Tessa never met the man until the dark night he arrived with an entourage of weird, scary people. Her mother's friend acted strangely when the dark man arrived, as if she couldn't see him. She sat down in her favorite chair and immediately fell asleep. Doing her best to wake the woman she considered a second mother proved futile. Tessa had realized something made her sleep unnaturally. Even to a child, that was clear.

The tall, dark man who came for them hadn't smiled or said a kind word to the frightened, grieving seven-year-old Tessa, only said that he was her father. She remembered gazing up at his dark scowling eyes and bursting into tears. The stranger offered no comfort or condolence to her, a terrified little girl just needing a kind look or word in that horrible moment.

When the large hand came down to take her smaller one, she shied away, afraid, and he looked displeased. That was the last time he attempted to touch her. What she was seeing was not for just any eyes. It was obvious that somehow not all humans could see the group that followed her dark mysterious father. Having been born with magical abilities, Tessa knew she was different to the other kids at school, but her mother had never made her feel badly, only careful, about those differences. His menagerie rushed them out of the house. Tessa managed to grab her stuffed cat, but every other memento or piece of her human life had been lost to her in that painful moment.

A small blue woman took her and her sisters to a waiting car. Blue was not a normal color. Heartbroken, she watched her neighborhood melt away into the darkness.

The car lurched strangely and she remembered clinging to her stuffed animal. When she saw a shimmering wall of sparkling light she thought they'd be hurt. Shaking and crying she felt the change, the difference when the car left the world she'd always known. In that moment she entered the Other World, and her life changed forever.