Wednesday - August 24, 2033: Topic: Introduction and Maria

I've moved into this town, Maria (pronounced mahr-ee-uh), just yesterday. The school year starts on September 2nd and so far, I've learned that this place has one crazy ass school.
With this new change, I decided to write in a diary, which is, of course, you. Sadly, because of my low amount of money, I could only buy a you made of paper. It takes much longer to write with a pen then to simply type... It feels really stupid, writing to a notebook, but it's easier to refer back to a notebook than my memories.
And here I present to you my basic information:

Name: Kareha Madina (surname, given name) [Pen name: "Alice"]
Age: 14
Gender: Female
Date of Birth: December 3
Likes and Specialties: Writing, academics, perfect memory (but it takes a lot of effort to drag things out), computers, anime, video games, cell phone gadgets, trumpet, inventing things
Dislikes: Being forced to make friends, peer pressure (even though I can handle it), escalators, romantic comedies that aren't funny, horror movies
Family: Father, Mother, Little Brother Ginga
Etc: I'm normal. Smart, but pretty normal. That's not to say that I spend all of my energy doing stupid stuff like the common high school girl (well, I'm actually entering high school in the coming school year, so yeah), but I don't go around slaying Tomogara or being a crazy butler or piloting some giant mecha. No, I leave that kind of thing to the professionals. I just live by slaying tests and being a student and piloting my brain. Very few notable achievements, but I did manage to win a writing award once, for Specter Town. Yeah, that was fun to write. One of my other achievements is earning a scholarship from LIT (Lunar Institute of Technology) at age 10 and being sponsered by them for all of my weird little inventions. I rarely get sick at all, apparently something I inherited from Dad and my body improved on. Before coming to Maria, I lived in Luna, the big city with lots of skyscrapers and the most autolevs in any one city. Fun Fact: Luna alone has fifteen autolev manufacturing plants and thirteen major companies. Doesn't quite fit elsewhere, but I've been known to have cold skin along with my cold personality. And that allows me to easily transition into the next part- my personality. I'm arrogant, fairly antisocial, sarcastic, and generally a negative figure in society.

Now you know who owns you and will make you famous some day. Be grateful, notebook; not all notebooks get to become famous. Of course, I'll have to become famous first for that to happen, so wish me luck or face the consequences.
Anyhow, I'll write exactly what happened today (using my memory, of course). I'll be aiming for a long, elaborate entry, so there may be more details than you could ever imagine capturing, but my memory just works like that.
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Upon waking up, I was a little bit confused as to where I was. The window was on my left instead of my right, my desk was nowhere in sight- actually, nothing was really in sight besides the book that I'd been reading, which was just lying around near the door, and the blanket that I was on; that's right, I didn't even have a bed. Usually, my room would be clean, but this was more like "barren." The white walls were quite beyond boring and probably would not change very soon, as I had no posters or photos to hang up on them. The floors were equally boring and made of wood- very slippery wood, as I discovered when I took my first step off that blanket.
Apparently, a concussion was what it took to remind me that I had moved into this new house just the day before. We had arrived in the evening, so the unpacking wasn't really complete.
I hadn't bothered to unpack much the night before, but I had brought my book on my person and read it before going to sleep as usual. I'm almost at the end, and from the looks of it, the protagonist is probably going to die. I don't like it when protagonists are killed off after they're developed to make you like them. It's almost like the author's luring your heart in and then stabbing it was a trident. That's cruel and very gory.
"Din-I mean, breakfast is ready!"
That was my mom. She's young, but I won't tell you her age. As you can tell, she sometimes gets the meals of the day mixed up, despite the fact that she's the one making all of them. She's got plenty of energy to spare, and a bright personality that takes something like death to beat back. Her daughter's rebellion also works, so I've been working on my relationship with my mother epecially so that she wouldn't be spending the days crying in bed.
I walked down the stairs, all the while taking in the lay of the house. To the right of my room is a bathroom, and after that is my brother's bedroom. To my room's left are an extra room and then my parents' room. It's true; I can tell what rooms they are at first sight. Along the walls of the stairs were pictures of the family members, apparently one of the first things that my parents unpacked. My face was bored, even in the photo.
Next, my parents, both in a couple photo, were beaming their demon-slaying smiles; that woke my eyes up. I actually couldn't see for a while, and when I closed my eyes, I saw airplanes. Maybe they installed some really powerful backlights into the frame or something.
On the bottom of the staircase, just like the real-life hierarchy, was my little brother, Ginga. He's twelve and already picking up strange habits, like "exiting the zone," as he calls it, while walking and only stopping after hitting a wall or something. He's very skilled at doing things in reverse or the opposite way. For example, he's perfectly ambidextrous and very good at running backwards. People say that he's the social type while I'm the "cool and collected" type, but I'm sure that the word they were looking for was "antisocial." Yeah, Ginga's popular, aparently. Way more than me, but I don't care so much. And that's exactly why he's more popular than me. He cares. I don't... most of the time.
Ah, yes, I forgot to mention that Ginga is actually a very good-looking twelve-year-old. He's pretty tall and has sleek black hair that can blind you very similarly to my parents' smiles. To be honest, it's really not too surprising to me that he's gotten the attention of many girls within five grades of his own, but there's no way that this will end well. After all, the three possible paths that this could lead to are A) a large-scale war amongst the girls, B) the largest romantic comedy reality situation that this world has ever seen, and C) a huge case of polygamy, which is obviously illegal and will result in all of the jails being taken up, meaning that all of the serious criminals will either have to be exported, let loose, or executed, and either way, the entire country is in for some trouble. Personally, I think that path B would be the worst, since there's no way that a real romantic comedy situation could actually turn out to be good with a cast of over a hundred females and a single twelve-year-old guy. That definitely wouldn't work for a TV show- I mean, there would be a load of morality issues to work around (all the second-grade girls and college-age females going for a junior high school guy? Doubt that would be well received), and then the censoring would get so bad that you'd barely be able to tell what was happening half the time.
Anyway, I kept walking on without actually taking so much time to stop, look at the photo, and explain all that to myself in my head. The smell of frying bacon was beckoning to me and I didn't have enough morning energy to resist. Using my carnal instincts as a parent leecher, I followed the scent of an awesome breakfast and found myself in the kitchen.
Boxes. There were tons of them all over the floor, half of them opened and half not, all of them full. If I had taken another step, I probably would have tripped over the closed box at my feet and smashed my head against the corner of the counter, dying a slow and painful death. Thankfully, that didn't happen because I first walked into a hanging frying pan.
"Oh, yes, you should be careful, Maddy! I doubt that anyone at your school could clear this obstacle course. Cooking utensils and boxes are all over, so watch your step!"
"Thanks for the tip, Mom. The backsides of frying pans are definitely painful when you walk your face into one," I said, touching my nose. It really did hurt, and stung for ten minutes after.
I carefully ducked and tiptoed over the box in front of me, aiming for one of the few free spots. When keeping in mind that a single misstep could result in death if something goes horribly wrong, it became easier to make sure to take in the entire field before deciding my next move.
Mom had cleared the area near the cooking area that she was using, so I headed there without any mistakes. My sense of smell wasn't working as well after that slap from the frying pan, but it had been in perfect condition before despite the after-sleep haze my mind was in; something was sizzling on an old-fashioned grill, covered up by the top. The house had come with a bunch of ancient appliances, this grill using the decade-old Dual Wave Grilling technique. I'm sure that it seemed awesome in the 020's, but Dual Wave machines have homes in museums now.
Nevertheless, Mom was using a Dual Wave machine. "By the way, Mom," I said, turning my head to scan the room, "I thought that breakfast was ready already."
For a second, the sizzling was very clear. "Well, yes, it was," Mom said, hand on her hip as she watched the bacon grilling while frying some eggs on an actual stove. "I was about to take out the bacon, but something happened and they went raw after I took them off." That's why you don't use Dual Wave. "I guess I didn't leave them long enough. Sorry, Maddy."
"No problem. I can wait." I shifted my gaze over to the half-done eggs. "That explains the bacon, but the eggs? Stoves aren't fast, but they don't backfire most of the time."
"Look at the box on the counter, and you'll be able to guess what happened" was Mom's answer.
If I knew what was in that box back then, I probably wouldn't have opened it up, but I don't have the power of foresight now and I didn't have it back then, either. I tentatively looked at the mentioned box. It looked like any normal box, labeled "Food! CAREFUL, there are eggs!" I guessed that it was empty of its original contents now (a guess that was wrong, in a way) and opened one of the flaps and looked inside. Stupid human curiosity always ends up being more of a negative than a positive, like when a couple of curious archaeologists uncovered what turned out to be a natural bomb. Thankfully, the bomb exploded in steppe quite a ways from other living souls; otherwise, an entire city could have been blown up. Of course, human curiosity pulled a lucky draw that time. This allowed the rest of humanity to research the rock, now labeled Torsunkai, so that similar accidents would not occur in the much more dangerous possibilities that there were.
Anyway, even I, the "Cold Queen," almost screamed when I saw the monster inside. Seriously, it looked like a monster. It was a blackish-brown, as if it was a clump of burned eggs unfortunately shaped in the form of a horror monster. That was exactly what it was. Spots of ketchup were strategically placed, and even though I know that most people think that mistaking ketchup as blood in real life is ridiculously stupid, given the context, it was very convincing. If I didn't know that it was supposed to be a pile of eggs accidentally made into that form, then I probably would have commended it as a sculpture and offered it to the Museum of Natural Horrors. As it was, I was just thankful that my nose was out of order (as in a telephone booth's out of order). I guess that bad things can really happen for the greater good sometimes (another example of that in second half of the paragraph above).
"Yeah, I guess I just forgot about them for a bit while they were frying," Mom said simply, tending to her eggs currently on the pan. Only after encountering that little surprise did I notice that she was keeping a hand on the pan handle and the other to steady it instead of her usual one-handed cooking dance.
"Anything I can help with?" I asked. I know, I'm such a good person.
Mom's hands kept steady on the pan handle, her face clear and focused. "I suppose unpacking the boxes with the label "Kitchen Stuff" on them would be good. Unpacking is a real bother, you know?"
I knew. That was exactly why I hadn't bothered yesterday to unpack anything of my own. Digging up a bunch of old crap that I probably didn't even know existed before the packing? Not exactly fun. Even so, I knew that it would have to be done, so I picked up a box and set it on the counter so that I wouldn't have to break my back.
"Where's Ginga?" I asked, rather carelessly grabbing things in the box and setting them on the counter.
"Gin? He's gone out with some friends." The calm in Mom's tone surprised me even more than the original sentence would have.
"Friends?!" I spun around with a huge kitchen knife in my right hand and a huge fork in my left. Once I realized exactly what was in my hands, I carefully set them on the counter next to some plates. While I see it would be a huge and interesting twist, I'm not a cannibal.
Now facing Mom, I could see that she had not changed the positions of her uncharacteristically careful hands. "Yes, friends," Mom said. "He met them yesterday and was actually hanging out with them all evening." That was why the lazy little girl-catcher wasn't helping with the unpacking (not that I was).
"It seems that I've underestimated his skills somehow," I said to myself. Seriously, friends made at night in a neighborhood that we've never been in before? That's skills as much as it is exceedingly dangerous.
Mom laughed. The eggs were done. "And I always thought that you were our 'Gin Expert.' But you're right in that his people skills are surprising. It was a pretty large group, with boys AND girls of all ages, including high schoolers."
I turned back to the counter and reached in the box to take out that dish that I remembered seeing on the top and felt something squishy instead. My hand recoiled reflexively, exiting that cage of terror with strange eggs and ketchup all over it. Even Mom frowned and stuck her tongue out in disgust as I moved my hand in front of her to get it under the faucet, which I turned on at top speed. "That last sentence sounded like a book or magazine advertisment," I commented while turning my hand under the cool water.
Mom took a moment to remember what she had said last. "Hey, you're right! 'Monthly Ginga Mag, a great gift for boys and girls of ALL AGES!! Subscribe now for only $4.50 a year and get a FREE Ginga voice recording CD! That's right, FREE!! Call us now at 1-800-GIN-RULZ! The number is, again, 1-800-GIN-RULZ!!'" Did I mention that Mom was great at changing her voice?
"That was awesome," I said, a smile on my face. "Doubt Ginga even knows what a CD is, though."
"That's true," Mom agreed. "Those little chips are taking over the world."
In a way, I suppose that DMZ chips really are taking over the world. For all you farmers out there, DMZ chips are Duo Memory Zephyr chips. "Zephyr" is the name of the company that first started using them. Those tiny chips are capable of easily carrying 100 terabytes of memory, a true advancement in technology. DMZ chips are being used everywhere now, and just about every major electronics company has adapted their wares to be DMZ-compatible. When I was a very tiny little infant, CDs still had a name, but by the time Ginga had a brain (according to my parents, that would be around two-years-old, but I think that it was when he entered junior high), CDs were forgotten, like VHSs were while my parents were teenagers, according to them.
Anyway, I continued unpacking box after box until that half-broken Dual Wave Griller finally got the bacon done for more than 10 minutes; that's the official test to check if the Dual Wave worked permenantly. Then it was time for breakfast.
As usual, Mom's scrambled eggs were awesome. As long as she doesn't forget about them while they're on the pan shaping into the next Miss Monster, Mom can make great scrambled eggs. As for the bacon, Mom's cooking skills had no effect on the Dual Wave Griller; basically, it was pathetic. When I first made the mistake of taking some bacon while still chewing the eggs, the contrast was so horrible that I almost threw up. From then to the end of the meal, I made special care to eat only one thing at a time.
"I'm going up to go back to sleep," I announced lazily after dropping the plate, fork, and knife in the sink. Bad idea, Past Me.
I was almost immediately caught by Mom's quick and powerful grip. Despite her pretty looks and kind personality, Mom is a gorilla when it comes to physical strength. She must have repeated at least a hundred times the story about meeting Dad by kicking his ass at tennis. Apparently, she kept smacking the living crap outta him and won by default because he had to go to the hospital. Sadly enough, I have not inherited that strength. It would be useful to be able to throw Ginga through walls.
"You are NOT going back to sleep," Mom said firmly. "Cool down with a shower and then help me unpack. When the men are gone, us women gotta stick together!"
Ah, one of Mom's moments of pride. As soft as she usually is, there are times when Mom will fight like a gorilla for her pride as a woman. Strangely enough, she rarely gets so fired up in front of Dad even though I'd expect her to just get more fired up when the guys are home. When she enters the zone, there's no stopping her.
"Okay, Mom," I replied, continuing my previous path going upstairs after Mom let go of my shoulder. No point in resisting when you know that you'll be getting the little bugs picked out of your hair no matter what. Mom, if you somehow get a hold of this, don't take the "gorilla" description as an insult; it's one of your charm points.
Walking up the stairs and looking at those pictures on the wall, I realized that this way the photos were in perfect order of popularity. First, you'd see Ginga, in all of his girl-killing glory. No doubt that he's the most popular one in the family. Following him were my parents, who knew plenty of people, but they don't even touch Ginga's fictitious Robe of Awesomeness. At the very end, there's me: the uncaring, evil me. My parents are so far above that I can't even see their also-fictitious-and-shared Scarf of Okay-ness. At the bottom of the well, I'm equipped only with my again-fictitious Boots of Hell and a shovel, just in case I suddenly feel like bringing my boots home... Now that I have the time to just lie down on my bed and imagine these Boots of Hell, I'm beginning to wish I had them so I could rename them and wear them. They look awesome in my mind, and if they weren't cursed and weighing around 1000 tons, I'd even call them flawless. Of course, they're only cursed and heavier than an elephant in my mind, and I can change that whenever I feel like it.
I impress myself with how I can devote paragraphs to relate strange things like Boots of Hell (fictitious), the Robe of Awesomeness (fictitious), and a walk up a staircase (real).
Yeah, then came the shower after gathering my clothes. Upon entering the bathroom to the right of my room (when you walk out of my room), I remembered the first impression of that bathroom I had.
My second impression was the same.
Compared to the rest of our house, the bathroom was very old-fashioned (yes, even more so than the kitchen), but it was old-fashioned in a classy way. According to Mom and Dad, this was a bathroom worthy of a king "back in the day," but nowadays it's mostly for old houses or very cheap ones. I've seen Porta-Potties with quality very close to these, but they're Porta-Potties. This bathroom, however, was easy on the eyes, with decorative things all around. The bathtub could have probably fit three people at least and old Traction Pads covered the bottom. The sink was plain and white, but there was a fancy mirror set up over it. As for the seperate shower, it was just about as large as the bath with sliding doors made of one-way glass preventing outsiders from even being able to tell whether anyone was inside or not. The most advanced piece of technology in the room was probably the lighting, which was built into the ceiling so that it would fit perfectly. It gave off a soft glow that illuminated the entire bathroom without blinding anyone who happened to look at it, a result of the latest research on convenient and efficient energy sources. According to what I've read, these lights require only a tenth of the electricity necessary to power even the most recent type of lightbulb.
I carelessly threw my clothes on the floor and... I can see it: a perverted stalker reading these words. Okay, then, I took a shower and finished up. Eat that, loser; no description for you. Any non-pervs reading this, you can ignore that.
After that, I tied my hair in my usual hairstyle- that is, pretty much wavy and down with a little ponytail of sorts on top. This "ponytail of sort on top" highly resembles a bunch of black grass fanning out in 360 degrees. I combed my hair a little, because even the Cold Queen doesn't like stray strands of hair flying into her mouth.
Next up was the promised hardcore unpacking with Mom. Somehow, we finished off all of those stupid, eco-friendly cardboard boxes. By the way, those adjectives were not directly related to each other. I like the ecosystem. Ecosystems rock.
In those eco-friendly boxes that were stupid for reasons other than being eco-friendly, I found my personal belongings and set them up in one of the corners of my room. I hadn't uncovered all of the pieces by then, but the parts that I found for my desk were placed leaning against the wall for Mom to solo later, since she's got the gorilla strength that I was talking about before. First, though, was a break. I was seriously expecting my back to snap in half during one of my trips to get those boxes with all of the... cooking utensils. Yeah, Mom took care of all of the heavy things, so I got the lighter boxes that were something like twice the amount of the heavy box population. Well, I couldn't even lift some of the heavy boxes, so I shouldn't really complain.
For the resting time, we basically just sat and drank iced tea to ward off the growing heat. Well, we also chatted a bit.
"So, where are you with your stories?" Mom asked, fanning herself with an issue of "Monthly Silver Mag," which is a magazine about antique jewelry and stuff. Mom's vulnerable to a good piece of jewelry, but most of the time her desired items are so expensive that all she can really hope to ever do is look at them.
I took a sip of my iced tea and then hung my arms lazily, leaning back into the chair with no energy or will to sit up straight. "I can't really think up of any ideas for Opening the Hidden Dimension, and Moonlit Fire is pretty much in the same position right now. Well, for the both of them, I've managed to lay out the plans for the future, but I can't seem to get to the planned parts because I don't plan exactly what's going to happen where I am. The only things that I think up of are unrelated to the current arcs, so I've decided to start writing a diary." That's you.
"You think that'll help much?" Mom asked. "I know it's a good thing that it's like that, but your life isn't exactly full of interdimensional travel and evil overlords who don't even know how to effectively do their job." In reality, the equivalent of "interdimensional travel" in my life would be the traveling from peaceful home to war-like school, and the "evil overlords" whom I haven't even met yet are the teachers, who may or may not know how to effectively do their job.
Mom pushed her cheek against her cold glass of iced tea. I followed suit.
"True, but a diary would help me recall past ideas." I took off my cheek and placed the other one on my half-filled glass. This was surprisingly effective, like an ice pack that isn't just there to be an ice pack. "If I try to pull out a lot of memories at once, I can manage a little more than a day's worth of memories before falling asleep. If I do that for my diary entries, then I can capture the entire day in detail and enter it into a permenant form. This way, I won't have to depend on memory-pulling when I want to remember a good idea from some day I don't exactly remember."
Mom took her face off her glass and nodded while taking a sip. "That makes sense. Considering all of the ideas that must be flying around in your head, getting them on paper after every day instead of doing a whole bunch after a couple days could really relax your memory a bit." Believe me, there are plenty of ideas flying around in my head. So many that sometimes I just have to sit down and mentally puke.
I said that and Mom laughed. "At least that saves me the mess of cleaning it up. Speaking of which, we should start unpacking again, or these boxes are going to be lying around until tomorrow."
So that's what we did, and the house was much cleaner by lunchtime.
I was walking down the stairs from some unpacking in my room and followed the sounds of destruction and boiling water and ended up in the kitchen.
Mom had already gone back to her one-handed cooking dance. Okay, so here's how the pan version goes: Mom grabs the pan handle with her right hand, twists and untwists her arm, walks in a semicircle around the pan, jumps over the handle while still holding it, releases it in mid-air, spins upon landing, grabs the handle with her left hand, improvises, and tops it off with a pan flip and twirl, catching whatever she's making while still twirling it until finally stopping. This repeats until the food is done.
That wasn't what she was doing as I walked into the kitchen. Here's the pot version: improvisation. Basically, she just dances however she likes. Usually, the pot version is much more dangerous than the already-dangerous pan version because Mom starts hitting things by accident and things get demolished. This wouldn't happen with the pan dance because she's got it down well and can perform it just about perfectly. On the other hand, the pot dance encourages her to do whatever she wants, regardless of whether or not she actually knows what she is doing.
What she was doing then looked like some sort of cross between some ancient rain dance and a common move at a rave. Several empty boxes were already scrapped up by the time I got there, and as I watched several more were also destroyed- some of them not quite empty. I think she crushed one of my desk's legs.
Too smart to try to stop her, I waited and hoped that whatever Mom was making would finish fast.
About 20 minutes later, we were sitting at the dining table eating spaghetti. Mixed into the spaghetti were meatballs, tomato sauce, cheese, and ham; Mom has a great talent for keeping what she's destroying out of her food, you see. I don't know how she does it, but the splinters always fly everywhere but in the pot.
With a refilled glass pushed against her face, Mom was lying her upper body on the table glass, sighing tiredly. "I wasn't quite used to this environment," she said. "I should have made sure that there were no boxes within a 30-meter radius. Sorry about your desk leg, Maddy."
"It's no problem," I replied, slurping up some spaghetti. "I'll just use Ginga's door; comparing it to that desk leg, it should fit nicely."
"No, Maddy, you can't take Gin's door," Mom said with a barely-stern tone. "I'll get you a replacement tomorrow, okay? From Modern Depot or something."
"Please, Mom, not there." Ah, a clump of spaghetti and ham held together with melted cheese. Nice. "Modern Depot's way too expensive and their so-called pieces of wood are artificial. Making artificial wood is even worse for the environment than cutting down natural trees. Just go for Home Depot, Mom."
Now, Mom knew that I was pretty smart, so she just agreed. "Home Depot it is, then. Thank my lucky stars for having such a cute and knowledgable daughter!" I want to write things down accurately, so I'm keeping that full quote from Mom, but please, just scratch that first adjective she used to describe me.
As I said before, that last adjective actually was accurate. It's been a long-lasting family tradition (long-lasting as in 7 years)- look to Dad for math and science questions, ask me for anything else. I'm very smart in math and science, too, but Dad beats me there. Well, he's lived for a while longer than I, so that shouldn't be a surprise.
Oh, yes, and both Mom and Dad are always happy to talk about the days of their youths. Even after hearing their stories 20+ times, I still don't understand how you can go to school and have to take notes on the lesson with a pen and pencil. It's so much easier to just have a speech-converting device so that you can refer back to the full lesson anytime you want. Talk about inefficient times. You could argue that the writing helps you understand the concepts better, and some people actually do that even today, but is it really worth the hand cramps? Plus, you usually end up missing some things when manually note-taking. What kind of idiot would go through all that unnecessary pain for a tiny profit? Besides, taking notes at all is stupid for me, since I can just refer back to all of the lessons using my memory.
By then done with my lunch, I stood up and dropped off the plate and fork in the sink and remembered what Other Past Me did before, thus being compelled to pause. "Do you want me to keep up with the unpacking or can I go?"
"Let the guys do the rest when they come back," Mom said lazily from her half-lying position on the dining table. "We've already done most of the stuff, anyway; I need to rest up."
I don't think that I'll ever argue to a "Let the guys do the rest." I love that sentence to the ends of the world- at least, when Mom says it. Otherwise it doesn't really do a thing. When you have a free schedule, though, it's the best. That's when I can catch some extra hours of sleep.
However, I couldn't do that today because my schedule wasn't quite free; I had planned to go visit the school if the weather was good today. Although the temperature could definitely afford to take a chill pill, the weather was manageable, so I would go.
"I'm going to dress up and go visit the school," I told Mom, sticking back just in case she had something to say. I really didn't want to feel that iron grip again.
"Map's in the drawer to the right of the sink," Mom said back.
I opened the drawer and pulled a DMZ chip from next to the kitchen knife that I had held and dangerously swung before. "Oh, and I should come home around 3, maybe? If I'm not back by then, then just wait longer." While sayng that, I was crossing my fingers and hoping not to get kidnapped or assaulted.
"No problem." Mom was too exhausted to do anything more than lazily lift an arm and twitch it to the side as a wave. The arm promptly flopped back onto the table.
A few minutes later, I was ready, dressed in a boring white T-shirt and navy blue shorts. My cell phone, one of the old kinds from Nerizov, was armed with the map chip and would release a crap-quality hologram screen in front of my face whenever I flicked a little switch on the side. Yeah, it's not a voice-command model; can you believe it? Not that I'd embarrass myself by commanding my cell in public anyway, but I still think that I should at least have a touch-sensitive. The manual buttons are really inconvenient for the only game I have, which is a bought version of Tetris. The farthest I've ever gotten in Tetris is Level 39, and by then the whole thing is pretty much hard-dropping all the pieces automatically. I hear that invisibility is activated by Level 45, but I haven't gone that far just yet. Stupid manual buttons keep jamming up.
Enough cell phone talk.
I opened the door to all of the heat and turmoil of the outside world and stepped out of my house.
Intense heat socked me right in the face, compelling me to step back and slam the door closed. Global warming, how I loathe thee.
I reached into my pocket, took out a basic Iceman, and slapped it on my forehead underneath my bangs so that it wouldn't be so easily seen by the common bystander. Sighing with relief at the coolness on my head, I opened the door again, a little slower this time, and took a step out. This time, I closed the door behind me.
My house, apparently, was on a road that looked like a donut. My house is on the west side of the donut, and there are two exits off into a bigger road at the center north and northeast areas. A number of houses were placed in the donut's hole and more houses took the ring side. By the way, I couldn't see all of this based on observation at the time; back then, this description was purely based off the map.
While walking along on the road, I began to realize how easy it would be for a creepy kidnapper to roll along during working hours and just nab a kid off the side of the road. As I began wondering if I really should have just told Mom to look for me if I didn't come home on time, I saw a black van drive up in front of me and slow to a stop.
The van was nothing short of epically suspicious. First of all, it was a black van. That activates the danger alarms instantly; The blood-stained tire, lack of a license plate, and perfect one-way windows were really just supports for the black van-ness. The window on my side rolled down and a middle-aged guy with some stubble and totally black, messy hair leaned out of the window, smoking a cigarette.
My first reaction was, of course, to jump back a safe distance away and examine the scene. From the looks of it, no one who could see this was around.
"Calm down, miss." Argh, remembering this pisses me off. I hate it when guys try to act all polite like that to absolute strangers. I mean, seriously, "miss"?
Either way, the suspicious guy (who was wearing sunglasses, by the way- whoever can't see the danger must be absolutely blind) reached into his pocket and lifted a hundred-dollar bill. "I want you to do an errand for me."
Did he think that I was a pre-schooler? "Piss off. I don't do errands." Ah, great lines.
Although those were indeed great lines, they were used at the wrong time. Apparently, this guy liked to have defiance in his victims. "That kind of attitude is just what I need," he said. Now, I began to wonder if he even knew what he was saying. Since when did having a no-errand attitude help a person do errands?
Anyway, the guy reached into his pocket again and took out- believe it or not- ten more hundreds. "Come on, it'll only take a second."
Yeah, that doesn't work anymore. "Those are fake," I said. Suspense levels rising!
"How can you tell that, miss?"
"I will bet you that errand that there isn't a watermark on there." How did I know it? I'm just a genius.
This man seemed fairly certain that his bills were real. "Fine, then. Come closer so that I can show you."
By now, I was indignant at how this guy underestimated the minds of youths. "I'm not that stupid." I took out my cell phone and held it out in front of me, still a safe distance away. "I'm going to turn on the flashlight feature in this. Seeing how the inside of your van is so dark, I should be able to tell from whether there's a watermark or not."
That really made no sense, but it didn't matter because, before the guy could really react, I clicked a button on my cell and turned on a powerful beam of light that shot forward and instigated a scream of pain from the man. That should have blinded him for ten minutes.
You see, the "flashlight feature" installed in my cell is modified by the DMZ patch I personally constructed. The increased power allows it to illuminate a space more than 300 meters away. It's mad awesome and I dubbed it the "Nuisance Killer: Lamp of Doom."
It's nice to have the power to blind people for ten minutes because then I can follow up with some of my other little gadgets. I inserted earplugs into both of my ears and clicked another button, thus activating "Nuisance Killer: Maiden's Cry." I know; I have a good naming sense. The high-pitched sound coming out of my cell phone would send intense sound into the guy's ears, thus continuing to drive him temporarily insane until the ten-second time limit was up. However, ten seconds were more than enough in this case because the guy got knocked out in the first three. If anyone nearby happened to get affected by it, I would not have to feel bad because they didn't come out to help me fight a kidnapper.
With a knocked-out kidnapper in a big black van sitting in the middle of the road in front of me, I decided to do the sensible thing and made haste to check if that money was real.
I grabbed and held up to the sun the dollars that had fallen onto the floor when the guy was flailing in pain. Guess what? There were watermarks; apparently, I'm not as much of a genius as I thought. It's too bad that I've actually got a conscience, because otherwise I would have gotten $1,100 for my currently-empty wallet. Just for fun, I rolled up two of the bills into thin, conical shapes and stuck them up the kidnapper's nostrils.
Just in case he actually was a kidnapper and had tied-up children in the back of his van, I opened the door to the back seat and looked in. It was full of long boxes... and each one was labeled "Head." This was another one of those moments where human curiosity makes people do stupid things.
I looked inside the closest box.
It's a good thing that it was actually just a bunch of Head tennis rackets inside because, despite my stupid impulse action at the time, I really don't want to get involved with the local yakuza. I'm sure that they don't know how to warmly welcome any newcomers. Also in the box was a note that read "Must deliver to the following places..." Although I remember the places, I don't want to list them all. I'll just say that "Luna" caught my eye. This guy was delivering to that city as well? That was a little bit of a surprise to me for no real reason...
Apparently, this guy was actually innocent and really just wanted to have me carry out an errand for him. The question is why he would spend so much money to recruit me... Besides, exactly why was his tire blood-stained? Even it seemed to turn out that he really was probably just on a perfectly normal job, he was still mysterious, so I didn't stick around. After closing the door, I walked off as if nothing happened. Hopefully, a decent person found him before some thug did, or no one found him at all and he just drove off. All I know is that when I later returned home, he wasn't hanging around.
Back into the timeframe I was following, I walked out of the little circle road and to the side of the road it was connected to, going through the center north exit. Going up west following the road, I watched the road and the speeding cars on it. Considering the perfect turns, breaks, and accelerations, most of the cars were on auto-pilot. On the other hand, I could have just looked and the green lights on the fronts or backs of the cars and would have come to the same conclusion.
Well, I now knew that we lived in a neighborhood of the upper-middle class. My parents' main transportation vehicles are a manual mini-van and a bicycle. I believe that we've imported the exotic species of ancientius bicyclius to a place where they aren't supposed to exist.
I crossed the road to my right and passed by a couple of houses. At least the houses were all pretty similar- on the outside, anyway. For all I know, every house in the town except for ours got a modern makeover inside, keeping the more old-fashioned exterior to fool the people from the outside into thinking that the owners of the house didn't kill hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get the latest lights and chairs.
I'm going to sum up the next ten minutes with this: I followed the path on the map and dropped by the school.