Tales from the Vault

Memories

This isn't an actual story, but I wanted to start recording some childhood memories for the sake of the future. And since I described a little of my fantasy world in the last chapter of this book, I wanted to go more indepth here. When my brother was three he built Lego towers, made roads for his toy cars, set up flashlights on their ends and put plastic cups over them to create colored streetlights--basically built an enormous city all over his bedroom. Being a 3-year-old, he named it Car City. We had no idea what this little game was going to result in. Car City was the root that all our future fantasy lands branched off of. Within a year or two, my brother and I had an intensely developed world with Car City at the heart of it. Car City was a huge, modern, advanced capital of the world and was led by the snobby nobility of the Leida Estate. The Leidas were a large family who lived in an elaborately detailed mansion, dominated the currency system of the whole world, and locked their servants and enemies in a dungeon. They had a lot of celebrity guests. The Leidas were like the Kardashians back before we had any idea who the Kardashians were. They had endless money and endless power, and constant scandals. My brother and I would make gossip magazines out of construction paper with stories and illustrated photos, and the latest Leida drama almost always made the front page. We also made newspapers for Car City with all the breaking news, complete with reviews of fake movies and interviews with pretend actors. 

Along with Car City, we had multiple other regions. One was Roseland, a much smaller city where the lifestyle was roughly like the 1940s or 50s. There was an orphanage run by this evil guy (rumored to be magic) who kidnapped children and sold them, and also there was a roadkill restaurant called Bidalit Barbecue where the worker drove around in a truck, ran over animals to kill them, and cooked them in his restaurant. Roseland was full of talking animals who were refugees from Bear Country because of a civil war there and they had to run away and hide when they saw truck headlights in the woods. Roseland was the type of place that outsiders stayed far away from. 

Then there was Apple Brook, the pioneer place you already learned about in the literary masterpiece, The Cowboy Mystery. By the time I was 12 I had written 50 or 60 stories set in Apple Brook, all with intertwining characters. Then, when I was 12 or 13, I took Roseland completely off the map, and split Apple Brook into three new places: Harpersville, Broadway, and Podunk. Podunk was similar to the original idea of Roseland. If a person didn't live in Podunk, they didn't want to go anywhere near it. It had a hotel called The Chicken Coop, which was an actual chicken coop, and their billboard said, "You'll be grinnin' when you sleep with a chicken." Then, Broadway had a population of a few hundred and was mostly dairy farms before some developers came in and named it Broadway as a joke. They turned it into this weird cow attraction with a giant cow statue, tours of dairy farms, cow-themed gift shops, etc. etc. It was called the Cow Capital of the World. All the citizens embraced it and raced to make money off of it. Finally, Harpersville was just a typical rural town closely based off of the one I lived in, and I invented a bunch of new characters who lived there, but it was my younger brother who made it interesting when he created Shady Hollow. Shady Hollow was an evil nursing home. My brother made it so detailed he even wrote up daily menus of the horrible food. Like, "Friday Dinner: Dumpster Diving." The workers tortured the elderly residents until the residents had an uprising, and we ended up making a whole entire movie about the Shady Hollow rebellion. We were dressed up as old people and sneaking around in the dark with flashlights planning our escape. But that's ancient history so we won't really go into that. xD 

Very early on in the existence of our world, we had a place called Bear Country. It was named that because mostly talking, Narnia-ish animals lived there. We invented a religion, culture, and alphabet as well a history involving wars and refugees. When I was a little older, we invented a place called Nuh Territory. The Nuhs came from my brother when he was 6. They started out as a joke but suddenly had their own story. If you've read The Book of Secrets, you know the Nuhs. They're the nullians. The only difference is that I recently changed the name. The Nuhs were furry gray animals with long trunks who walked on two legs. In our original stories they spoke through their trunks and only made a low humming sound, like "nuuuuuh." They lived in cave dwellings in their own territory. It looked like a desert, but actually had a giant, underground, saltwater lake. The caves flooded every night and one Nuh was designated as the security and used its trunk to sound the alarm to get to higher ground. At some point we got a Cars computer game called MaterNational. In free play, there were all these different areas to drive in and one was a desert with a cave you could explore, and we were obsessed with it because it happened to look almost exactly like Nuh Territory. 

Then when I was 12, we invented this fantasy game we played in the backyard, and it resulted in a new addition to our weird world. We now included space realms with different planets, like one planet had cold misers and another had heat misers (from the Christmas claymation special A Year Without a Santa Clause). The cold misers were constantly attacking the heat misers. These two characters named Kia Noah Kanack-Anada and Augasta Kanacka-Anada (these were their actual names) found a portal and accidentally ended up in the space realms, and they helped the heat misers fight back against the cold misers, and they had a mentor called the Sun King. 

The stupid thing was that the world itself never had a name. Anyway, I'm writing this so I can have it for myself in the future. I'm always seeing people here on Wattpad talk about their childhood games and that's the stuff I can't get enough of. It's always so funny and amazing. I wanted to record all the details of my fantasies before I forget them. Also, because I enjoy overthinking, I Googled childhood fantasy worlds, wanting to read other people's memories, but all I got were these psychology articles saying that while every child plays imaginatively, only about 1 in 30 creates their own world and that it's a sign of heightened intelligence. So, a round of applause for all us Wattpaders. *claps enthusiastically*