Part 1: The Price of Fame

Sascha got home and snuck into her room to get her nightclothes. Bastion was sleeping soundly enough that she probably could have cartwheeled in with no problems, but the only TV in the house was in her room, and if Bastion saw last night’s performance…

Well she just didn’t want to deal with it right now.

She got out, changed and padded into the living room located above the small coffee shop, knowing with a dread certainty that tomorrow everything was going to change.

The next day she got up to her alarm blaring in her room, and Bastion crying pitifully for someone to kill it. She went in, shut it off for him (she kept it far enough away from her bed that she’d have to get up before hitting the snooze button), grabbed her clothes and hurried out of the room. Bastion smiled as she went and said “Have a great day at school…”.

She froze, and her eyes narrowed at him. Did he know? Even worse...did he tell Arthur?

Deciding not to chance it, she stuck her tongue out at him and hurried into the shower. But he brought up a good point. What the hell was she going to do at school today? Most of the town….oh hell, a lot more people than the stupid town…had just seen her on international TV. Was she the newest sensation or was she being laughed at the entire world over? Somehow as much as she wanted a singing career, neither sounded good at this point in her life. In either case, everybody she knew had seen her sing, and she had absolutely no idea how big a deal it was for her school…the council….even her parents.

She finished, dried off and went downstairs to a breakfast of eggs and bacon and coffee served up by her watcher. Arthur, at least, was either unaware of what had happened or was too British to mention it until she tried to talk about it. She kept conversation light and businesslike, mainly reporting on how they stopped Ember (and Cameron’s machine teleporting her through time). She mentioned there was some other “stuff”, but she couldn’t talk about it then. She looked hopefully at him as she finished up and said “So…we’re going motorcycle shopping tonight, right?”

Arthur looked tired and said “Yes, well…we’ll have to see about that. Tonight we have to talk a bit about how things are going to run from here on out.” He turned with a sad look as the coffee shop’s front door bell rang and a customer came in.

Any questions were interrupted by Laz and Oscar coming in to pick her up for school. As she grabbed her books and turned back to ask Arthur what he meant, Oscar mentioned they saw a Channel 6 News van on its way down the street towards them, probably to interview the “superstar”. Panicked, she pushed the two of them out the back and into Laz’s van and got them driving. Sure enough a white van with the Channel 6 logo and a bunch of satellite equipment coming out of the top of it passed them on the way, and with a terrible realization, she sighed.

“Well….now Arthur knows.”

At school, crossing from the parked van to the building easily took three years. It wasn’t obvious at first…nobody came up to her to cheer or make fun of her….but they were all in groups and whispering to each other, and they were all staring at her.

“Now nobody worry, nobody worry…she’ll be signing autographs a little later today!”

Sascha looked in horror at Oscar, who was now walking in front of her with his arms up and addressing the general schoolyard. She swung a foot over in front of him and tripped him. Not enough to squish his precious laptop, but enough to shut him up at least. As he was protesting, Sascha saw Opal come out of the school’s front door. Her best friend Opal…who would stand by her no matter what…was finishing up a phone call.

“Yeah. No. Absolutely. We’ll be there on Friday night. Thanks.”

She came up with a smile and said “Well, I just booked three local places in the next couple weeks. Sounds like everybody is interested.”

Sascha got a dangerous smile, reached out and grabbed Opal by the arm. “Can I get a word over here for juuuust a moment?”

A moment later she and Opal were off to one side of the schoolyard, and Sascha was standing very close so she could talk without anybody overhearing.

“What the hell just happened? When did you get all managerial? I thought we were going to wait and call Anzo?”

“I already did!”

“You…you what?”

“Anzo understands now that the way to convince you to do this is to convince me. So we talked it out and….well….he says that if this pulls off he’ll set aside 10,000 miles of Amazon rainforest to preserve….”

Sascha cut her off. “Listen….you know I want to do this right?”

“Exactly, so…”

“And you know that I can’t, right?”

“Good! Then…wait. What?”

“Think about it. How am I supposed to do this? How am I supposed to go out at night if everybody knows who I am? How am I supposed to go on tour?”

Opal’s look softened a bit. “Sascha…. Maybe that’s the point. Look, this is a chance that will never come up again. Are you sure you don’t want to take it?”

“I don’t….hell I don’t know. Of course I want to…but I need to stay here. I just don’t know if I can make something like that work.”

Well what about the replacement Slayer coming to town?

Sascha looked even more stunned. "The….the what?"

A horrified look flashed in Opal's eyes as Sascha stared back at her. She said “Was that the bell? We’d better get going…” and she started to hurry past Sascha for the door.

Sascha's hand caught Opal by the arm and, with more strength than would be normal for the small girl, she brought Opal back in front of her and stared at her with a very serious look on her face. "Spill it. What'd you overhear?"

Opal looked uncomfortable. “I might have heard something Arthur said on the phone…that someone was coming to talk to you today and that they had a replacement coming in. I guess I assumed it was because you wanted to take Anzo’s offer.”

All of a sudden it made sense...Arthur’s grim look…his subtle warning about the talk they were going to have….

She’d screwed up too much, and now they were going to replace her.

“I didn’t…. I wasn’t told…” her voice trailed off as she looked at Opal with shock. “They’re reassigning me.”

“Even more reason to leave!”

“You don’t understand! There is no ‘leave’ with the council! I’m either going to be shipped back to England or I’ll have to go…..home.” The thought of it scared her as much as reassignment. She was a very different person than she was when she left her parents.

Then the first bell actually rang. Opal patted Sascha’s arm consolingly and said “We have to get to class. Listen…you’ll be fine. I’ve got everything taken care of.”

The day was agonizingly long. Even teachers were staring at her out of the corner of their eyes and trailing off in their lectures. Lunch finally came around and she sat down with her tray across from an amused-looking Oscar and a busy-looking Opal, who was just getting off of another cell phone call.

Sascha sat down, looked at Oscar and said “Okay. Do it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Look me up on the internet and tell me if I’m good or if I’m a joke!”

“Oh that. Okay…okay…let’s see what we can find.” His fingers started to fly across the keyboard. “Says here….you’re somewhere between ….the little Asian dude on American Idol…..and Paris Hilton.”

“I’m where??” Sascha groaned, hear head settling (for the hundredth time today) into her hands.

“Hey...Paris Hilton is popular!”

“Yeah, but they’re both bad singers!”

“Who cares how you sing?? Being rich and famous don’t mean nothing about how you can sing.”

She spoke through clenched teeth. “I care.” She grabbed her uneaten lunch and got up. “Look…I’m just going to go find someplace private before class for awhile.”

She turned and abruptly came face to face with Anzo, who smiled reassuringly at the obviously miserable look on her face. “Hey. Do you have a moment?”

She shrugged. “I…um…sure.” She sat her tray back down and followed him to the other side of the cafeteria….the side the freaks would never dare sit on. She could see Brad the football jock (that she saved from a vengeance demon!) glaring daggers at her as she followed Anzo to a table. He sat down at a table already occupied by two jocks and a cheerleader and gave them an even stare until the three of them cleared out. He gestured for Sascha to sit across from him.

“I see you’ve had a pretty tough day so far. Care to talk about it?”

She blushed. Anzo was the last person she wanted to show weakness around. “It’s just….I’m just not used to all the attention.”

“Well, things are different now. You’re going to have to get used to it.”

“Anzo…I don’t know about this. I mean…I’ve got responsibilities here, and the whole vampire god thing….how am I supposed to do all this?”

He gently said “Listen Sascha. If you let your entire life be controlled by a bunch of stuffy british suits...well you’re going to regret it.”

He paused for a moment. “You may not know it by looking at him, but my father is a violin virtuoso. He is….unequaled. I have literally never heard better. But he let life and his obligations control him. Now he’s the head of a multi-billion dollar international corporation. He is rich and he has power, but he will never be what he wanted to be.”

She stared at him hard for a moment. Part of her couldn’t help but agree with him. She was being controlled by the council. And now they were just going to cast her aside. She had busted her hump every day since she’d gotten here, and they didn’t believe she was capable of not screwing up so they were just going to move her out of the way.

She asked him slowly “Does he...regret it?”

He smiled a bit at that. “My father isn’t exactly the type to share his feelings a lot….but yes, I think he does. To this day that violin sits unused in a safe in his office.”

He leaned forward and said “My father was a musician. Hitler was a painter. If you let other people control everything about you…you’re going to end up exactly what they want you to be. The question is…is it what you want to be?”

Staring back into his striking brown eyes, she softly said “No…not really.”

The world came back into focus after a moment and she nodded at him “I’ll…I’ll think about it. Can I get back to you?”

He nodded. “Take all the time you need. Just don’t take too long. You have a marketability here…your lack of interviews so far might actually work to your advantage with the 'mystery' angle. But it won’t last forever.”

She got up to go, but turned back to him. “Anzo...do you really think I was good?”

He smiled kindly. “I think you were amazing.”

“Oscar said I ranked on the internet right around the little Chinese guy in American Idol.”

His smile widened into one of genuine amusement. “Well, far be it from me to contradict Oscar’s research with my marketing experts…but I’m fairly certain you’re a good investment at this point.”

She smiled back at him, nodded her thanks and returned to grab her tray. For the only time that day, she felt good enough that she didn't care about the staring and the whispering. She wasn’t even listening to Opal starting in about her new image. The two girls walked back to class as she vaguely heard Opal say “So how do you feel about changing your hair?”