Ronin Lightspeed: Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Something more productive
I was 6 at the time, maybe 5. When my dad shook me awake. I don't think I'll ever forget the fear in his eyes. He grabbed me out of bed.
It was bright. I thought it must have been morning time but one of the few things I remember was my clock reading 2:32 am. The house must have been shaking because things were falling off shelves and drawers were flying open. I saw blurs shooting around.
Blurs of all different colors. They seemed bright as a star. I heard my dad yell out as he fell to the floor. I thought he must have tripped on something.
I looked around and could find him. My mother shrieked and ran over to pick me up. She ran through the house. They seemed faster now.
We ran out the door and out onto the lawn. She set me down but when I looked around for her I couldn't find her. I saw the blurs through the windows and the open door. They all stopped.
I could see the outlines of people. But they were all fuzzy and still, they shone like stars. Then something happened, in a fraction of a second a light burst from the room they were in and it was gone. Not just the blurs, but the entire house.
Even the cars in the driveway had vanished. After about half an hour, the fire department arrived. Someone must have called in about the screaming and the lights. They stood there for about an hour scratching their heads.
Then a bunch of black vans arrived and men in suits came out. They told the firemen that there had been a freak gas leak and something must have set it off. One of the firemen asked “how the hell does an explosion completely remove the pipes?”
I don't think I've heard from him in a while. Or any of them for that matter. I think they said there was a fire department upstate that needed more men so they had to leave. So then I was stuck in foster care for a bit, bouncing from family to family for a few years, until I landed myself in juvenile detention for repeatedly stealing from convenient stores.
Then after 6 months I was let out and put in an orphanage. I got adopted by the Fox family. Then Mr Fox went to jail for something, I don't really know. I don’t really care.
Then Mrs Fox put me in public school. I got into a couple of fights, and now I'm here, talking to you.
“You know I don't believe that, Ronin, ” Ms Elanta, the school psychologist said.
“Really, i assure you i went to juvie, got the missing teeth to prove it” Ronin joked. Ronin had grown up to be a blonde haired, brown eyed kid.
“I mean I, and frankly no one believes the blur story” she replied.
“The 'Blur' story?”
“your grades are slipping, your highest grade is a d”
“Hey i have an A”
“I think we all know PE doesn't count” Ronin looked over at the door.
“Alright Ronin, you need to do something more productive with your time. If you get in another fight. We will have no choice but to expel you” Ronin stood up and grabbed his bag.
“I know we were having such a riveting and ground breaking conversation,” he said as he opened the door. “But my bus leaves in like,” he looked down at his watch. “Two minutes, so I got to go”
Ronin sprinted down the hallway and out the door to see his bus, number 329. He could see his buddy Axel, asleep, and drooling on the window. Once he got to the door he saw his bus driver. She was an old woman with a deep russian accent, he never caught her name. He didn't think she liked him very much.
As Ronin sat down next to Axel, he shot awake. “Ronin” Axel was a slightly chubby boy, he wore a backwards cap everyday like he was an 80s surfer. Axel wasn’t the brightest kid, but his family funded the entire cafeteria, so he got good grades. But he thought the teachers liked him.
“Howd you sleep?”
“I stayed up all night playing the new demo for Beyond Racing, I couldn't put it down” Axel’s dad owned Revolution Games, so he got to play everything early, and so did Ronin, but Axel’s dad didn't know that. A group of students got on the bus, they were a mix of cheerleaders, football players, and kids with grades too low to play football. Axel turned to Ronin.
“No,” Ronin said.
“I haven't even said anything”
“You were going to say that we should crash the party the football team is throwing this weekend” Axel stared at Ronin for a second.
“Was that what you were going to say?” Ronin asked
“Well yes, but my point still stands, we currently are losers. Nobody knows us, neither of us have a girlfriend, we're not on any sports team, and we’re not even in any clubs”
“Correction,” Ronin said. “Nobody knows you, I am famous for my amazing fighting abilities”
“I think there's a difference between famous and infamous, anyways, we need to be at cool kid parties"
“Why? Ronin asked. “First of all, Mrs Fox would say no, I can only go to work and school. Second, it's not like we get bullied. We don’t have any problems right now. We just aren't popular, and frankly I don't see why we would want to be, every popular kid is always getting in trouble for something stupid, like last year when that Thomas kid got caught with a cheerleader in the janitor's closet. You do realize that janitor quit after that, right?” Axel looked at Ronin for a bit then sighed.
“There’s just no point in arguing with you. If you want to stay a loser forever, then fine, I'll be at the party tomorrow” he put on his headphones and stared out the window. He spent the bus ride home thinking about the yelling he was going to get when he got home. Mrs Fox was a very uptight woman. Always concerned with what the neighbors thought. When Ronin had first met her, she told him to refer to her only as Mrs Fox.
She would spend her days making sure the house was as clean as possible. She had only fostered Ronin because she thought it would make her look like a good person. She loved to pretend like everything was perfect when people were looking. But when you got home she would shout your ear off about something she thought was important, like how you didn’t make enough eye contact. She had two children who were actually hers.
A bratty girl named Erica, and a boy named Nathen, who wasn't all there. They both didn’t like Ronin, but Ronin thought that was because their mother didn't like him. The bus stop was 4 blocks from where Ronin lived so once the bus stopped, Ronin got to running. He wasn't the fastest kid. He was in fact very slow.
The ground began to shake. That had been happening often the past month. He used to think it was the subway running beneath his feet but when he checked there was no subway line that ran under where he lived. The shaking wasn't violent enough to damage anything but it was noticeable. He continued walking.
There used to be a homeless man who lived in the alleyway near his house. He used to work at a convenience store down the road, and still wore the vest with his nametag long after he had been fired. But recently, Ronin hadn't seen him. He assumed that he had been arrested for something. Or had moved into a different alleyway.
Ronin didn't really care. He finally reached the house, well house was a nice way of describing it. It was the top floor of an apartment building that Mr Fox had owned. The whole building was old, every floorboard creaked, the wallpaper was coming off the walls, there was one apartment that just had a hole in the floor, big enough that the the people in the apartment below it had a ladder and used it like a second floor. Once Ronin reached the top he used his key to open the door.
Mrs Fox was at work, trying to get enough money to bail Mr Fox out of jail. Or as she preferred to call it “Mr Fox is on a business trip and he just needs a plane ticket home” and her other kids went to a private school that didn’t get out until 2 hours after Ronin’s did. He had the “house” to himself. He went to his room where there was an array of posters and comics. He had an old game console he bought at a flea market and games he had found in a box he bought at a garage sale.
Ronin sat down and started doing his homework until Mrs Fox came in.
“When you're done with that I need you to clean this filthy room up” she barked at him. His room wasn't filthy, you couldn't even call it messy. The room had been clean since Ronin moved in. but she insisted that it was disgusting. Like how everything was disgusting. He couldn't wait to be 18 and on his own.
He soon after went to bed. When he woke up. He had to quickly get showered, brush his teeth, and get out the door. He needed to get to work. Ronin worked at a comic shop owned by a 30 something year old man named Eric, who was the only person Ronin knew who read more comics than him.
The job was a pretty good deal, Ronin worked everyday but Friday and he got an 80% employee discount. Eric was a close friend of Ronin’s dad, so when he wasn’t able to foster Ronin, he thought he would at least give him a job. Ronin ran down the street, continuously looking down at his watch, he had 4 minutes to get there before they opened. He ran past an alleyway when in the corner of his eye he saw a bright blue light. When he walked back the light was gone. And so was everything in the alleyway. He would have stopped to think about it but he didn’t have time. He ran in the door and slid behind the counter just as it hit 7:30. It was a slow day. He didn't even know why they were open this early. Most nerds sleep in on Saturday. When the first customer of the day walked in. He grabbed a few volumes off the wall and walked over to the register and set down the books.
“Alright, that's the first 2 volumes of Tool Man, a volume of Kaleidoscope, and the last volume of the Brink of Tomorrow event. That all comes out to, $85.12” the man grabbed his wallet and put his card into the reader. That was the last customer he got that day. It finally reached 5:00 and Ronin ran out the door. He was playing back what Axel had said yesterday on the bus.
“If you want to stay a loser forever, then fine” he didn't want to be a loser, but he also didn't want to go to that party. He had been in his head for so long that when he snapped back to reality, he was already at his house. He walked up the old creaky stairs, and into the apartment, into his room and fell onto the bed. Mrs Fox walked in the door and started yelling again about how disgusting his room was.
He sat upright and before he could stop himself, said.
“Can I go to a party tonight?” she stared at him for a few seconds.
“Not until this room is spotless” which was her way of saying “no” He stared outside his window as she left the room. The building he lived in and the one next to it had no space in between them, but his was one floor taller. So he could easily step out of his window and onto the roof of the building next to his. He looked at his watch. The party started at 6:30. He looked from his watch, to the window, and back to the watch. He got up and walked over to his window.
He opened and stepped outside.