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realpaintheory

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Emma looked up slowly, not daring to believe what was happening.  She told herself over and over again that it was pure coincidence, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't believe the one thing she desperately wanted to be true. After all, who would be calling her? She had moved around too often recently to make any new friends, she hadn't spoken to her parents in years, and her boyfriend, Alex, was staying in the town near the canal for the weekend, trying to sell his new book to a literary agent. He was the reason they had came here in the first place.

Shaking, Emma edged towards her phone and, with trembling fingers, picked it up to look at the screen. Surely there would be a recognisable phone number on there?  When she saw the screen, however, her heart sank.  There was no number there at all, the display was white static.

She decided there was nothing else to do. Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she pushed the "accept call" button and pressed the phone to her ear.

"Hello?" She asked, cautiously. Immediately the phone buzzed loudly with white noise, like a radio between two stations.  Emma instantly recoiled and held the phone away from herself.  Even at arm's length, she could clearly hear a crackling message on a loop. A child-like voice was shrieking "STOP IT!!! YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE MEDDLING IN!!! THIS IS YOUR ONLY WARNING, EMMA ROBSON!!!!!"  The voice cackled, stopped abruptly, and then there was static briefly before it started again. 

Emma dropped the phone, horrified. The voice had sounded childlike, but smothered in a cruelness no child could possess, and laced with a sinister hiss. In short, the voice sounded eerily inhuman.

What scared Emma the most, though, was that the thing, whatever it was, had known her name. Had it been watching her?  Emma rushed over to the window and peered over it.  There were a few bushes around the canalside, but Emma knew in her heart that she wasn't being followed.

Gathering her wits, Emma quickly grabbed her notebook and wrote down every detail of the phone call. Then she set the notebook back down on the desk and slowly crossed over to the glass tank, where both of the creatures sat side by side, seemingly watching her every movement.  She looked at them closely. "What are you???" She muttered, mainly to herself. They were like nothing she had seen before.  The largest was about 20cm long, the smaller probably 5cm less. Their bodies were thin, and similar to that of a snake, however they were covereed in a glossy, black coat of fur that clung to them and rippled with every movement.  They each had four very short legs that ended in kangaroo-like feet, which were long in proportion to their bodies.

Their faces reminded Emma of a bottlenosed dolphin - small and round, with a long snout.  The eyes, however, were like cat's eyes, although the iris was an opalescent colour, shining blue one moment, green the next, then a shade of light yellow, but none of the colours softened the dangerous glint in their eyes.

Emma wasa about to write all of this down in her notebook, when she frowned. The message on her phone had told her to stop her research, that she was meddling in things she didn't understand.  So why was she carrying on? Why wasn't she letting the message affect her? Was it because she was stubborn? Because she didn't like being told what to do?

Emma searched her feelings before she came to her conclusion: she was doing it because she knew it was the right thing to do.