Ketchup

This is all of Ketchup as of March 1st. Should time progress normally after this post is posted, changes will be made, additions added, and subtractions...well, you get the idea.

Yes. Chapter 4 is still unnamed. I guess if you feel like suggesting something, let me know, I'll actually re-read the chapter and decide if I like it. :D

Lastly, this isn't final. I've probably failed to save changes even to the first chapter, so errors or pet peeves of mine (which you may not even notice) will abound.

Ketchup (I've removed the subtitle for the sake of my continued, but utterly relative sanity)

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.

(the previous several paragraphs are up for major editing. Seriously.)

1. 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 confirmed none of them had jumped ship.

“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 retorted, looking profoundly annoyed, “Now tell me, where is the bullet, or shall I activate my nuclear-powered electromagnet and get it myself?”

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 his faculties. It only goes to prove how bad institutions slavery as well as whatever institution lab scientists belong to are.

“Oh, come on, how would you know that?” he asked, seemingly too surprised 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 oddly-textured clothes from his backpack, which had been placed by his bed.

“Well, you can't leave now,” the doctor said, realizing too late he was pleading, “You've got to stay in for another two days,” he said. “Doctor's orders,” he added without any particular purpose.

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.

“Yes,” 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 pivoted on the spot, landing his small but rather heavy pack in the doctor's face. The doctor performed a rather unusual trick, at this point, whereby he fell to the ground while moving rather rapidly forward. The result was that his head hit the floor with an unpleasant whack roughly in the middle of the door. 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.

2. No Control Freak

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. I, the author, assure you that Jack has a stomach which seldom decided to eject it's contents. However, Jack really did have to try hard not to eject it this time. This time, he not only kept his stomachfull, but also regained his balance and some of his common, everyday composure. However, a common, everyday composure is quickly decomposed when one is decidedly rocketed through clouds, and, consequently, drenched. I, the author, acknowledge that the scientific accuracy of this entire story is based in as much fact as it takes to validate the existence of mosquitoes when near water on a good, Minnesotan summer day. As such, I maintain the fact that Jack was, in fact, drenched, when he came out of the top of that cloud.

Thankfully enough, his entire electronic system was perfectly waterproof and was unharmed, as such. However, he was further knocked off course because his vision. By the time he could see where he was going, the gravitational pull on him had decreased noticeably. Jack blinked several times, muttered, "I didn't know it could do that," and continued downward. Now, when people go down, they gain velocity. Velocity is speed over distance. I think. And gaining speed over distance is acceleration. Therefore, I, the author, can say, with some certainty, that Jack was accelerating.

Now, under some circumstances, acceleration is good. For instance, when you're pointing away from gravity's pull and have a good force propelling you away from the said. However, when you're accelerating in a direction not opposed to gravity, you eventually either gain such velocity that you don't hit our dear planet, or you do. I haven't had the opportunity to investigate this thoroughly, but I think it's true. You either hit something, or don't hit something, in instances when you're accelerating directly at it. In this rare case, Jack just managed not to hit that which he was originally pointed at. Instead, he found himself flying straight at a battered American flag. As you can see, Jack doesn't have a lot of luck. This might have to do with the fact that he accidentally burned his rabbit's foot, upturned and melted his horseshoe, walked under few more ladders than there are people in the United States, and, to top it all of, saw so many black cats over his left shoulder that, if proportion maintains sway in this situation, he ought to have suffered for the two years of his life which he had, so far, had to himself. As it was, he was fairly happy, and hadn't encountered much suffering of any consequence.

This being said, he did happen to be flying at an American flag. For the twentieth time. For this reason, jack said, "Probability rockets. Blast," after which he managed, as always, to miss the flag. By this time, he had managed to decrease his velocity to a speed entirely manageable. With direction under control, Jack returned to his home.

3. Home

Jack's home was extraordinary, and yet plain. It was a small, abandoned apartment building outside of the main city. To him, it was valuable, not only because such things were rare in his town, but because he did, in fact, call it home. He lived alone, yet he had several pets which were quite good for him.
The apartment that he primarily lived in was fairly large, and, over the years, had become as well-furnished as any five-star hotel would be. In the manner of such, there was, at a certain place, a large screen TV. However, Jack had, with his own hands, made it. It was a few feet across and seemed to have a very large block of wood behind it. For your woefully uniformed readership, I'll reveal it's purpose quite simply. It was a computer.

Around this time, I ran out of time describing his house because Jack decided to go find something to eat.

He made scrambled eggs with more minced bacon than any pig could live through seeing. He also had more oil in the pan than would be healthy for just about anyone. However, he'd done this multiple times and wasn't dead yet. That was, in a good bunch of areas, his philosophy for defining what to do. In a good dose of others, though, he put sense and morals into a decision.

In a few minutes, he had some steaming yellowish matter stuffed into a tortilla which could only be home-made. Jack was incredibly industrious.

"Hands up!" a voice said in a voice which couldn't exactly be identified as anything in particular.

"Not with breakfast, Xink. I could use some orange juice, though, thank you," Jack said.

Xink was a computer. Yes, you probably guessed by the time that you read this, that she was the large block behind the screen. I only say "she" because it's a term used quite admirably on ships and countries. Xink's gender had never been accurately defined, and, I, as the author, see little reason why robots should be so mercilessly segregated as we humans have been.

"I don't have any more orange juice, sir," Xink replied in a tone which suggested with almost painful obviousness that it wasn't true.

"Oh, quit your bawling, you great brown blockhead," Jack said mercilessly.

"Yes, mastah," Xink said, sniffling a bit. A clear glass glass full of fresh, cold orange juice popped out of almost nowhere and landed on his table. Sadly, orange juice is fairly transparent, so, me saying his table was splattered with orange liquid would be just plain evil. However, it was true that there was orange juice all over the table. Jack licked the juice off of some of his more reachable areas. Xink sighed, the table was wiped up in a second, and Jack drank his orange juice. He might have drunk it, but I haven't tested the Hangoverer's Guide to Hanging Over with orange juice.

Anyway.

He was drinking his juice when a bullet made a uncannily clean hole through his glass. It also made a bit of noise, but it's most important that it made a clean hole, and that it was remarkably uncanny. Though his expression would convince anyone who didn't know him well that he was totally unbothered by this occurrence, he was rather surprised and slightly worried. He was aware that his bones wouldn't have set perfectly yet, and, for this reason, he didn't enjoy the idea of another bullet in him. Especially outside the main city, where the nearest doctor professed ardently that he was a reincarnated gorilla king. On most occasions this wasn't a problem, thankfully.

Jack's instinct would have been to miraculously jump onto the ceiling and release a gas which would only effect his unseen opponent, but all this ballyhoo was entirely unnecessary. Jack's hand was covered in orange juice. Dramatic effect would demand that I say blood there, but, in this case, there is no such reality. Orange juice dripped down his arm and onto the table, which he had been utilizing to browse the internet and occasionally check his security cameras. And, one should know, spilling Jack W. Rabbit's orange juice on a bright morning like this was considered by the general public to be a suicidal action. In reality, however, Jack would only imprison the intruder for a few days.

Anyway.

Jack was surprised. The intruder stepped from the shadows which not even I, the author, noticed before, and stepped up to Jack. If Jack hadn't trained him himself, the intruder would have been on the floor with up to five broken bones. As it was, Jack had trained him, and, by some insane change in motion, the intruder sat across the table from him, quite unhindered by Jack's attempt to put him into awful pain.

"Socks!" Jack whispered, looking, as well as humans can imagine, like a ghost. Socks was, in fact, the chap's name. Why was not as obvious. If I decide to, I, the author, will crank out some insanely impossible story of how he was noted from Jack's other friends by his socks, but, for now, I need only mention the phrase "North Pole", and the words, "really", and "cold".

"Jack!" he thundered, shaking Jack's hand as if he still needed to warm his up, "You've grown, old sock!"

Jack attempted to gather his wits a bit. He seldom doubted that Xink had hidden some of them under the TV stand. In reality, however, most of them had been stashed away by his part-time housekeeper in a suitcase in the attic. Jack had a fairly large supply, so he wasn't keeling over yet.

"So why are you here?" said Jack, seeming, only partly, to cope with his good friend and student's return from the far away and desperately cold upper regions of Earth.

"I'd like to borrow the Flycatcher."

"You want to borrow the Flycatcher?" Jack said, incredulously, "That thing's almost older than I am!"

"But it's fast," Socks retorted, smiling, "And fast is what I need."

"Well, you can have it, but it's been a while since it worked properly."

"What do you mean? It worked perfectly back when..." Socks trailed off, looking troubled, "When it wasn't in pieces, right?"

"Right. I took it apart a while ago. Needed the parts for a new thing. What do you need it for?"

"I want to plant a second base on the South Pole," Socks replied, looking slightly nervous.

"Ah. Why didn't I guess?" Jack said.

"You've been too smart to mess around with that stuff for years, Jack. Face it."

Jack coughed.

"I've had to do a lot mobe guessing than you'd care to imagine in the last few weeks."

"Ah, well. It's what humans do."

"That is so cliche."

"Sorry," said Socks, quickly putting on an accent which seemed to mix both Texan and British with a smidgen of Microsoft Sam.

"Anyway," said Jack, "I've got something else that ought to serve you at least as well, probably better, than the Flycatcher."

"Okay..."

"Come on. I'll show you it," Jack said, standing up. He walked over to a tattered-looking grandfather clock and took a large sledgehammer, aimed it carefully, and, despite Socks' startled cry, smashed the clockface in a full foot. It was whole and unharmed. Jack slid the grandfather clock to the side, revealing a passage roughly four feet tall and two feet wide. The clock face remained, sticking out of the wall. It let out a sad note that indicated it wasn't perfectly protected by the plexiglass cover on its front. Jack led the way, on hands and knees. Socks followed, and, at Jack's order, slid the grandfather clock back to its original place, blocking all light from the passage.

Or that's what it looked like, to one so constantly exposed to places entirely covered in snow and ice. To Jack, it almost looked bright, mostly because of the amount of time he spend outside at night.

Jack flipped a switch and, though Socks never guessed, they'd exited the passage several seconds ago. They were in the middle of a large hangar, hundreds of feet wide and deep, and over twenty feet tall. Jack started walking over to a small blue ship that looked capable of high speed chase, not only in the air and on wheels, but on artaficial legs.

"I can't use this," said Socks, "It looks like it can only fit one person! Two, at best."

"That's right. Only one person," said Jack, looking a bit proud, "but its cargo hold can carry more than the cargo hold of your everyday commercial jet."

"How?" Socks said incredulously.

"Um, trade secret," Jack said, looking a bit nervous.

"Ok, so, how much do I have to pay?" Jack walked around the ship for several seconds.

"Well, I'd charge you fifty thousand," Jack said. Socks winced. "But you're my friend. Because of that, I think I'll lower it to a straight forty nine thousand nine hundred ninty nine and ninty nine cents. A whole copper Lincoln to take home with you." Jack handed him a penny.
"You know, I don't carry that kind of money around. In fact, I've only got twenty thousand in my bank account."

Jack raised his eyebrows. "You thought I was serious?"

"No. I was just making sure you meant what you said."

"Oh. Ok. Well, feel free to borrow it, but it'll still be forty thousand if you want to buy it. Considering what it can do, that's very, very cheap."

"Thanks. I'll be sure to bring the regular load this November. Use it well," said Socks.

"Ah. Yes, thanks for that, too. I hope you know how to use it, because it can do one blinkin' unbelievable pace."

"Oh?"
"Yes. More than four times faster than the Flycatcher."

"Right ho. Toodloo."

"Toodles, Socks," said Jack, shaking his hand, "I hope you find one of those crazy monsters one of these days."

"Sometimes I wonder whether I should just sit back and wait for one of them to find me."

Jack grinned. "You'd know best, I guess," he said, waving. Socks jumped into the pilot's seat and flipped a fairly large green switch. The machine hummed to life in a manner not unlike the roar of a well-revved twelve-cylinder engine. The only difference was that, though it did move the spirit as a car would, the noise was much less. The Hyperjet had been designed for much more than speed. Stealth had also been a major factor.

The cockpit closed, and the Hyperjet hummed off the floor. A wall-wide door on the other side of the hangar opened up several feet, and, playfully, Jack thought, Socks threw the throttle forward. Jack thought he could hear him screaming with unrestrained glee over the low hum of the craft while it rocketed off.

4. UNNAMED

Jack quickly jumped into another Hyperjet and flew out the hangar door. Somehow, he hadn't managed to put a fast central processing unit in this one, so the startup sound, shamelessly stolen from Mac OS 9, was only played several seconds after Jack actually started the Hyperjet.
"Xink?" he queried his wireless headset.
Xink's voice came through sounding happy. Jack had never asked her why she seemed so happy after seeing Socks, but that was basically the way it always ended.
"Yes? Can I serve you any more orange juice?"
"No, thanks. I'd just like you to search our database for matches for the fingerprint on the bullet. And thanks for the orange juice."
Through the windshield, Jack could see stormclouds forming. He cruised above them to avoid delay, and got out some binoculars.
His earpiece beeped annoyingly. Xink managed to say, "The police chie..." before Jack took the call, wishing Xink enjoyed immitating Microsoft Sam less.
"Hello," Jack said, grinning, in a German accent.
"Hello? Jack Rabbit?" the police chief said.
"That's me, old onion. What's going on over there?"
"I wish you wouldn't--nevermind. Why aren't you at the hospital?"
"Well, the fact that you called me up after I left convinces me it was best to do exactly that. Before, on the other hand, it was because I needed to get home and drink some orange juice."
"So...important, is it?"
"You'll never guess how much a glass of orange juice can do for you at every meal."
"Precisely. For now, I'm confined to guess you're hiding information from me that I ought to know."
"What can I say? I always do. Good guess, by the way."
"Should I be worried about this bit of information?"
"Well, aside from the fact that, in the next few days to weeks you could be in mortal danger, no. The source of that mortal danger makes it extremely difficult for me or anyone else to announce it to you. I will in good time, though."
"Ok. Just--make sure you know what you're doing."
"Will do. Toodloo."
There was a fake click sound, and Xink announced that the call had been ended. Jack cut her off as soon as he could, but Xink seemed to have guessed he'd do that, and finished just in time.
"Xink, where were we supposed to pick up that shipment of titanium plating?" Jack said.
"On dock twenty-five of the Nikiaays' harbor," said Xink in an echoy monotone. Jack decided to make no comment on Xink's continual voice alteration.
"And where was I going to buy that CPU for this old racer?"
"You sure didn't tell me. You could try Starbuck's, though."
Jack looked thoughtful. "They usually only sell drinks of one sort or another."
"Oh."
Jack careened off into the distance.

The pile hadn't looked very large in the original picture, but it was quite enough. Jack paid the dealer and loaded up the metal, before racing to his nearest computer sales store. When he asked for the part he needed, he found it was outdated. "Why can't we have the same technology for two weeks straight for once?" he often said. The world more than often passed by faster than your average bullet. Thankfully, Jack also knew how to go faster than your average bullet. So, usually, he and the world could stand still, together. Other times, he just let it pass him by, like this time. Then, he found that he'd either have to update the Hyperjet's hardware, or make an outdated product himself, infringing on numerous patent and copyright filings. A lot of the time, the latter option seemed more than just appealing.

Jack was a secret agent. If this hasn't been obvious, it's most likely because Jack isn't, by standard definition, a secret agent. He was, as he more than frequently liked to call himself, a "freelancer". This basically meant that all his desires and feelings and such dictated, somewhat lightly, what he would do. The greatest of his desires was actually rather contrary to the average secret agent's desire. Or, rather, his willpower to resist this most powerful of desires was greater than that of other secret agents. Either that or he was what is more than frequently called a "hopeless romantic." These select people can be decent, average, ordinary humans. On the other hand, though, they can be indecent, sub-average, abnormal, and, most importantly, not humans. In most situations, this was not the case.

Jack's freelancing allowed him the freedom to, by, he thought, every definition, stalk a fair number of girls without capital punishment or otherwise. At this time, one would be most foolish to put this book or story, as it may end up, down, the main reason being that you so trust your author that, thus far, you have not dropped the book in terror or disgust. On the other hand, when an author tries to reason with you, one is more than well advised to drop the book immediately and begin reading the Communist Manifesto, just for instance. But, when you look up arguing, one would likely find that arguing generally involves at least two persons, and, in this case, it could not be more obvious that there is only one. You.

Jack's heartstrings twanged out a tune that, though, in its original, may have been called "beautiful", when played on the heartstrings, was a most heart-wrenching tune. Whether or not this means the tune was therefore not "beautiful" will at this time be left to the reader to decide.

Jack's life was truly fraught with romance. The author would like to let the reader know, at this time, that his ability to define the word, "fraught," is less than Olympic.
As one would be at the edge of his or her seat by now in restrained anger or perhaps a feeling of betrayal, that this fine book would star a stalker, the author must quickly define the word "stalk," before the reader blows up with anger or has some sort of nervous breakdown. By stalk, the author simply means that, on any occasion that Jack found himself in the presence of a girl whose visage he inwardly adored, he would nervously occasion looks, double up his path, lose courage at the last moment, and sit down somewhere, sweating profusely. This happened to Jack more times than was healthy. If the reader decides that stalking and stalking are not two different things, feel free to toss the book across the room. The author doesn't object in the least. He's seldom really considered his writing epic by any definition. Go ahead.

Supposing this story, or book, if it ever ends up as that, is still in your hands, and not cruelly mauled on the dirtiest floor you could find in your house, or, better yet, workspace, I will continue this complicated and doubtless confusing tale. The reader should be warned, however, that the events taking place in this story are mere imitations of reality, and should not be taken as anything other than that.



5. The Author Uses Up Space

Were it up to the author to create a wonderful, flawless lovestory, he would doubtless fail miserably. In the deepest way the author has been able to muster, this story mirrors real life. It isn't too shameful to admit, either, that, in the more realistic scheme of things, several weeks or months have passed. In the story itself, one might imagine just after the sentence, "Jack careened off into the distance," the whole scene slowed to a standstill, Jack and all. Were the author more competent, he might have mentioned the presence of a rather pleasant sunset. As it is, the author isn't particularly competent. This may be partially due to the fact that the author is now engaged in a likely unprofitable exercise of his writing abilities, instead of doing something far more boring and educational. Regardless, this narrative must continue.

Jack continued careening off into the distance, in the general direction of a sunset not altogether unpleasant. His conscience rather harped on him and made its existence well known by the dispersal of several ounces of sweat, which would cause Jack the inconvenience, that night, of having to shower outside his normal schedule.

He soon arrived at the, "target location," as he'd nervously been repeating in his mind, exited the Hyperjet and proceeded to insert it into his pocket.

If, at this junction, the reader's mind fails to comprehend the previous statement, and decides to take issue with it, the author directs the reader to the abysmal writing that has so unpleasantly filled several chapters so far. If issue is to be taken with anything, this book should now have been put down and sprinkled with a soft layer of dust. If the reader feels reasonably sure they can deal with every and all oddity, verbal inconvenience, and complete failure of communication, the author genuinely hopes the following won't, "top it all," so to speak.

Jack found himself in a rather small block -- that is to say, a piece of land surrounded on all sides by city roads, a piece of land, moreover, whose size was sub-average -- wherein large quantities of people ambled aimlessly, smaller quantities jogged determinedly, and even less sat in the occasional patch of grass whose hue rather determinedly bellowed, "I'm alive!"

Trees of varying quality and size were strewn rather randomly over the green, shading the occasional patch of unkempt grass. The sun seemed to have gotten out of bed on the wrong foot and, suddenly finding himself gifted with appendages, trotted off in no particularly important direction. On the whole, the scene was ordinary. Jack noticed little of this consciously, because his conscious thoughts were occupied elsewhere. While the girl had practically seen him once in her life, he was still wondering the typical things a guy wonders when his heart is pounced upon suddenly by the fair visage of one of the fairer sex. Among these was the rather unpleasant debate of whether or not the girl even knew he existed. Still, Jack tried hard to be a man of action, and being here was the first step toward that. He was silently predisposed to think nothing could possibly happen that would make the girl aware of his existence, for the simple fact that he'd hide, run, or simply disappear rather than let her see him. This peculiar behavior can probably never be fully explained, but, in essence, the author is ready to assume Jack was afraid.

However, if he were simply afraid, he wouldn't have the slightest problem talking to a girl. He'd more likely skip the pleasantries and get to the whole hero act, supposing the impending threat was physical. As it was, the threat was in no way physical, but rather mental. Jack was rather unpleasantly disposed toward the whole human thing of talking to one another, and this simply because of fear. The precise reason of this fear may never actually be known, due to the depressing rapidity with which a guy falls for a girl and subsequently falls on his knee for a girl. Regardless, Jack was afraid.

Jack's first instinct was to use the Hyperjet to cloak himself, but that would sort of defeat the purpose of his plan. Being the military genius of the block, he sat down on a bench rather near the central sidewalk crossing from one corner to its opposite. His hands proceeded to exude sweat and engage each other in various recreative activities.