It had been quite some time since Anya had been home, and her departure hadn’t turned out on good circumstance - marked by her father’s attempt to pimp her out for his drug habit, and her being forced to fight a man trying to force himself on her off of herself, discovering she had some kind of powers in the process. Now, gratefully, somehow the catlike ears which spontaneously sprouted at Bethany’s house had disappeared, but she was still stuck with the ridiculous “underwear costume.”

Her absence, apparently, had been noticed by at least a few people. Coming off of Big Dog Avenue and turning onto Runyon Ave, almost as soon as she stepped onto her street, some guy noticed and started screaming.

“Hey! It’s that girl! That one from the news! Jag….Jag….The missing girl!”

Others began to notice as well, whispering, shouting, calling on phones about the missing child everyone assumed had been kidnapped and murdered. Anya let out a sigh and just continued tramping sulkily on the way to her apartment building, wondering how she was to explain her absence to her parents. And what could she say? That she’d run away and somehow got accidentally sucked into some tournament in Hell? She’d started to convince herself that it was all just a dream. After all, how else could she have taken out a world-class terrorist, and with one shot, let alone won the whole thing? And, as expected, there was no prize money, or the house she’d wished for. Same old same old.

Up the stairs and through the holed, infested, and stained hallways to her number, there was a part of her that was glad to no longer feel like her life was in danger, but what she had come back to was largely depressing. She knocked, waited a few seconds, then knocked again.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming. Hold your damn hor–Anya!?”

Appearing almost as dumbfounded as he, Anya smiled timidly in the face of her father.