Owl City: A Novel Experience

Chapter 1 - Something In The Air

Once upon a time, fiction collided with reality. There was absurdity and there was beauty, there was anguish and there was hope. A light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

And you, Reader, were part of it.

Or, you're going to be. I'm not sure which tense to use. Tenses and timelines can be so tricky sometimes.

I know it's tacky and generally frowned upon, talking to the reader like this. (And I swear to never be a pretentious idiot and refer to you as the "gentle reader". Ick.) I'm only addressing you now because I wanted to let you know ahead of time that you're important. To this story, and to your own world. Both sides of reality will need you, and it may be sooner than you feel ready for. But try your best anyway, alright? Because I know you'll be amazing. I've seen the potential, and it is limitless.

Sam and Michael and so many others saw it, too. But that part happened much later, and I have to do this properly. Prologue or no prologue, every good story begins when things get interesting.

The day things got interesting for Samantha Seul-Ki Park was the day her little brother told her that his toys could fly.

-:-

She would have brushed it off as the rambling of an over-imaginative 11-year-old boy, if it were anyone other than her brother. Michael had never been the over-imaginative type. She wasn't even sure he understood how to play pretend at all. His autism, mild as it was, came with a number of various quirks she'd learned to navigate over the years – and one of those quirks was that he never played with his toys the way other kids did. Instead of driving his Hotwheel cars in physics-destroying flips and crashing them into each other, he would line them up from wall to wall with careful precision.

Rather than make his plastic dinosaur roar and stomp and eat said Hotwheels, he carried it with him everywhere, running his fingertips over the scaly surface. And with his toy airplane, there were no flights around the world. He would simply set it by his bed and spin the propeller for hours while he listened to music.

He did like to build things with his k'nex set; but even then, he was never interested in building creations of his own. He preferred to google pictures of city skylines, pick any skyscraper that caught his eye, and then replicate it. No instruction booklets needed.

Sam figured if he did have an imagination, it was a very left-brained one. So when he said he'd seen his toys fly that morning, she paid attention.

They walked home together after school every day, even though their schools were always different. She was four years older than him, and that age gap made it impossible to return on the same bus. Moving from home to home made it especially hard to keep the tradition of walking together. But they were both stubborn about it, and no matter where they were living, she always found a spot to meet up. Today, their place was flooded with autumn gold and crisp air.

She avoided the leaves in the road as they walked, so that Michael wouldn't be bothered by the harsh crunching noises. The murmuring of the trees was music enough, and it wasn't often that he chatted with her like this. She wanted to enjoy it while it lasted.

"Trevor flew first," he said, holding up his dinosaur. "Then the Antonov An-2, and the circle-robot, and then everything all just went..." He stopped and spun in place, waving his free hand around and making little whooshing noises under his breath.

"Whoa! Careful!" Sam chuckled, pushing back a nearby tree branch so his long blond hair wouldn't catch on it. (Haircuts were on his list of Things To Avoid.)