Chapter Text
Have you ever read a book or seen a movie and wondered: what if? What if it was all real? What if it wasn’t all made up solely for the reader’s entertainment? What if there really are wizards in some far away city in England, what if there are mermaids who can lure sailors to the lowest point of the ocean? I’ve often wondered, have often considered and pondered the possibilities of there being other beings that scientists could never explain.
I always knew I was different. Not because I was some kind of weird alien or the next Superman. I just instantly knew I was different the day I started kindergarten and arrived at school with my moms and all the other kids stared at us. The children didn’t understand this, they thought it was abnormal. They had grown up with a mommy and a daddy, while I hadn’t. For years, I remember being insulted for this by my classmates while the teacher wasn’t looking and I kept acting like I didn’t care much about it, but really at the end of the day when I got home, I would get there with tears rolling down my cheeks and my parents would console me. Looking back at it now, I find it funny how kids that young could be so cruel already. That sort of bullying went on for a little bit, but after a while, people grew out of it and realized their words wouldn’t impact me, but that was just the facade I put on. In reality, every word felt like a needle jabbed into my heart, and with the first few needles, it didn’t hurt me nor scar me, but the others did, some more than others. By that time, I was a big sister to a toddler named Mitchell, who went from wobbling on his lower limbs to starting school himself. And my curse got cast upon him, because he had to go through the same charade, children insulting our moms, making fun of him, and Mitchell couldn’t put up a disguise like I had. He would start sobbing at school and countless times the telephone rang with the teacher on the other line, telling one of my guardians to come pick their son up. I grew protective of him, engaging the big sister role.
As I started to grow up mentally and physically, constantly having to buy new clothes and shoes, I discovered a book called the Tales of Lynn, which blew me away completely and started my obsession with fantasy and everything surrounding it. I used to stay up until the late hours of the night during the weekends, sneakily reading books I found at the school library that just had the word fantasy somewhere in the title. Most of the time though, those books weren’t much help and just talked about the characteristics of fantasy when what I wanted to know was if there were humans who had powers, who could fly or turn invisible. When my mom, Aurora, told me to look it up online, I typed a few words into the search bar and tons of results popped up before my eyes. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that people could make up anything online, so I sucked it all up, every piece of information fueling my curiosity and excitement. I talked about it with this girl who had to sit next to me at school and she seemed to want to escape me, like she was trapped prey. Let’s just say we never really clicked. It’s when I saw a lonely girl in the schoolyard reading the Tales of Lynn that I freaked out and walked over to her immediately. Long story short, we became best friends and we would discuss multiple theories we had read online about super humans. One fateful day though, my mom popped our huge bubble by telling us the truth: people could invent stuff online, they could invent having seen someone fly or seen someone dissolve into thin air in front of them. I was stunned and I finally realized that my childhood fantasies would never happen. And that’s where my story started, down this rabbit hole I can’t get out of.