It was raining. But it usually rained. At least that’s what I had noticed. When I had first moved here from Texas it was fine, but now it rained every day. I had moved from the top of the world to the bottom, the middle of southern California. My name is Luke Taylor, or at least it was before the games, but where are my manners, you don’t even know what the games are. Every two years an alien species hosts a series of tests, they make the contestants fight physical and mental challenges. Of course for a 16 year old this would seem impossible. Let me take you back to where it all began.
It was night and I sat in his bed. Three years ago that night his dad had passed away from heart failure, on my birthday, I had only been eleven. But here I was sitting in my room on his birthday crying. Early that morning, I had gone into my father’s study and found an old journal that his father had written as a boy. I had read about how my dad had skipped school, how he had been the weird kid at school, because he didn’t care what everyone else thought. I thought about my friend Shawn and how he thought like that. It drove the teacher’s crazy, and most of the popular people, but his real friends thought he was amazing for being that way. Although sometimes it got him in a lot of trouble, like the time he told the principal he looked stupid in a school t-shirt, or the time the science teacher’s jacket caught on fire, he told her she looked hot. That was Shawn. I kept reading about my dad, and how he had once jumped off his house onto a trampoline. It sounded fun until, I found out the trampoline ripped when his dad had landed. That changed my mind very quickly. Then I read about how his dad had accidentally knocked a replica sword of the wall into a fish tank, at his friend’s house. It only impaled two fish. By then I couldn’t take it anymore, if I kept reading he might not be able to stop laughing. I got up and went to his back yard. I hopped the fence; it was only five feet tall, had a solid top, and was made of metal. Behind my house was a canyon; all around the canyon were pieces of a plane that had crashed forty-three years ago, twenty –nine years before I was born. I liked to explore the wreckage. I walked down a hill into the tail of the plane where the luggage usually was. I started looking around; I found a golf club, a brief case filled with socks, a broken rusted phone, and a little item that looked like a sports wrist watch. I pressed a button on it and the watch and it wrapped itself around his wrist. I pulled on it trying to get it off, but it wouldn’t budge. I started pressing buttons trying to get it to let go and I suddenly felt a sharp pain. The second button shot a signal flare up into the sky from the center of the watch, and that’s when everything went dark. When I woke up his head hurt like crazy. The watch was gone but instead I had a ring. It made me look like I was married. I scanned my surroundings, and found that I was strapped to an operation table that was in the middle of what looked like a jail cell. I wondered what had happened. Just then a man walked into the cell, he was tall, maybe 5/4, had white hair, pale white skin, and a long scruffy beard. He walked up to me and started to examine me.
“Well for a human, you are quite scrawny, but I suppose we will have to make do”
“You talk like you’re not human”
“But I’m not,” he said “I am Fiffle, the nadir”
I just lay their wondering if the old man had been drinking. Then I looked at the tools the man had brought with him, one of them was a knife, so naturally being the stupid kid I was a tried to grab it. That was my first mistake. The door burst open and what looked like a man in a black jump suit came out with a small square. The Jump suit man hit me across the face. Talk about being a jerk. I just laid there as the old man read through files. Then he turned and looked at me, I felt like Frankenstein, about to be electrocuted by a mad scientist. Then Fiffle looked at the wall and made a high screeching sound from his mouth. The wall suddenly opened up like play dough. What came out was what looked like a computer, and a couple tools. Fiffle looked at me studied me, and then said, “you are about to compete in a series of test, and events, then if you should survive you will be released,”
“Should you lose, well you will have to compete again, assuming you don’t lose a limb, or gain mental injuries this time”
“What if I refuse,” I asked
“Well then you will stay here as an eternal janitor,” he said with a serious face. “Now we need to give you some power to keep you alive,”
“What kind I,” asked now interested “do you mean mental, or physical?”
“You choose, we can make you breath fire, shoot lightning from you bare hands, fly, control rocks with your mind, or you can levitate objects with your mind, which will it be?”
“How about lightning,” I choose, “Will it be permanent, or just for the challenges?”
“Permanent,” he said “but you can only shoot lightning, if you have the energy to, if you are tired and you try, you will die,”
“How about I go home instead?” I said hoping he would say yes, in the back of my head I already knew what he would say. Without answering he started typing on his computer. He picked up a giant syringe, filled with purple liquid. He walked over to me and without a warning, jabbed it into my arm.
“Now when you are ready, we will get you your gear and start your training.”
“Training?” I said very much confused.
“You don’t think we would send you into the arena with no practice, did you?” Fiffle said like I had just asked the dumbest question he had ever heard. He continued to type on the computer. Finally he spoke “would you prefer black, or red?”
“For what?” I asked.
“For you suit, you can’t fight in what you’re wearing,” he said very calmly.
“Wow, you never said anything about fighting,” I said. If I had to fight someone I was gonna lose for sure, in school even nerds picked on me.
“You have to fight genetic monsters,” he said as if it were nothing, “they are animals with special gifts, like you,”
“Great, let’s start training,” I said calmly now that I knew nothing was gonna be normal, “by the way what is a nadir?”
“We are a race of shape shifters,” he said with a hint of sadness “or masters make us shape shift for their entertainment, and then they make us teach young humans to survive,”
“Kind of like what you’re doing to me,” I said.
“We are not doing this to you, our master’s the Screet, are” he said sounding offended “I must warn you now if you attempt to escape you will be imprisoned for eternity, because we can track you everywhere you go, if you attempt to kill the other contestants you will be killed, if you cheat in any way you will be killed,”
“Now that I know how to get myself killed, let’s get to training, so I don’t get myself killed,” I said.
“When we enter you will find a table, it will have some gear, an outfit, and a mirror, so you can see if you like the way it looks,” Fiffle said in an upbeat tone.
He undid my arms, legs, and waist. I got up and he led me to a wall. Then he made that horrible noise and a hole opened up. We continued down a hall, we took a left, and there was a door at the end.
“This is as far as I can go; you will find a small device on the table, it will allow me to talk to you throughout your training,” he said “good luck, and try not to die, I like you, I would hate to lose a new friend,”
“A friend?” I asked, “That’s what you are?”
“Oh, in time you will see that’s exactly what I am,” Fiffle replied.
I entered the room, it was a giant canyon, it looked just like home, and there was a long walk way until it dipped into a valley below. Right before the dip there was a table, there was a pile of cloth, I put it on over my clothes, it quickly tightened, and it was all black with a purple circle with an eagle on the shoulder. I continued to look around the table; there was a staff, a satchel filled with little gadgets, a pair of boots, and a pair of gloves. I quickly put on the boots, gloves, and slung the satchel over my shoulder. I put the small device in the corner, in my ear.
“So what’s the Eagle for?” I asked,
“Should you survive, the screet who paid for your equipment will be given a gold statuette of an eagle, to commemorate that he knew you would win,” Fiffle answered
“So it’s like a sponsor,” I thought out lout.
“All right let’s get started,” Fiffle said from the communicator on my ear, “You will need the staff, it is no ordinary staff, it can shoot bolts of peer matter, the blast will throw any life forms, but break any solid objects, it is designed to look like a metal hiking stick, the little eagle on the top, is your symbol, as you train people will put bets on you, the more bets the harder the challenge, if you get to reach 200 bets the master of games must give you a new piece of gear”
“So I want to impress as many people as possible to survive?” I asked
“Basically, yes” he replied “but if you attract too much attention to early you will lose bets later on”
“Alright what’s the first challenge?” I replied.
“I was hoping you would ask that soon,” he said gleefully “the first challenge is survive a fight with a flaming monkey”
“How big, how strong, and aside from the fire what’s its gift?” I was gonna get all the info I could, that UN evolved chimp was going down.
“Well its five foot four, it can lift a boulder the size of a car and it can smell even the faintest sent” he replied “although it hates bright lights, it can’t see very well, and it can’t swim”
“Great and how am I supposed to train for this?” I asked “I don’t know how to make a bright light, and I can’t swim very well,”
“Think you have three minutes to plan, and then we are sending in drones after you, plus they breath fire, and can catch themselves on fire,” he replied “I just realized your doomed,”
“Thanks fife,” I said glumly, I was gonna prove I had what it takes win so that I could go leave here as soon as possible. I quickly scanned the area, there was a drop off to my left about ten feet, the drop was about two stories high, to the right was a wall, I could climb but if I was fighting a giant monkey he would be a fast climber and I wasn’t, then there was the door which if I tried I could take him in a fight, maybe. Just then the door opened, I was looking at a flaming king Kong, but half the size of the real one. So being the stupid human I was, I hit it with my matter staff, that just made it mad, it shot a ten foot flame at me. The next thing I did was just as stupid, I jumped off the edge of the cliff into a forest, to keep myself from shattering against the ground, and I rolled straight into a tree. I kept running, every time I turned around I swear he was smiling as he chased me. Finally I came to another cliff; at the bottom of this one was a lake. No time like the present to learn how to use a matter staff.
“How do you use the matter staff,” I yelled in to my communicator.
“It’s linked to your thoughts, if you think about it shooting, it will,” Fiffle replied “and there is no reason to yell at me Kev,”
‘Sorry dude, but I needed a response fast, this thing is looking at me like I’m lunch,” I said very seriously. I pointed the matter staff at Peppermint breath, and thought about the staff firing, it did, but I was holding it backwards. The blast sent me flying into the beast.
“Hey numnuts use your gift,” Fiffle said annoyingly
“I don’t know how to use that either,” I responded, that’s when I thought of a plan, “does it work the same way as the staff?”
“Does the nadir change shape?” he said as if I had asked another stupid question.
Naturally I thought of a plan worthy of a boy, attack. I pointed my hands at the monkey, a bolt of purple lightning shot from my hands straight into the ground. Now annoyed with these new weapons/gifts, I thought about the bolt hitting the monkey in the head, and BAM! The monkey went down.
“Not bad huh?” I asked Fife
“You didn’t kill it you just knocked it out for a few seconds,” he replied “now if you’d like to survive I’d advise that you get behind it and blast it off the cliff into the water,”
“Sounds simple enough,” I thought it would be, but it wasn’t because right then the fire monkey woke up. I pointed the staff at the monkey and blasted it two steps back, then four, then six. Finally there was enough room for me to run and baseball slide under his legs. So that’s exactly what I did. He didn’t see it coming. I slid right past him, jumped up and blasted him four times, till he was at the end of the cliff. Then I pointed the staff at his feet, thought of the matter staff making a huge blast, and it did. The ground under the ape couldn’t handle the weight, it shattered, and they fell into the lake. I pointed my left hand at the ground and shot lightning into the lake. That way he’d stay down.
“Please tell me I get a break in between each training session,” I said tiredly to Fiffle.
“Why would we do that, you don’t get a break in the arena” he said dully “now let’s find a clearing for you to use those gadgets of yours”
I had almost forgotten about them. I looked off the edge of the cliff; I saw an opening about twenty feet to the west, there was a grove of trees with a nice clearing about the size of a mall. I climbed down the side of the cliff very carefully remembering that the water was electrocuted, I was almost down when I slipped and fell. I hit the water, but I didn’t die. Not that I was complaining, but it seemed strange.
“If you haven’t figured it out yet, your ability to control lightning makes it so it can’t harm you” Fiffle said sounding like a teacher.
“Thanks captain obvious,” I said, relieved that he had explained it.
I swam to the edge of the cliff, and then waded to the shore. I made my way through the forest to the clearing, when I had made it there; I sat down near a tree.
“No resting, you are going into the arena tonight” Fiffle said very strictly “you don’t have time to wait, the other contestants have had months to train”
“I thought you said the game was just a test,” I replied nervously “that if I could stay alive I would be fine,”
“And you will be but you don’t know the first thing about fighting,” he said fast “but you can win if you take in all the training you can get,”
Reluctantly I got up, and opened the satchel, I found a small metal ball, a small knife, a hand sized pad, and a stick with a glowing orb on it.
“Put the pad on the ground, and stick the lightning rod on the top, then shock them” Fiffle said plainly.
Naturally I did as I was told. When I shocked it I was really surprised. It started unfolding; it kept unfolding until it had turned into a little tent. It was the same color as the ground, but when you looked at it from the side it looked like trees.
“Insta-camo tent,” Fiffle said very happily, “my design I hope it comes in handy,”
“So do I, but I hope it doesn’t take so long that I have to use it a lot,” I said very hopefully.
I kept going through my bag I found a little metal disk; on one side it had a lens on the other a knob.
“That is your signal flare it is for if you decide to quit and try again next year” Fife said casually.
“Wait, I can quit?” I asked,
“Yes,” Fiffle replied, “But you will be tagged and forced to try next year,”
“Oh,” I muttered, “sounded too good to be true anyways,”
“Next in your bag of tricks, you’ll find a bottle, in it is a bottle pill,” Fiffle said.
I kneeled down and started searching, and then all the way at the very bottom I found them. I pulled out the bottle, on the front (I can only assume it was the front) was a label that read ‘5 minute energy surge’.
“So the pills are pretty straight forward,” Fiffle said, “For 5 minutes you will have unlimited energy,”
“Great, so about those challenges,” I started.
“You start in 1 hour, pack your gear and make your way up to a cliff,” Fiffle commanded, “From their you will be able to only be attacked from one side, that way you control the fight,”

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 28.11.2012

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