Tales from the Vault

Amber and the Mansoins

This is from a series I've wanted to post for a long, long time, but I didn't know where to begin. The other night, as I browsed my childhood binder that weighs like 20 pounds, I came across this story, one of my earliest. I didn't start writing until I was almost 10, so it was around that time. I'm weirdly excited to introduce the world to the Night and Leida families and their dozens of horrible stories.

The Night family lived in the pioneer region of my fantasy world, and had an ungodly amount of children. I think they eventually hit thirty. This is because each character was actually one of my dolls or stuffed animals. Every time I acquired a new one, I added them to the family. It was just vaguely explained that a new child had been adopted. The people and places I knew in real life and my Thorsby best friends were also written into the stories. I wrote over thirty stories about the Night family alone and as I grew older, starting around age 11, it got progressively more bizarre. The main character became a traveling theater actor, the world slowly modernized with no explanation, they got a talking dog as a maid, the house in which the Night family lived began to spontaneously grow through magic (the kids found cracks in the walls and would discover whole new rooms, with one storyline focusing on the discovery of a basketball gymnasium of unexplainable origin inside their home), a delinquent character was introduced, they began to run a boarding house because in real life I moved and wanted to include all the new people and friends in my life and I wrote them in as boarders, and they accumulated so many horses I had to keep a chart to keep track (these horses, of course, were all champions in one thing or another). I somehow toughed it out until I had just turned 13, but then it crashed, burned, and turned into something else much more manageable. The roots of this storyline kept reemerging as different things and actually the short stories I write to this day were born out of it.

But anyway, back on topic, I wrote this one when I was 9 or barely 10 and it was much more simple. Just the pioneer Nights and the rich, modern Leida dynasty.

The Leidas were the on-again, off-again dictators of our fantasy world and lived in the modern city district. They owned the currency system and lived in a ridiculous mansion that was constantly growing. In real life, they were my brother's stuffed animals. When we "played" our fantasy world, our separate characters naturally collided in crossover storylines, and then I wrote them down in stories. This is one such crossover.

Here we have the literary masterpiece, The Nights Go To Car City, original spelling and grammar intact.
__________________

Chapter 1: Waiting

"Amber!" My little sister, Mary, called. (PSA: Mary was a Precious Moments doll with a rainbow drawn on her cheek in permanent marker courtesy of yours truly.) "Amber, wait up!"

I sighed. "Come on, Mary."

"How much longer 'till we leave?" Mary asked, for the 10th time today.

"I told you, tomorrow!" I said. From the fifth through the 9th Angelina had stayed with us. (I actually have a story about this as well, titled The Insulted Angelina.) Now, the Bear Family had invited us to stay at their house for the 12th-15th. We were leaving tomorrow.

(We often referred to the Leidas as the Bear Family because in their earliest state, before two dogs and three bunnies were added, they were made up of six teddy bears. In the stories, I pretended the Leidas were people, but sometimes wrote the Bear Family out of force of habit.)

We met Phillip and Sara (remember Phillip from The Cowboy Mystery?) as well as Jenny and Nellie at the school playground. "We heard you're going to that mainson!" Phillip shouted as we got closer to them. "That mainson" is what the kids call the Leida's house.

"Have you ever been there?" Jenny added.

I shook my head. "We've just seen their condo and the cabin in the woods." (Although it was natural we would combine the Nights and the Leidas while playing with our toys, it was never once even slightly explained how the Nights, a family from the pioneer realm, were such good friends with the Leidas, the rulers of the country, within the story-verse. As implausible as it was, the fact remained, and the Leidas were constantly inviting the Nights to their various vacation homes.)

"How many kids do they have, again?" Phillip asked, even though I had already told him.

"12," I replied, sighing.

"Do they really have every toy in the world?" Nellie asked. "Yeah!" Sara agreed. "Do they?" (This was a big deal to my brother and me. Naturally, the richest people in the world would own one of every toy ever made in the history of toy-kind. We were constantly specifying this fact.)

I shrugged. "Angelina says they do."

The next morning, we wer up bright and early. (I fail to see the point of anything that has happened in this story up till now.) We ate big bowls of oatmeal and finished packing our bags.

"Honk, Honk!" A loud horn tooted. (I have no words for the awkwardness of this sentence.) We ran outside with our luggage. Bobby was waiting in the limo. (Bobby was Mr. Leida himself, the on-again, off-again king/president [it varied] as well as a tycoon and inventor of a magic powder that created gold coins.) "Hop on!" He shouted.

"Come on!" I called. "It's time to go!"
—————————————
The next chapter is super long so it will be its own part.