The year is [REDACTED].
A teenage kid by the name of Douglas is out on the town for the evening, having just finished attending a party at the condo down the street. His parents aren’t home, but he knows they’ll be back soon.
They always had their reasons to be out of town every Tuesday and Friday, and the only reason he could figure was they were some kind of cool secret agents. He swore their secret was safe with him long ago, as long as they brought home some “cool gadgets” (a word he picked up in his early elementary days) from their adventures, and quote, “as long as they weren’t bad things from bad guys”.
As good parents would, they humored Douglas occasionally, with trinkets like puzzles that claimed to be “impossible to solve”, a deck of Dos (which drove him to laughing tears when he got it), and other things you’d pick up at the local drugstore when you’re running late on someone’s birthday but only care about them just enough to get them some kind of gag gift to make them think you cared.
Tonight was a Friday night. No school tomorrow. He’d go shopping with his father the next day, and help him pick out dinner for the next week, and he was hoping this would be one of those weekends he got to pick out a Kids Cuisine or some Hot Pockets. Simple as he seemed on the exterior, Douglas was quite the enigma on the inside.
As he approached the last turn on the block, Douglas stopped. There was a strange car in the drive, and not strange in the “out of place in the neighborhood” kind of way, the kind that makes you wonder what company decided their mascot was going to be a motor vehicle that somehow remains street legal, like the Oscar-Mayer Wienermobile. This car was, at least, not a piece of ground meat in an aluminum facade. Indeed, the vehicle was in the shape of a perfect sphere, with obvious exceptions made so the tires would be on the ground, with a pristine chrome finish.
Curious, Douglas got closer before hearing the screech of tires. He turned around to see a car speeding down the road, but he couldn’t get a good look at it before it sped directly into the sphere on wheels. Just when it couldn’t get any worse, the cars violently exploded, sending scraps of scorching-hot metal and rubber flying everywhere. It was a miracle Douglas didn’t get hit too badly, but the heat of the explosion definitely left him with some sort of hyperthermia. People began emerging from their homes, looking at the explosion in shock, some quickly dialing the proper authorities to help the wreckage. Despite his normally eager to help mindset, Douglas knew this situation was dangerous… but then he recognized the vehicle responsible for the collision.
It was his dad’s car.
No, no, Dad!, he thought, probably aloud, probably not. He couldn’t hear anything due to the explosion. He ran over to try and pry open the passenger side doors, nothing. They were locked. The airbags had popped. The smoke was too thick to see his father’s fractured form in the driver’s side seat, but the sinking feeling he felt… he knew it was there, wasn’t it, some cruel twist of fate would surely at least let the poor man go quickly. There was no smell of blood, the ash and smoke and leaking oil made sure to cover it well.
Douglas remained at the car’s side until the police arrived, with some members of a local fire brigade and an ambulance shortly behind them. Somehow, they believed that the sobbing, crying child wasn’t a suspect, and beckoned the fire team to investigate further.
No bodies were recovered. There wasn’t anything in either vehicle, apparently - nothing worth disclosing, they said, other than a cinderblock on the gas pedal. Douglas, meanwhile, had heard nothing from either of his parents. No note. Nothing. He was released after questioning, given a ride back home, took the key from under the mat, and went inside.
The house looked completely different. It was just like the exterior of the car, chrome and glowing and humming eerily. The lights in the house glowed a harsh, industrial white-blue, and some radio noise came from upstairs. Nervously, Douglas took a look around. Household appliances were still the same, everything was where it should have been, except for the few things that seemed to be replaced. The couch and coffee table were a rounded desk, like something you’d see a receptionist at, the TV was much fancier and displayed multiple local news stations, all clashing in audio to join the jungle that was the home’s noise. He couldn’t stand it, so he went to turn it off, then upstairs to hear the radio.
That’s when he heard the doorbell ring. Everything suddenly shimmered, with a strange, green glow, and suddenly, everything was normal again. Was he hallucinating?
The doorbell rang again.
And again.
Douglas remained completely still.
It rang a few more times, before stopping. Douglas decided to just… go to bed, rather than face who or whatever was outside.
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The next morning was Saturday. Douglas couldn’t believe that it was only the next day. Everything that had happened felt like it took so long, but he was awake now and the calendar did indeed confirm it was Saturday, and the clock told him it was almost noon. Outside, rain lightly fell. It would have been the perfect day to shop, he thought. It’s nature’s car wash…, and then the weight of everything that had happened the night before hit him again like the car crash itself.
The doorbell rang again. Douglas went and answered it.
No way, it couldn’t be… his dad? His mom?! They looked exhausted and fairly upset. Not saying anything, they came inside and headed up into their bedroom. Douglas could garner no response, and when he tried to get into their bedroom, the door was locked.
That didn’t matter too much to him. His parents were alive and safe, he should be ecstatic about this! Celebrating! He wasn’t an orphan! Both of his parents were alive and well, and they certainly didn’t know he knew their big secret. Well, that was okay. He’d talk to them about it when they were ready.
Without any warning, the door slammed shut, the blinds closed, and everything went dark, before flashing that same green and going back to the strange, chrome interior. But this time was different. Douglas noticed that the door to his own room upstairs was ajar, and being the naturally curious young man he was, he went to check it out.
Strangely enough, what he found wasn’t unlike his own room, though his bed was a workshop table with a bunch of mechanical parts and blueprints strewn around, his desk was some sort of manufacturing table, and there were some kind of skeletons in his closet.
Taking a look at one of the blueprints, he noticed some strange text on it, something along the lines of “Blurring the lines of fact and fiction,” written out in… Club Penguin PSA text? He didn’t remember being fluent in that - the site had shut down a long time ago, and all he knew about it was from the cheap fiction novels he’d picked up when he was younger and wanted to read a lot about penguins, “the world’s best-dressed wedding guests nature has to offer.”
Strangely enough, blurring the lines of fact and fiction was right, as this appeared to be blueprints for something he recognized from another relic of ancient history - this was a Springlock suit blueprint, but designed by someone with modern technology and a lot of common sense for safety, and the back held a rather long list of safety features that modern tech allowed it to have, like life-sign readings, optimized scanners, and even some kind of super-strength if the suit worked in harmony with a human wearer or endoskeleton. This… would make a bangin’ halloween costume, if it was built right, he thought. But then they’d all think I was some kind of furry. He pondered for a moment, before figuring, It’d be true anyways.
Now, he didn’t quite have an understanding on a grasp of time, but he figured that the instructions weren’t any different from putting a ham radio back together, just a lot more complicated and with dangerous implications, should he mess it up. He thought back to his childhood idol, Nelson Kodak, and their incredible mechanical prowess. And they were only a janitor! If they could do it, he could do it, too, even if he was only fourteen. He could follow instructions! He’d always been the oddball who followed the lego sets’ instruction manuals to the letter, even with the filler blocks nobody would notice nor care about (he certainly did). Most of the moving parts were already here, anyways, so it wouldn’t be too different to what Hiro did in Big Hero 6 with Baymax. Though the version they were building wasn’t quite his size, the suit seemed to accommodate fairly well for that, if he made the necessary adjustments… now he was really getting excited to get that set up.
It took him the entire day, an entire sleepless night, and into the next before he finished. The room seemed to provide him with everything he’d need - food, water, a cot for napping… it was strange, to say the least.
When he had finally finished, he went to go tell his parents about his cool new toy - when he realized there was no door to leave through. How did he even get inside? Where were the windows? Was he even home anymore?
Nervous, now, he decided to load up the suit’s storage compartment (it really did have everything) with all the blueprints and scrap it could safely carry with him inside before putting it on. Like clockwork, the thing started up, giving him vision with the suit’s eyes acting as cameras as he piloted it like any old blow-up costume - walking normally. It was loud and uncomfortable at first, but he got comfortable with some adjustments made internally. It was like piloting a really small mech, like those scenes from Power Rangers where they got two guys in costume to duke it out (cartoonishly) on a model scale set of some landscape. The cameras, however, let him see things he could not see with his own eyes… his own footprints around the room created a fairly noisy mess to look at, but there were shoeprints that weren’t his own that seemed fairly old. They led right into the closet… and there wasn’t any reason not to follow. Gathering all of his courage (and a snack for the road), Douglas sighed, leaving behind his room for whatever skeletons really were in the closet.
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It had been about four years since that fateful night, give or take, and Dave smiled as he reminisced on his starting day - the lines between fact and fiction were blurred to fit his fiction and his facts. Today, that line was so far blurred that his first code name became his legal one - a side effect of making his past a work of fiction he remained emotionally distant from. His parents never knew he existed, and he had forgotten all about them, other than that night. That was the one memory he wanted to keep. He didn’t want to be an emotionless war machine like in all those movies he enjoyed mentally referencing, though - he made friends outside the company and eventually decided to take a vacation with all those days he’d saved up over his hard-working time there, opting to bring along a friend for the ride.
The hotel he’d booked in particular was nice and backwoodsy, perfect for getting away from the neon glare and city fanfare of urban living. Acid never particularly liked being in all the hustle and bustle, and this place would hopefully get rid of the bags under her eyes that he assumed were under there. Room 45. Fourth floor. Nice and high up, perfect for getting away from the noise without getting too close to people in penthouses.
Letting his car park itself after he removed his luggage from the trunk, he took it all in for a moment, his attire perfectly inconspicuous and mismatched to look like a tourist that had never been, well, a tourist. Adidas pants, a hawaiian shirt, his prized Lightning McQueen crocs he had had on that fateful day (faithfully restored to his current shoe size), and his Inspector Gadget-inspired fedora full of little things that’d constitute anything from party tricks to self-defense and beyond, just in case anything bad happened on their extended vacation.
Surely nothing bad was going to happen on this vacation, he figured, as he went through the doors right as he was mentioned.
“Really? Dave? I thought you said this was the best place to unwind?” Acid inquired of him as he entered, just as the front desk worker took one look at his outfit and seemingly put him on every watch list known to mankind.
Casually, he responded, “You said you didn’t really like vacations cause it's too much hustle and bustle, right? So I picked a more out of the way hotel…”
… and the rest was history.