For those of you who read my older Kidnap version, I'm working on a new one. Below is the first chapter. To give a basic idea, the story continually switches between the two twins, Ben and Jen.
BEN
THE BEAUTIFUL, GOLDEN WYRNIAN SUNLIGHT trespassed on
the private area we name as a bedroom, dancing on my eyelids as if today
brought much joy and happiness. Although we, the Nuuks, should wake up at the
first sign of sunlight, I was not so. In fact, there were many other traits
that Nuuks should have and I don’t; being smart, for example. As I wallowed in
the deep sea of dreams, the electrifying touch of light jolted me from my slumber.
Gazing around with my temporarily blurry vision, I had just enough presence of
mind to notice that my digital alarm clock was noting the time as 9:04. It took
a second for the fact to settle in, and then I started panicking. I had to
leave home for school at 9:10! Hastily switching my silken pajamas for my casual
clothes, polishing my shoes, brushing my teeth, combing my hair, and wearing my
metal belt, I made my way down the magnificent marble staircase. Since I was in
quite a hurry, I did not notice my father, Raymond White, good-naturedly
ambling up. I bumped into his hand, and he nearly dropped his test tubes that
he was carrying oh-so carefully.
“Now,
there, son! You don’t need to be in such a great hustle!” he said in his
friendly, affectionate voice that he always used on us. “Us” meaning myself and
my nutcase sister Jennifer “Jen” White. My father is one of those gentle men
whose main priority is his family. With brown, twinkling eyes that always seem
to be laughing at everyone and a grin that revealed gleaming white teeth, he
was one of those guys who you would rather talk to than leave alone. He was an
inventor, but a chemist at heart: he always seemed to be fiddling around with
beakers of hazardous acids. He had his own private laboratory at the fifth
floor of our mansion. We could usually hear him pounding away, locked up in
that secret chamber of his. He would come up with bizarre new inventions that
were not only useful, but quite inexpensive to create. His favorite invention,
a gizmo called the Universal Positioning System, was a hit galaxy-wide. It
could track down an exact location anywhere in the known universe with
precision and also could take over as auto pilot of a space vehicle to veer you
out of any trouble.
I
smiled back at him, murmured an apology, and continued to hurry down the
stairs. My mom was waiting there, with a slight frown, waiting for an
explanation for my tardiness. Her brilliant green gaze followed me as I,
looking shamefully downwards, refused to meet her eyes. My mind began
formulating a lie at an emergency alert, trying to make out another excuse than
sleeping late. Forgot about homework…no, I used that day before yesterday.
Anyways, my mother always seemed to know when I was lying. I finally lifted my
head, feeling guilty.
“Ben?
Woke up late again? Next time, I’ll have to pour some TCL on you.” TCL was some
sort of acid that only worked on sleeping people. It would cause a sudden pain
wherever applied on the body, causing the person to writhe in agony before
waking up. As soon as they wake up, the pain subsides. Sadly, it was legal to
use on lazy kids.
My father had invented for use by the WBI
(Wyrnian Bureau of Investigation) against any armed squad that may be present
in The Dark Day Forest, at the edge of the Pantarian sub-continent. It had been
successfully used against the Aldrin king Chabin when he attempted to attack
the parliament.
My
mom pretended to glare at me, but I knew she couldn’t she was much too pleasant
to ever get angry. I guess I must have looked slightly panicky when she said
the word “TCL” because she ruffled my brown hair and told me to calm down. She
smiled in that friendly way of hers that made me feel warm and safe. My mom, by
profession, was a teacher. She was a master at English and had written a series
of successful realistic-fiction novels. I loved it when she tutored me in
English-it was the only subject I was pretty good at. She had long, wavy brown hair that seemed to
shimmer in the sunlight whenever she moved. She was also an excellent cook,
specializing at roast chicken.
I
sat down at our dining table, shoving my bowl of cereal spoon by spoon in at an
alarming rate. Opposite to me was my extremely irritating sister, Jen. As I
mentioned before, she is the vilest, craziest, and most annoying creature in
the whole universe. Not that I’ve travelled all over, but I’m still pretty sure. She loves all those soppy
shows like Hannah Montana and loves singing operas. The worst part about her is
that she is so smart. I’m really
embarrassed to say so, but my sister is like a total genius when it comes to
every subject except for Biology and English. She doesn’t like those for some
reason.
Her
cereal bowl was already empty and she was unconsciously neatening her hair. I
finished, threw my bowl into the sink with the finesse of a hoopyball player,
picked up my lunch, my bag, and dashed out the door: but not before taking a
Coke bottle with me. A fresh breeze greeted me with cold hands as I walked out
of the gate of my family’s palace. I glanced at my touch screen watch, pressed
a button for the UPS, and a hologram appeared that had the world landmarks. I
clicked on The Palace of the Whites, and then typed in “directions to the
falcon school no.22.”
I
don’t suffer from short-term memory loss. Falcon Middle School wanted to ensure
that their students woke up early enough to search for their school anywhere in
a 30-mile radius. It changed its location every day. This watch of mine was
like a cheat I used to find it faster. What’s better, we don’t have to look for
it by walking. All students receive a non-polluting mode of transport called
the hover-cycle. It is a no-wheel vehicle that hovers just above the ground. As
you get promoted to higher grades, you get better and better versions till you
end up with the hoverboard. Then you can join the traffic of people above your
head. Till then, the hover-cycle has to content.
My
watch was reading ACCESSING until it reached the DigiMaps page. My school was
about three miles away. Not far. All I have to hope for is that nobody saw me
using……I turned around and I saw Jen staring solemnly at me.
Great.
I’m dead.
Ok,
left turn at Evelyn Street, drive straight for about half a mile, then another
left turn: all right. I’m here. I was trying to focus on the directions to
blank out the ill-fate that was due to take place today. I’ll probably get
detention for cheating in the school hunt. Ah well. I’d better enjoy life for
the next few hours.
Our
school was a towering glass building made up of three sections: Sixth, seventh,
and Eighth grades. There were about eighty campuses in the entire of Alstonia.
Each day, the staff from one campus moved to the other. That’s how the school
hunt goes. I stepped inside the building, gazing upwards at the magnificent
glass pillars that seemed to rise up till the sky. I touched one, and
immediately recognized a familiar tingling sensation.
So
they got it working, after all, I thought. The Quantumlift. One side of the pillar opened slowly, moving into the two
hollow sides on either side of it, revealing a black inside with blue neon
lights that flashed at regular intervals. It was curved inside. I looked up.
There was a seemingly endless passageway, and when I looked down, I felt sick. It
was like a never ending pit. A person could fall for fifteen minutes until they
would hit the ground. Meant for intruders who didn’t know that there was a Quantumlift
to send them up. I could see a cylindrical shape zooming down at an
unexplainable speed and quickly pulled my head back out of the vault. There was
a quiet hum as the Quantumlift hovered its
way down to the opening. As it stopped, the glass that enclosed it opened
without as much as a squeak. I stepped in. The glass was ultra-transparent and
fingerprints did not affect it, so it actually seemed like I was standing on
nothing and I was shooting into the air. It didn’t even bend light, so there
was no way someone could actually find out I was in a glass capsule.
A scanner popped out of the wall, its
tiny lens going over every inch of my face. The lens was concave, unlike the
other video cameras. The concave lens was able to magnify whatever image was
formed so that it could practically see
through good disguises.
“Face recognized. Benjamin Oliver
White, currently residing in the Palace of the Whites. Brother of Jennifer
Oliver White.” A metallic voice said, seemingly all around me. I sighed in
relief. Sometimes the machine would malfunction, and, not recognizing my face,
would open up a trapdoor underneath that dropped me into a net.
The glass doors slid shut, and I
typed in 117th floor. The sides of the pillar closed in front of me,
and the Quantumlift began rising silently, effortlessly, towards its
destination. I couldn’t even feel it lifting up, but I could see the blue neon
lights flashing faster and faster. Soon, I had to grab onto the rails to
prevent myself from lifting off and crashing into the ceiling. Floor 100,
101-wait no, it’s 116 now…What?? Red neon lights began flashing, and a metallic
voice said:
“Malfunction. This
machine has stopped working. We request you to cooperate in our Emergency
Procedure.”
Panic starting seeping through my
skin as I realized I was about to be dropped 117 floors into a net that would
roll up and keep me there until lunch break when a teacher comes and checks if
there was anyone who fell into the hole. Improvise, improvise, improvise! I
needed something.
“Emergency procedure commencing.”
I pulled the metal belt off my jeans
and I slammed it into the glass of the Quantum lift. Without hesitating, I spun
around, managed a reverse flying kick at the center of the glass, and watched
it shatter. Triumph blinded my horror; I knew that all I had to do was leap
through the gap, grab hold of the ledge of the 117th floor, and
climb out. I pumped up: if I messed up, I just could have let myself fall
through the gap.
Then the floor opened up.
I began flailing helplessly through
the air, attempting to grab something. In my hand was my belt, in the other was
my watch, and on my back was my bag. I twisted around and threw my bag. G Force
easily outweighed the strength, and the bag came plummeting down at me. Then I
remembered.
I tied my Coke bottle to my bag with
a shoelace from my favorite Reebok shoe. Then I pulled out a packet of Mentos
and frantically began feeding it in to my Coke bottle. Before the carbon
dioxide could escape, I screwed the cap in, turned it upside down, waited a
second for the pressure to build up, and then released. The bottle and bag
rocketed up, and latched onto a wall.
My bag wasn’t an ordinary one. It had
a mechanism that clamped on painfully to any solid surface. I wasn’t one with
chemicals, but when it came to mechanics, I was the best in the family. It had
taken me a year to devise the contraption, and another 1470 Nuukian dollars to
purchase all the materials that were required. It was initially meant to be a
trap for anyone who tried to steal my bottle as a prank, but now—it’s a
lifesaver.
I pulled out my belt. Running my
finger over the top, I felt a gear begin to move, and the top transformed into
a grappling hook. I made this device when Mrs. Nolan began taking all of the
things fiddled with in class. When she turned around, I would pull back my
belongings and fiddle with them again. The secret was the mechanism inside that
caused it to shoot forward and back as fast as a cobra; so the teacher wouldn’t
even notice it. What’s more, this belt was bout the smallest my contraption
could go, since it wouldn’t contract anymore. It usually was about twenty
meters long.
Which
was about three meters farther down than I was to my bag. I pressed the middle
of the belt and this mechanism took action: it shot forward like a cobra and,
after stretching a bit, it sunk into the cloth and held fast. Suddenly, my
speed came to a juddery halt and I felt quite sick. I’m afraid I let down a bit
of digested food over there, but I hope the cleaners didn’t mind. Then, through
a tedious process, I began to haul myself up.
About
four minutes later, my hands grasped the ledge of the 117th floor. I
hauled myself up, disabled my latching contraption, shrunk my belt to normal
size, put it back on, and examined my physical and property damage. There were
three miniscule holes on the skin of my bag. That was about it. On my skin,
however, there were several cuts around my hands and one on my neck. I guessed
that my neck was cut by a flying glass shard when I wrecked the Quantumlift. My
hands, well, I don’t know about them.
I
took my First Aid Kit out of my bag and applied antiseptic on my cuts, before
bandaging them up. With a groan, I picked myself up, walked to my classroom 7
A, pushed open the door, and looked at the board:
“FOR
ANYONE WHO DID NOT READ THE
SIGN ON THE GROUND FLOOR, TODAY IS AN UNEXPECTED HOLIDAY. DETAILS WERE GIVEN TO
YOUR PARENTS AT 9:15. THAT PROBABLY MEANS YOU, BEN.”
I
groaned.
Interested? Want to read more? Please comment to tell me.
Interested? Want to read more? Please comment to tell me.
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