Prologue: I’M BORED
Yawn~
“Syasya, you shouldn’t yawn so widely. Bugs might fly
into your mouth.”
A grunt. “Yes, mom.”
The sarcastic remark was ignored. “So Anis, what’re you
drawing over there?”
“Huh?” Anis said at the sudden address to herself. “Oh,
this?” she asked with her blue mechanical pencil – one that was given to her by
Syasya – towards the piece paper on her desk.
Anis was a short thirteen-year-old girl with chocolate
colored skin and short straight black hair. She usually wore baggy clothes that
used to belong to her older brother and a bracelet Syasya had bought for her
recently. She was currently aiming to be a great magician like her idol, Cyril,
but lately she had been toying with the idea of being a comic artist or mangaka.
She had a great talent of drawing. It was something she
realized when she had tried drawing the characters of her current favorite
anime, Kuroshitsuji and was resulted with a fairly decent Sebastian.
Said character was what she had drawn on the left blank side of the English
worksheet she was supposed to have completed and handed over last week. The
butler had been drawn with a gloved hand to his chest and a wicked smile on his
lips. Next to his head was a speech bubble and the words, ‘Yes, my lord,’ were
written in Anis’ short circular handwriting.
On the right side of the paper, she had drawn a teenage
boy posed as if he were in midair with his right hand engulfed in flames and
his left encased in ice. The boy’s Japanese uniform was worn messily – giving
him the typical delinquent look – his hair was wild and spiky and a cocky grin
completed his wild-like features.
“Wah! Those look awesome!” her friend said. The girl’s
name was Almira. She wore glasses and was quite pale for a Malaysian. She was
one of the few close friends Anis and Syasya had. Syasya would sometimes
jokingly refer to her as ‘mom’ or ‘mother’, usually when Almira makes a comment
about her sleeping and eating habits or usually unfinished homework.
Anis visibly beamed at the compliment. Then, she turned
to Syasya.
The aforementioned girl was only a few shades darker
than Almira but could still be considered pale and was barely taller than Anis.
She had long ebony black hair, equally black eyes and an unhealthy amount of
dark bags under each eye. She always wore her favorite white jacket over dark
clothes and a bracelet she had bought for herself. She had bought a matching
one for Anis as well. They cost RM2.50 each and had been bought at an RnR
somewhere along the PLUS Highway. The hood of her jacket would always be pulled
up during class as a way for her to cover her closed eyes – not that it had
ever worked – as she could never stay awake for longer than five minutes after
an adult begins talking.
Syasya currently had her eyes closed and her head on
her desk with her arms curled around it as a way to block out the bright rays
of the sun from the window across the classroom. When her two friends grew
suspiciously quiet, she lifted her arm slightly and saw the two of them looking
at her expectantly with Anis’ drawings held up in front of its artist for her
to see.
“Yes?” she asked with a raised black brow.
“What do you think?” Anis asked with slight impatience.
“To be honest,” she began after a sigh and a closer
look at the characters. “Too chibi. You forgot to draw the pentagram on
Sebastian’s glove and the other guy’s power doesn’t make any sense. No one can
use ice and fire at once. They two of the most conflicted elements there are.
They’d just cancel each other out. And if not then that guy would be pretty
unstable, therefor making him either extremely useless or as dangerous as a
ticking time bomb.”
Anis felt a shard of ice stab her heart. Syasya – painfully
honest as always.
After getting admonished by Almira (“You shouldn’t be
so harsh on her. She’s your best friend.”) to which Syasya only responded with
a grumbled: “I’m going back to sleep,” Anis began thinking of what Syasya had
said. Her friend was quite knowledgeable of non-academic related subjects like
magical theory, mythology and theology – she does extensive research so that
she doesn’t get the facts mixed up in her stories and annoy readers that are
knowledgeable of stuff like this, her writing was one of the few things she
took seriously in this world.
And…well, it was true; fire and ice were opposite
elements just as wind was with earth or metal with wood. But, this surfaced a
new dilemma for the young magician. What was her character’s element going to
be? Anis knew that she could have just replaced one of the already chosen elements
and create an awesome combo like fire and metal or wind and ice…but, ice and
fire were both really cool! And they’d be way cooler together…right?
“It’s up to you really,” she suddenly heard the
supposedly-sleeping Syasya say. “He’s your character. What happens to
him, his background, his looks, his life… it’s all up to you, his
creator. He’s yours. What others say shouldn’t matter. I was just
stating my opinion.”
A smile decorated Anis’ features. Syasya was her best
friend. She always knew what to say to put Anis relaxed and at ease.
“We don’t have school tomorrow or the day after,”
Almira suddenly announced. “Do the two of you have anything planned for our
four-day weekend?”
Anis had heard of that. These past two months, a lot of
unexplained phenomenon had been randomly happening all over the world. Two
months a go there was a huge fire on King George Island in the Arctic. The fire
destroyed five research facilities, though miraculously, no human or animal had
been killed or hurt too badly. Two weeks after that, Rio de Janero was flooded –
not with sea water – despite the lack of rain Brazil had been having the past
week. The flood wasn’t a major one, no one was killed or hurt too badly, but a
lot of public and private property had been damaged or destroyed. A month after
that, an island appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
But maybe calling it an island was too generous. From the pictures she had seen
in the newspapers and on the internet, Anis thought it looked more like a
mountain-sized pointy rock than anything else. Scientists have said that if it
was measured from below sea-level, that large pointy rock would be a few dozen
feet taller than Mount Everest.
Five days ago, a strong wind had hit Southeast Malaysia
and a good portion of their country’s Southern Peninsular. Though brief, the
unexpected gust of wind had been strong. From what she had heard, it had
been strong enough to topple over trains and airplanes, send a large tsunami to
the north, make buildings crumble and send the tall ones toppling and blow away
numerous citizens miles away from their initial position. It had even sent two
cars slamming into Anis’ house which angered her mother greatly – considering
the fact that one of the cars belonged to her and she had been forced to take a
bus to a meeting she had in Johor Bahru, her anger was understood. Again, miraculously, no one had been killed
despite the great damage and destruction the gust had caused.
Although, Syasya had claimed to have almost been hit by
a car that had been sent rolling (yes, rolling) her way. She and her
mother had been out in town and her mother had already crossed the street, but
Syasya had only crossed halfway, placing her in the very middle of the street.
Thank goodness, the wind had stopped blowing before the car could hurt her. Anis’
friend had been able to escape without a scratch as the most damage the car did
was knock her down from the soft collision it gave her.
Anis, honestly, wasn’t surprised. Syasya had almost
suffocated under a mattress in her infantile years, got lost twice,
stung by a herd of jellyfish and fallen out of a moving car in her childhood
days and had almost got run over by a car (now twice), run over
by a motorcycle, set her kitchen on fire and almost poisoned by a snake the
past three years. There had been many instances in her life where her chances
of dying had been higher than her chances of survival and yet she had gotten
out of all of them with less than a few bruises – she got those from being run
over by a motorcycle. Syasya once said that her cousin called her the ‘luckiest
unlucky’ person he had ever met. He said she was lucky to have gotten out of
those situations alive, but was also very unlucky to have gotten into them in
the first place.
Anyway, back to the first topic, the whole cyclone
incident had caused great damage to their school and for the past three days,
the students had come to school to help the teachers clean up and fix as much
of the damage as possible. Unsurprisingly, not many students had come because
they either had their own damage-control to do at home with their family or
were too lazy to help. Now that most of the manageable work was done, the
students had been told to stay at home and help their family because tomorrow
and the day after was when the replacements for all the destroyed things would
be delivered and the teachers didn’t want any of the students to steal or break
the newly bought and extremely expensive equipment.
Honestly speaking, Anis had wanted nothing more than to
skip school like most of her classmates had, but knowing that her best friend
would be forced to go to school and help with the cleanup (because her mother
was a teacher at their school and the only damage Syasya’s house got were
broken glass doors and windows) made Anis attend anyway. She didn’t want her
best friend to suffer alone.
“Not much,” Anis answered Almira’s question. “I’m gonna
be helping my family clean up the house, but other than that, nothing.”
“My house’s pretty much fixed up. We’ve thrown away all
the broken glass and my dad and uncle replaced the doors and windows
yesterday,” the still-awake Syasya said. “But I’m going to be busy throughout
the whole break. My grandmother asked us to drop by her place in Melaka
tomorrow and my cousins from KL want me to spend some time hanging out with
them on Saturday to ‘celebrate’ my ‘survival’ through ‘another’
‘life-or-death’ situation.” Syasya’s voice had been dripping with
sarcasm at the mention of her cousins. She even rolled her eyes and used her
fingers to mark the quotations in her sentence.
“Melaka and KL,” Almira said almost enviously.
“Must be nice. I won’t be going anywhere for a while and the most interesting
that’s happened here in Segamat just blew by last week and left a real mess for
us to clean up. I’m getting really bored of this place. I wish something out
of the ordinary or amazing would happen…” Almira sighed before she placed
her head on the desk like Syasya.
“Those places aren’t really so interesting if you’ve
been there about a thousand-and-one times before…”
At the time, Anis had been quietly drawing another
character on the blank side of a Science worksheet, contented with listening to
her best friend and close friend argue on the pros and cons of travelling out
of their hometown, Segamat.
Thinking back on that day, Anis couldn’t help but
think…
Almira was the one who made the wish…
So why were Anis and Syasya the ones who had to go
through it all?
