Two Weeks, Day Zero: Prologue
Josh was a lion. That might just seem like a piece of character exposition to most people, but, to Josh, it meant several very important things. Independence, for example, he prized most highly. He was, after all, an adult lion, now. And he could do what he wanted. What he wanted, come the end of the eleventh grade, and his eighteenth birthday, was to maximize his independence, and, as any teenager knows, you cannot have independence while living under your parents roof. It just didn’t happen, and Josh was no exception. He left, naturally enough, sorted out a summer job, an lived for the first time as his own person. Nobody could tell him what to do, and, as he trudged through the cold, night air, thick as porridge, going home from the third kegger in seven days,  he smiled to himself, cheeks pushing out against his now full, red mane, and thought, life is good.
But, unfortunately for Josh, life wasn’t always good, and the ominous clouds, dark as onyx, threatened to conquer him. He wasn’t afraid, whatever came his way, he would deal with. Because he was a man now, and men did exactly as they pleased. 
That was, of course, until the gods of rent, traffic or taxes, always spiteful of the sacred independence of men, decided to come knocking upon the door. But Josh wasn’t worried about the gods of rent, traffic and taxes, right now he was worried about the gods of rain, thunder and clouds, because that was what was immediately relevant to his situation. He silently nodded his respects, but the god scoffed at him, and, to drive home its point, let loose a torrential downpour upon his head. Well, I suppose independence can only go so far, right? 
Josh cursed, lopping into a sloppy run for the nearest cover from the spite of on high, a bus shelter, he could hardly see it through the rain, thick as wool sheets, and might have missed it entirely were it not for the anti-crime floodlight, the kind that stadiums use, that hung like the hand of god over the shelter. He darted inside, keeled over, shivered, rung out his mane, sat down on the bench, and only then noticed the other. It wasn’t a canny feeling, walking into a transparent glass shelter, acting like you’re alone for five minutes, then realizing you weren’t. It wasn’t hard to see why he had mistaken the other so, he was, after all, sitting perfectly still, gray, brown and white against the, well, gray, gray, brown, and white of the storm. He turned, or, at least Josh thought it was a he, his head around. Not an unimpressive feat, turning one’s head one hundred degrees around to face someone, so uncanny, and, in the shadow of the storm, it wasn’t any less so. 
“Good evening,” said the owl, a smart and cheery  voice, as though he were playing the good natured know-it-all in some child’s cartoon. It should have given the lion ease that the silence had been broke, instead it only deepened the awkward quagmire. 
“Uh, Hi- uh, umm, hello?” Josh responded, teenage eloquence in full, hormonal swing, he had accidentally carved the end of his sentence into a rise, giving the phrase the air of a question. Josh, with polite niceties aside, would have been happy to let the conversation wither and die at that, and stare out into the river that had replaced to road, and wait for a bus. But the strange owl, barn owl, be corrected himself, remembering something back from ninth grade biology, did not leave the conversation at that, but continued.
“Might you have the time?” he said in the same, fake cheerful voice, raising eyebrows which constituted most of his face.
“Uh, yeah,” Josh replied, now having his wits more about him, then pulled out his smartphone and looked at the time, “Three fifteen.”
His eyebrows went up again, “In the morning? You should have been home hours ago,” Under different circumstances this would have provoked an almost violent response from the lion, but, recently freed from the yoke of parental dependence, Josh felt the need to put his newfound freedom out on display, he puffed out his chest, put his shoulders back, chin up, mane out, and was about to explain how he lived alone, and would go home when and how it pleased him, but the owl continued, getting up out of his chair, the cheerful constitution, gone, “Out at this time of night, at your age. Preposterous. Letting your cubs wander about the streets in the dark. I’ve half a mind to speak to your parents!”
Whatever hostile remarks Josh’s new life had stifled now came back to him, ready to bring bare his teenage rhetorical broadside. It started auspiciously enough, Josh, being a Lion, had much more experience with orations made up of fightin’ words, as opposed to awkward greetings at the bus shelter, “Now listen, I don’t know who you think you are, but…” and stammered to a hault, an incomprehensible look on his face. Incomprehensible because of one, simple reason: he didn’t believe in fate. He didn’t believe in conspiracies, secret societies, determinism, hard or soft. He didn’t believe in fate. There was no reason, no reason whatsoever for Josh to rationally think that this unnamed owl, who had approached him in the middle of a storm, in a bus shelter, on his walk home from a party which he had stayed late to to watch the girls bend over as they cleaned up. Fate. Josh couldn’t think of another word for it. Because, as he looked down, down at his neck where it was covered by neither mane, nor wife beater, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that the owl, without reason, had walked up to him in a bus shelter, and stuck a hypodermic needle into his neck. The last thing he heard, as the gods of satire revoked his rights to a skeleton, was a deep purring from the owl’s throat, very close now. Just as his eyes fluttered shut, he thought he heard, “sleep, little one.”