kneeling down to get a better look at it, I considered my position. This is a dying animal. It might have a disease. There might not really be anything I could do for it, except what I was about to blunder into a moment before to end its pain. Yet, watching it making tiny movements, seeing its body rise and fall in rhythm of its breathing, I felt I could not just leave it there to die.
	It did not resist as I scooped it up into my arms, and I worried that any incorrect movement I made would injure it further. I hurriedly stepped away from the building functioning as a city nightlight behind me, hoping that nobody noticed the wheezing red ball of fluff. It very nearly blended in with my red sweater, so from I distance I might have looked like I was just walking around with my arms folded.

	I lived in a hole in the wall on the poor side of town and it was a lucky night if the complex was bereft of peddlers reeling in another hooked client for their very legitimate businesses. I suppose I had returned at a late enough hour that the only souls still awake were inside their apartments burning the midnight oil in a glass pipe.
	It wasn't a big place. Two floors, four rooms on each, and an office. Each room a small studio with a bathroom. My door was unlocked. I was either naive or lazy-- I couldn't decide which-- and had put good faith in the upstanding citizens that lived in the slums around me that no thief would wander in to steal my hand-me-down clothes, rickety old furniture or obsolete electronics.
	Stepping inside my door I took a paranoid moment to look back upon my entry path, checking the dark corners for any glowing omnious eyes. I had the peculiar feeling that I was holding something valuable and may have been followed, but I reasoned to myself that the smell of the animal might have attracted some stray cats or dogs, and that was what I was worried about-- not some stalker in the night.
	I set the rabbit down, still meekly wheezing, on the counter near to my sink and ran some warm water with the drain plugged, causing a makeshift miniature bath to form. I eased the rabbit inside and began to slowly rub its fur under the water, the blood melting off like a layer of burdens that was waiting to be lifted. The rabbit went limp, and I worried that its condition was deteriorating. I needed to hold its head above the water as I cleaned it, but it continued to breathe, slowly and weakly.
	As I cleaned it, its coat took on a bright white color once more. Perhaps I was just tired, but it seemed to shimmer in the dull light of my room, as bright as a full moon on a clear night. This made it easy to find the wound, a large gash on its underside, like smeared red paint on a pure white canvas. I retrieved some gauze from the medicine cabinet in my bathroom, and gently wrapped it over the wound and around the small creature's body, being careful not to wrap it too tight. The creature looked at me as I did so, and in its eyes I was perplexed by a sudden quandry. While I was sure that the rabbit couldn't really know what I had done for it, I couldn't help but feel like now, it was acknowledging me. That deep within its black pupils there was some form of recognition for me and my rescue, such as it was.
	I filled a small dish with water and another with some lettuce and slices of carrot I had in my refridgerator and placed them on the floor, along with a folded towel, and seated the rabbit on top of it. I didn't have anything like a cage, so this would have to do... and even so, I didn't think the rabbit was going anywhere. While it was moving around a bit more now, breathing more steadily, a great escape didn't seem likely.
	I turned around, fell face first onto my bed, still fully dressed, and lost consciousness moments later.

	A bright, white, luminous light fills the sky, and in the center a perfect featureless orb stands as a guardian between heaven and the earth-- as if looking down and judging all the denizens below as they participate in their greed, their filth, their impurity. The days pass endlessly and without note or consequence, and the omnipresent orb watches forever, silently abiding each atrocity it witnesses-- but as time flows on, bright, glowing stars begin to fill the white sky, one after another, innumerable, until the sky is a twinkling ocean of heavenly bodies, and then, all at once-- they begin to fall. Streaks of stardust paint over one another, the earth is overcome with light; and to all who would gaze upon it, it would appear as though fire was raining from the heavens, striking the earth with holy vengeance.

	A small voice I've never heard before speaks quietly from the window of my room in words I don't understand-- no, they didn't even sound like words. It was a series of foreign high and low pitched squeaks and beeps, like a machine would make. Opening my eyes slowly, I turn my head to see the most perplexing sight.
	Settled next to my window is a small girl whose hair is very white, and as the sunlight touches it, it seems to faintly shimmer. Seated upon a stool that had been sitting around my apartment, she was peering into a very strange contraption I am positive had not been there when I went to sleep-- the closest thing I could compare it to was a computer but it had too many screens and they were all filled with incomprehensible symbols I'd never seen before, and there were no buttons or any discernable input methods of any kind on it, and all across its body were what I can only describe as veins, pumping light back and forth through it. It was grafted onto my wall and windowsill and something resembling an antenna was sticking out of it, pointed toward the heavens.
	I sat up slowly, and-- making little noise-- began to approach the stranger. She seemed distracted with the machine, still making odd noises into it. A took a single step towards her, and she twitched-- causing me to notice something about her I had overlooked.
	Atop her crown, blending in with her sun-touched hair, were two white, fuzzy protrusions and now as she turned to face me, I could see quite clearly they they were oversized ears... like a rabbit would have. I could never sneak up on this girl.
	She was wearing a plain, pale blue blouse and skirt, with a silver crescent moon pinned to the chest of her blouse. She was barefoot, and her hair was messy and unbrushed. Her eyes were a bright red-violet color and looked at me with quivering uncertainty. I had seen these eyes before. She opened her mouth to say something to me, but the only sounds that came out were more high pitched squeaks and beeps. She went on for a moment like this, seeming distressed, a series of nonsensical noises. And then she quieted down and seemed expectant of me to reply.
	"I, uh.." I stammered. She was raising her eyebrow at me. "What? I don't understand."
	She turned around again and detached a small piece of the contraption in my windowsill, one of the machine's many screens. She held it up to my face and unintelligable symbols swarmed back and forth, seeming to respond to my every movement. She made another squeaking noise, as if commanding me to say something.
	"Wh-what is this thing?" As the words left me, the little screen filled with letters I could read.
	LANGUAGE RECOGNIZED. EARTHLING LANGUAGE - ENGLISH. ORIGINS DATING BACK TO THE SPLINTERING OF THE TOWER OF BABEL. WIDESPREAD USE THROUGHOUT WESTERN CONTINENTS.
	She then pulled the device away from me as it continued to fill with words.
	HUMAN. MALE. WHITE. ANGLO-SAXON HERITAGE. 25 EARTH YEARS SINCE BIRTH.
	She connected it to the machine again, and placed her hand atop the machine's body, closing her eyes. As she did, the machine began to glow a blinding blue color and then dulled again, seeming to 'transfer' the light into her body, causing her to faintly glow the same blue color. When it faded, she stood up and turned to me, and frowned.
	"This language doesn't make any sense. Why do so many of your words mean the same thing?" She had a soft, quiet voice, like gentle wind whistling in your ear late at night.
	"Who are you? Why are you in my apartment?" I questioned, hoping to finally make some sense of the situation, not yet ruling out the possibility that I was still asleep.
	"You brought me here." She folded her arms, not out of annoyance or impatience, but perhaps in discomfort, like I'd forgotten something important. "Remember?"
	"I... no, no. I never bring anyone here. I think I'd remember if I--" As I stumbled through my words, she peered into my eyes, and I froze.
	"Look..." She lifted her blouse past her stomach. There, below her chest, was a wrap of gauze-- with a deep red stain in the center.
	It was having trouble grasping what I was seeing. Last night, I brought an injured white rabbit home with me and patched it up-- and that's all. This girl is claiming that was her?
	"When I fell to earth, I was intercepted by a group of the separatists who are causing chaos back at my home. You saw what they did to me.. and they left me for dead." Her words were full of shame-- she stared at the ground while she spoke. "You should have left me, too. Now I've been disgraced by the impurity of mortality, and my people will never accept me again. If I stay here much longer, I will be considered human-- meaning I may as well be dead anyway." Her shoulders tensed and she quietly sniffled; she was on the verge of tears.
	I was almost sure I was asleep, now. That rabbit was now a person, standing in my house? And she's from some otherworldly place? I pinched my arm and my nerves reacted, informing me I was in fact awake and had to deal with the situation... somehow.
	The girl in front of me stood quivering, staring at my floor, her hands clenched in fists at her side. Not knowing what to do, I tentatively reached my hand over and placed my hand on her shoulder. She shuddered, but didn't resist.
	"Is there any way I could help you?" I asked, and she searched me with her eyes, placing her gaze in mine as if to discern my intentions. She sighed, and then returned her eyes to the floor. "I have no way to return on my own. The fall is one-way, to--" she stopped herself mid-sentence, as if she was about to say something she shouldn't. She composed herself again, and continued. "I contacted my superiors. My orders are to survive until help arrives."
	Every time she spoke the situation made less sense. Contacted? This machine is some kind of communications device? Survive? As in-- whatever attacked her before is going to try again?
	"Listen." She took a step back from me and gave me a cold look. "We are trained that if we are discovered by humans, to disguise ourselves or eliminate the human. However..." she softened, and looked troubled as she went on. "I would be dead if not for you, so..." She trailed off, and sat back on the stool and stared at the machine. Left standing there, still very confused, I turned as well and remembered the can of coffee I had bought the night before, still waiting for me on my counter.