Chapter Text
Hello, everybody! My name is Ninten Calloway, and I live half a mile north of the small town of Podunk, which is honestly a pretty lame place compared to all the other places I’ve seen on my recent adventure, such as Merrysville, Spookane, Ellay, Youngto—Oh, sorry, I had better explain the whole “adventure” thing before I get lost describing everywhere I’ve traveled to.
Well, I think instead of briefly describing my journey, I should tell it to you, in bits and pieces at a time. So, get ready to hear the totally epic and definitely not boring story of how I beat up a floating doll, saved a girl from a cemetery, defeated thousands of vicious zoo animals, traveled to a magical realm, forgot a forgotten man, fought robots to retrieve a rocket for a nerd, returned a hat to a girl with magical abilities, drove in a tank, killed a dragon, learned how to teleport from a telepathic baby, fought aliens and millions of buffalo in a swamp, defeated an entire gang, climbed up a mountain with the gang leader, got saved by the previously mentioned nerd in a tank from a giant robot, found my great grandfather’s gravestone and learn a song from it, and finally destroyed the evilest force ever!
Okay, so maybe I exaggerated a few things about my journey above, but the majority of that is what actually happened. And, you’re about to hear a much more descriptive version of my life in a story that I am about to tell.
You already know I was born in Podunk. I have two little twin sisters, Mimmie and Minnie, who are identical besides their hair color—Mimmie has pink hair, Minnie has red hair. Both of their hair colors are naturally black, like mine, but there was a certain accident that happened a few years ago that changed that, and I’ll get into that later. I also have a mom and dad, but my dad isn’t even around most of the time, always busy with one work trip or another.
On the morning that changed my entire life, I had accidentally slept late, but I was immediately jerked out of my sleep by...an earthquake. I leapt out of bed and dove underneath my desk in the corner of my room, when I noticed that something was wrong. My lamp was unplugged and in the middle of the room, when it should have been next to my bed. More than that, the lamp was floating in midair.
Quite honestly, this should have been expected, but I certainly didn’t think something would happen inside my house; most everything happened closer to the cemetery or zoo. For the past few weeks, strange phenomena had been occurring all around Podunk—people becoming almost crazy and violent and not thinking straight, animals turning vicious and constantly leaping at me when I walked onto the path into town, zoo creatures gaining unusual strength and breaking down the fence to the zoo completely, and zombies roaming around the graveyard.
No one was sure why these things were happening, but the mayor assured the town that everything was going to be completely fine, multiple times, in fact, though he had stopped saying those things after some people in town actually started turning into zombies.
The most likely explanation was that it had something to do with my psychic powers, my abilities, or magic, or whatever else you want to call it. I’ve been able to use them since I was born—bend spoons, use telepathy on animals and other small creatures, make myself temporarily have a small shield, and heal minor wounds. These powers also changed my sisters’ hair color, and permanently, too. Technically, the powers are called PSI, short for psionics, and a subcategory for the more offensive ones are called PK, or psychokinesis.
All of my PSI was curative, defensive, or “other,” as labeled by my great grandfather, George, in his journal documenting psychic abilities and a few other various topics. George, according to my mother, had mysteriously disappeared one day with his wife, Maria, and when he returned, he barely talked to anyone, was rarely seen by the public, and buried himself in his studies. When Mom taught me about him, I had been intrigued by all of the mysteries of where he had been and how he knew about PSI, and how I had somehow gotten it. Because neither Mimmie nor Minnie, and certainly not Mom, had ever shown any signs of having the power. Anyways, PSI definitely could be the reason behind the strange happenings lately, and it was the best explanation for it all.
I bolted towards my closet, threw open the door, grabbed my trusty baseball bat and sent the lamp flying across the room. Pieces shattered everywhere, some hitting me and causing small scratches, but I mentally pictured them healing, and what could’ve been permanent scars faded away. The lamp was defeated, but the earthquake certainly wasn’t.
When I stepped out into the hallway, I could hear my sisters screaming for help inside of Mimmie’s room. They were hugging each other, huddled against the wall together as one of their dolls floated towards them slowly.
“Ninten, do something!” screeched Minnie as she trembled, whipping her head towards me to get my full attention, which she really didn’t need to, because she already had it. The doll zipped diagonally, left and right, getting closer to me every second. I swung at it with my bat, but the doll simply sped right at me and smashed against my arm—hard. There was probably no chance that I could ever hit this doll with simply a bat.
Closing my eyes, I began to focus all of my energy on the doll, centering my mind until everything around me seemed nearly overwhelming with power. Then I let it all release. Though I couldn’t see it, I could feel a wave of nighttime air crashing through the room, knocking the floating doll unconscious onto the floor.
Almost right after the doll was defeated, the earthquake stopped, nothing out of place, no sign that there had ever been anything wrong. All of a sudden, a melody began to play, repeating itself multiple times, until I tracked the sound back to the doll, which quickly became quiet. It was only four words long, with five simple yet rather memorable notes. Take a melody...
Why was the doll creating that tune? Could it have been my PSI? It seemed rather unlikely, considering that I had used my paralysis ability many times before, rendering the target unable to do anything more than breathe and blink. I didn’t remember reading anything about musical PSI in my grandfather’s journal, but now was as good a time to check as any. I hurried down the stairs and into the living room of my house, where my mother was soothing Mimmie and Minnie as they attempted to calm down.
“Oh, Ninten, why do you think this is happening to our house?” Mom asked worriedly, leaving my sisters to comfort themselves. She drowned me in a relieved hug. “I know strange things have been happening all over the town, but why our house, and why hasn’t it happened before now?”
“That’s what I want to try and find out,” I told her. “Have you seen George’s journal?”
My mother walked over to the bookshelf and grabbed the journal off the shelf, setting it into my outstretched palm. “Ninten, I know that this is more than a boy like you should be able to handle, especially at your age, but you’re right. You could be the only one to ever be able to find out what’s going on, and, whatever it is, it has to relate to your powers. I think that you need to go into town and talk to the mayor. Go explore town and do your best to fix whatever is wrong.”
I almost stumbled back in astonishment. Leave home? Venture into town for a long period, possibly out of Podunk, to find out more about the strange happenings and maybe discover the meaning of my abilities and why I have them. “Wait, mom, are you saying that you’re going to let me just...leave you here? Are you and Mimmie and Minnie going to be alright without me?”
By now, my sisters were each planted on one side of mom, both smiling encouragingly. Everybody in my family seemed perfectly fine with me leaving them, but was I? For all I knew, I wouldn’t even be leaving town if the phenomena was only here in Podunk, but it definitely could be spread throughout the entire country of Eagleland, and even across the world. But if I didn’t go and try and stop this, then things could get so much worse.
“Okay,” I said with a nod. “I think I’m ready.”
Mom made me promptly go to bed with a dinner of prime ribs, something she usually prepared for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, so apparently me leaving was a very special occasion. I watched the sunlight fade away and vanish from outside my window, and without a lamp, the room was engulfed in complete darkness, left alone with my thoughts, and those were racing with ideas, questions, and concerns for my journey ahead, however long that would soon prove to be.
The next morning, I dressed in a blue and yellow horizontal striped shirt with a red cap Dad had bought for me when I was just an infant, and a red scarf that came from around that same time. I waved goodbye to my family as I walked around the corner of trees, and then everything that I had known all my life, everything that was truly familiar, seemed to vanish.
After walking for a few minutes in silence, I approached the Lindgren household, where my childhood friend, Pippi Lindgred, resided. Surprisingly, her house was drastically smaller than my house, though I only have two more family members than her. Pippi was an only child, and we had been friends since she arrived at Podunk four years ago, in the late autumn. Mom had taken me over to greet the new neighbors, and Pippi and I immediately found we had a shared interest in exploring, despite the two year age gap between us.
Throughout that winter, and for every season until the beginning of last year, we had explored every inch of the woods north of the house, and we would always beg our mothers to take us to the zoo, where we ran around looking at all of the animals until it was dark, laughing and having fun.
And then, one day, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t seen Pippi in over a month—hadn’t been thinking about her or anything. We had somehow, at some time, drifted apart from each other, with both of us growing up and becoming less childish by the day. I didn’t go over to her house anymore, she never knocked on my door, we barely talked, and that was only to wave a short hello and goodbye when we passed each other in town, but we never made more than a minute or two of conversation, and, even then, there was a chill of awkwardness in the air that couldn’t be ignored.
As I passed Pippi’s house now, I focused my eyes straight ahead, not wanting to feel any sort of guilt of not talking to Pippi if she was on her front step where she normally was, simply by pretending to be distracted by my thoughts. What surprised me, however, was glancing over to see Mrs. Lindgren pacing nervously back and forth on the porch of the house. “Ninten!” she called out to me.
Stifling a small groan, I jogged across the unkempt lawn to her, desperately hoping that she wasn’t going to ask me to hang out with Pippi or anything. “Hi, Mrs. Lindgren, is something the matter?” I wondered. “Because I’m kind of on this mission right now, and—”
“Ninten, I need you to help me!” she exclaimed. “I haven’t seen Pippi in ages, and the mayor hasn’t been receiving anybody since people began turning into zombies a month ago! I know it’s a lot to ask of you, but would you mind looking for Pippi if you’re headed into town?”
“Um...” I bit my lip while pondering what to do. Obviously, Pippi was my friend, or at least she used to be, but wouldn’t taking this request cause me to get very sidetracked from what I was supposed to be doing? Well, then again, I didn’t really have an objective of what to do right now, only to figure out what was going on. Maybe Pippi could even give me some fellow explorer’s insight on her opinion. I snapped out of my thoughts to see Mrs. Lindgren staring at me for an answer, and I met her eyes. “Yeah, of course I can help look for Pippi.”
“Oh, thank you so much, Ninten,” she said, breathing a sigh of relief. “You truly are an exceptional boy, and I’ll be sure to pay you some other time for your efforts, even if you don’t find Pippi.”
“That’s really not necessary,” I started to say, but was cut off once again by the sound of the front door shutting, and I was standing alone on the porch. “Okay...” I mumbled to myself, heading out of the yard and back onto the path once again.
Now I really did have an objective for what I needed to do on my adventure, if you can even call it that, especially this early on. There’s going to be so much more action happening soon, I promise, but for now, I’d like to stay close to home.