Ketchup -- A Story of Romance, Action, and a stupid girl

For those of you who can't cope with the idea of a boy creating a girl character who is stupid, buzz off. For those of you who can cope with it and have, read on. As Blogger just died on me in the most annoying fashion, I just lost a great work of writing, and am in a much too tired state to attempt to resurrect it. However, I'll try to introduce this story as humorously as possible, so you won't be sitting, looking at trillions of light particles/waves zinging at your eyes at speeds hereunto unreached by mankind. Anyway, as I was saying, I will definitely not make any jokes in introducing such a serious and thought-provoking story. As such...

Ketchup (a story of romance, action, and a stupid girl)
By Noah Bertilson


Introduction


As is necessary when making books, some people decide they need introductions, forwards, and prologues. I find the very idea entirely preposterous. Merely for the sake of the sanity of publishers, this is included, supposing this crazed semblance of words ever does come from the cursed pixels of this computer to the blessed pages of a well-printed book. As this is entirely unlikely and probably opposing to what most people would have me call "fate", this introduction is almost entirely useless. As I intend to leave some reason to it, I'll add a bit of an introduction to Jack in specific and some other very important people. Here yah go, crazy publishers:


The Real Introduction


It was a long time ago when Jack was a boy. Er. No. He is a boy, but he was a younger boy before he was an older boy. He had parents. Two of them. Fine, kind, good, honorable people. Um. And there was one man and one woman. Definitely. (publishers, if you can't deal with that, you can go ride an ICBM. Nuclear, yah hear?)
Anyway. He had a father and a mother. They taught him so much in his first ten years of life that he was easily wiser than a good half of the average college student. Though this necessarily degrades the average college student, it doesn't mean, in any way, that college students are universally stupid. It just means that certain ones are so accomplished in the art of stupidity that their renown should have, before now, become much greater.
As I was saying, he had parents at that time. On his twelfth birthday, his parents went on a date after his birthday party, while he was babysat by one of their better friends. As this tragic story unfolded, he was doomed to have his parents killed for reasons not yet revealed. Sorry I got so nondramatic and humorous there, but, ahem, it's hard to make a death funny when you're 1. not playing a video game, 2.  an intelligent, fairly un-morbid boy like me.


Satisfied, pubs?


Ah, on to the story. Jack is now fourteen years old. He's been wandering through the United States for the last two parent-free years of his life. He's in better shape than anybody in a ten-mile radius of himself about 94.56% of the time, and he carries a useful backpack full of all sorts of useful stuff. However, at this moment, his life is in danger. Why, I don't even know yet. We join Jack jumping over a dumpster. A dumpster which is rather big.




A Jackrabbit Down


Jack's brain only registered shock for a tenth of a second. After that, his brain was unconscious, but the immensity of the shock seemed to have kept his brain in an odd in-between state, so that it still attempted to find out why he had failed to clear the dumpster correctly. It was a fairly complicated jump, but he'd completed it flawlessly from the day he learned it.


Jack woke up two days later, a gunshot wound in his shoulder, in a hospital.
“Where's the bullet?” he asked the second he'd rounded up his senses and made sure he hadn't lost any of them.
“What?” said a nearby doctor, looking unnerved, “Hey! You're supposed to be asleep, doctor's orders!”
“What, did the doctor's union start a dictatorship?” Jack threw back, looking profoundly annoyed, “Now tell me, where is the bullet, you great albino Batman?”
The doctor looked slightly stunned for a few seconds, and then said, “The police have it. They're going to find the man that shot you, and you're going back to sleep,” he added firmly.
Jack immediately sat bolt upright. “No, they're not, and it's a she,” he said, flexing his legs and arms. The doctor looked blank, then arranged his features into a look invented before time by enslaved lab scientists. It conveyed the firm belief that the recipient of the look was believed not to be in full possession of either his senses or his sense. It only goes to prove how bad institutions slavery as well as whatever crazy institution lab scientists belong in are.
“Oh, come on, how would you know that?” he asked, seemingly too astonished to stop Jack from doing experimental push-ups.
Jack snorted. “Like I'm going to tell you,” he said, getting out of bed and picking some very thin clothes from his backpack, which had been placed by his bed.
“Well, you can't leave now,” the doctor said, realizing too late that he was pleading, “You've got to stay in for another two days,” he said. “Doctor's orders,” he added helplessly.
Jack rolled his eyes.
The doctor suddenly looked up, looking triumphant. “And the police chief wants to see you, too!”
Jack jumped. “The...the police chief,” he repeated lamely, not looking around.
“Yeah,” the doctor said, seeming to think Jack's surprise and fear was actually resignation.
Jack bolted to the door in three long strides, opened it, and went out. The doctor came running to the door, at which point Jack took off his backpack and slammed him over the head when he came through the door. The doctor slumped down against the wall. Jack suddenly had an idea. Moving as fast as he could manage, he carried the doctor's body and moved it into his bed, pulling the covers over him.
“Sleep well,” Jack told the unconscious doctor, “I hope you didn't break my laptop.” He patted the bald head almost thoughtfully, and bolted out the door once again.


A Bullet Gathered

At the fourth floor, Jack entered the elevator. At the lobby, a short UPS delivery man came out.
Alright, alright. You got me. He's Jack. But so what? It makes for a sleek story. Anyway.
Jack easily exited the building without any trouble whatsoever. His tongue even decided to project itself in the direction of a security camera. Everyone knows such behavior is entirely normal and ordinary.
The sad thing is that he forgot to cover up the signature he had traced on the back of his backpack with a glow-in-the-dark, neon-green Sharpie. In a blindingly bright shade of green, it stated clearly,


Jack Walker Rabbit (this is meant to be in a handwriting-like font, but Blogger has none such)


Several thousand miles away, on a deserted desert island, a large array of high-resolution LCDs, the video played back in slow motion. A man sat in a large chair adorned with many different animal skins. On the front, there seemed to be zebra, tiger, jaguar, as well as a small skin on the top, who, considering the twin, long ears pointing from its head, would be well judged to be a rabbit, or, more precisely, and, I'm afraid, intrusively, on your happy readership, I enlighten you with the intriguing truth that it is, in fact, a jackrabbit skin. Oh, yes. The man. Well, he looked very sinister, mainly because the light of twelve LCDs has an all-around zombifying effect on anyone who sits in front of them, excepting those so adorned with blood so as to make them look like zombies anyway. These cases have proved to be rather rare, as the amount of zombies in the world has decreased so drastically over the last several decades.


Outside of the elevator, Jack walked unhindered out of the hospital. He frowned. Things were so boring these days. You used to have well-trained thugs jump on you from the top of two-story buildings. This was a rather odd technique, but it worked. The sad thing was that few people had large squads of tough men willing to jump off of two-story buildings. For this reason, Jack's life had been a bit of a bore for several months. Considering he was only fourteen, he had a lot left to see, but he was fairly well prepared. He sighed and continued walking away from the hospital.
He was also thinking about being shot. And where the bullet was. But that's about all I, as author, am willing to tell you, the reader, about what he was, or what he was not thinking about at that time.
For now.
Anyway, he was thinking about how on earth he could have not cleared a dumpster so small that, by comparison to some of the ones he'd cleared, was merely a bump in the road. Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit here, but I'm the author here, okay?
Now. As Jack grabbed his bike, which, for some reason, was sitting right outside the hospital, when, actually, he had left it about eight miles north of there in a place quite ruined by poverty. He had “lended” it to a man who claimed quite convincingly that he needed a bike to drive to the liquor store. Jack had, at that time, found this extremely interesting, and set the GPS in his bike to track the man. As it turned out, the man biked to a liquor store. Once there, however, he attempted to rob the place. Being an avid redneck, the store owner scared the man so badly that he didn't even bother to gather the bike. Thankfully, as always happens in such idiotic spy TV shows before now, the bike could “ride” itself. The one problem is that it terrified the northern population of the city, which, by and large, was poor. Word soon circulated that there, “was a witch in town”. I, the author, don't in the least deny that adding a witch at this time would “spice” things up a bit, but this is meant to center on Jack. This means, of course, that Jack actually being self-centered seems rational. I, as author, deny it, and leave it at that.

Ah, yes. Jack was on his bike, riding down a street. He was quite calm, despite the fact that his computer, back in his backpack, was going haywire because police cars were converging on his current location at speeds varying from sixty to one-hundred miles per hour. His computer knew things like this because he made it to. Sadly, he was already going at more than fourty miles per hour, so getting out his laptop and stopping it from sending crazy signals to his brain which were hardly understandable anyway was entirely out of the question.

Upon crossing an intersection at speeds which would make Lance Armstrong faint, Jack finally did turn on his rockets. And then he started to move really fast. Now, today, people seem to relate the word "fast" to their car, or some other means of transportation. Not to bikes. I think the average person doesn't know how fast Lance Armstrong has gone. No matter. I can assure you, though, that, if he wanted to, Jack could have outstripped the Concorde. Only here, he merely had to outstrip several police cars which were converging now, at a point several blocks ahead of him. His computer had calculated the trajectories of all the cars at one-hundred and ten percent of their actual speeds, assuring no police would come to harm. Jack firmly believed that brining people to harm was wrong. Taking this belief into account, he calculated the probability to damage of all things of the city to be wonderfully decreased if he merely increased his altitude by at least twenty feet. This he did without so much as a "click", though, honestly, "click" doesn't even describe what people usually use "click" to describe, i.e. It's as easy as CLICK, and you're hooked up to the biggest financial difficulty the nation has to be in distress over! Anyway, he, being the all-around technological genius that he is, had already integrated mind-computer control so all he had to do was think something which would tell the computer to tell the bike to increase the altitude of the bike to X. X is a variable, for your information. Not to be trifled with.

Anyway.

Jack totally missed the police cars and vaporized a good portion of a dense oak tree. Dense here means that it was “having the component parts closely compacted together”, not “stupid; slow-witted, dull”. Because of this, Jack's flight pattern, if it must be called that, was quite changed. He was, by resisting the gravity of Earth, going up. In going up, people feel a strange feeling. They start barfing, in extreme situations.

TO BE CONTINUED


I feel it a heinous crime for my readers not to comment profusely and...well. Have a nice day.


!Noah!