Novels for Middle Grade

    Ciao, Mad Lies
    After a suicide in middle school, Andrew gets an education from Jia regarding the uses and abuses of social media as they try to figure out how a tragedy like this could happen.

    Chapter 1



    Andrew Warden could not understand the problem here. Emma van Amideme was like a local celebrity. She was barely fifteen, but still she ran one of YuTu's most popular influencer channels. Maybe that was the problem, but the thing is that she was a social media maven who had the power to change a trend in anything from hair to hemlines, toothpaste to trousseaus, and make-up to music. Why would she not want to give a minute of her show's time to the best video game ever?

    She'd abruptly refused. Her refusal wasn't even mediated by any sort of regret or apologetic tone. Quite the contrary: it was clear, stark, and entirely unapologetic. That rendered it cold and much more like an insult than Andrew had been anticipating. To be honest, he'd not exactly expected a warm reception, especially since he was beneath her notice in school and she'd never even acknowledged his existence until he'd asked her to mention the game on her channel.

    Maybe if he'd ever talked to her before, he might understand her better, and if she'd stood closer to him, her voice might be more clear, but she wasn't the kind of girl to get closer than six feet to Andrew even now Coronavirus had been tamed. That was beside the point though. "Look why not?" he'd protested.

    "I don't do video games! Nobody cares about them, but a bunch of retarded adolescent boys who have nothing else to contribute to society." Her two friends, who stood a respectful distance away, could have been clones of her from the way they looked like her, and they had laughed at that.

    That bit like a rabid dog, and so Andrew bit back. "Oh and like your fashion and make-up tips will save the world from climate change?"

    "Right, 'cause burning energy on endless hours of pointless video games is so good for the planet! People have been closeted for months! They need something to brighten their lives and perk themselves up. They need to feel good about themselves. Do you know how many suicides there were because of that confinement?"

    "No. How many?" Andrew challenged even though something he should have listened to inside him screamed at him that this was entirely the wrong way to deal with Emma.

    "A lot," she retorted with a bit of guilt in her voice, he fancied.

    If there was one thing he hated about her it was that she was so educated and so well-spoken, so he was happy to have caught her without a ready fact. He quickly took advantage of it, and said, "Video games help too. It gives people something adventurous to do. It gets them out of themselves for a while."

    "It’s all fake. It’s not real."

    "How is painting your face so you look different, being real?"

    Andrew seriously wanted to know the answer to that question, but Emma seemed to have no response to his accusation. She eyed him speculatively for a second or two which made him feel really quite uncomfortable; then she asked, "So what is this stupid game?"

    It's called Crimes and Misdemeanors, from ChallengeSoft.

    "Challenge Soft? That's a chuckle. And the game is about…?"

    "Um…you have to recruit people into your gang and then you go out and see if you can steal stuff and build yourself some turf."

    "Wait this is your great game? It’s all about theft and abusing society?"

    "It's just a game. It’s very challenging. You have to be smart and inventive, and organized. It teaches really good skills."

    "It teaches crime: like how to steal other people's fake property!"

    "That's not the point! Besides, it gives back to the community. It gives one percent of its profits to rehab causes."

    Emma eyed him for a second like she might be relenting, but then her expression suddenly soured and she said, "How generous! One percent! Look, I don't care."

    She leaned in closer to him and he was startled by her startling green eyes, but he could focus only on her lips as she spat her words.

    "Nobody cares! And I'm not going to ruin my brand by promoting a dumb video game on my channel that I don't even play, especially one that glorifies crime and violence! End of story. That’s not what my channel is about. It’s about beauty not ugliness, if you can understand that. Seriously, you need to get yourself a life, Andrew or whatever your name is. There's more important stuff in life than violent games, you know? Get your own YuTu channel if you want to promote your stuff!"

    With that, she walked away to rejoin her gaggle of girlfriends who had sidled further away as she'd launched into her assault. She moved so fluidly, but without looking back, and Andrew almost physically kicked the bench they'd been standing next to.

    He restrained himself only because he'd once really kicked a bench that he hadn't realized at the time was fixed to the ground. He almost broke his foot that time, and he was limping around for two weeks afterwards. He'd told his mom it was a soccer injury.

    She'd been thrilled that he was playing soccer. His dad wasn't. Andrew wasn't either: playing soccer that is, so he'd had to level with his dad, who'd laughed heartily when he'd learned the truth. Andrew suspected the laugh was a relief laugh because his dad hated soccer. He thought it was a game for girls. Which it was. And boys too. It’s just that the US boys hadn't done anywhere near as well as the US girls had on the world stage of soccer, which no doubt explained his dad's attitude.

    Andrew had never told his dad that he'd once had a soccer video game which he quite liked. He'd traded it for an old Super Mario 3D World game though, and then he'd never played that. It contained Luigi Bros. His friend, Chase, had thought it was a classic for some reason. But that soccer game was nowhere near as good as Crimes and Misdemeanors, which had become seriously popular.

    It had sold about six million units last he'd read. He'd got the disk so he could still play it even if his Internet connection was down, or sludgy. ChallengeSoft was doing well. He'd read there was speculation that they might go public with a share offering and he was thinking of maybe buying some. Shares always went up right after a public offering. The trick was to know when to sell them before they went down again, but if ChallengeSoft was this good at bringing a game out, perhaps they were a keeper. Maybe he could get rich!

    Of course, he was way too young to be trading stocks, but his dad would buy him some and he knew a bit about the market from this old stocks and shares trading game he had as well as from some online forums he'd been following. He hadn't even had to trade for that game; a friend of his who didn't like it had just given it to him one day, claiming it was too realistic. Andrew understood. He didn't like games that were too realistic; they tended to be boring, but Crimes and Misdemeanors wasn't.

    Maybe that's what Emma meant when she called it fake? But you know, life is boring sometimes. Nobody wants to play a game where it's too real and nothing fun ever happens. That's just like going to school.

    Andrew had once had a plan to create a game where you got to be a boy and you lived the boy's life. There were other games out there like that - sim type games - but the one he had in mind would have been different, because it would have been much more personal. You could have scanned in your own picture and it would have been put onto an avatar that you would then control. It would give you a way to live your life differently, and maybe work out problems in the game that you had to deal with in real life.

    The problem was that while he was learning some coding skills and making simple games, Andrew had nothing like the abilities he would need to create a mainstream game like that. That's why he'd written to ChallengeSoft two years ago, telling them his idea and suggesting they create their next game like that.

    He'd never heard back from them.

    No doubt they were very busy working on the next upgrade to Crimes and Misdemeanors, which was fine with him. It was always about the upgrades, which kind of made game-buying more like a subscription than buying a game, now that he thought about it. Now there was a way to make money! Games that weren't upgraded quickly fell into disuse and players became bored with the same old thing. The demand was always for better graphics, faster game play, greater challenges, easier controls, and so on.

    Andrew watched Emma walk away, laughing at something with her girls. Probably laughing at him. He hoped her channel became a swamp.

    He didn't notice another person watching him from the shadows of the building. She was Asian, and an associate of Emma van Amideme.



    Chapter 2



    It was probably a month later, and Andrew had just about forgotten his misadventure with Emma, when he got the package in the mail. His mom handed it to him when he got home from school. She never asked him about these deliveries because they were always new games and she had zero interest in his video games.

    Andrew never abused her trust by getting things she might disapprove of. He got all of his games in the mail these days because you could preorder them and they arrived on release day, so why go to a store? Most of the stores he used to go to had gone out of business anyway, because of the pandemic.

    At least, that's how he got games whenever he had money to spend on them, which was never as often as he would have liked. Money had become tight since his mom was let go after the business downturn. She still hadn't found a replacement job. A lot of moms were in the same boat, she had complained. Although she had what she considered was a temporary position, it didn't pay what she was worth - so she reminded the family often, usually adding that most jobs didn't pay women what women were worth.

    It seemed to Andrew like a lot of women had that same complaint, but at least she had work. His dad was just about hanging on to his job, and often he was working from home, but not always. Tempers had become a bit frayed now and then in what still seemed like a crowded house even now. He and mom, and his older sister Darwen, had to tiptoe around the place sometimes when dad was working.

    That's why Andrew was glad when he could go back to school at last, now things had eased and vaccinations were in the majority of arms. He'd always been very careful about distance and masking and his family had fortunately avoided getting sick, but now it was pretty much over, after what had seemed an interminable time, he finally got to see his friends without Skype or Zoom in between them, although to be honest, he was rather less thrilled about seeing some of the teachers in person.

    His mom always assumed a package meant another game and Andrew found it amusing because it could be anything - even drugs, but she trusted him and he wasn't about to deceive her. Drugs were a fool's game. That's one reason he really liked Crimes and Misdemeanors, because there were no drugs or anything like that in it. It was just pure crime: burglary. There were no weapons involved, which is why his parents hadn’t nixed the game. And Crimes and Misdemeanors really meant using your brains, sneaking into places, finding your way around barriers and alarms, getting away with it. It was a bit like hacking and it was the coolest thing ever. Fortunately his parents didn’t know how detailed it was or what skilz it taught. Or what the players thought it taught anyway.

    This particular delivery confused Andrew though, because he hadn't ordered anything recently, and most games these days came with the download first. Andrew liked to get the disk too, if one was available. He liked something physical for his money, so it was truly weird to get a disk without getting the download, especially when he hadn't ordered anything.

    Was this an update to something he already had? If so, why hadn't it popped up in game? Maybe it was a game he hadn't played in a while? Exciting times!

    After he'd shown mom that he'd done his homework to her satisfaction, she'd handed him the package and he'd taken it to his room and closed out all the school apps, getting ready for gaming mode!

    He tore into the package and became quite confused. It was a black box with an HDMI cable. What the heck was this?

    He was sure not about to hook something into his computer when he had no idea where it came from or what it might do! There was no telling what damage it could do to his games machine. It could be ransomware that would hijack his computer and scramble his files, and hold them hostage until he paid bitcoin to release them! Heck no to that!

    Fortunately, there was a letter accompanying the box, which he belatedly discovered in the packaging. When he read it, he got quite the shock.

    Chapter 3



    Mr. Warden,

    Some time ago you wrote to us asking if we would consider creating a game in which the player could play a real life rôle using an avatar of themselves, augmented by means of a scan of the player which would then be superimposed over the avatar for verisimilitude.

    We have given your idea some long consideration and have decided it would make for a fun game. Enclosed is a beta test version of this game, which we’ve called NuYu, for you to try.

    We're sending this to our usual beta testers, but since it was you who suggested this game, we would appreciate your feedback too. Please advise as to playability and entertainment value. We are also curious to discover if it meets your expectations. Take your time. The game is still under development, but end-user feedback is vital to success.

    It went on to say a couple more things and give a contact email for him to reply to.

    Andrew couldn't believe it. They had listened to him! Yes, they'd ignored him for two years, but now here was the result! They'd used his suggestion, created the game, and they wanted him - him! - to be a beta tester.

    The beta was a version of the game that was considered close to being finished. It was playable and had pretty much everything in place, but might have a few bugs or problems that still needed to be worked. It just needed testing and tweaking, and he was a tester!

    Wow! Nobody else had this game! He could even superimpose his own face on the avatar like he'd suggested! This was cool.

    ChallengeSoft, it would appear, liked to use big words in their communications, but that didn’t put him off. He knew how words were formed and very similar 'tude? Yeah, he got it. It meant lifelike! What was with the circumflex over the 'O' in role, he had no idea, but he knew what it was. He'd paid attention in English.

    It didn’t matter! He didn’t hesitate another second, and plugged the black box into His HDMI port. An icon appeared on his desktop and he clicked it. The game started up. It asked him to stand in front of the computer so it could make a scan of him using the computer camera. He had to turn slowly around 360˚ following spoken instructions in the game. When he finished and sat down again, his image was already in the computer, staring back at him from the screen and waving to him. That was way cool, but if he was honest? A bit creepy, too.

    The screen read, "Game Starting!" so he waited. And waited. He hoped this was because the game had a lot of power and that was why it was talking so long to load. He hoped it wasn't because it was too buggy to play, or because his system couldn't handle the size of this game. How big could it be? This was a games machine, so it ought to work!

    But no, just about when he was losing patience and thinking of restarting it, a new screen popped up asking, "Ready to Play?"

    "Duhh!" said Andrew.

    Then it annoyed him by telling him there was a video to watch first. "Okay, fine! Let's get it over with," he said, since there seemed to be no way to bypass this feature.

    The video began rolling and it went on about how this was a totally new game engine ('good!" thought Andrew. New is always better), and it was unlike any other game he'd ever play ('likely story' thought Andrew). It rambled on about how he needed to play with care, because his in-game experiences could impact his real life by giving him options and choices he never knew he had. It also advised that he could play and replay scenarios in the game that he'd never have the opportunity to do irl. He would open a whole new world, the video said, and this world would improve his life immeasurably. "Yeah, right!" he thought cynically.

    The video continued and became really interesting. In a compartment in the game box (Andrew checked and there it was) was hidden a small cable with a small camera on the end. The game instructed him that this was 'to be employed' if he wanted total realism in his game. He was to wear the camera in his everyday life.

    The video didn't say this, but it so happened that the camera was small enough that he could hide it, and no one would know he was taking video. For a moment he had some qualms about the smarts involved in doing that. Suppose some boys used it to invade a girl's privacy? That was a problem, but before he could focus on that over-much, a new concern pervaded his him. Did he have to go film his life before he could play the game? And if so, how much?

    No! In a way that was only slightly creepy, the video seemed to read his thoughts at that point and went on to assure him that it was not necessary to do any recording in order to play the game, but if he chose to do this, it would make the game much more realistic. It had a microphone built-in, too, so he could annotate the video with key words he would speak, such as 'bedroom' (where he sat right then) or 'house' for where he lived, or 'school', or whatever. The game would log these descriptions and use them to identify locations.

    The game was specific about his not revealing he was beta testing, so he concluded that he should wear the camera on the DL! The instructions advised him to record everything he did, everywhere he went, and everything he saw. At the end of each day, he was to download what he'd recorded into the game by plugging in the box. It would integrate his real life with the game-play engine and update the game to incorporate his own personal world.

    "Whoa!" exclaimed Andrew. This was way more than he'd imagined. When he'd imagined the game, he'd thought that it would be impossible to really have a game where you live your own life. He'd just thought there would be a generic house and school and other stuff, and his 'real' avatar would live in this fake world, so it would be sort of 'him' and like his life, but not really.

    This game was so much better than that. They'd taken it to another level. He'd record his real life and eventually it would be fully-integrated into the game! This was amazing!

    He couldn't wait to get started and luckily, the video wasn't that long. Before he knew it, he was picking stuff from lists that in an adventure game was his inventory, but in this game were the things he had in his life. For example, there was an assortment of houses, and he had to pick the one most like his. It already had his location from a GPS unit in the black box, and it identified his street and his house from Gogglemaps.

    This was pretty awesome! He clicked on the room in the house which most-closely matched where he was, and the house was set down right over the top of his actual house, so now the game had not only his street, but also what his house looked like inside! Cool!

    In a similar way, the game had him identify the size and make-up of his family, his school, his favorite games, and so on. He didn’t even notice that an hour had passed already by the time he actually found himself in the game.

    Instead of those stupid point-of-view things in movies and TV shows where a person sees themselves from a third person perspective, which Andrew had always considered to be bogus through and through, in the game, he was looking out of his avatar's eyes at a bedroom. It didn’t look like his bedroom, but he assumed that would be fixed once he started wearing the camera.

    In the game, he looked around and found his PoV changed as he looked. On the dresser - which he didn’t have in his own room, there was a mirror, so he walked over and looked into it and saw his own face looking back at him! This was great: his avatar was already incorporated into the game and it looked so real! Except he'd have to fix the generic clothes, but that could wait.

    In the game, he went downstairs and looked around, surprised only a little to discover that everything was generic. And no one was in the house, which was odd, because in the real house, his mom and dad were on the couch watching their show on TV, and his older sister was out on a date, thankfully, because she was like a little dictator. Andrew called her Yojong because that was the sister of the North Korean dictator, so he'd learned. He never stopped to consider that this made him Jongun. His sister's real name was Darwen, which was his mother's maiden name.

    Yeah go figure. What is it with girls?

    Anyway, he went outside - and was happy when no one called after him asking where he was going and what time he was going to be back which is what would have happened if he'd tried to leave the house without saying anything. This was great!

    He walked down the street and it looked just like the real street outside his house. Everything was static, because it was just an image, but it did change perspective as he moved, and it looked pretty real. He didn’t care that there were no sounds or traffic. It meant he could walk down the middle of the road if he wanted.

    It occurred to him that he could have taken his bike, which he would have in real life, but he hadn't thought about it when he first left the house in this new game environment, and now he did think about it, he wasn't sure if he would even find a bike parked in the garage if he'd looked. How would the game know he had a bike?

    He guessed that was why he had the camera. He could wear it tomorrow and do a tour of his house so it would look more real, and he could cover the garage and identify his bike and see if the bike would then appear in his garage in the game.

    It didn't take him long before he'd arrived at his school. His town wasn't that large and he usually rode the bike to school, but honestly, it was close enough to walk. He was just lazy, he realized. Plus his bike was pretty cool-looking.

    There was nothing going on at school of course, because it was closed. And, he had to remind himself, this was a game.

    Out of curiosity, he tried to open the school gate, which was closed, and it opened! This was interesting, he thought. Maybe the game allows a person to do stuff they wouldn't be able to do irl - which would be fun.

    He carefully closed the gate behind him for reasons he did not think about at the time, and then he wandered over to the main entrance to the school, which was locked.

    Of course it was!

    He looked around the schoolyard and suddenly realized that this was visible from the street, and therefore it had been recorded by whatever mapping vehicle had driven through this area.

    The interior of the school had been invisible to the vehicle doing the mapping. That's why it was so dark in there! At first he'd just figured it was because the lights were off inside the building, but when he turned back and really looked, he could see that it was pitch black - in other words there was nothing beyond the school door. Maybe that's why he hadn’t been allowed to go in there: it was because it wasn't mapped, and so there was literally nothing beyond the doors. It was a game boundary.

    He turned and exited the schoolyard, leaving the gate open because he couldn't be bothered to close it.

    He walked a little further. There was not a lot to see, other than the background image. No people were out here and no vehicles came by. Just out of curiosity, he tried to open a couple of other doors. One was to a small building that had been converted to apartments not long before. The door would not open.

    There was a bar two doors down from that, and when Andrew tried the door on it, expecting it to be closed, it opened right up. This was a surprise. It was just a game, so naturally he couldn’t go in there and order a drink, but irl, he couldn't even go into a bar! He'd be thrown out. Yet here, he went inside and no one was there except for one guy smiling from behind the bar, and looking very welcoming.

    Andrew approached him. From other gaming experiences, Andrew expected him to speak, but he was frozen. Andrew walked further in and looked around, but there really was nothing interesting in here! He tried to go back and visit the toilets just out of sheer curiosity and his need to explore, but that door would not open. Not that he had needed a bathroom, but what was the point of a bar with toilets that don't work? Andrew had never been in a bar, but he imagined people in there would be drinking a lot of beer, and would need to visit the toilet quite often.

    Bored, he turned and left. He seemed calm on the outside, but inside, his mind was running riot. Why that building? Why could he go into the one building he would be banned from entering irl? Well, maybe there were other buildings he could enter, but he wasn't about to try every door in town just to see. Not today!

    It wasn't until he had his character return home after his mother had called up from downstairs advising him to start getting ready for bed that he thought of something. He looked-up the bar on his browser and finally, he realized what had happened: the bar had a website of course, with phone number and directions and so on, but it also had this 'walk-thru' section where it looked like you were entering the bar. You could do a 360 turn, and see it all inside. It was exactly like he'd seen in the game!

    It suddenly hit him that this game had searched for the bar's website, found the 360 image, and imported it into the game to fill out that little section. That was pretty cool.

    It was something he would never have thought of had he been the one designing this game. Those programmers must be geniuses. He guessed that's why they made the big bucks. Who knew what else he might find if he explored the game more?

    But now wasn't the time. He respected his mother's rules so he turned off his computer, got himself ready for bed, brushed his teeth and settled in for his reading time. One of his mom's rules for the freedom he enjoyed was that he read each night.

    When he was little, she'd read to him and he'd loved it. His dad never did, but his mom had read to him some of the greatest stories he'd ever heard, and she read well, doing the voices and stuff. Once he got older, she'd encouraged him to read for himself and she would sit with him as he did, helping him out if he got stuck.

    Later, she'd encouraged him read by himself. Quietly of course; he didn’t read out loud when by himself. His mom had given him some nice incentives and rewards to read, as well. He'd been able to finagle some good computer games out of her by promising to read certain books, and he didn't cheat. He couldn't, because she'd read the books and she'd ask him about what he'd read the next morning. She always knew if he exaggerated or invented stuff.

    Now it was such a habit that he didn't think twice about it, and he had some amazing dreams when he read a good story before falling asleep. Not always, but quite often. It was like playing a video game in his sleep which was great.

    Finally he closed the book and turned out his light. He wanted an early night so he could get started in the morning with the camera, mapping his world to see what kinds of things it added to his game and what changes it made.

    Chapter 4



    All day the next day he wore the camera and no one knew. Of course he told no-one, not even Chase Charles, his best friend at school. He was a beta tester now, sworn to secrecy - well not really, but that's how he chose to look at his new situation.

    He had walked to school for a change so that the recording would get a lot of detail. Tomorrow he would ride his bike. He left home early, and walked all around the school before he went in, to record the premises thoroughly.

    Inside he walked the hallways on the first and top floors, including the bathroom he normally used. He even snuck quickly in and out of the girl's bathroom which he would never do, but he had to be thorough for this recording. Anyway, no one saw him. He didn’t go into the teacher's lounge because there would be people in there, but he did peer through the glass door into the principal's office and looked up and down, left and right to get an image of that. He was curious to see how it rendered in the game.

    He didn’t go into the classrooms. They were all largely the same and he figured that would be taken care of as he went to each of his classes during the day, but he did go into the gym, which wasn't on his class schedule for that day. He figured on gym day, he'd leave the camera at home so it wouldn't risk being discovered when he was changing.

    By the time he went to home room he was almost running late. He wasn't late, but he was normally in there before now. Chase tackled him when he arrived. Not literally, which would have been probably painful since Chase was a linebacker on the football team. He wasn't huge, but he was strong and confident.

    "Where the heck have you been?" he asked as Andrew showed up and dumped his backpack on the table they shared.

    "Oh, did Chasey-wasey miss his boyfriend over the weekend?" said Conner, the quarterback on the school team.

    "Zip it, whippet!" Chase said in a threatening voice, but then he laughed. He'd started with the rhyming after the class had read an English novel that had featured someone who supposedly spoke Cockney rhyming slang, and Chase had thought it was cool. Andrew had thought it was stupid. Chase had grown bored with it himself and he didn't rhyme much anymore, just once in a while, with certain phrases. He and Conner were teammates and friends, but Andrew had never been a part of the football team's circle despite being such good friends with Chase.

    He and Chase had been kindergarteners together and had shared the first two years of elementary school, but later Chase's family had moved away, so none of the last half of elementary school or the entire time in middle school had been shared, although they'd stayed in touch. They'd played online games together, and had even met up from time to time.

    Chase's family had moved back in time for high-school when his mom had split from his dad and she wanted to be back there, close to her family connections. Andrew had noticed that he and Chase and grown apart quite a bit, but they still connected because of their past history, and over video games.

    They weren't close enough that Andrew felt compelled to share the beta test thing with Chase though.

    "So did you check out the Tight mod like I suggested?" Chase asked.

    It took Andrew a second to wake up to what he was asking.

    "Whassup? Still asleep?" Chase asked jovially.

    "Yeah, I guess."

    "So what did you think of it?"

    "I didn't get around to trying it."

    "You didn't try it, Wyatt?" Conner Passeredo called over from his table next to Chase, all smart-mouth as usual, emulating Chase.

    Chase gave Conner, the first string quarterback, one of his killer game looks, then he turned to Andrew and said lightly, "You should try it tonight. It’s got the perfect name."

    "It does, huh? Okay." Andrew shrugged. "I'm really not as much into Dark Assassin as I used to be," he confessed, referring to the game Chase was talking-up the mod for.

    "How come?"

    "I dunno. Just got bored with it, I guess."

    The truth was he had something far more interesting to play, but he wasn't sharing any secrets. Not yet anyway.

    "Well try the mod. Maybe you'll change your mind. It really beefs up reaction times. I'm psyched to try it in multiplayer."

    "Okay! Sounds good."

    Andrew really had no enthusiasm for a discussion about Dark Assassin or mods right then, but before anything else could transpire, Conner was giving them a heads-up.

    "Here comes Queen Beyotch, fashionably late as usual. But que mono!"

    "Who's Kay Mono?" asked Andrew.

    "Definitely someone I wouldn't want to get close to!" Chase joked rudely.

    Andrew had no idea what they were talking about, except that he knew from health education that 'mono' was a transmissible disease also known as the 'kissing virus' because you could get it from kissing someone who was infected. Yuk!

    He realized though, that what Connor had said must have been one of his slang Puerto Rican catch-phrases and not somebody's name, since they weren't looking at anyone who might have been named 'Kay'; they were looking at Emma van Amideme who had just strolled in like she hadn't a care in the world.

    She was only a few paces ahead of Mr. Wells, the home room teacher, who often seemed like he'd been waiting outside for her to show-up before he could begin his morning routine. Actually, Andrew wouldn't have surprised to learn that his snarky idea was the truth. Normally he wouldn't have paid much attention to Emma, but the fact remained that she was a personality and Mr. Wells was known to be rather taken with her; hopefully not inappropriately, especially since he was a friend of her father's.

    "The 'B' word is a bit harsh, dude!" Chase said quietly, half-joking to Connor.

    "Is it harsh if it’s true?" Connor asked philosophically and then sat down and focused on sorting out some stuff in his bag.

    "As long as the mono part isn't true, I wouldn't worry overmuch!" Chase joked, shaking his head at Connor.

    "Okay guys!" Andrew said in mock remonstration. This garbage had gone on too long and was entirely wrong in the first place. Having chastised the two of them, he was a little slow himself getting settled down, because he was intently focusing his camera on Emma so the box would get some good imagery of her. What it would do with her, he had no idea, but he was still a bit miffed about her rejection of his idea, so he let it roll, and some half-baked plan began cooking on the back burner of his brain.

    "You might as well give up any wild fantasies you have of converting that goal, dude!" Chase observed to him.

    Chase was a bit too observant for Andrew's taste - at least he was this morning.

    "I have zero interest in Media Maiden," Andrew said, naming her like it was her superhero name.

    Chase laughed. "Is that her alter-ego?" he asked. "Connor thinks her secret name rhymes with Nvidia switch!" He pronounced the video card manufacturer's name like it rhymed with 'media'. The 'switch' rhyme was obvious to Andrew. And it was really rude. Yes Emma had rejected his game idea, but that was no reason to abuse her.

    "You don't share his view?" Andrew challenged. He was actually curious.

    "Nah. She's not really like that," Chase said, keeping his voice very low despite the noise in the classroom. "I don't think so anyway."

    "Oh? And what’s the great Chase Charles's considered opinion on the subject?" Connor asked.

    "I think she's just so self-centered that she comes-off like one: no time for anyone, but herself and her riches."

    Andrew raised his eyebrows and cocked his head in subtle acknowledgement of what he considered to be a thoughtful observation from his friend. He said, "Rich is what she's becoming from the gazillion promotions she has on her channel, dude!"

    "I didn’t know you were a fan of hers!" Chase joked.

    "I'm not. It’s just what I hear," Andrew said, hoping his slight self-consciousness didn't show too badly. The fact was that he'd watched her channel quite a bit, but only while planning his pitch to her about Crimes and Misdemeanors, which had now fallen flat.

    "It’s a flash in the pan. Trust me. It won't last; then she’ll come crawling to the football team for the attention she craves!" Connor said confidently.

    "Now who’s dreaming?" Andrew asked, turning his attention away from Emma. He hadn't thought Connor had been paying that much attention, but evidently he didn't miss much. Andrew guessed that's why he was such a good quarterback.

    Any further trash talk was stunted as Mr. Wells, who was also their science teacher, finally arrived at the front of the classroom and as usual, got right down to business without any preamble or introductory rambling. This suited Andrew. He didn't really like gossiping about people. That was more like girl's work in his view, since they seemed to do a lot of it, but maybe he just noticed it more when girls did it. Plus he had a strange feeling that the popular consensus was wrong about Emma van Amideme, although if you’d asked him to explain that, he could not have said why.

    He only half listened to Wells as he meandered on; his own thoughts were all over the place because he was bored already, and the day continued in much the same vein. There was nothing new. His classes were already well-traveled and set in their ruts for the semester. No new topics were launched that day - only continuations of topics already well-traveled.

    Andrew, as usual, paid sufficient attention to avoid being embarrassed if the teacher of the moment asked him a direct question. The rest of the time he spent wondering about the game, how it would extract and interpret the information he was recording, and just how much storage the box had. Would it run out and fail to capture part of his day? Half of it? Three-quarters? Even with the best compression algorithms, he knew that video sucked up massive amounts of both bandwidth and storage.

    The E-Gods alone knew how many Petabytes of server space Goggle had to devote to storage for YuTu vids, for example. It must be massive.

    Not that his little box was anywhere near that league, but recording a solid eight or nine hours of video had to suck up some serious real estate. There was nothing he could do until he got home and tried it out to see what it had recorded, and what a difference - or not - it made to his experience.

    It turned out he was to be quite surprised.

    Chapter 5



    The first thing he did when he got home, before anything else, was to hook the box to his computer. He knew it had a ton of data onboard and he wanted to give it the maximum chance he could to download and integrate everything before he opened up the game properly. The second thing he did was open the new package he'd received. Yet another one that he was not expecting.

    It turned out to be from ChallengeSoft - and it was virtual reality goggles! Unbelievable! He could tell from just looking at them that these things were not cheap, but the accompanying note said that now he was a beta tester, these would give him a better experience.

    He truly had to force himself to delay trying them out right away, and he left his computer churning data from the box as he got changed; next he did his homework, and after that, he ate the evening meal with his parents and sister. His dad always insisted they eat together, him being Lord of the Manor and all that crap. Andrew tolerated this in good humor because all he had to do for the rest of the evening was play his new game.

    He was surprised when he finally, finally! and chomping at the bit, made it back to his room, to discover that the game was already up. He'd imagined that only impatience and frustration awaited him because it would still be downloading and processing, but it was sitting there with a blank screen and the sentence, "Do you want to play a game?" sitting there like it was joking with him, using that old line from the War Games movie. He smiled. So his game had a sense of humor, huh? Or more realistically, its programmers did, which was not a surprise to him.

    "How did you process eight hours of video so fast?" he asked admiringly as he clicked to continue, and then added, "Or did you do a crappy job with blocky polygons instead of real vid?"

    The game, as if to answer him, opened with a view of his bedroom, which was photorealistic and showed everything as it had been this morning when he'd first activated the vid feed. There was an option to switch to VR goggles, which he did immediately. He plugged them into the same HDMI port his box was now not using, and slipped them on. His bedroom was sharp and crystal clear, and it looked pretty much how it was right then, as he changed the angle of view and then compared what he saw on the screen with the way his real bedroom was.

    This was amazing, and impressive; then he had the idea that maybe the programmers were especially sneaky, and had done the best job on the first part of the video he'd shot, which they knew he would see first, but they'd been a lot lazier on the rest, hoping he wouldn't notice. In the game, he quickly proceeded out of his room, downstairs, and out the front door, but no matter how fast he went, and no matter which random direction he chose to go, the scenes looked real - like he was watching a home movie of his travels outside that day instead of a computer game.

    This was more than impressive; it was all but impossible. But he realized that maybe they'd sent the VR goggles because they knew that the smaller screen the goggles employed would require much less processing muscle for the video. If he'd been watching this on his monitor it might have been slower and stuttering, but he didn't care. The VR was amazing! It rendered the view into a 3D world that looked so incredibly real.

    He went to the school and was blown away. The vid quality here was just as good as it had been in the bedroom. How had they done this? How could they have processed all that information so quickly? They must have, like, the best algorithms ever invented and the most efficient way ever devised of moving information around because while his gaming computer was a decent one, it was an older model. These machines grew old fast, and he knew that his sure wasn't that speedy - that it could process all these data points with such amazing speed and efficiency.

    It was then that he noticed a trick they'd used. When he looked to the side of the screen, or the very top or bottom, the image was blurry, but it quickly changed to a much improved resolution even as he looked.

    It suddenly became apparent what they'd done. They were tracking his view and they'd used an algorithm that made his screen behave like his eyes did; the center of the screen, where his focus was most of the time, was very sharp, but out on the periphery, it was a lot less so, meaning that they had less manipulation to do out there: less detail to shuffle around. It was apparently only when his VR gogs detected that his eyes had moved to the edges that it sharpened up what it was he was looking at and sharpened the resolution - just like real eyes worked. Weird.

    That was pretty slick and it explained part of how they were able to do what they did, but not all of it. One thing was sure; these guys were really good.

    He let that go and in the game, he walked into the school yard. Now when he approached the door, it was unlocked and he could see detail inside. He entered and walked the same hallways that he had this morning and everything was rendered just as his camera had caught it that day.

    The difference as that there was no-one there which struck him as odd for a second until it dawned on him. He was never at school at this time of day! No one was! This was showing the school as it was supposed to appear now - when it was closed and everyone had gone home - except that there were one or two more lights on than there probably were in the real school, otherwise it would be largely dark in here, so the game was apparently realistic, but it cheated a bit here and there.

    He wondered if he would have gone there during the day - like if he was off sick from school one day and then entered the game - if it would show his fellow students going about their day as usual? There was no way to tell.

    Or was there? He remembered that he could change the time in the game. Normally it was real time - now in real life was now in the game, but he remembered from the introductory vid that time could be adjusted so that it could be night in the game even when it was daylight outside, and vice-versa. How did he change that?

    He called up a help screen and typed in a query - except in the game it was called a querty, after the first few keys on the keyboard. It was another example of the programmers' warped humor, Andrew concluded.

    The answer came back fast - yes, he could change the time in the game, so he could effectively travel backwards in time. He set the clock to when he first arrived at school that morning - and when he set the game going, it was just like arriving at school that morning.

    He couldn't recall every detail of what had happened as he walked into school earlier that day. He was aware he was capturing video, but he didn’t pay attention to everything that happened every minute, so he didn't know if this was simulated or if it was what he'd actually imaged, but it seemed so real - except that it was on his gogs rather than in front of eyes unfiltered by computer code and three-colors of LEDs. It seemed so real, though. He recognized people and they looked just like they would if he'd been looking directly at them.

    How were they doing this so quickly and with such detail? He was aware of the peripheral blurring, but even so it looked so good! It was so natural that at first, he hadn't even registered that there was sound: a background wash of noises and indistinct conversations. He stood watching al this for a while, recognizing several people.

    The computer evidently did not, which wasn't surprising. Every other new person who appeared - or very nearly so, had a question mark pop up with a text box he could type into. The box asked, "Name?" Andrew typed it in if he knew it so that the game could identify his classmates and others in the school. Most of these people he did know by sight of course, and not so much as people he'd normally speak to, but just fellow school attendees.

    It looked like that magic box he'd carried around all day had captured actual people from school and rendered them into the environment rather than populating the school with dummy avatars - placeholders for the real people he knew.

    The thing was that they were interacting! They’re weren't simply standing around like characters do in a first person adventure or exploration game, like in one of the Zelda stories, for example, merely marking time with that stupid spastic throbbing while they waited for the player to approach and ask questions of them, to which they would reply in a speech balloon or a box at the bottom of the screen. These characters were talking to each other like they had a life separately from anything Andrew might be doing. It was so good!

    He hadn’t paid any attention to what people had been wearing that day, so he had no idea if these people were clad in generic clothes, or if they were wearing what each of them had actually worn that morning. It really didn't matter, and Andrew was less interested in that than in eavesdropping, and in doing so, he realized that the sound was treated like the video: it was indistinct for a reason and was nothing more than meaningless mumbling until he moved closer and focused on someone in particular who was talking, and then the speech made sense and was a real conversation - at least simulated to sound real. In treating conversations this way, just like with the video, they saved tons of memory and time.

    One of the two guys he'd been edging toward and intently listening to suddenly said, "Hey, butt out, dude! Private conversation here?"

    Andrew didn't know the guy, so he started to type "Sorry!" but there was no space for him to type into. In response to his keyboard input, a notice appeared in the information panel to one side of the screen and advised him to speak in natural language.

    What?

    Andrew couldn't believe that. But he tried it. He said, "Sorry dude! My bad!"

    The guy on the screen said, "Don't sweat it," and he turned away from Andrew. The guy's conversation immediately became mumbled again, and Andrew moved away from those two. This was amazing. It was like real life, yet it was all contained here in these little VR gogs!

    He had an inkling how they were doing it. There was obviously a set of stock responses which were output in certain situations - like if they didn't want Andrew prying into a conversation, they would have the person give the 'butt out' response, and then go back to mumbling. It was an easy way to keep things simple. Just to be sure, he tried it on a couple of different guys and he got the same stock response. He wondered if that might change as more outside information got entered into the game.

    He also wondered what would happen if he'd pressed the conflict, and hadn’t backed-off from that first guy. Would the game support having the guy get into a fight with him?! He didn't know and wasn't interested in pursuing it anyway. As this thought ran through his head though, he became slowly aware that he was idling his time away here, and he was risking being late for his home room class, so he quickly headed over there.

    Not that he'd get into trouble if he did, because this was just a game, but he didn’t want to risk getting an in-game detention, or a tardy or whatever the game rule was here, and spoiling his exploration of how his recorded 'mods' had been integrated into the game.

    In the home room it looked just like it had that morning. He walked over to where Chase was at their table and dumped his backpack down, and Chase said, "Where the heck have you been?" which now that he thought about it was probably exactly what he'd said for real that morning. Andrew wondered if this was just a recording of what actually happened. If he'd come in early, would Chase have said the same thing? He decided he was going to check this out and he accessed the time and reset it back ten minutes, and relocated himself outside the school. From there, he proceeded directly to the homeroom and entered.

    Now it looked like Chase had just arrived. Andrew said, "Hey!"

    "Hey yourself!" Chase responded.

    Clearly the game was making up the responses, and not simply spewing back what Andrew had recorded. Probably there was a limited set of stock responses, but this was pretty impressive.

    Chase said, "Did you catch the Steelers game? Stellar!"

    Andrew found this interesting. The real Chase would never have asked him that question because he knew that Andrew wasn't much into sports. That wasn't the interesting thing though. The interesting thing was that Chase was really a fan of the Steelers. He never used to be, but he came back from his family's stay in Pittsburgh a convert. How did the game know this?

    Technically he hadn't been in Pittsburgh, he'd been in California - which is in Pennsylvania! It’s a small community that hosts the University of Pennsylvania and sits in a bend of the fabled Monongahela River. Andrew had delighted in the whole idea of California being in Pennsylvania when he'd learned where Chase was going, even as he was miserable that Chase was going. But where else would his father go to teach at the University of California if not Pennsylvania?!

    The thing is: how did the game know that Chase was a Steeler's fan? Andrew had a hunch he might know, so he paused the game and took off the gogs, switching back to his monitor and opening his browser to check the game score. Back with the gogs in the game, he asked Chase, "So what was the score?" Chase gave him an answer which matched the game score Andrew had seen on the website.

    Somehow the game itself was looking this information up online, and so Andrew, pursuing his hunch, paused the game, took off the gogs again and went to Chase's SpaceBuck preen. SpaceBuck was an upcoming social media choice for people of their generation, and sure enough, there it was: Chase proclaimed his Steeler's fanboying right there on his home facet, which Andrew knew was public so anyone - including this game - could see it. The game was obviously using the internet to supplement information, and it had apparently tracked down Chase and found some info about him to use in the game.

    As slick as that was, it still hadn't captured Chase properly. He was more into online gaming than the Steelers, as big of a fan as he was of the football team, which was why he'd always talk about games with Andrew, but somehow the game Andrew was playing had not picked up in that. Not yet anyway.

    To test this out, Andrew asked, "So how was the Tight mod? Did it work pretty good?"

    Chase didn't answer. Instead, he turned to his pal Conner and started mumbling.

    Andrew smiled. He could see what was happening here and he was onto this game! It was all smoke and mirrors, and deflection. But would it change? Would it improve with use or would it be boring and always stay this way?

    He began to jump forward after that, visiting his school day at progressively different times just to sample what was going on. It was growing close to lunchtime in the game when he had a brilliant idea. He needed to track down Emma van Amideme.

  • Cleoprankster
    Cleopatra wasn't always the exotic queen we think of her as today. At one point she was a mischievous girl who had issues over her father's behavior and who didn't get along with her brothers and sisters. Maybe it was like this?

    Kleo hid behind a large cut-stone block. It was that time of the evening when the sun was setting heavily into the ocean in the West, and this transition between day and night was her favorite time because it meant she could more easily sneak around and get things done. She liked to sneak. Sneakery was a child's highest calling in life, she felt, and no-one sneaked better than Cleoprankster.

    It was Cleoprankster's mission in life to pull pranks on people and this time of day helped her greatly because people had a hard time seeing what she was up to in the twilight zone of the day.

    It wasn't day and it wasn't night, so people who saw well in the daylight couldn't see where she was going, and people who saw well in the night couldn't tell where she'd been. She could sneak around and set up her pranks quite easily.

    This evening's prank was one which she had been pulling for some time. It involved the pyramid her family was trying to build for her grandfather. She loved her father, but she did not like her grandfather. He wasn't so grand, and she was not about to allow even her father to build a giant monument to him with these large cut stone blocks that smelled of lime and baking desert days. She had a fine pyramid scheme in mind which would un-level the playing field.

    Cleoprankster's real name was Kleopatra or Κλεοπάτρα in Koine (or Biblical) Greek, which was the language she spoke most often. She lived in Egypt, or Aegyptus as she sometimes thought of it in Greek, because she was Macedonian Greek by descent, and it had been a long descent from Alexander's best general to herself. He was obviously the best general because he stayed alive and had descendants!

    Her name wasn't really hers though. It was a tribute to her father, pharaoh Ptolemy Auletes, because Cleopatra means 'glory of her father', so she went by Kleo for short, which just meant glory. She liked that name muchly. She knew she was destined for glory because she knew that one day she would become queen of all Egypt. Oh yes, she would, by hook or by crookedness. Or by sneakery.

    She was born in 69 BC which is well over two thousand years ago. She had two sisters, Arsinoe and Berenice, and two brothers, Ptolemy and Ptolemy. Yes, it was that weird, and this explains a lot about her attitude to life, which wasn't let's face it, the very best it could have been. Cleoprankster was not a good example to follow, believe you me.

    Berenice was no longer around due to a severe disagreement with her father which resulted in Kleo and her father spending a couple of years in Rome, but at least she had picked up some choice cuss-words in Latin, and learned a few bits and pieces of some other languages, too. And now they were back! And Egypt was in a bit of a mess which was nothing to do with Kleo's behavior for once.

    Because she was the daughter of a king, she was highly-educated. He teacher was Philostratos which means love of the high clouds. Maybe. His head was certainly up there most of the time as far as Kleo could tell.

    He taught her boring stuff like oration, which was how to speak, and which she already knew! Duhh! Why teach her to do something she already could do? She'd been doing it for years! What a waste of time!

    He also taught her philosophy. Literally, that means love (philo) of sophy. Sophy is wisdom. Maybe Kleo should have been called Sophie because she really was very smart; at least, she had convinced herself that she was. Unfortunately, smart isn't the same as wise, and she wasn't quite smart enough to realize that. Kleo's problem was that this smartness of hers did not always get channeled in useful directions.

    As she grew she would learn many languages. She was good at language - sometimes bad language, but also foreign languages such as Arabic, Aramaic, Ethiopian, Latin, Median, Parthian, Syriac, and Trogodyte which is almost the same as Troglodyte. It means people who live in caves. Knowing languages meant that she not only learned very much, but also she could talk her way out of anything.

    She needed that skill, especially the basic Egyptian she had taken the time to learn, because Kleo's problem was that she was quite smart, but very bored. This meant that she got into all kinds of trouble, most of which she managed to blame on her siblings (her brothers and sisters). Having several siblings was quite useful, she had discovered over the years.

    But she was not thinking of siblings right now. She was thinking of sneakery. Hiding behind that large and dusty stone block, expertly chiseled by someone who knew how to use a good copper chisel she was waiting for the last of the workers on the pyramid to leave for the day. It wasn't even a pyramid yet - nor would it ever be if Kleo's plan worked. Right now it was a large, empty space, and the workers were trying so hard to get that space very level so it would serve as a sound foundation for building on.

    Only a complete camel would try to build a giant pyramid on a surface that was not level, so the first job of building a pyramid was to get a very level surface. The workers had to dig down through the sand to the rock; then they had to make sure the rock was level and flat across the entire base of the pyramid.

    Some people would throw up their hands at this task, and give up, but not Egyptians. They were dedicated like you would not believe. I have to level with you: they were level-headed and on the level.

    They did their leveling by building a wall around the area they wanted to be flat; then they flooded the area with seawater. After it was fully flooded, they drilled holes

    down into the rock and made sure the bottom of every hole was the same distance from the surface of the water. Since the surface of the water was quite flat, then all the holes would go down the same distance! Even Kleo had to admit that it was a brilliant scheme.

    Once the water was drained, the rest of the rock could then be leveled-down using the hole bottoms as a guide - hence a very flat surface.

    It was ingenious. Kleo was smart enough to appreciate how superb the plan was. She was also sabotaging the plan every chance she got by sneaking out and adding rock and sand to the bottom of some of the holes that were already drilled, to make it seem like they were not drilled deep enough.

    The next day when the workers came back, they would drill out those holes again, and end up making them deeper than other holes! They would realize that the other holes were now wrong, and they would have to go back and drill those holes, to make them as deep. But by then, Kleo had dropped little rocks and sand into other holes so they were wrong too!

    In other words, the drilling would never end! Kleo's plan was even more brilliant than the leveling plan was. She was so proud of her accomplishment. What a fine queen she would make when she was such an excellent schemer!

    Adjusting her wig so it did not slip while she worked, she snuck out with a small leather bag and began depositing little rocks and handfuls of sand randomly in various drilled holes.

    The water felt warm on her dusty feet. It was nice to be out at this time of day, as the heat began to fade slightly, and before the chill of the desert night came on. She could feel the annoying, gritty sand washing out from between her toes. It felt good!

    One or other of her mutts (mutt was the Egyptian word for mother - she had several and never did know which one was really hers) would be annoyed with her for ruining her sandals, but she had lots of sandals. Besides, they were made from leather and so were camels - and they never had a problem getting wet so she didn't understand the problem.

    "What on Geb do you get up to Kleopahtrah, to ruin your shoes like this?" one of them would say using her formal name. Geb was the god of the Earth and so they would use his name when they meant, 'what on the planet do you get up to'?

    Ruin her shoes like what? Kleo always ruined her shoes the same way: she either wore them out from wearing them when she was out, or they rotted off her feet for some obscure reason. There was nothing mysterious about it. She usually ignored her mutts or tossed out a mumbled bit of nonsense as a reply, because this taught them never to expect a straight answer from her. She felt this was good training for a mutt to have.

    Her father on the other hand, was an it. No kidding! That was the informal Egyptian word for dad. It was so busy it had little time for Kleo, although they did run into each other now and then (usually then) even in a palace this big. He seemed only to be interested in her education, which was a commendable and rare thing for a girl in this country. But then she was royal!

    Kleo always told him quite honestly that she was learning everything she could learn. She never told him that she wasn't necessarily learning it from Philostratos. If he started to ask too many questions, she would start answering him in Trogodyte and he would cave. Her system worked really quite well because she practiced hard at it, and as you well know, practice makes deflect.

    She went to her chamber and took off her wig, which despite being lightly constructed, was uncomfortable and made her head sweat. Her bald pate was shiny with it. She wiped a hand over it wishing that head lice had never been created by whatever evil god created them, because they were a plague upon Egypt which was why she shaved her hair - or rather why she had a servant do it; then, perversely, she wore a wig, which since it was made of real hair, would also attract lice, but at least it could be taken off and washed.

    She would be the first to admit that this habit made little sense, so she wore no such thing when she was in the palace, and often tried to get away without one when she went out, preferring to wear some fair heroic headdress instead. Her fertile and inventive mind was constantly in search of materials that looked like hair but were lighter, and less sweat-inducing than this thing was.

    Finally, she called for a bath and sat down to rest while the palace servants rushed to meet her needs. What a day!

  • So this Canadian girl walks into a cloud - and discovers she can fly it like an airborne chariot! Nibi Kisi meets other cloud chariot riders and discovers there is an environmental crisis that she's been blind to, and she and her new friends must help.

    When it happened, Nibi Kizis was walking home from school on her thirteenth birthday, with her head in the clouds as usual.

    In Nibi's case she had no choice. As she traversed the hill between her school and her home, like she did every school day, she literally headed into the fog which seemed permanently to shroud this landmass at this time of year.

    When she was young and foolish, she had liked to think of this journey as moving between two worlds. In the fairytale stories, some people had a closet through which they could walk. Nibi had this vapor which thickened the higher she climbed, until it was quite impossible to see more than a few feet, most notably her own two feet, ahead.

    Now that she was a mature young woman, she didn't think of the fog that way. She thought of it as a nuisance which would embed itself in expensive clothes and ruin her beautiful hair. She could always walk around the hill of course - if she wanted to take several hours to get home, for it was a rather hefty hill.

    The odd thing was that it had not always been there. It was a hill made of trash which had been piled up and compacted down, and then piled up again and again over many years until it was finally covered in rocks and dirt.

    The best place for trash, she thought. Now it was a park, and a hike and bike trail, and a great sledding, snowboarding, and skiing attraction in winter, when it happened to snow, of course, but by this point, winter was some way behind her.

    It certainly didn't by any means lead to another world except in the most mundane of senses. It led from the public school which she tolerated as an unavoidable evil, to the wealthy neighborhood of civilized people where Nibi lived.

    She dreamed of the day when she would graduate high school and move to a select university, preferably far from here, where she would get an actual education which would in turn enable her to move on and find a satisfying life in the adult world. Consequently, her life now was devoted to getting there from here, which meant school and study, and therein lay one of her contradictions. Why walk at all when a parent could drive her and she could get some reading done in the car as she traveled?

    Well, Nibi didn't much enjoy her parents. They were like the school in that they were something she must tolerate in order to get where she needed to go. Nibi liked to take in the long view of life, which was why, as she was about to enter the fog on this day, she pulled out yet another plastic head cover, of which she kept a ready supply.

    Plan ahead (or for your head, as she once had joked) and be prepared, she thought. She carelessly tossed the plastic wrapper for the disposable head-cover aside as she plodded into the mist. It was a trash heap hill after all.

    With an audible sigh, she tied the cheap and nasty head-square over her hair in what was very likely yet another forlorn attempt to avoid the cloying vapor getting into her head.

    What had, as a child, been viewed as an exciting doorway to another realm, and one of adventure at that, was now nothing more than a temporary nuisance through which she must pass and endure in order simply to get to the other side. Just like her parents. Just like her school. Just like her childhood.

    She really wanted to get to the other side of all these things. Really. It's not the journey, she had to console herself often; it's the destination.

    Her parents weren't so bad, and they were quite well-off, which was a necessity in life, Nibi considered, but they might as well have been slave overlords for all the demands they put upon her. She had sometimes felt like she was really in the ownership of a pair of wicked witches, such was the weight of their expectations pressing down on her. As her education and reading progressed, though, she found a better counterpart in Greek mythology.

    Sisyphus, despite being the king of Corinth, was punished for being, as far as Nibi could tell, very similar in outlook to herself! She identified with him. He was like her. He was well-off and happily satisfied with himself and his successes, yet he was punished for it by being forced to roll a huge rock up a hill every day only to have it roll back down so he had to roll it back up again the next day!

    Seriously? He never heard of wedges under the rock? Never heard of digging a depression in the ground to sit the rock in after he'd rolled it up? Apparently, the ancient Corinthians were not too smart.

    At least she didn't have a rock to roll, but she would be the very last to deny the simple fact that she was the smartest and most talented person in her school.

    On top of that, she was an excellent athlete who had won many trophies in school games. She had never pursued her athletics beyond the school however, because her parents considered her academic life to be far more important. They wanted no "jock" in their family. It was uncivilized.

    This was, fortunately, one of the few things in which Nibi and her parents found common ground. She had no interest in pursuing sports outside of school, but as long as she had to pursue them in school, she had decided that might as well be the best, and so it was.

    Unlike many girls her age, she supposed, she had found herself wishing she'd had an older brother upon whom the weight of achievement would press instead of squashing her like an iron press sitting on one of those disgusting burgers in a fast-food joint.

    Having an older brother would have left her free to be herself! Alas, she had no siblings. She was secretly pleased. In this way, she didn't have to share anything.

    She also had no friends, but that was by her own choice. On the one hand, she could not be bothered to waste time with people she did not feel were up to her own high standard, and on the other hand, her parents would more than likely only compare Nibi to any friends she brought home, and she was in no doubt that she would not survive such a comparison with her sense of supremacy intact. Her parents could be very demanding and insufferably critical.

    It was at that moment that she heard an airplane fly overhead - probably one of her parents' friends flying back into the local airport. Airport! That was a laugh. It was a field which not that long ago had had some asphalt added to make a decent runway. But learning to fly was high…joke!...on her list. How she wished she could get into a plane right there and then, and take off, leaving everything behind her.

    Talking of 'on the other hand', she felt a very unpleasant wet sensation in her fingers and lower arm, like she was being licked by a very large, very cold tongue of some giant breed of dog! Yuk! This happened at precisely the same time as she felt her legs collide with something soft, but only slightly yielding, which was also wet and cold. Whatever it was soon became warm and felt weird.

    She had become stuck in something and she could see nothing but the mist. As she bent down to try and see what she had walked into, she hit her head against the same wet, soft, but unyielding whatever-it-was, and felt herself moving forwards quite quickly even though her legs were not moving at all!

    What was going on here? Had she become caught up in a giant marshmallow? Her mind boggled for a moment at the thought of having to roll a giant marshmallow up a hill every day only to have it roll down again overnight.

    Soon she became aware of a bright light overhead and a feeling of warmth, like the sun had just come out from behind a cloud. She looked up to discover that it actually was the sun. It had been invisible all day because of the low-lying clouds, and now the clouds had all gone. The sky was clear and the sun was bright and very warm despite the fact that it was on its way to descending into the distant horizon.

    How strange that she could see so far today! Normally the view was obscured by fog and even when that wasn't there, there was the usual haze and low-level pollution. This felt like she had risen above it at the same time as she had been given new eyes to see with.

    And see she did. Her vision was crystal clear, her hearing primed for distant sounds, and her sense of smell receiving rich perfumes and odors from all around. Things were so sharp and bright that she felt this might be what it would be like to have been legally blind and suddenly got new eyes. As well as legally deaf and got new ears, and also legally olfactory-deprived and got a new nose; which actually wouldn't have been such a bad thing. Nibi had a somewhat awkward relationship with her nose.

    She glanced around and realized that she could see nothing for the thick clouds, but then she realized the clouds were all below her! She was moving without moving, above the clouds! Briefly, through a gap between two large ones, she caught a glimpse of her own house down below her. She was flying in the clouds above the gated estate where she lived! What on Earth - or rather, off it - was happening?

  • Maoglee Putara
    This isn't Rudyard Kipling's Maoglee. This one has more in common with Harry Potter. An original story rooted deeply in Kipling's classic but with some modern twists.

    Maoglee Putara Jagala, most often known as simply Maoglee (Mao rhymes with 'Zedong', and glee rhymes with 'club') didn’t know he was a wizard until Bahlu the bear found him living under a Shailendra tree. The tree had long been dead and the center hollowed out, but the tough casing of the outer layers and the bark had long provided a good shelter from the heavy rains that fell periodically in this thick jungle, or jagala as it was known locally.

    Both of his parents were dead, killed when Maoglee was an infant, by the evil wizard Shir Khan, whose name was only whispered in these parts or was not said at all, and the word 'Lagara' meaning 'lame', was used instead, because of his limp paw.

    No one had seen that wizard since that fateful day. Some believed he was dead, but many believed he had somehow been wounded by his encounter with Maoglee, and that his strange disappearance was linked to his failure to kill the boy.

    They believed Shir Khan had retreated to lick his wounds and would someday come back to finish what he had begun.

    Maoglee had been delivered to the wolves by the great huntress Bugira who had taught magical shifting at the School of Wolfing before retiring unexpectedly. She was a shape-shifter of course, and still taught the occasional class, but mostly she kept to herself and was often in the company of Bahlu who was also a shifter. Strange as it sounded, she had felt that jungle life was Maoglee's best chance at a normal existence, safe from the dangers of the human world, where he would only be made a pariah if any magical abilities were discerned within him.

    Worse, he could have been exploited as the Magic Boy, turned into a fairground side-show and spoiled. He was far better-off being raised in isolation from all that, his wizardly origins kept hidden from him until he was old enough to understand. Perhaps that had been a mistake, but now it was too late to change it.

    Bugira had therefore sent Bahlu, in bear form, to find Maoglee and bring him to the wolf school, where he could learn enough to be prepared for his future, whatever it might turn out to be.

    Thus it was mid-evening in the currently very warm Seoni hills, in the central Indian province of Madhya Pradesh when Father Wolf awoke, scratching himself and yawning, to discover a large brown bear standing over him. He started and yelped, and instantly transformed into the wolf-form he had lost during his sleep. He growled.

    "Have no fear Father Wolf!" said Bahlu cheerily. "It is only I, Bahlu, the bear-shifter!" As if to prove he wasn't lying, the big black sun bear assumed human form, and Father Wolf did the same. It was considered bad etiquette to remain in the opposing form when with a visitor. It was also considered bad etiquette and even rude to shape-shift back and forth in order to force your host to do the same, so both remained as humans.

    Shape-shifting offered a bi-stable state. When in the form of the animal or the human, one was considered stable and it involved neither effort nor discomfort, nor even much thought to maintain the state. While shifting, though, one was considered unstable and vulnerable. Sleep had that effect.

    Sometimes a shift would fail and the person attempting it would revert to the form they had started in. This was rare, and except for those extreme instances which were considered medical cases, it didn't bother people. Among children it was a source of humor; among adults, merely an irritation, but this is why most adult shifters did so only out of sight of anyone else. It was deemed to be a private thing, like humans considered a bathroom visit; however, when hosting a visitor who shifted, shifting in their presence was considered a mark of respect and trust. It was rather like shaking hands for humans.

    Father Wolf had been in the middle of a good stretch and about to wake his wife and four cubs with a view to hunting. The bright Moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived, and it was Bahlu's blocking of this light which had so startled Father Wolf. In irritation, he said, "Bahlu is it? What brings you back to the wolf school at such an uncivilized hour?"

    "I come on behalf of Bugira."

    "Augrh!" said Father Wolf, "I thought we agreed we would be rid of all this magical nonsense when we agreed to take the boy in?"

    "You cannot be rid of something that is part of the boy!" Bahlu spat in disgust. "It is not like a wound that will heal! It will always be with him and it is now high time he learned the truth and came into his own, as nature intends."

    Father Wolf seemed more irritated than ever at this, but he realized he could not resist Bahlu by himself, nor could he reasonably call for help from his fellow wolves because they undoubtedly would be in agreement with Bahlu, and even were they not, the wolves themselves could not resist someone of Bugira's reputation. But he would make his own rules. He was determined.

    So he growled again and said morosely, "very well, teach the boy! Teach him our magical ways, and see what good that will do any of us when the dark Khan returns. It will do none, I promise!"

    "Naan? You have naan bread here?" asked Bahlu licking his lips expectantly.

    Father Wolf looked at him in disgust. "Not naan, none! Nothing. No good!"

    "Oh!" said Bahlu, disappointment dribbling through his words like melted ghee.

    Father wolf, now resolved, continued, "But at least we will not have to shoulder the burden of raising him any longer. Take him. If you can find him."

    "Well, where is he?"

    "I have no idea. The boy has run wild. He is all over the place!"

    "You have no idea where he is to be found?"

    "Oh yes, I have a great idea - he is in the jagala!" With that father wolf laughed maniacally.

    The bear frowned in annoyance at him, but there was no sense to be had from the wolf-shifter now, so he huffed and turned away in disgust. He would just have to start searching among the trees, creepers and watering holes of the jagala for Maoglee, if it took all night and all of the next day.

    Beyond that he would make no promises.

    Bugira searched, too. The first people she encountered were the elephants, who in her opinion spent an inordinate amount of time at the watering holes. It’s not as though there was any alcohol in them, but she supposed it must take quite a bit of water to hydrate something the size of an elephant.

    In fact, she had often wondered if their wrinkled skin meant that they actually didn’t hydrate quite enough, but who was she, with her sleek black coat, princess of the jagala saido, to judge? Bugira was a proud melanistic Indian leopard whose only blemish was a chafing mark on her long neck under her chin, where once a collar had resided, but no longer. The mark was not visible in the jungle shadows and none here knew of her past.

    She strolled casually out of her dusky concealment, startling a few animals closest to her who knew how powerful she was, but she had no interest in hunting as her self-revelation proved, she believed, but sometimes her thinking was over everyone else's head.

    Instead, she approached the elephants. She sought Colonel Hottie, the matriarch. Hottie had recently taken over from her mother who, having grown old, had stepped down from the position. Hottie was much younger, and it showed.

    It did not take Bugira long to find her, admiring herself in the placid pool by which she stood, attended by her aunties.

    "Colonel Hottie? Colonel Hottie!" Bugira called, intensifying her voice slightly on the repeat, which got the elephant's full attention, just as the panther had intended.

    "Why, Bugira! Come to pay your respects?"

    Bugira respected her as she respected all animal life in the jagala, but she suspected that her idea of respect would be considered a defect by an elect like the Colonel.

    Bugira decided to avoid that whole scene by starting out with a compliment, but not about Hottie's looks. She was not bad-looking for an elephant, but Bugira happened to find trunks very confusing. They were curiously phallic and so seemed very strange to her on a female elephant, but maybe that was just her.

    She said politically, "Colonel Hottie, I'm looking for Maoglee the jagala larakee. I thought with all your connections and up-to-date information, you may well be able to tell me directly where he is to be found."

    "The jungle boy? Are you hungry Bugira?" Colonel Hottie joked, and her female friends laughed appropriately.

    Hiding her annoyance, Bugira pretended to find it amusing too.

    Colonel Hottie placed the tip of her trunk onto her forehead in a signal that she was thinking deeply, and her eyes closed for a few seconds, but Bugira could tell it was purely for show; then the pretentious elephant advised, "Last I heard, he was to be found heading toward the Bandaraloka."

    "The monkey people?" asked Bugira in disgust.

    "The same!"

    "Then I must seek to overtake him at once!"

    "Good luck with that!" wished Colonel Hottie and the elephant returned to the adulation of her sycophants.

  • Seahorses
    Set in the same world as Cloud Fighters, but featuring a different set of characters and taking place on Australia's beautiful Barrier Reef coast, this environmentally-conscious adventure has no cloud chariots. Instead, it has sea horses - mounts literally made from seawater!

    It seemed ridiculous to associate cold and snow with December. December was for hitting the beach and swimming with the sharks, but that was what the news had said: flooding threat from heavy winter snow!

    Mel was so glad that she lived in the southern hemisphere. Those in the north thought everything was backwards down-under, but it was the other way around. Up-over was backwards!

    "Don't you agree?" Mel asked Syd, and her twin agreed without hesitation even though she had no idea what she was agreeing to. She was confident that if it was something her older (by a few minutes) sister had come up with it, it was no doubt very agreeable, but not as agreeable as the ice cream which was heading her way right then.

    Add and Dar were carrying two ice creams each: one for each of them and one for each of the twins. Mem was also with them, carrying her own ice cream.

    It had only been the temptation of ice cream that had lured Mem to the beach. She was terrified of water ever since the refugee boat on which she had sailed from Indonesia had sunk, just forty kilometers off the coast of Christmas Island.

    Now there was a place to visit this time of year, but back then, eight years ago, Mem had nearly drowned. It was far too far to swim. Her parents could not swim at all, and she had lost them that night as she and another girl her own age stuck by each other, calming each other, keeping each other awake, and staying afloat and alive on some scraps of wood and large plastic bottles that had fallen from the boat.

    The bottles had once held some sort of poisonous chemical in them. Mem considered it to be ironical that these things had now saved two lives. But only two. No one else survived. Mem and her floating friend came to be known as 'miracle children' in the press.

    They were found at dawn, the only two survivors from the wreck. They had been taken to Christmas Island to await their fate: stay there or be sent back.

    This was where Mem had got lucky for the first time in her life. One of the men who were working with the refugees had taken a shine to the girls and set about adopting them when he discovered they had no relatives left alive.

    But fate had not done dealing them bad cards yet. Mem's friend, Cahya, whose very name meant 'light in the darkness', became ill with some infection which had been evidently caused by something she had swallowed with the sea water while floating in that huge Indian Ocean. Maybe it was even something from the chemical bottles. Whatever it was, she could not be saved.

    To say that Mem was heart-broken to lose someone who was so important to her and with whom she had been through so much, was to say nowhere near enough. It never could be.

    She was ripped open by it, but she was adopted by a very kind man and his wonderfully-loving wife who had devoted their lives to helping refugees, and slowly her heart mended as much as a profoundly broken heart can. The weight of the loss of her young friend and fellow survivor still hung heavily on it. That weight would never leave her and it prevented her heart from repairing properly.

    Neither would her fear of the sea leave her she was sure, and she avoided even looking at it as she came back to the amusing faces of the twins who were her cousins by adoption. Their smiles seemed huge and it made her happy to see them, even though she also had to see the ocean. But she could sit with her back to it and her face to her friends and apart from its insistent sleepy, endless snoring, she could forget the sea was even there. How wonderful was that?

    She had never thought of the sea as snoring until she met her cousins two years before, but that's exactly what it sounded like as the effervescent waves rolled ashore, and were sucked back across the rasping sand.

    Even she had to admit it was beautiful out here on the sand, on the northeast coast of Australia, which itself looked out warmly over the Great Barrier Reef, but this was as close as she would ever get to it, sitting on the sand a healthy distance away from the water's edge.

    She didn't mind flying over it, because it was so far away that she could pretend it was not there, but you would never catch her out there on a boat ever again, and in no way was she going to go swimming, not even with dear friends and cousins like these, not even in the shallow water close to the beach.

    The littoral, that's what it was called! She'd been trying to think of the name all the way back from the ice cream stall. Littoral! Not literal! It meant the border between land and sea. It was not all land, not all sea, but a mix of both which had its own strange flora and fauna.

    It was pretty much the part which the tide covered and uncovered and despite her fear of the great water, Mem felt a curious affinity for it, because she herself was like that: not all one thing and not all another. She was a mix.

    Memberi Bambang was an Indonesian, but living in Australian territory. She was a dark girl living in a largely white country. She was a slightly rotund, well-padded girl living in a world that's unhealthily preoccupied with body image. She was a Muslim girl living in a country which was mostly Christian, but because her adoptive parents were not religiously restrictive, she was not constrained and hamstrung like so many Muslim girls are.

    She didn't want to wear a head-cover when she grew older, but it was required by law in some places where she grew up. In the end she did not have to wear it. Less than three percent of Australians are Muslim. Most are Christian, but there is no state religion. You can be whatever you want in Australia, and Mem knew what she wanted.

    Her adoptive parents were not typically religious, which is to say they were western Buddhists, but they allowed her to follow Islam. It was all she knew. It had been quite amusing, because she had been more strict than they were when she first arrived, and they had accepted her choices, but over time she had relaxed somewhat, and they had adapted to her, and now she still felt very much religious, but also mature about it, making her own decisions. She had never felt so mature or so happy in her life. Except for that weight of her friend dying, which still clung to her as she and Cahya had clung to each other that long, chill, horrible night.

    So Mem felt very littoral, but that feeling was all she ever wanted to have; she wanted nothing to do with the real littoral. She was definitely staying on the dry side of it. Like her religion, it was her own decision and no one, no thing, could change her mind about that! Nothing would make her ever go over to the wet side!

  • SeahorsesThe sad truth is that neither Lewis nor and Clark cared a whit about Sakakawia. She's mentioned by name in their diaries less than a dozen times. Far more often she's simply 'the squar' or referenced in relation to Charbonneau as his wife or 'squar'. That's how little they thought of her. Because of these idiot, self-important white men, we know next to nothing about one of the most influential American Indians ever to have lived. All that's left to us is guesswork and speculation. Maybe her early life was like this. Maybe. You decide.

    Tsingabogop was very silent as she moved through the shadowy pattern of trees and scrub which surrounded the land where her people, the Newe, were staying. The Newe had set up a temporary camp at this place they called Pahates Ogwa, the valley where three rivers meet.

    Their tipis were pitched up on a low bluff, safely above the water for fear of a spring melt suddenly flooding the area, but most of the people were not up there. Instead, they were down in the bottom of the river plain, where the hunting, fishing, and foraging were good.

    Apart from the bluff, this area was quite flat until it reached the distant hills and mountains. Because of this, it was a whole a mess of channels and creeks, and slow shallow streams running among abundant trees, interspersed with some meadow and scrub.

    The variety of trees was engaging. In various places on their travels and in her exploration of the area once they had set up camp, Tsingabogop had seen ash, larch, birch, pine, fir, aspen, juniper, elm, burr oak, cottonwood, crabapple, hawthorn, and spruce, but she did not know them by these names. The Newe had their own names for these things.

    Nearer to the ground where she was, were rabbitbrush, gumbo lily, sumac, wax currant, serviceberry, dogwood, sagebrush, chokecherry, and an occasional cactus. There was also milkweed and harebells, bitterroot and flax. There was rice grass, June grass, and wheatgrass.

    Less easily seen, but lurking not so very far away were animals of all kinds. There were bears and bison, elk and deer, wolves and rabbits, cranes and eagles, wood rats and woodpeckers. The place was alive with birds, fish, snakes, lizards, and insects, some of which were becoming a nuisance she thought, as she walked into a cloud of midges and spat them out, flapping her hands to keep the rest away.

    If a person knew where to look, which Tsingabogop most certainly did at her age, then underneath her small brown feet, rather soiled and dusty now since she wore no moccasins at present, there were roots, bulbs, and tubers. This was what Tsingabogop was supposed to be doing: not hunting animals but hunting for plants and roots for medicine and food. What she was actually doing was stalking her friend Bocikinakai whose name meant Leaping Fish because she was such a good swimmer.

    Of the two of them, her friend was the only one who was doing any foraging. This early in the season, which the Newe called buhisea mea, or budding Moon, there wasn't much in the way of berries, nuts, or fruits to be had, so she'd been looking to the ground for the telltale signs of where these things might be hiding, and also right then, for places where rodents might have hoarded things for themselves.

    Tsingagobop should have been helping but there was too much to enjoy out here. The sky was clear with only a few puffy white clouds. The sun was beginning to warm the day, and a light breeze was blowing across the valley floor as the air heated up. That wind brought the scents of nature reviving itself after a snowy and cold winter, and everywhere was alive with sweetness and promise. Who wanted to be digging in the dirt for roots? Not she.

    Her best friend had been poking the ground with a sharp sturdy stick trying to find these buried food sources. She was on her knees by a tree where there was brush and fallen tree limbs, which was exactly where rodents liked to hide, staying safe from aerial predators, and so they liked to use the same location for burying their supplies. If you have to hide from a predator, you may as well have a snack at hand. Bocikinakai was smart, and very good at what she did. The last thing she would expect was for Tsingabogop to come out of nowhere, charging at her, and roaring like a tookoomuts.

    To her credit, Bocikinakai did not scream and panic. Instead, she rose to be as tall as she could and turned to face her attacker with the stick held out before her, defensively. This was not only very brave, it was also a very smart thing to do, because if she had turned and ran, a predatory cat like a cougar would have had her in a minute. If she had tried to climb it would have caught her. But when she turned to face it, it might begin to have second thoughts about the easy meal it thought it had found.

    Having turned, she was angry to discover that this was not a mountain lion and was instead her silly young friend. Tsingabogop laughed at her friend's weak defense and asked, "Do you really think that little boto can be used to fight a mountain lion?"

    Bocikinakai brandished the stick in question menacingly, and she said, "I do not need this to fight you. You're not a tookoomuts! You're a mutsembia!" There was severe annoyance in her voice for the scare she'd had. She was very fierce when she was annoyed, but Tsingabogop laughed at her play on words, which had turned her attempt at being a ferocious lion into a sheep that wasn't scary at all.

    "Stop wasting time playing predators, and come help me dig up these roots, Thistle Head."

    Tsingabogop's name meant a kind of thistle which had a fuzzy head. This had arisen from when she was born, her hair sticking up all over the place, but these days, it could also apply to her prickly nature.

    Her hair didn't even stick out anymore. It was very long since the Newe never cut their hair except when someone close had died, and they cut it as a sign of mourning. It was kept shiny clean from all the swimming she did. Growing up as she had, living down by the Agai (or Salmon) River which was a long way south of here, Newe children all learned to swim and play in the water at a very early age. It kept them clean and fresh and sweet-smelling, and helped to use up all the energy they seemed to have from living outdoors and eating a healthy diet full of fruit, seeds, grain, and fresh vegetables.

    Tsingabogop pulled her own digging stick out of the buckskin waistband which held her apron tied above her hips, and she crouched down to help Bocikinakai dig up the roots. In the summer, Newe children wore very little. The smallest of them wore nothing at all, but when they grew older they wore an apron for the girls and a loincloth for the boys. After twelve springs had passed her by, Tsingabogop was reaching the age where she would be required to wear something more covering than this skimpy apron. Soon, she would no longer be considered a child.

    Bocikinakai was two years older and already she wore the knee-length buckskin dress with the long fringe reaching to her shins, with its wide sleeves, and of course, moccasins on her feet. She had made all of these things herself, learning from her mother and her grandmother, and what it meant was that she was probably warmer right then, this early in the morning, than Tsingabogop was, but it also meant that she was very likely to become too hot later, when the sun reached its height.

    This older girl, Tsingabogop had noticed, had even begun braiding her hair into two tails now, one by each ear. Bocikinakai might have only two springs more to her age than did Tsingabogop, but the prickly thistle girl sometimes thought she never wanted to look old like that. She felt it was better to always dress as she did. It gave her freedom and kept her very cool in the heat of the guuteyai mea, which was the Moon that signified the hottest month.

    With a hefty sigh though, she settled down by her friend, and began poking and digging into the soft earth with some enthusiasm, thinking that if there were some nice roots, or tubers or onions, or something like buried here, it would at least be a prize to take back into the camp and show her mother that she'd been working. Tsingabogop and her mother did not get along.

    That might explain why, in the traditional tug of war that her mother had entered into with the mother of a prospective husband, her mother had let go, signaling that she was glad to send Tsingabogop to another family when the pair were married, which would be soon. Tsingabogop was not happy with that, which explained why she was more rebellious than most children there. She had a stubborn streak and liked to get her own way.

    Newe parents didn't discipline their children with harsh punishment. It was enough of a penalty to earn the disapproval of one's fellow Newe, and allowing children to express themselves and to grow up learning their own hard lessons prepared them for becoming adults in this harsh and unforgiving environment where disaster could hit at any time, and in many forms. A flash flood could wash away a camp. A bad hunt could mean you did not have anything to eat for a while. A tookoomuts could come charging at you out of nowhere and carry you off, if you were not always fully aware of your surroundings. It was a hard life. Tsingabogop had learned her lessons well, but it didn't mean she was happy with this life she led. But what else was there for her? She was a very young woman in a man's world which offered few good options for her.

    But Tsingabogop had wished her mother had held on to her arm a little more tightly so that she did not get pulled over the line and end up with a husband to be. This man she was now betrothed to, Boabehe, was almost three times older than she was, and she did not like him. She did not want to be joined with him. He already had a wife anyway! Why did he want her? Did she have no choices for herself?

    But this was her life. Her miserable life as a possession to be bartered for a pony or a few furs. She dug deep into the soil, her thrusts reinforced from her dissatisfaction with the way her life was going. Surely it had reached the lowest point now? It could not get worse! At least there was that to hold on to.

    For all of her wisdom and self awareness, Tsingabogop was still very young and had much to learn. She did not know what sort of a life lay before her, and she was certainly quite unaware, and could not know that at that very moment, not more than a mile downwind, there came sneaking in a raiding party of the Hidatsa people, who were mortal enemies of the Newe. Her life was about to change so dramatically that she couldn't even conceive of how different it would turn out to be.

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