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Bella’s mother and stepfather were a bit whimsical about where they’d end up living, and chose the classic ‘throw a dart on a map’.
In one life, the dart might’ve landed near Phoenix, and the rest would have been history.
In this one, however…Renee’s aim was slightly off when she threw the dart.
Bella still visits her father regularly, of course.
So she knows some things are slightly different, but come on, her hometown's perfectly normal! It’s Forks that’s weird, if anything: there was something unnerving about just how green everything around here was. And if it wasn't green, it was grey, wet, and miserable and yes she was getting homesick for a sneeze-and-you-miss-it tiny town smack dab in the middle of desert country.
It's only for a few months out of every year, though, so she shrugs it off. Even if that hill is on thin ice for being way too tall because mountains do not exist and she'll fight anyone who says otherwise.
The older Bella gets, the more she realizes some things are lost in translation; it’s her father that recommends she join the Girl Scouts, but seems to think she’s joking when she talks about earning her Controlling Plants with Minds patch, and by the time she’s gotten her Surviving in Nature patch she’s given up telling him just what her troop gets up to.
The camping trips are good practice, though. Even if it's in a different biome than what she trained for, but at least she's doing something and with a friend her own age, at that! Jacob Black's pretty cool, even if he sometimes makes funny faces and weird noises when she's sorting through her gear, and keeps looking at her like she's an alien even when she's doing the most normal of things.
Not to mention the Summer Reading Program—the first time Bella survived it, she’d left for Forks not a week later. Charlie had congratulated her for her reading chart, and ruffled her hair and said he was impressed by her creativity.
So she doesn’t really talk about it. Or her Unmodified Sumerian classes in school, or the bloodstone circles, or…well, the list goes on.
Time goes on, and Bella’s visiting for less and less time, because the older she gets the more things pile up. By the time she’s reached high school, the visits practically grind to a halt; her internship at the radio station means she’s busier than ever before, between running errands and simply surviving.
It’s not until StrexCorp shows up, however, that Bella deems it a good idea to visit Charlie again.
Well…okay, it’s less her idea, and more 'StrexCorp bought their neighborhood and is working on shutting down Night Vale High and instating their own charter schools in time for her class to graduate and fuck that noise’.
Plus, it’s not like she had much cause to stick around, not when Phil and Renee had been talking about doing something for his job prospects.
So, really, between the choice of attending a Desert Bluffs school [ugh], or Forks High, it was really a no-brainer for Bella.
No matter how bizarre it was.
…it’s been a while, actually.
Turns out, distance doesn’t make the heart grow fonder, it just makes things seem less weird.
Seriously, just how had her younger self not noticed some things? Twin Peaks was practically a ripoff of Forks!
It’s been years, but Bella’s still unnerved by how ominously green everything is. More now, actually, since the Whispering Forest had sprouted up less than five minutes from her house and no fewer than twelve people had walked in and never come back before the public safety announcements started going out. Just about the only silver lining to living here was the rain, and the various clouds that never fail to blanket the region. Even if none of them glowed here.
Fork’s high school isn’t that bad, but Bella sorely misses her Unmodified Sumerian credits.
And she’s vaguely confused by everyone’s complaining about PE. [It had some very good real-world applications, what was the big deal? Dodging fireballs invoked by black magic was easy, compared to Chad Steinbeck’s throwing arm.]
Kinda weird how nonchalant everyone was about their librarians, though by now she’s almost used to how everyone laughs whenever she talked about Street Cleaning Day or Poetry Week.
And to top it all off, her dad’s Police Department must be having severe budget cuts, since his patrol car can’t fly. Oh, and he doesn’t even have a balaclava anywhere in his house. [Talk about disappointing.]
...and then it turned out that a new family moved into town sometime in between her visits, and one look at the Cullens and she was fascinated.
Not by how pale they were, though she spared a moment to calculate their odds of survival if they ever set foot in her hometown. Definitely less than five minutes if it were high noon, but maybe ten or so at dusk? No, probably less, they looked paler than sun-bleached bone. Hmm.
No, it's because Bella sees the predatory gleam in the Cullens' eyes, and their ethereal beauty, and immediately feels a pang of homesickness. That blonde in particular really reminds her of Jessica Simmons in fifth grade, back before she forgot to check her harness when their Girl Scout troop was earning their Paragliding and Divebombing patches.
That Edward guy was more of an afterthought than anything else, actually. Though it was also a new record, too: not even five minutes, not even trying and he apparently hated her guts, when her previous personal best was four hours and thirty-seven minutes for a budding blood feud.
The Cullens, meanwhile, don’t know what to think of this new arrival.
Bella Swan had, in the span of a single week, gone from “flavor of the week” to “what is she on, or is she just messing with everyone?” with alarming speed.
Her father had made it well known she had an eccentric sense of humor, but that still didn’t quite prepare everyone for her incredible deadpan, or her reactions to the most random things. It's a good thing small town gossip is so efficient, too, otherwise there would have been more than a few people very concerned by her remarks about body counts and street cleaners and throat spiders. Isabella Swan had singlehandedly become the strangest person in all of Forks, and most of her classmates seemed to be torn between her doing it for fun or the attention, and acted accordingly.
This eccentric newcomer smells of sand and mesquite and desert wind [though Edward doesn’t know why it’s so enticing to him], and they get even more confused. Because of their enhanced senses, they can tell Bella’s confusion is genuine, but why was she so terrified when Valentine’s Day was brought up?
Alice’s the one that puts them on high alert: trying to see Bella’s future gives her a migraine, and flashes of something great and terrible that she can’t quantify, a black abyss and yet not and what was she?!
So, of course, Jasper’s equally alarmed, and that's before he notices her emotions whenever anyone mentioned Homecoming Week.
Edward’s fascinated, but also questions his self-control and sanity as time passes and Bella’s slowly smelling less like something alien, and more and more appealing to him. Self-control, because something about her practically sings to him; sanity, because after their lab bench spontaneously combusted for the third time this month, the fact that he can’t read her mind barely even registers.
Rosalind is so, very befuddled with Bella’s fearlessness: she’s tried to scare her away, but each time she tries, Bella just lights up and that absolute lack of self-preservation is enough to make her to stop short.
Emmett’s the one in the parking lot, when the accident nearly happens. He’s very amused by it all, and has a running bet as to why this new chick’s gravitating towards them so much, when he sees Edward gear up to save— holy shit did the new girl just backflip away from the SUV? That settles it, she's free entertainment at its finest. A walking comedy act just by herself, and downright hilarious whenever Edward's in the same room too.
Carlisle’s also highly interested in the mystery that is Bella Swan. Even beyond what his family’s been saying, he took her vitals after the almost-accident, and the machine broke. Or, at least, that’s the only logical explanation as to why the readouts say her blood’s irradiated AND poisonous, and carrying trace elements of…something he’d never seen before. [Bella, meanwhile, thinks the orange juice just doesn’t taste the same. What was this sugary swill? Orange juice was supposed to be imaginary, with an acrid tang and a sharp aftertaste. Forks was so weird.]
Before, Bella didn’t even believe in snow.
Now, she’s been forced to have an open mind about mountains, given where she’s living now, but jury’s still out on the snow thing [it’s all in her mind, it’s a social construct, it’s not real okay?]
Hey, after ignoring the multiple suns thing that one time this is easy.
Not long afterward, Edward had a very confusing experience in Port Angeles. Not bad, per se, though it'd been equal parts distressing and disgusting to hear some would-be rapists’ thoughts when they were tailing a lone, clearly lost young woman— only for said thoughts to go from 'easy target’ to 'WHERE THE HELL DID SHE GET THAT MACHETE FROM?!’
And when he finally pulled up next to her, he couldn’t see it, nor where she could possibly make it fit...or any bodies, for that matter, though there were a few very suspicious scorch marks that gave him pause.
Huh.
Bella and the Cullens become friends, and when the vampire thing comes up, she doesn’t so much as bat an eye, barely even shrugs.
“Hey, my hometown doesn't discriminate. Old Woman Josie's got a houseful of angels, and Hiram McDaniels is literally a five-headed dragon, and he ran for mayor not too long ago. So long as you're not Desert Bluffs, we won't be having any problems.”
...suffice it is to say, no one knew how to answer to that.
Bella’s more than happy to answer their questions, too, though even now her answers leave a lot to be desired because no one can tell when the joke stops and the truth starts.
Her questions, in turn, aren’t quite like the ones they’d answered in the past. Carlisle doesn’t want to know where Bella got the term 'Lizard Kings' from, or why she thinks he knows where Franchia is located, or evil time traveling clones, or…the list goes on.
All in all, Bella’s slightly strange, but perfectly friendly.
[Alice has yet to decide what she makes of Bella’s talks about the Monolith, though.]
Edward finds himself struggling with an ever-increasingly obvious crush not long after that, not that Bella notices; she’s more than happy to talk about her efforts in helping Night Vale’s local Children’s Militia[?! Wow was the town creative with names], though, and the first time she touched an oven in their household was also the last. [How she managed to accidentally recreate Greek fire was something to ask at a later date.]
Plus, it turned out that her strange scent wasn’t the least of it, not after what Carlisle had ascertained after his morbid curiosity got the worst of him. Bella’s apparent confusion about regrowing appendages aside, turns out her inoculations included stuff for 'Blood-Space War botulism’ and 'Librarian-based diphtheria’ as well as the usual chicken pox and tetanus. The medical records he'd managed to get his hands on read like a horror story now that he bothered to give them more than a passing glance, and somehow gave him a migraine on top of everything else.
Time passes, and things are going well.
Sure, Bella's scent changes a little as time goes by, but that’s probably the least weird thing about her. After all, better this than the scent of something scorching— Esme had banned her from ever setting foot in her kitchen after the discovery that flour had a tendency to explode under the right circumstances, 'right circumstances' typically being 'in the presence of a statistically significant amount of entropy'. On the plus side, their house now had one fire extinguisher in every room. Ahem.
Bella’s pretty weird, but she’s also pretty cool, so it balances out in the end.
Some things just get lost in translation, though. Even now.
The baseball game was…interesting.
Bella’s comments about Night Vale’s annual Sheriff’s Secret Police vs. Firefighters game left everyone looking at her in horror, but it was the nonchalance with which she dodged the 120 miles-per-hour baseball that let her into the game.
...and then some strange vampires decided to crash the party.
Bella's many things, but at the end of the day she's human, with all that entails. A year out of Night Vale, in a very rainy place, is it any wonder that just about any traces have been slowly washed away?
So when the breeze shifts, several fates are sealed, hers included.
They try to attack, and Bella’s ready to go to bat, but no dice.
“I could’ve taken them!” She mutters petulantly. Bah. Overprotective vampires. Just when she’d been having fun, too.
The Cullens are insistent that Bella flee, keep saying that the vampires are more dangerous than she thinks and it's frustrating that they apparently didn't believe her when she said she'd dealt with worse because really, what was a vampire to a Librarian?
...eh, it’s been a while, might as well check up on how Renee’s been doing, see what was going on with StrexCorp. It’s adorable how Edward’s so concerned for her health, but really.
Their first hint Something Is Up is when Bella pulls out the bloodstone circles.
Specifically, “What the hell are bloodstone circles.”
Bella returns to her hometown, at the Cullen’s insistence, she might add. It’s been a while, and— oh, dear.
On the plus side, StrexCorp's no longer trying to forcibly assimilate Night Vale into its company town hellscape. On the other hand...
“What’s the big deal about—mmph!” Edward manages before Bella claps a hand over his mouth.
“Watch your words, it’s Street Cleaning Day tomorrow! C'mon, I think I remember a bunker we can hide out in.“
"What.”
They glimpse the vampires trying to get to them, but then…
“Fuck it, time for the big guns. Let’s go the library.”
“What.”
“Bring a machete, orange juice, and I hope you remember at least some Jane Austen, it might very well save our lives Mr. I Lived A Hundred Years."
"What?!"
"We have no time, just run!”
After it's all said and done and turned to ash, Bella’s slightly reluctant to go back to Forks. Meanwhile, Edward’s more than a little freaked out, and the rest of the Cullens are in no better shape. The trip back is in almost complete silence: Bella’s asleep, meanwhile the rest of the car’s eying her a lot more warily than a few days ago.
She’s nursing a sprained wrist from staving off a Librarian, a broken leg from landing the wrong way after sticking an illegal pen on one vampire and a loaf of bread on the other [and thus siccing the Sheriff’s Secret Police on both], and a concussion on top of that. She's a teenage girl who did a very good job of fighting the vampires hunting her, and now everyone else in the car is forced to grapple with the reality that Bella's jokes had never been jokes and the realization that an entire town was at the nexus of a reality almost too eldritch to comprehend. And it was the place she called home.
When the werewolves start showing up, there are very few things everyone can agree on: more vampires are bad news, taxes are a pain in the neck, and that Swan girl is a menace and almost definitely has a few screws loose.
Meanwhile, Jacob Black’s having the time of his life. He's her oldest friend, and had a front row seat for some of the shit she's pulled over the years: all those camping trips and the times they went fishing [or, well, he went fishing while Bella shuddered and flinched at the prospect of having anything other than solid ground under her feet and eyed the river with no small amount of trepidation from behind a rock], that one time he swore she pulled a machete out of nowhere to help clean the fish he'd caught—
And for years, nobody believes him, just thinks Bella's got an overactive imagination and he's just been playing along, when in reality he's seen her start fires with a snap of the fingers and the way shadows move oddly around her— not to mention the time they got lost in the woods Jacob could have previously sworn he'd known like the back of his hand, only to see thick fog on what used to be a sunny day and the crows didn't stop telling them to keep going until they stumbled across the river and suddenly everything made sense again. That time, his feet ached like they'd been walking for hours, but his dad told him it hadn't been more than five minutes since he'd last seen them, if that.
Bella noticed the look on his face, and patted him on the shoulder with a tired smile and a "they don't believe me, either," that took the wind out of his sails and cemented their friendship thereafter.
That was then.
Jacob knows the woods better than anyone, now; knows them so well, he's startled Sam and Paul and the others countless times by taking shortcuts that apparently have him popping up out of nowhere. Just a few minutes earlier than they expected, or even a few seconds, but it's enough to accidentally jumpscare people. Nobody can follow him when he's in a hurry, and the crows he's taken to feeding since that one time keep following him whenever they can. Everyone else thinks it's a coincidence, that it has nothing to do with those summers spent with one of the few children close to his age, but Jacob knows better.
Whatever weirdness Bella had, it rubbed off on him. He just considers himself lucky that it's for relatively benign stuff like birds gifting him bits of bone and teeth and claws, because really, it could've been so much worse.
And now one of Jacob's oldest friends is back, only now there's vampires and werewolves and had he not had an entire childhood to get used to her kind of chaos, he might have even been shocked.
Instead...well, seeing everyone react to Bella after having spent years saying “no I’m not making this up I swear, she legitimately does not believe in mountains” is the best kind of validation.
Sam and the others alternate between going “holy shit he wasn’t kidding”, “okay where’s the popcorn I think she broke that one vampire’s brain, this is free entertainment at its finest”, and he is just having a great time right now.
Fun fact: most interactions with the Volturi involve intimidation and shows of power and them going “oh look at how menacing we are, don’t put a toe out of line” immediately followed by the other party's “oh sure I’ll follow the rules please don’t kill me”.
When they see Bella, however…
There’s a lot of groaning and facepalming and “I thought we were done dealing with you little monsters— wait, people can actually leave that hellhole?” and “are you guys part of the Illuminat—HEY don’t insult my hometown, it’s awesome”.
Aro pinches the bridge of his nose and mutters darkly about containment breaches under his breath, and the Cullens are both very curious but also do not want to know.