Stupid sister, stupid brother, stupid bird, stupid invisible psycho and its stupid story…

  “Oh my, what happened to you?”

  Argh…

  “It was nothing. Please, have a seat and I’ll begin shortly.”

  “Was it an analphabet? Was it arrested?”

  “No, it wasn’t an analphabet and he’s probably laughing about this with my sister right now.”

  “She just asked a question.”

  “Yes, I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry!”

  But when someone asks you for the millionth time about your black eye and the answer’s as stupid as it gets, you tend to see everything red. I really had to slam that door on my face…

  “Well, everyone’s here and it’s 14 o’clock, so I’ll begin. I believe we can continue where we left off yesterday, but I’ll throw in a quick recap. One of our main characters, Yana, was thrown into a different world thanks to a shadowy electronic program, specifically designed to capture her for reasons we do not yet know. In this world, Yana met a hidanna Summoner named Jack, and during their adventure learned that he’s the result of an unfinished project to create a living weapon. Both Yana and Jack were then brought back to his world by people with essentially superpowers, and Jack started living with the Lonergan family. We finished our story with the knowledge that Sofia, one of the young ones that were watching their adventure, can form change Jack’s weapon, which she shouldn’t be able to do because they only respond to hidanna, and not to human beings.”

  “That’s a very helpful recap, thank you.”

  I do have some writing skills, not just copying what the Unknown sent me, no sir, not me.

  “How about you recap what happened to your eye before we continue where we left off?”

  How about no…

Life Changing Pranks

  In anyone’s lives, mine, yours, the person sitting next to you… There always comes a time when we inevitably question ourselves and our purpose. Is there more to our design than just working for an unclear goal? Profits? A nice TV? The cure for the flu? Some people are born and destined for greatness, people that we all know about and respect, but most of us do nothing more than leave a couple of toddlers behind to try and make a name for themselves instead.

  Then there are people like Sofia, who’s intrinsic nature means they are meant to make history, whether they want to or not.

  “Oh, so you were serious when you said yesterday she’s more important than what she seemed.”

  “Of course. I wouldn’t lie about something like this.”

  No, I’ve just lied about everything else.

  We’ll return to her during Carnival, a normal day in most of the world, a national holiday in Brazil, where they get in thongs and feathers and dance on the streets for everyone to see – it’s a really good show, actually - and the appointed freshman day in many of the world’s more traditional schools and colleges.

  “Those were great days, when we walked up to the freshmen and spray them with worms and paint and wrote some shit with glittering markers on their foreheads.”

  “And force them to throw yogurt at each other.”

  “Oh, that was so cool.”

  Yeah, it was alright.

  Anyway, it wasn’t something the entire student body was thrilled about, particularly the ones who couldn’t care less and were tricked to believe they had better things to do than find some costume to appease their peers.

  And so, before she knew, Sofia was one of the few 7th graders who hadn’t bothered to dress up as an animal of her choosing. Without realizing the implications of this infraction, she became a target for the pranks the older students had prepared that day. Only when she looked back and saw some of those bigger, scary boys with suspicious cans and an unfriendly glint on their eye that she started to consider that it had been dumb of her to disregard their orders.

  “Let’s go back inside,” she insisted, turning to her two friends. “We’ll look at the cards on the wall-”

  “Look, if they have a problem they can spill it out,” Nasser said before she could finish her sentence. “They don’t have the right to bully us.”

  “It’s a stupid tradition and we don’t want to participate,” Carlos finished.

  Both of her friends were boys from her year but in a different class, who shared her passion for trading cards. While Sofia had a lot of fun with them, playing with their decks or just chatting about the cartoons they all watched at home, sometimes their actions came across as blunt and without much thought put into them, as if they were trying to prove something everyone else already knew to be true.

  Refraining to give voice to her worries, Sofia could only hope the scary trio who tailed them would simply leave them alone. All the tables inside the students’ common room were busy and they weren’t allowed inside the classrooms during recess so, in order not to disturb the delicate balance of a trading card transaction, Carlos suggested they’d go behind the school grounds where a couple of forgotten table tennis tables were still perfectly usable, bathed by the warm sunlight of an early Spring morning, and with no other students in sight. Even if the table tennis tables were surrounded by lush bushes adorned with exquisite white flowers, going to such an abandoned corner of her school with three students from the 12th grade close by left Sofia a bit uneasy.

  As they put down their backpacks and prepared to peruse at each other’s binders for what they were looking for, the older students joined them, but for a while did nothing but stare at their stacks of coloured cardboard. Then, eager for some salt, the taller of the three boys swiped one of Sofia’s decks from the table. She turned around and tried to get it back almost without thinking, but he lifted his hand, putting the stack of cards out of her reach.

  “What, you want this back?” he asked with a smirk.

  “Y-yes, please,” Sofia said.

  “Give her the deck,” Nasser said, turning to him with Carlos, slipping in a little threatening tone.

  “What did they say? Did you hear anything?” asked one of the other students.

  “I dunno man, he ain’t a giraffe, I can’t hear a thing,” the one holding the deck answered, cracking open a laugh.

  “You’re just proving how dumb this whole thing is,” Carlos said.

  The spiky haired guy held his arms up, his smirk unwavering. “Chill out little dude, you aren’t into this, I get it.”

  “But you still have to pay for not doing as you were told,” the other student ended.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do. It’s the fucking rules, and you’ll fucking respect them.”

  It was the third student who had talked, bigger and lankier, but far more serious than his troupe, to the point of making Sofia gulp. Nasser, however, did not flinch.

  “No, I don’t have to fucking respect them. Following some stupid tradition everyone else does as an excuse to pick on us before you won’t be able to do it anymore is pointless and pathetic.”

  The fat guy eyed Nasser for a moment, with nothing but a blink, before deciding what to say next.

  “We’re still writing something on your girlfriend’s forehead.”

  “Wait, NO!”

  “Let her go!”

  In a blink of an eye the other two boys had seized Sofia and the third one approached them with a marker while Nasser and Carlos ran to stop them, but before anything else could happen they all froze at the sight of the restrained girl transforming into blue tips of light. And, before they could do anything to stop it, the tips mingled, multiplied and broke apart, growing as one to become something they could not have imagined in the far reaches of their minds.

***

  Why am I not the guy next door? To feel what he feels, to think about what he thinks, get a glimpse of his memories instead of the ones I know by heart? Check if his life is truly worse than mine? Some of us have had it bad, especially in the earlier stages of our lives, like me, for example, always getting picked on because… Well, let’s not go into that, it’s not the point of this meeting.

  And then there are people like Jack.

  You see, coming to this world he believed he could finally find refuge from his past, and he did. There were no ties between this place and Rujad until Doctor Swain arrived and, other than Christine’s randomly asked questions, there was little to remind him of what he had been through before.

  One more person had learned about his origin, but he had never pushed him to a place where he didn’t want to go, and Jack had grown to respect him quite a lot.

---

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  While he talked to David about his family and how he could find a home with them, someone knocked on the door of Sofia’s bedroom, and peeked inside.

  “May I come in?”

  It was a green-eyed man, with grizzled hair that had once been dark, just like David’s, wearing a neat navy-blue suit, shoes that reflected the ceiling light like jewels, and a trusting smile.

  “Guys, this is my dad,” David explained, waving his hand at him.

  “Please, call me Josh,” his eyes quickly shifted from his son to the Portuguese siblings, and rested intently on the hidanna. “You must be Jack, right?”

  He immediately turned to David and the glint in his eye, begging him not to panic, had exactly the opposite effect, as he jumped into a defensive position.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing, I-”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Jack turned at the suited man and his hand found his way to the sphere he had collected from Sofia.

  “Form change.”

  The Fonseca siblings traded worried glances and ran to the other side of the bed. Seeing a very real bladed weapon materialize behind the strange boy’s back, David jumped up and Josh pulled him behind him, raising his hands.

  “No, no, Jack, listen to me, we’re not here to hurt you!”

  “And you can’t, that’s not what I’m afraid of.”

  “Then what are you afraid of?”

  The answer almost leapt out of Jack’s lips, but he maintained enough control to stay quiet, staring at the grown man while he thought of another, no less true, answer.

  “I understand you’re scared; you don’t trust me, and you have no reason to,” Josh continued as he refused to talk. “I know you came from a difficult place, and this is how you learned to protect yourself. But you won’t need that here, not with us.”

  “Sounds too good to be true.”

  “But it is true. I have no way to make you believe in me, Jack. If you want nothing to do with us, I’ll step out of the way, you walk out this door and you’ll never see us again. But go out there in the streets and I guarantee you someone else will find you and send you through those same channels you want to avoid.”

  “He’s right,” David said getting out from behind his father. “Things in here are different.”

  “What’s in it for you?”

  “Nothing. Why should there be something for me?” Josh asked.

  “Because there always is.”

  “With hidanna. But we’re human,” David said. “We can show kindness without getting something in return.”

  The concept was so alien to him that Jack lowered his guard, trying to wrap his head around it. It just didn’t seem possible, not according to everything he had ever known. But his instinct, that primal gut that he relied on when his thoughts weren’t enough, was in sync with them, told him that they had to be trusted.

  Precisely because they weren’t like him.

  “That’s strange, though.”

  “What is?”

  “It doesn’t seem like Jack would agree to go with them so easily.”

  “Well, huh, inevitably he did.”

  They were so vague with what happened on her room, I had to make up that entire dialogue… I have no idea how they actually talked him into going with them, I just know they did otherwise nothing that follows or even what I already knew about him makes sense.

***           

  Shortly after the private jet touched down in London, Joshua Lonergan met with his wife and older daughter and had a long, closed-door conversation with them while David told Jack more about the rules of their world and what he could do with his already acquired skillset, pretending the conversation happening in parallel had nothing to do with them. Once they were done, the long, dark-haired young woman stormed out of the room, grunting in frustration, and the couple stepped outside to properly welcome Jack into their mansion.

  One of the rooms he found that they had only skimmed by on the tour was a large studio that had once been used for Christine to have private ballet lessons, with a wooden floor, a mirror covering an entire wall and a bar at hip-height covering another one. It was spotless, just like the rest of the house, but it smelled stale, as if it hadn’t been used for years other than by the household. In the Team Steel base, they had had much smaller, but similar practice rooms so he started using that room to stay in shape, only bringing his weapon with him when he was sure no one else was around that floor and it was rainy outside.

  There were a lot of things Kuchinja worked on both his Summoner students and his soldiers. Endurance, more often than not, meant running around the compound, sometimes for hours. Offense, unlike what you’d expect, never depended on the weapon each person deployed. It was a regime for the body itself, toning it to be efficient at taking down others even before the weapons came into play. And, finally, defence – reflexes and intuition to counterattack anything any future opponent would dish out at them, in life-or-death situations or otherwise. In most cases it required the use of partner or two, but Jack had only had such luck once – Kuchinja very quickly realized he was faster than anybody else, he started pitting him against five.

  Of course, on his own Jack wasn’t going to be able to do something of the sort again, nor did he want to. But he had some ideas of what he could do to stay sharp, and as he learned to navigate the online network of that world, he found other suggested training regimes to put to the test.

  During one of those, already a few months after he arrived, past the tame, tepid Summer of England and into the perpetually raining Fall, he failed to realize he was being watched.

  How? He didn’t let anything else slide, why couldn’t they be more specific here.

  Now that I think about it, though, it could’ve been because he was already starting to get sick here.

  Jack was just finishing drills when his eyes crossed the door and he found Christine there, leaning on the edge of the wall with her arms crossed, as if she had been there watching the entire time. Her deadline was coming up to present her completed “Perchance” album to her publisher, and she had been absent from the mansion for most of the month, so crossing eyes with her made him stop on his tracks and straighten his back.

  “Do you know how to dance?” she asked before he could ask what she was doing there in turn.

  “I’ve never tried,” he answered, slowly shaking his head and masking his confusion.

  She pushed herself from the door and walked to his side, producing her phone from her back pocket. She put on a fast-paced song, dictating rhythm with a pair of maracas. “Do as I do. Oh, relax, compared to that Muay Thai stuff or whatever you were doing this is child’s play.”

  She moved her feet in a square motion in sync with the maracas, and, looking down at them, he copied her. Then, keeping her arms close to her body, she started moving her shoulders, swinging them up and down, and he did the same. That had nothing to do with the type of music she made, and it was a very basic step, but when she told him to keep doing it and stepped back to look at him, her smile grew as she reached for her phone again and stopped the tune.

  “You’re a freaking natural…” she thought out loud as she waited for someone on the other side of the line to pick up. Jack stopped moving and her receiver picked up. “Yeah, Ruth? I just found our lead dancer for “Fighter”… Hang on,” she pulled her phone from her ear and pointed it at Jack just enough to take a picture of him. Ignoring his protesting, she sent it to her manager and put the phone on her ear again. “… oh, please, that’s nothing some makeup won’t fix… Exactly! He’s perfect for it… Yeah, I’ll bring him with me.”

  “Bring him where?”

  Ignoring him, she said goodbye to her manager and left the studio, yelling from a distance.

  “Won’t be nothing to worry about until the end of the year, just keep doing your thing.”

  “Wait, the lead dancer for Fighter during the “Perchance” World Tour was Jack?”

  “… I took inspiration from that dancer to write him, yes.”

  What a dumb fucking lie, holy shit.

  “He did look fierce, now that I think about it.”

  And they bought it? Don’t laugh, whatever you do, don’t laugh.

  As she had said, there was still a lot of work to do on the album itself and marketing components before they could even consider the details of the tour. But, as deals were closed and content had to be created for the fans, Christine started showing up more and more on the studio, demanding Jack stop his usual practice to teach him some other basics – pop oriented dance steps, and a handful of slow, ballroom steps that she claimed would be useful. She refused to go into details as to why, but he had worries of his own what stopped him from questioning her further. As Winter approached and the temperature dropped further, he found himself to be tired more often, weak and cold. He shrugged it off as not being used to the temperate weather of that foreign country, and kept pushing through his training, even if his chest ached at the end and breathing was difficult.

  As you might expect, his recklessness caught up to him, exactly when Christine decided to join forces with her manager to force full cooperation out of Jack for a videoclip they had planned. The studio was empty, so they went downstairs, chatting about the choreography they were working on as they made their way to one of the living rooms, facing the woods. Whenever he had nothing else going on, Jack would often sit at the large parapet of a higher window with Moonlight on his lap, gazing outside at the perpetual British rain. That day, they found him in that very spot, but the cat was nowhere to be seen and his eyes were closed.

  “He doesn’t look so bad up close,” Ruth said, squinting to get a better look at his thin, bony face.

  “Let’s wake him up.”

  She climbed up to the parapet and shook him by the shoulder, but Jack’s head hang to the side, and he didn’t move. Christine raised an eyebrow and took a hand to his forehead.

  “Oh, fuck, he’s burning up.”

  “Burning how?” Ruth asked, already reaching for her phone as she guessed what was going to happen next.

  “Call 999. Lenny! Carl!”

***

  “Why would he grow sick all of a sudden?”

  “Lots of different reasons. Let’s say, temperature dropping means your immune system becomes compromised, maybe he got wet practicing outside because he hadn’t used his weapon or worked with his other hidan for too long, he is in a different planet, which naturally has different viruses and things that makes us sick, and he was an experiment, so maybe he doesn’t have that good of an immunity to begin with.”

  “Yes, that would all make a lot of sense. Are you studying medicine, Mr. Dandelion?”

  “Oh, no, but I have a cousin who is, and she’s very diligent in telling us all about it.”

  A few days later David called Yana to tell her that Jack was down in the hospital with what the doctors called an atypical cold. Like any sensible friend would do, she promised to drop by as soon as she could and, once he heard of a friend of hers that was so ill, Yana’s new boyfriend agreed to join her.

  It saddened her, seeing the one who had risked his newfound freedom to save her, a lifetime ago, bedridden with serum on his arm. Jack didn’t so much as turn his head when they entered the room, but Yana imagined he had smelled them from a mile away.

  “Hey,” she said, once she was sure he could see her, with a cheering smile. “How are you feeling?”

  “Pretty fucking great,” he answered to the ceiling.

  “Wow, you’re a lot nicer than I expected.”

  Although Yana slapped his shoulder as a half-assed reprimand, Jack didn’t bother to look at the owner of that unfamiliar voice. He already knew what to expect and preferred to hate something without a face.

  “Jack, this is my boyfriend, Eric. I’ve already told you about him.”

  As he finally moved to his line of sight, Jack had to endure the dashing looks of an older high school student with a carved face framed with perfect, wavy locks of dark hair and ice coloured eyes.

  “How are you doing, man?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  He raised his hands in his defence. “It was just a question.”

  “Dumb fucking question.”

  “Oh, ok, Eric, why don’t you go and get us some Lyke?” Yana rapidly said before things could escalate further. He turned to her and merely gazed ahead for a moment, but ended up nodding and, after a kiss with Yana and a glare to Jack, left them alone.

  “What was that for?” Yana asked Jack, crossing her arms. “We just came for a visit, what’s with the attitude?”

  “They know.”

  Yana blinked back at him. “What?”

  “They know I’m not human.”

  “The doctors?” Once he nodded back, still staring at the ceiling, Yana took one good look around the room before deciding what to ask next. “What did you tell them?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why not? If they know more about you it might be easier for them to help.”

  “It doesn’t really matter anymore.”

  “What do you mean?” Yana asked, all warmth on her voice snuffed out in a heartbeat. “Are you just going to give up like that? After everything you’ve been through, you’re finally in a place where no one even gives a shit about your past or whatever, and you’re just going to drop dead and pretend it was all for nothing,” once she realized he wasn’t going to say anything else, Yana adjusted her shoulder bag. “Fine, I don’t give a shit either.”

  Storming out of the room, she couldn’t see how Jack put a hand over his eyes and cursed himself for his own pathetic reactions.