#duFu
I might as well just get on with the introduction. Hello, everybody reading this, My name is Brooklyne, for short just Brooke, and the most interesting fact about me is that I’m adopted. No, not as an insult, just adopted, along with my twin brothers Leo and Xavier.
We were playing basketball in the front yard when the first one came. Nobody knew that we were adopted, and the subject popped up in the middle of the game.
“You don’t look much like your parents, you know.” Leo answered for me.
“Adopted.”
“What, all three of you? Or just one or two?” I rolled my eyes.
“All three of us.” I answered. “Have you got a problem with that?”
We carried on playing in uncomfortable silence. It was new, you know. Chip had only moved into our neighbourhood in the past few months. It was weird talking about it, and that gave Xavier the chance to grab the basketball and shoot, making us win 5-4.
The boys sank into the small couch on our patio, and I sat in an egg-shaped hanging chair.
“Man, you guys are so going to get into the basketball team.” Chip said. I coughed, and he glanced at me.
“I mean, you two are so gonna get into the basketball team.” People always forget me because my triplets are boys. Everyone calls me ‘Tomboy’. We went inside, and Chip went back to his own house. We were eating dinner when Mum called from upstairs to get the mail. We looked at each other. Who was to get it? After a round of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Leo ran to get it. There were three letters, each addressed to one of us. I wondered who it was from. I tore mine open, just to see the words imprinted on the page:
You are one of the Missing.
#Yao
I had peacefully finished off my soup and had prepared for pie when Brooke rushed in, almost tackling me and Leo, waving papers in her hand with small print on them. Mom and Dad looked on angrily as a bowl of soup spilled, knocking noodles, chicken, carrots, lettuce, and broth onto their laps. Muttering a quick apology, Brooke grabbed me, and tried to pull me off my chair, but I fiercely held on. When she let me grab a slice of peach pie, I let her pull me towards her room, with Leo following, chugging down his soup and gulping down slice after slice of leftover banana bread.
“What’s the matter?” I inquired after she had shut the door and locked it.
“Yeah, I was eating,” Leo glared at her through his giant loaf of dessert. Brooke promised to explain everything, but she told us we had to go first downstairs, and make an excuse so that they wouldn’t notice anything. Now, I was even more confused! Mom? Dad? Why couldn’t they hear about this? If Brooke had gotten a boyfriend and was trying to ask us about what boys like, sure, but that didn’t mean our parents couldn’t eavesdrop! On second thought, I wouldn’t be a very great help on couple relationships anyway.
As soon as we were downstairs, cleaned up the mess, and promised we were not doing anything that we shouldn’t be doing, Mom let us into the den in the pretense of playing video games, but not before she checked Brooke to make sure she wasn’t feeling ill (she is, just in the mental format).
As I slid in the disk for the triple-player Doomsday Midnight, Brooke fell into the couch, taking a swig of Gatorade, something she referred to as both a remedy for when she wasn’t feeling her best, and also the god of drinks. Leo took the controller, handed me one, and offered Brooke one, but she declined, saying she wasn’t really up for any gaming, and still was thinking about the mysterious papers. She didn’t say a word as the game opened up, and we began to jog through the dark castle, hunting demons and giant spiders with our automatic rifles and grenades. She refused to give up anything as we unlocked the new level and defeated the main foe. She didn’t even murmur as the sounds of zombies burning filled the den, our obtained flamethrowers shining bright in the dark room.
Finally, when we had surpassed our previous kill count, Brooke suddenly screamed out,
“WE’RE ONE OF THE MISSING!!!”
We both turned around to look at her, the spilled cherry gatorade on her shirt, her expression of half rage, half intimidated. At that moment, five demons suddenly jumped off the wall and began tearing at us with their claws and teeth. We suddenly got back into gaming mode, flashing our flamethrowers and watching as the horde grew and grew…and then, our flamethrowers ran out. Our grenades had all been chucked, now, we only had bolt-action sniper action rifles and a pump shotgun that jammed whenever we fired a single shot.
Using it all, our fist, our omega burst of radiation, our rifle shots, we managed to make it out…only to encounter a Shuriden, one of the ancient, weapon-wielding ultra demons that could also control zombies. The only way to kill them was to pump some lead into their mouths. Using my special move, I ribbed his jaws apart, carefully avoiding the sharp teeth, and then Leo jamming a collected Molotov Cocktail down his throat. In a flash of sparks, the monster exploded, but we had forgotten one key element: Cocktails tend to burn violently, thus often making those within a ten-feet radius burn to death.
After the keynotes of death, we all turned around to view Brooke. She was staring straight-ahead at the football sitting on the table. We shook her, trying to get her attention, but she waved us off, and refused to say anything more. Apparently, “We are one of the missing” was all we had to work with. The next day, when we were at school, Brooke wasn’t herself. She hardly goofed around, didn’t threaten to punch the boys who said she couldn’t shoot a three-pointer (and also didn’t shoot ten in a row for their gawking eyes), didn’t act up when it came to dissecting frogs, and didn’t even attempt to build a statue of a naked something from her mountain of mashed potatoes and peas and meatloaf.
That day on the ride home on the bus, it was the usual: try not to die, avoid being the victim of the chocolate milk-pouring jerks, or get bullied around by the eighth graders. Brooke didn’t say anything on the whole ride home, even though we had intentionally chosen seats next to her so we might squeeze some information out of her, but….nothing. She didn’t act out, but quietly worked on her math homework, something so not, well, Brookey! And then a wave of emotion suddenly came over me, inundating me with one thought: What if it has to do with our adoptions?
Of course, no! Ha! Imagine that, that had been a funny thought. That had nothing to do with anything…right?
[Please ignore this gap, there were some spacing problems that had to be overcome]
#Bai
“You are one of the missing.” What was it supposed to mean, anyway? The missing what? The missing person? The missing piece? Why was Brooke so upset about it anyway? It was probably just a prank, a prank on us Year 9 students who had recently joined this school – there was probably nothing to worry about anyway. Surely nothing could go wrong. However, knowing Brooke, I knew that something had to be wrong. The strange thing was – all three of us had been adopted, all three of us had been given notes. But surely that could not have been the reason? Well, my analysis has proven: Different skin colour, different eye colour, different clothes, different gender, different family, different street to live on, same school (but no one else has received a note). The only other case I could have thought of would have been the fact that we lived in the same house, but why would anyone want to target three completely innocent children? More investigation was needed. Perhaps there would be some kind of safe in the basement that would at least give us a clue of what was happening? After calling Xavier and Brooke over, I had to try some kind of combination code. I suspected a birthday would be somewhat correct, and thus I tried mine first: 03122010, which was correct. Strangely enough, it was mine, not the others. But the note inside said only one thing.
“Xavier Skidmore, Brooke Skidmore and Leo Skidmore. 071746282943. James of VMWEDU department of the FBI (coded for the security of the country – definitely has no connection to education).” The note somehow seemed suspicious, even though it was clearly not. We had to check upon this James, and see who he was and why he was connected to us three. After contacting our parents, who had no idea of the matter – yet who could have placed the message in the safe and left it for us – had agreed to try and find out who our birth parents were. After dialling 071746282943 and speaking to a kind-hearted Receptionist, we were allowed to visit the FBI some days later.
The day had finally come, the day to visit the FBI. The plan was to try and lead the agent out of the room and to search it for any documents that could possibly be anyhow useful to us, as we could definitely try and work out what was happening for ourselves. As we entered, Xavier was given a bottle of Hill Frost, his favourite drink (he had drunk 2 litres at his ninth birthday), and we were ready to enter.
dufu
(bai you idiot. we are triplets. triplets=3 siblings who are born on the same day. smh🙄)
I was the one to step in first, even though I was the youngest of our trio. Inside the room was some tall guy. Like, tall, tall. 6″4, maybe? He was broad-shouldered and stared at me sinisterly. I backed out of the room, my palms covered in a sheen of sweat. I would not like to meet THAT guy in a fight. He’d probably crush me like I would do with my empty Coke can. Oof. I went back out and signalled for them to come. There were three chairs, which Leo, Xavier and I sat in. I gripped the underside of the chair as this James guy began talking.
I shivered at his voice. It was so… honeyed. Well, I guess you would say, well, Brooklynne, isn’t that good? No. It was the voice a cat would use before killing a fledgling. Falsely honeyed, but no mistaking the deathly tone. And I was stuck in his gaze, his piercing gaze, so… curious but deadly. I spent the whole time staring into his eyes, not taking note of anything else he said.
While I was daydreaming, my brothers were working. Xavier had thrown up from the Hill’s Frost and had heard something about a file. Leo had snapped a few pictures on his phone, but most of them were blurs and could not be interpreted. But we managed to figure out most of the words. There was a ‘survivors’ list and a ‘witnesses’ list. And, at the bottom of the list, cropped, but legible, was Brooklyne, Leo and Xavier Skidmore.
#Yao
We were all back at our house, Mom and Dad cooking pasta and meatballs while we tried to decipher what we had just found. It was strange, how everything was supposed to fit together perfectly like a puzzle. We had one piece, we didn’t have it all.
“How about we make a list? We can detail what we know, and what we don’t know,” Brooke suggested, punching her wall in frustration.
What we do know:
Our births are extremely mysterious. Our parents adopted us.
As for the what we didn’t know, the list took up a whole page. Within two minutes, Brooke had gotten frustrated to such an extent that she grabbed the paper, whirled it into a crumpled ball, and then chucked it at her Space Ranger figurine a few meters away. The toy had great value, because it had been made in the 60s, and was worth approximately 6,000 dollars. However, being the figurine nerd he was, Leo had known this information for a very long time, but he had never shared it with Brooke before, as he wanted to keep it a secret until he revealed it to her for her thirteenth birthday.
When dinner was called, we were all rather unhappy, as we hadn’t really gotten anything from the pictures Leo had taken. We knew something was amiss, but what? Our parents probably weren’t involved in it; they were so kind and loving, but was the FBI? How about the CIA? Was it aliens? Some sort of terrorist organization? Trafficking? There were many questions, and a lot had gone unanswered.
After pasta, which, by the way, was pretty good, we had to try and figure out what the list of names were. The papers we were looking at had a list of names, enigmatic names that probably meant nothing. But to us, it meant everything.
I quickly organized all of the papers and began to take notes as Brooke called the numbers that were listed. Normally, Brooke would receive an empty signal, and some answered it, but the minute Brooke described who she was, their reply took form in hanging up. However, one girl did answer it. Her name was something along the line of Triera? Trara? I didn’t know, but she reprimanded us about the fact that we had disturbed her date. I just wanted to go to bed, and she was talking about dates? I slammed the phone down for Brooke.
The next day, after a quick snack, we all decided to call the numbers again. Maybe we’d have some luck and someone could tell us a bit more information. There were a few more people who answered us this time. Some of them told us more about themselves. Because we already knew their names, they knew we weren’t strange stalkers, but they would only tell us they were all near the age or at thirteen. Strange coincidence!
Brooke was exhausted, and so was I. Leo was munching on a muffin, trying to daze out the many thoughts circulating through his head.
We all had no lead, and we had spent more time downstairs in the basement than actually upstairs. We slept in sleeping bags and watched videos all downstairs, with only minimum time spent in the kitchen and living room.
The fact was still there that all the names of the kids we had called were around thirteen. That was strange. Were the sheets just based on age? Or…was this a clue?
#Bai
As of the second day, we just messed around, trying to call those that were survivors. No such luck came, no such possible happiness of a success. As a result, I just enjoyed my time at school.
It was first through history that the school day started with. It was certainly tortuous, for the time went on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about this silly old topic about kings and queens of different countries such as the United Kingdom (some kind of Henry, who had seven wives, or was it five?) and this crazy queen of France, Marie Antonniete, was it, who said something about cake? It was all rather chaotic.
And then came Maths. This subject was mainly about algebra, about the factorisation of different combinations of sums of different powers, the factorisation of different numbers and how to work them out efficiently, and how long it took us to calculate simple calculation problems without the use of a calculator, and a times table competition. However, during this lesson I had a think about the witness list, for that was the only one we hadn’t checked yet, with one name on it — Angela Dupre. Now, this was beginning to become suspicious, if we could call her and work our what was happening, then it would be more evident what had happened thirteen years ago, if that was the time this strange thing happened. This could be incredibly beneficial to us, as we would know exactly what happened. Surely this would work?\
dufu
In the middle of Math, a ball of paper hit me in the head. I rubbed the spot it had hit. Ouch. I turned around. Leo was at the desk behind me, looking smug as ever. When my gaze met him, he flicked his head back around and signalled to open it. He looked like a right fool.
“Brooklyne, we all know your brother is amazing, but you can’t be staring at him for the whole lesson.” Mr Finn gave me a stern glance. The class sniggered. I felt my face flushing red, and I shot a death glare at Leo. I was getting good at those. He backed up with an “I didn’t do anything” look”. I turned back to the ball. It said Angela DuPre, 0998 7865 301, resend to Xavier. I scrunched it in a messy ball and threw it at Xavier when Mr Finn wasn’t looking. It hit Chip in the shoulder blade, and I signalled for him to throw to Xavier, who was to his right.
At recess, the fun started. I grabbed my phone, squirted my hands with sanitiser and ran out. I dialled the number on the paper and waited. We were in the girls’ locker rooms, all squished up in one toilet cubicle. I heard a voice on the other end of the phone.
“Hello? Who is this?” We decided to lay everything down. We told her how we were adopted, about the list, everything. Then she freaked out. She started hyperventilating, and she shut down the call and blocked us. Damn it. We snuck out and sat down on a bench. Nothing was going right. Next was chemistry. We had to write down the entire periodic table. Just as I was writing chlorine, Something very weird happened. Something very weird indeed.
#Yao
I was sitting by myself in the lunchroom, trying not to make myself choke. Because Leo and Brooke were dumb and I was smart, the school board decided to put me into the Honor Math Class, which meant I always ate lunch ten minutes earlier than they normally did.
Therefore, it was only pure logic that I grab my food while there was still no line, make my way to the cleanest seat, and sit down. It was all very nice, as I was able to almost finish my meal before the other classes came in, which, by that time, would mean the lunchroom would become noisy, smelly, and disgusting, making it impossible to enjoy any type of foodstuff. Unless you were the one causing all of the noise, smell, and disgust. Then you were happy to eat your food like that.
After I had thrown my trash away, I noticed something very strange going on with Brooke and Leo when they came in. They were hyper and so happy, normally not their attitude after they had to do Chemistry with boring old Mrs Tuskie. Advanced Chemistry with Mr Terupt was way cooler. Mr Terupt was a first-year teacher, but he had gotten the job because he had graduated from Dartmouth, so naturally, he was a great candidate. However, he encouraged crazy behavior, and usually let us mix all of the chemicals we wanted, as long as we had our lab coats and safety goggles on, and he approved all of the materials we had. Just yesterday, my partner Libby and I had come up with an awesome mixture. By adding a few droplets of this, and a flask of that…BOOM!
We had invented a popcorn popper that relied on gases and chemicals.
However, Brooke dropped a depressing statement on me with the same malicious purpose as the time she had purposefully, with full intent, knowing the ramifications, dropped a tuna fish sandwich on me. However, technically, she didn’t get in trouble, because she blamed it all on her slippery hands. Good grief.
“A weirdo dressed in black that looked like JB came into Tuskie’s room to give her some mail. But then, when Cute Janitor Boy walked past me, he gave me a wink and then passed me a note. I read it, and it said: “Look in your locker”. So, I went and opened up my locker, and somehow, he had written on my schedule: ‘Angela Dupree would like to meet you at the Liston Public Library at 4:00 today. If you miss the appointment, she will leave after five minutes. If you attempt to bring anyone other than the ones I have specified (you and your twin brothers), I will personally make sure I cut off all clues to the whereabouts of my location, and an end to your search. I don’t know much, but I do know you weren’t adopted under normal circumstances.'”
I refused to believe it. Finally, a lead! But then, Brooke told me the bad news.
“Mom and Dad are never going to let it go, and I already phoned them during recess-”
“You aren’t allowed to use your phone on school premises!”
“Shut up! As I was saying, they told us they have an appointment with someone today at 3:15, and they won’t be home when we get back. But to make sure we didn’t go out of the house, Mom put a tracker on all of our bikes. We can’t walk, we don’t have that much time after school ends. What are we going to do?”
I pondered this for a long time. We couldn’t bike, or else we would get in big trouble. We couldn’t walk, we couldn’t really do anything…AHA!!
At exactly 3:15, right after school had ended, I ordered a Uber.
“Genius!” Leo and Brooke both shouted at the same time.
Within ten hot minutes of driving, we were there. I had charged it to my mom’s account, but she didn’t notice because I had paid using the point system, taking away forty of her points she had gained from previous Uber services. The good thing, though, was that she hadn’t checked her points lately, and she probably didn’t even know if there were any missing ones. We devised a plan.
#Bai
And so we were there, where we were supposed to be. Apparently the note had said to locate her in ‘the meeting room’, which, practically, was just a large box with a tube on the outside, and so could be seen all the way round. The plan was to record the entire meeting, only with a few techniques. So, I would be on the inside of the tube, recording every single word that would be said. Then, I would have to save it, and upload it onto both their phones too, to create a copy. Then, we would have a full collection, with the survivors list.
At precisely 4 O’Clock, a dark-skinned woman entered the museum. Without looking at anyone, she scampered directly to the entrance (the back one, as I presume so she would not be seen, for exactly the same reason as she did yesterday, possibly to hide her identity). She took a chair out and began to sit at the table and began to read a book, but her eyes were above the book, and were, indeed as expected, staring at us.
“Hello children, right now you have to listen to me. I appreciate the fact that you want to use recording devices and upload them to each other. Yes, I know about that. Right now, I am probably being tracked by many cameras, which is exactly why we need to remain silent. I need to tell you my story.
So, thirteen years ago, I was working for a plane company, located just around here. I was working at Gate 2B, where I was set to work. That night, there were no planes expected, and all I had to do was help some random customers, and also a boy that looked a lot like you. He gave me a note to keep. Anyway, it was around this time that a plane suddenly appeared out of the window, shocking us all. There were no planes expected, as I just said, and my supervisor began calling the company, and the company didn’t believe it. But when they saw it, they called the police, and the police called the FBI. It must have been the most chaotic day of my life.
However, I had just checked the plane, and there were no people, no, no. There were no passengers, waiting to be served. There were even any pilots! No flight attendants, no stewards, no air marshals, no one to even watch over these passengers. But this was the biggest surprise for me – all of the passengers were babies.
It’s ridiculous, I know, and ever since I have been unable to work at the company, they call me delusional simply because I say things and do things that they think I’m mad. I refused to deny that, the truth and all this time now, the company has been paying me sums of money for my so-called madness. But then, I got into science. There was only one reason why I got into science and technology, and that was because on the plane, it said Tachyon Travel. Now, I’m not sure whether you know what Tachyon means, but it’s a beam that allows it to travel faster than light, and that just means Time Travel. Now, I know you may not believe me, but you have to trust me, you have to trust all the other people that know this is true. I don’t pretend to understand all of this, but because of your plane crashing into our time, where it didn’t belong—where it changed lots of people’s lives—because of that, we’ve all been living through what’s known as Damaged Time. Kind of like a nuclear wasteland, maybe? Time travelers couldn’t get in at all for a long time. And they could see only limited moments in time.”
dufu
I tilted my head to one side, trying to process the flow of information I was receiving. Damaged time? Time travellers? Tachyon, even? I frowned at Leo, who was wearing the same expression. But Xavier, however, was nodding his head like an eager little puppy. But before Xavier could ask for any more physically impossible information (Yes, I can prove it’s physically impossible), I heard a loud crash in the library hall. Xavier jerked out of his trance and immediately turned to the door. Angela looked at the door, and with surprising elegance, leapt up and bolted the door. Phew.
We waited in the glass room, anxiously waiting for the library to close. I knew Leo was hungry; he always had a slightly mad look on his face when he was hungry. Luckily I packed food. Xavier had tuna and cucumber, and I had smoked salmon and cream cheese. But Leo was on a wholly different level. He liked bell peppers, mustard, anchovies, lettuce and pickles in his sandwiches. An interesting combination. I tried it once, and it wasn’t bad. Actually, it was delicious, but I preferred salmon and cream cheese. Then, in an interesting turn of events, the door fell on its hinges.
We weren’t there long enough to see who was responsible. We were up and out of the fire exit. Then Xavier turned.
“Angela! She’s still in there!” He turned back and ran in. I was out, and we waited on the park bench behind a newspaper, waiting for Xavier.
I saw him, but he wasn’t with Angela. He had a shocked look on his face.
“Sh-She disappeared! Behind a t-tree!” I frowned and tilted my head. What? She can’t have. That’s witchcraft. Judging by Leo’s unconvinced look, Leo didn’t believe him. I didn’t, but it just wasn’t logical.
#Yao
I sat around the table at dinner, thinking to myself the swirl of thoughts that had circulated in my head. I was busy listening to Brooke vomiting her disgusting salmon and cream cheese on sourdough bread. Now that I thought about it, Brooke was a very sturdy sister. She had never thrown up before. But the four-mile run home had obviously made her regurgitate quite a bit, not to mention Leo trying not to think about anchovies. On the other hand, I was not at all affected. My tuna and cucumber sandwich had actually been very good, and I was savoring the delicious casserole mom had made, while avoiding their questions aimed at why the heck Leo and Brooke were barfing their minds in two separate bathrooms. I tried to give them honest answers while avoiding both the truth and the possibility of having them sue the school cafeteria. I told them Leo had simply overeaten the wide variety of treats that the school gave as choices for lunch. They believed that; Leo had done that just last week and had to go to a doctor for indigestion. Unfortunately, Brooke was more difficult.
I had to think long and hard. No matter how many times she head-butted the ball during her soccer matches, she had never gotten a concussion or threw up. I decided to try and convince them that the sandwich Brooke had gobbled down had bacteria on it, the bad type, and I gave them a very complicated discussion about how bacteria divided and mutated and cross-food contamination.
“Huh?” Mom asked when I had finished. Dad simply stared at me as if I had gone mad. They had gotten so raveled in it that Mom had forgotten all about her high school biology courses, and Dad only faintly grasped all that had been taught in his college biology course.
“Let’s just call it: Brooke ate something bad and got sick. How ’bout it? Deal? Good.” Mom only nodded, while Dad dumbly kept staring.
As I passed, I heard Dad ask: “What the @#$! are they teaching kids in middle school these days?”
I smugly grinned.
That night, I was busily studying over my Chemistry, Math, English, and Biology notes, busily preparing for mid-term finals. Meanwhile, Brooke was lying in bed, trying to recover by staring at her own private television. She used to share a bedroom with me, but after she complained about my disgusting habits of always eating in her bed when she wasn’t there, Mom decided to get all sympathetic and gave her the guest room, WHICH HAD A TV IN IT!!! No fair. While I had to fight with Leo over who got the good TV in the living room and who got the crappy one in the family room, Brooke didn’t have to deal with anyone. And when Brooke started complaining that me and Leo took turns watching Netflix in her room when she wasn’t looking, Mom took away both of our TV privileges for a MONTH!
But aside from my raging rant, it was fair to say we all were very confused about what had happened to the woman we had met, Angela Dupree, who had simply disappeared behind a tree.
Meanwhile, I could hear Leo blasting away on his Xbox console, playing Titanfall 2.
I slammed my book shut, and turned on my own Xbox. I quickly joined the game, and began to shoot Leo’s avatar, currently in his Titan warbot, quickly forgetting everything.
This was a nice period. All I had to worry about was beating my kill streak while not getting shot myself. I didn’t have to worry about anything other than armor upgrades, rocket tracking systems, and better aiming scopes.
Although I never announced it, me and Leo both knew we were against each other, and we gamed late into the night, constantly taking down each other’s teams, flags, and whatnot.
The next day, I had completely forgotten about Angela, and everything else, while Leo evidently had too. Brooke got even more sick and vomited almost four times just in one morning, (it’s surprising how much vomit the human body can produce just from dry toast!). But then, after school and during dinner, Mom and Dad notified me about the “adopted kids convention” they’d be taking us to.
#Bai
We were going to be leaving for the adoption conference, about adoption and the impacts of it, and of how interesting and fascinating it is, and how it is so much better, and how many things are very beneficial for it, and so on. The plan was to go the very next Saturday, and although it very much interfered with almost every single one of our activities: studying, swimming, running, gaming, thinking, eating, sleeping, drinking and a lot of other activities it certainly was a brilliant plan, and so we decided to go.
The place was located in a school, but the school’s location in itself was very suspicious. The truth was, it was located in a town where it was near all the survivor’s places, and so, therefore, would be for all of us to join. This seemed like it could have been a ruse, but so it was a good idea to work it out. When we left for it, I noticed immediately that there was a kind of rock nearby, but I paid no attention to it, simply because we were trying to work out the details for the building itself. It was a kind of yellow bricked building, its paint rather new because of its texture, but it wasn’t perfect in any other way – in fact it seemed almost dirty for a high school. Its grandeur couldn’t be matched with anything.
The inside was a huge gymnasium, which had many chairs. Children were instructed to sit in one part of the hall, adults in the other. And so eventually we were allowed onto the cave I was talking about, and the strange thing was all the members of the survivors list was allowed onto one group. That was certainly strange. Soon, we had walked to the cave, but there was a strange sound. I heard the noise first, a sort of grinding that was coming from inside the rock wall. I peered out through the entryway, blinking at the sunshine that filtered down through the trees. And then the sunlight seemed to narrow, to dim. The entryway was closing.
“No!” I screamed.
Xavier threw himself toward the opening, toward the last rays of sunlight.
The opening was only five steps away, maybe six, and Xavier stretched out his legs, sprinting like he’d never sprinted before. In a second his right foot would be out in the sunlight, he’d slip through—
The sunlight disappeared.
“Are you an idiot?” Gary demanded from above him. “You could have been crushed in that door. Killed.”
“Caves don’t have doors,” he muttered back.
“JB was getting his head pounded into the stone floor. It’d been quite a while since the last time JB had rolled over on top of Gary, the last time he’d seemed to be dominating this fight.
Xavier jumped up.
“Leo!” he screamed. “JB’s going to lose if we don’t help him!”
Xavier lunged at the struggling men. He grabbed Gary’s arm and, by bracing his feet against the ground, Brooke managed to keep Gary from punching JB again.
No—scratch that. Gary’s arm continued forward. Brooke had managed only to keep Gary from punching JB quite so hard.
I glanced up to see that some of the other kids were rushing toward him. Brooke, with a girl’s sense of fighting, went straight for the hair, jerking Gary’s head back by entwining her fingers right down to the roots. I had to admit—it seemed to be working.
Until…
dufu
Where were we? Who was everybody? What time was it, if there was even an answer to that? I let go of Gary’s hair and walked to the back of the cave. Nothing was making sense today. I saw Chip at the back of the cave. Chip?! But… he wasn’t adopted. But the sad look on his face told me otherwise. What was the whole point of this? Was it so much of a big deal? I paused. Wow, it was amazing how much one thought could be so wrong. Nothing, nothing else could ever be so wrong.
Gary and Hodge, regaining their postures (Gary was still massaging his scalp, which made me proud), were standing on a higher part of the rock floor. I hadn’t seen Hodge, and the only way I knew his name was from his elaborate name tag. And because Gary was saying his name at that precise moment. They were saying something about time, but I wasn’t listening. I was zoned out, wondering where the hell we were. But I tuned back in when a girl of around my height and stature asked a question. Gary opened the cave door, and all we could see was darkness.
None of us reached out in fear of spaghettification. We all just gazed out, enchanted. But then Gary shut the doors with a slam. My ears were still ringing when he announced what we were to do. I had a sick sensation of falling, and I stood up. Gary was holding some… device that looked like a thin grey slab. I raised my eyebrows. He seriously wasn’t going to do anything with that, surely. He smirked and clicked a few buttons on it as if it was a TV remote. But now, there was no going back, no parents to run to, no tears to cry.
#Yao
Wonders upon wonders. I wished I could have told my parents I had to win a gaming championship, or the big test was coming up, or…Anything to avoid the situation we were currently in! And then Gary and Hodge cruelly told us what they were doing.
“Ladies and gentlemen, what we want is to send you to the future. A future full of promises, full of wealth and fortune. You will be able to see wonders that your brain cannot comprehend currently! And,” he added with a smirk, “you will be able to discover that our gaming systems are really quite just virtual reality to a degree that it is no longer distinguishable between life and VR!”
That won many of the kids over, but unfortunately, I didn’t want that. I didn’t care about how good Titanfall 2 would be in VR mode; ALL I WANTED WAS TO GO HOME AND EAT A GIANT, GREASY SLICE OF PIZZA! Then, I saw JB. He was crawling towards a rock, and I knew we could trust him more than the two villains standing before us. I motioned for JB to give the projectile to me, and he threw it. I caught the whizzing rock, grabbed it clean out of the air, and using all of my force and past Little League experience…I nailed Gary’s head. The rock bounced clean off, leaving a stunned Gary crumpling to the ground, bleeding a little from where the impact had hit. Hodge quickly looked at my direction, and when he ran towards me to tackle, JB directly smashed him, but only knocked Hodge off course. Brooke went into for the killing shot, and Hodge wobbled a bit, only to then be knocked to the ground violently by Leo, who had hurtled all of his weight at the man. Soon, we took turns punching and shoving Hodge until he begged for mercy, but just because of what he had attempted to do, when he stood up, I punched him down again, and then kicked at his unmoving body. Apparently, he had given up, and his smashed bones had evidently been proof of that.
However, it turned out Hodge was a tad too difficult to fight to the point of KO, as he kept just getting up and then getting knocked back down. In fact, we turned a game out of it.
There was this one kid who always pulled a one-two-three combo that made him look like a black belt and also an expert at playing Mortal Kombat X. In fact, once, he punched Hodge lightly, and then duped him into thinking he was weak. When Hodge stepped forward to deliver a blow himself, the kid then dodged and did a powerful side kick that swept Hodge off of his balance.
In the end, Hodge groaned at us that we were destroying our own futures, and that we would never experience the joys of living in the future. This time, no one really trusted him, because he had actually tried to hurt us, and so, I shut him down with a quick karate chop to his neck.
But then, we noticed JB was standing in a corner, doing something with what seemed to be a rock. And then, suddenly, we were all zapped away.
I could feel my body slowly being torn apart of its old 21st century self. My heart pounded, but unlike its normal fast, quick pace, this time, it was slow, and heavy. I can only remember closing my eyes, and the rest I soon forgot.
“Huh?” I groaned as I sat up, rubbing my sore muscles and joints. The impact of my fall had clearly done some damage. I ached all over, and I strangely felt very hungry for giant deli sandwich or some cheesesteaks. I rolled over and bumped into a figure.
“Brooke? Leo?” I asked, my head spinning. I just wished I was back home, sleeping in my comfortable bed, not out in this summer heat that was very, very tormenting. The lump didn’t respond.
Where were we? Or, when were we?
#Bai
When? Why? What? Where? How? Who? These were the six questions that kept on cycling through my mind. When were we in time, why were we in time, what were we doing in time, where were we in the world, how had we been sent into the world, who had sent us into the world and what were we supposed to be doing anyway? I did not know what we were doing, and suddenly as I had seen it, I felt a great amount of sickness ai[on me, for I did not know what to do at all. It was as if I did not know what to think and why we were here. It was like I had just started on a brand new page and was working distinctly from memory and was therefore rather unfamiliar with the environment. My thoughts at the time were like this: When? Why? What? Where? How? Who? When? Why? What? Where? How? Who? When? Why? What? Where? How? Who? When? Why? What? Where? How? Who? When? Why? What? Where? How? Who? When? Why? What? Where? How? Who? When? Why? What? Where? How? Who? When? Why? What? Where? How? Who? When? Why? What? Where? How? Who? When? Why? What? Where? How? Who? When? Why? What? Where? How? Who?
I did not know any of this, any of what had happened and was therefore very much baffled by what was going on, and so I would have liked to ask my friends for help and question them about what was going on, but I could not have done so simply because at that time, a device began to shout, which was probably the thing that had brought into the time we were in now. It was JB, talking through the device known as the Elucidator, which had taken us here, and I was confused and baffled about how the thing worked, for it had around four billion, nine hundred and twenty four million, three hundred and ninety seven thousand, and five hundred and sixty three buttons on it, as well as three billion, eight hundred and twenty three million five hundred and two thousand, and sixty seven levers on it too. This was clearly a complicated device from the future, but was bow disguised as a cup. I could just about hear JB shout something, although I had just hitten a wave of nausea and did not know what he said.