“Pretense to an Adventure”

A Nagol Story Book,

Preface to the anthologies

By Eli Lleoz:

Once upon a time, not so long ago nor so far away, there was a land known as Sector 23. It was a rather peaceful place (with some notable exceptions), and was populated by a number of people who were all friendly, to a greater or lesser degree. In this land, there lived a young boy, known to a few simply as “Logan” and to many not at all. Like most young boys, Logan had a tendency to become somewhat bored from time to time and thus was driven to seek out things to do. Unlike most young boys, when Logan plotted to leave one day and find a place just of his own he actually did it.

“Well, I think that’s it,” Logan announced to the lovely lady across the counter, “just about everything I could possibly need on my adventure.”

“I’m sure it will be,” the checker replied looking over the massive collection of things the boy had just gotten checked out.

Without another word, the boy disappeared of the door ferrying along the half overflowing shopping cart he had filled. The cart he took to his bicycle, and, once he had unloaded it, returned to the cart corral placed in the middle of the parking lot. As he did so, he decided that he could, should he have the chance, probably come up with a much more efficient system for distributing both the cart corral and the carts themselves. But it was not his business, and the boy simply put the cart away and drove away on his bicycle.

From the store, he biked back to his house. His room was located on the second story and that’s where he put the stuff he had bought after returning his bike to the garage. The stuff he strategically placed into his backpack locating each item so as to guarantee maximum space efficiency. The backpack he hoisted onto his shoulders struggling under the burden, which was far too much for a boy of his age. He then set out of his house and down the road, which lead out of Sector 23. Today he was leaving for good. When the road came to an end, forming a ‘t’ with another, Logan abandoned the road and set out cross-country. Before him lay all of the world to greet him, behind him lay all of the world he had left behind. It was really a very poetic scene if the reader takes to such things. Fortunately, for the reader, neither the author nor Logan were very poetic persons, and the scene passed by never becoming immortalized in verse.

Logan marched on for the rest of the day unfatigued by anything around him. The first few miles were the easiest being mostly farmlands with the occasional pleasant forest. Where the forest came to an end was farmland and where the farmland ended, forest. Logan was happy to observe, as he had predicted would be the case, that there were few, if any, of the dreadful swamplands such as those that Sector 23 lay in. Well, there was one, but with a bit of planning Logan managed to miss it by a good two miles or so.

As the day, the perfect day of Logan’s departure, wore on, Logan became tired and greatly desired to find a fast-food restaurant that he might eat and be refreshed. Alas, the land to the north of Sector 23, while not boggy or swampish, was so uncivilized as to be lacking in any such conveniences.

“This is a great bringer of joy,” Logan said to himself sarcastically though you might not think so, “there are absolutely none of those islands of fatty foods served with fries and a shake that usually dot the land.”

Determinedly, Logan set out to right this wrong. Of course the only thing to do when you can’t find a fast-food place is to build one, and Logan did just that. It took most of the remainder of the day, and the willingness to violate a whole bunch of building codes, but by 8:00, when Logan generally got to eating supper, he had completed an entire fast-food restaurant. Actually, the whole thing was an improvement on the traditional fast-food eatery because the service was not paid by the hour and thus was much faster. This being the case because you do not have to pay robots at all, much less by the hour. As a matter of fact, the restaurant was such a success that by the end of its first night Logan could declare proudly that he had made a profit. Eventually, night fell and Logan was forced to close his restaurant and make camp for the night.

Camp, from Logan’s perspective, was a bit more then what we might consider a nights lodging in the forest. In the first place, Logan precluded the threat of sleeping on the cold hard ground by having a tent with a built in air mattress. If you could call it a tent. Logan’s “tent” was plugged into a hydrogen fuel cell, had satellite TV, and was Internet connected. It was in this comfortable setting that Logan made “camp” and prepared to spend out the night.

Unfortunately, the peaceful setting did not last, and Logan got no sleep at all until well after midnight. At about 10:03, Logan, who was having trouble sleeping, was up playing SimCity on the Internet when all power suddenly flickered off. Logan was, of course, extremely annoyed seeing as how he had forgotten to save his game recently and now all was lost. Having a mild bout of anger, Logan said a few curse words the strongest of which was “boof.” Of course he was a bit relieved when the computer rebooted and he discovered that the game had autosave. Nonetheless, when the power flickered off for a second time Logan was infuriated. Seething mad, Logan stormed out of his tent wielding his flashlight in both hands as if it were some sort of laser sword or something. A broad swoop of the flashlight’s beam revealed who was to blame for the power failure.

“Raccoons,” Logan spat out the word vehemently, “what right do they think they have to go about and wreck my game?”

The raccoons turned towards Logan bashfully as if admitting that they, indeed, had no right to interrupt his game. Millions of virtual people, perhaps they realized, had been decimated by their disruption of the electrical supply. One of the raccoons took a step back, while two others eyed Logan woefully.

“Shoo!” Logan cried out to the raccoons, “bygone with you…”

Logan’s words were cut short by a most fierce and terrible explosion. The blast threw Logan to the ground and the fireball launched into the sky could be seen for miles around. Logan returned to bed contented that the raccoons had defeated themselves, although he was no longer able to play SimCity.

The next day, Logan awoke and went out to survey the damage. It appeared that one of the raccoons had somehow managed to release the hydrogen gas from his fuel cell. The hydrogen gas, which is very explosive, had gone Hindenburg when one of the raccoons attempted to light a match in order to see what was going on. How much the raccoon had planned to be able to see by matchlight remained up for debate in Logan’s mind. The results of the explosion were clearly evident, not only was there a massive crater in the ground, but a great deal of debris lay scattered across the field in which Logan had made camp for the night.

After attempting to repair as much of the damage as he could, Logan packed his supplies and prepared to set out for the morning. But, naturally, he could not actually begin his day’s journey before stopping at his newly founded fast-food place and getting a sausage biscuit with hash browns. Once breakfast had been taken care of, however, Logan was rather quick in setting out at a brisk pace. The day’s journey was, for the most part, uneventful and all that will be recorded here is that Logan made good time and by dinnertime had traveled a great distance from Sector 23. Rather then trying to find another fast-food restaurant, or founding one, in the largely uninhabited land that surrounded him, Logan made other plans for dinner. The alternative, as it would be, to having fast food was to order a pizza and see if the pizza place really could meet their thirty-minute guarantee. Not surprisingly, they did not and Logan was rewarded with a free pizza although it was cold by the time it actually arrived.

After eating most of the pizza and packing the rest away into his portable refrigerator, Logan made camp and went to sleep. Unfortunately, Logan did not have time to repair his fuel cell and thus was unable to play SimCity. But, as a result of getting too much sleep, Logan woke up feeling refreshed and feeling ready to take on the day. The feeling did not last. For starters, after perhaps an hour of hiking in the primarily northerly direction he had been taking all along, Logan encountered a forest that was dismal looking, to say the least. For the rest of the day, Logan trekked through the forest trying, and failing at times, to think happy thoughts. Occasionally he thought he heard the sounds of distant unfriendly beings, but each time brushed his fears aside.

Finally, with the forest showing no signs of coming to an end, Logan decided to make camp for the night. Judging from the time, it should have been about dusk, but beneath the thick canopy of the forest the setting of the sun seemed to make no difference at all. The first thing Logan had to do while setting up camp was to try and repair what remained of his fuel cell. His flashlight batteries were dying and he, by no means, meant to spend the night without light. Suddenly, they attacked!

They were orcs, a strange race of beings that were, according to legend, distant cousins of the elves twisted into an evil race of hate-filled beings. Their history was of no matter to Logan, however, what mattered was that at this very moment they were making a very good attempt at killing him. Hastily clamping two cables together, Logan threw a switch and illuminated the forest floor with more light then it had seen for years. Startled and frightened by the light, the orcs recoiled. Logan looked around; he guessed he only had minutes before the orcs attacked once again. Undoubtedly a simple light was not going to frighten them off for good, the question was, what would? Logan had at least one idea that he hoped would impress them.

Working as quickly as possible, Logan hastily strung together a line of vacuum tubes and pointed each at the cylinder in which was held a quantity of hydrogen. He attached the makeshift x-ray lamps to a battery on a timer and ran for his life.

Far in the distance, one could hear the sound of thousands of trees being vaporized instantly. A scientist in New England declared that a small patch of forest had been vaporized by a hydrogen explosion, but was dismissed by his peers. A teen in Montana took the fireball as a sign and choose to take his own life. Fortunately he failed. A few trees on the perimeter of the blast area started on fire, but a furious thunderstorm, which raged throughout night, put out most of the fires. The damage was already done.

Logan awoke the next morning and surveyed the scene of the blast. A massive circular clearing had been gouged out of the forest leaving behind a wasteland more barren then the moon. Logan had the foresight to carry along a Geiger counter and was reassured to find the clearing was not radioactive to any significant degree. Besides being completely lifeless and having recently been inhabited by orcs, the clearing was in most ways a respectable place to build a home.

“Odd,” Logan said to himself as he glanced around, “why do you suppose that maple tree is still there, nothing else is.”

“Odd, indeed,” Logan replied to himself, “and it was relatively near to the center of the blast, was it not?”

“Who knows,” Logan said shrugging his shoulders.

Reaching into his pocket, Logan removed the only thing he had saved from among his things, some sort of beacon or something. Pondering it for a moment, Logan gently squeezed the trigger.

“On this rock I build my home!” Logan cried out to the world in general.

Later that day, a single robot descended from the sky. It was followed by one, then another and another until the clearing was positively swarming with various druids. One formed from the dust clay, another carefully took itself apart piece by piece and became part of the growing city around it.