writing_shadows

Betty Albright was not usually hopeful. That was more Biff's bailiwick, with his irrepressible naive cheer. Betty couldn't understand how someone who'd gone through all the things they'd been through could be so gosh darned cheerful all the time.

It was infuriating, really.

But she had an idea, and it was a slim chance, she knew, but everyone was always going on about how things were different here. And with her life on the line, maybe she needed to try something. Maybe for once the odds wouldn't be against her. Maybe, for once, there was hope to be had.

So although today she was in the library as usual, she wasn't in the history section (she was running out of books there to read anyway). Today, even though she was taking notes as intensely as ever, the scowl of concentration as present, her topic of interest was different.

Today Betty was studying how to be feminine and glamorous (in an innocent fashion, of course - she was trying to be a damsel, not a femme fatale).

It wasn't something that came naturally to her. She'd always been a tomboy, and a romantic non-interest to boys - heroes or otherwise.

(She remembered one particularly long and violent death in which she was sliced apart a mere few yards from where the hero professed his love for the damsel. All they'd needed to do was turn their heads and she would have lived.)

It would take practice, determination, and most of all - gumption.

But gee whiz, she was a red-blooded American Earthling, wasn't she? That meant ideas which needed gumption had a better likelihood of working, right?

Right?