Alice 1: Fiery Remix Crisis!

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The halls rang with the final tone of the day: the school day was done. It didn't matter to Alice; she stopped paying attention about half an hour after lunch, when the second earbud went in and she drifted off into a mix of break-beats and distorted synths. Her eyes sat half-open while the teacher droned in, wobbling in and out of consciousness as she was prone to do on Friday afternoons.

She rose a moment after the others did, by impulse, picking up her bags while the songs blasted in her ears. Zombie-like, she left the room, down the hall, down the stairs, putting on her too-big jacket and leaving the school without saying a word to anyone. Kids left her alone, and she left them alone. That's how it'd been for the full year and that's how Alice liked it.

Alice stopped at the street corner long enough to switch out bands and think of what she'd do with her day. Her brother had plans with his friends, going somewhere other than "home" and spending the night there. This left Alice with an evening, night, and morning to herself, something she loved and dreaded. "I'll have to swing by and grab my laptop, I think," she mumbled to herself, switching to a lighter album, a lighter genre.

Home was a place of dread, but it's where she laid her head at night. It's where she plugged her laptop in. The person who bought her phone, her headphones, her laptop, and even the albums that started her interest in music, he might be there. Alice gave him a 50/50 chance; she stopped paying attention to his schedule months ago. The last thing she wanted on her free day was to run into that pitiful excuse for a father.

But she needed her laptop. She had a few ideas for a track, tapped out and jotted down in a notebook during her lunchbreak. Music was her passion, had been for years, it was what connected her to the outside world, if only through a few Internet forums. If she wanted to get anywhere with it, she needed to do something with it. And not just anything. She had to be fresh, original, incorporating the "stuff" of popular tracks with new ideas, fresh ideas. She'd get there.

She hit play as the crosswalk symbol turned and started on her way home. Get home, grab laptop, hit up a coffee shop like she tended to do. Maybe she'd run into the older kids who hang out on her side of town, they'd seem to take a liking to her, mostly because she was quiet and filled out the group. Even a quiet outlier can be important to the function of the whole.

The apartment was still, if not quiet-- 808 kicks hammered against her eardrums-- when Alice returned home. The counter was cleaned up from the breakfast she had eaten half of, fruit replaced into to bowl on the table and dishes done. The place looked spotless-- or, at least tidy. Ugh, and somebody had sprayed something chemical, which told Alice her brother was here. Or that he had been here, earlier. It was hard to tell, as loud as it was.

Her room had been neatened up a little as well, any organized chaos destroyed and replaced with a semblance of structure. Her laptop was closed there, atop a stack of magazines, and the clothes she had left dumped on the floor, folded and placed on her bed. Yeah, it was probably her brother. Or her father had hired a maid again. Of course, Alice realized while trading out her earbuds for her studio monitor headphones, that if there really were a maid, she'd be able to hear them together in the next room, and in that brief moment of silence, she heard nothing.

Alice scooped up her laptop, and checked her brother's room before she left. Four, evenly-placed knocks, but no reply. The room was empty, and opening the door and poking her head in resulted in an assault of the same air-"freshener" smell from the rest of the house, thinly veiling a heavy, masculine stink. If he was home early, but not at home... he must have gone out with friends?