Excerpt:

“Hey!”

Hazel jumped a foot off of the ground. There was a yellow ghost swinging its way up onto the room, waving its arms at her and stalking towards her. Wonderful.

“What are you doing up here?” the ghost was demanding. “This rooftop is private property, okay? Go take your stupid robots someplace… oh.”

The ghost paused, apparently taken aback. “You don’t look like one of the Scumbucket Punks. They’re usually a lot more…” Apparently words failed—him? It seemed mostly likely that the yellow ghost was a him—here, so he resorted to waving his arms some more. Then he tilted his head, in a way that was, for some reason, maddeningly familiar, and he said, “Are you okay?”

She didn’t quite know how to respond to that. The ghost cut her off, anyway, starting towards her again. “Did you—wait, is that a broom? You’re a witch? Did you fall out of the sky?”

Hm. In light of the ghosts behavior, Hazel was forced to revise her previous judgment. Maybe not a ghost. Maybe just the person whose house this was.

“Seriously, are you hurt?” The ghost/homeowner had drawn up level with her now, kneeling beside her, and he—it was definitely a he—was staring at her in concern. Not that she could see much of him, thanks to the late hour and the driving rain. But he seemed worried, anyway. “Can you hear me?” he asked, speaking slowly. “Are you hurt? Did you get hit by lightning, or something? Shot down by a passing steamship?”

At last, she found her voice. “I’m fine,” she told him. “I— I fell. The storm.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, easily, apparently making sense out of her jumble of half-words. “Do you want to go inside? Someplace less rainy than the roof, maybe?”

“That would be nice,” she said, after a minute’s consideration. Her earlier tantrum had taken much of the wind out of her sails, it seemed. Not to mention, the young man’s familiarity was itching at the back of her mind.

He offered her a hand, and she accepted it slowly. He had a firm grip, she noted absently. She followed him over to the roof’s edge and then down a ladder attached to the side of the house, then in through a simple door.

The interior of the house was a blast of light and warmth, and it took Hazel a moment to adjust herself. When her eyes weren’t so overwhelmed by the bright overhead lights, she realized that the “house” was actually more of a antique/second-hand item depository. There was junk everywhere—it reminded her of the Professor’s laboratory, in a way. She took a deep breath; the air in the workshop smelled like engine oil and, weirdly, fresh-mown grass.

She turned to thank the young man, and almost jumped out of her shoes again. Because, now that the rain and the darkness and the hideous yellow rain slicker were out of the way, she recognized him. From the expression on his face, he recognized her, too.

“You!” she yelled, pointing an accusing finger at him.

“Me,” agreed the young man. The young man from her dream of a few days before—the one with the squid. Norbert? Normal? Norman.

“Norman,” she said, uncertainly. He nodded, slowly, and then he said, equally as slowly, “…Giant squid?”

“Bright green,” Hazel agreed, readily. Norman let out a deep and fervent sigh.

“I was really hoping that was just a bizarre dream brought on by too much engine oil.”