It must've been cruel fate that Claire Winters was born in the small town of Podunk. Podunk was not ironically named, even if its settlers had intended it to be. Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe "Podunk" was the name of the town's founder. Claire didn't know. She never really researched into the history of the founding of her birthplace. She did know this: This place was backwater.
The sleepy town of Podunk wasn't without its charm, however. There was the annual Fair where the residents of the town would show off the best of their harvests and a hog-tying contest (Of which Claire had won second place last year -- The winner was a boy twice her size and almost fully grown!). It was a rather close-knit community of ranchers and farmers. The residents were a simple folk and the vast majority of them went to church on Sundays, fished and hunted as often as possible, and spent summer nights drinking beer on the porch. The weird one, in this dinky little town where the next neighbor was at least two miles away, was Claire Winters herself.
From a young age, Claire was smart -- and much more curious than her peers. By the time other children were learning multiplication tables, Claire was already calculating astrological vectors of nearby comets. When they were learning about the water cycle, Claire was voraciously devouring books on micro and macroscopic organisms and running through their anatomy and what made them tick. The young girl seemed utterly entranced by the science of the world and especially of the slimmest of possibility that perhaps life existed outside of the world. Watching the night sky from the telescope she had received on her 8th birthday was one of the upsides to living out in the boonies. She could see stars that she knew city-dwellers couldn't due to the massive amount of light pollution. Still, it was obvious that Claire couldn't excel as best she could in Podunk... So when it came time to enter high school, Claire and her parents worked their hardest to get her enrolled in a Girl's Academy closer to the city.
It wasn't until tragedy struck did Claire finally got her wish. Even after what seemed like an endless gauntlet of tests, forms, and meetings, Claire was only accepted into a prestigious academy when she lost both her parents in a tragic car accident. She received a full scholarship at one of the state's most prestigious Academies that was about an hour away from little Podunk.
Of course, the enrollment was a bit of a mixed blessing -- for one, Claire had to bike 10 miles from her house to get to the bus stop, which was then another hour away from the academy. But that was a small price to pay to attend an institution of learning where she could actually... -learn-. The much more difficult cost was something she hadn't expected. It was all the social differences between her and her peers... Something that Claire could hardly adjust to, especially after losing both parents. The girls that attended Saint Seiya's Academy for Girls seemed like they had come out of magazines. Perfect hair, shapely bodies, styled nails, eyeliner -- real city folk flair. Claire had none of that charm. She had a short, boyish build. Her muscles were toned and wirey like a squirrel's from years of helping her family bale hay and tending to animals. Her nails were never manicured and she already had callouses from hard labor. She couldn't even relate to many of her classmates since they've never gone fishing or tied a hog or wrestled sheep, just as she'd never been to such-and-such beach or visited some fad country in Europe. "Country Bumpkin", some of the meaner girls would call Claire behind her back. High school was brutal. It seemed like the mean girls ruled the top of the social hierarchy, the nice ones stayed to themselves, and that meant those that were different (like Claire) sat at the bottom.
That meant Claire was stuck in limbo -- too intelligent for Podunk, too country for Saint Seiya. The only people who seemed to really understand her was her family -- Aunt Kayla who came and checked up on her every so often and the family dog, Max. Sure she had friends in town and in school, but she still felt disconnected and alone sometimes. She tried to explain it away as hormonal angst, but she couldn't control her feelings as well as she wanted, so she just dove into her science and her fantasy. She had always fancied the thought that she was different or that she had been misplaced at birth. Maybe she was an elf or an alien? Augh, those were just childish daydreams... but perhaps...
Claire let out a frustrated "Argh!" as she slammed her face into her pillow, kicking her feet against the mattress before rolling back onto her bed and staring out of her bedroom window. Summer was almost over and she was just about to enter her Senior year in High School... It almost felt like she'd soon graduate Saint Seiya without ever leaving her mark on that prestigious academy. Claire jumped out of bed and stood in front of her mirror -- dressed in a green-and-yellow striped shirt and a pair of jean overalls. In spite of being eighteen now, she still basically as flat as a board save for the pair of small petite breasts upon her chest and she was just as short as she was last year (save maybe an inch or so). Shouldn't she have grown up a little by now? At least... emotionally, if not physically! She wanted to feel like she belonged, like she could be who she was, but everything still felt wrong... and she dreaded going back to school and seeing all those judgmental faces again. She wanted to say it didn't bother her, but even her online friends noticed that Claire had been trying to get that country twang out of her vocabulary. The young girl let out a sigh, taking a seat by the windowsill and staring up at the night sky. Well, who knows... maybe school would be better this year? Maybe she could be popular and overalls would be the new vogue? Bah, who was she kidding?
Then, as she considered turning into bed, the flash of something caught her eye. "No... way..." She whispered to herself as she grabbed her telescope, following the white dot that jet across the black sky. Impossible. She tracked that comet in her logbook just last week. Had it... had it changed course somehow?! Claire scrambled toward her desk, taking out a composition notebook that had been filled with numbers and data, her finger coming toward line and her eyes furrowing. Had she made a mistake logging this last time?! Then, there was a soft rumble that barely shook the glass of water sitting at her desk. In-freaking-possible. The young girl shot up and and leaned out the window, her eyes widening at the trail of smoke coming from the nearby forest. No way. This close?!
Already Claire's heart was racing as she spun from the window and hurried down the stairs. "Max! I'm going out for a bit, be good! I'll be back soon, Seeya!!" She shouts as she darts through the kitchen and out the backdoor toward her bike. She needed to see it -- that comet MOVED, she was sure of it. It wasn't supposed to land anywhere near Earth and it landed IN HER BACKYARD. There might've been something new, maybe the meteorite had some weird magnetic composition that hadn't been discovered yet! Maybe something else! Maybe there was alien life on it! Claire didn't stop to consider anything else, she just ran past Max's doghouse toward her bike and jumped on and began pedaling as fast as she could. Maybe she could get there before anyone else.
Claire shrieked and jumped back as the tiny pod cracked open and the thing spilled out..."What the fuck?!?!" She paced a bit, occasionally looking down at the mass in the dirt. After a few minutes she had made her mind up, this was way too important to leave to chance and she slid down the still warm edge of the crater to gather the creature in her arms and bring it back into her house.
The clearing was smoking and scorched all around the crater and the air smelled of ozone and sulfur. At the bottom of the pit was a shiny silver orb, one whole side still glowing hot from its plummet to earth. It was about as big as a beach-ball and as she stared down at it as it cracked in half spilling a ruddy orange fleshy mass out onto the blackened dirt at the base of the crater. The thing oozed out and lay there, slick with liquid from inside the pod. it looked almost like an octopus but had only four stubby tendrils and no eyes. It pulsed slowly and seemed to be hurt or near death.
Claire panted as she approached the crater, her lungs and legs burning from how fast she had pedaled to get here. The girl leaned her bike against a tree, sucking in breaths of the cool, night air as she reached toward the handlebars of her bike to take off the flashlight that had been set to strobe. In her haste, she realized she had done rather poorly in gathering supplies, only having the pocketknife on her person, the light attached to her bike, and the messenger bag on the back of said bike that only had a pair of gardening gloves in it which she quickly put on. Ah well -- it wasn't like she had a lab or anything to run any tests on the soil or anything, but maybe she could take a hunk out of the meteorite back as a souvenir? The girl panted, taking a moment to catch her breath as she spun around, her flashlight illuminating her immediate surroundings a moment. It looked like she really was the first one to arrive... Which meant that everything she found was hers to take first. The girl beamed as she got to work, starting to sweep around the crater, looking for signs of anything out of the ordinary.
It didn't take long... a few minutes into her search, Claire smelled it before she saw it -- the strong scent of ozone and sulfur was hard to ignore. The girl winced as she approached, her eyes widening as she sucked in a shocked gasp... Impossible...! She had to pinch herself to make sure she was awake... This... this was really an alien pod...! With a real life alien in it! Claire bit her bottom lip as she approached delicately. "Hey there, little guy..." She called out in a reassuring tone -- though she was certain it couldn't understand her. "No need to worry... I'm not going to hurt you..." She promised as she reaches out to offer her hand, trying to get it to pull itself from the silver orb and onto her gloved hand.