The (Mis)Adventures of (Re)Becca Smellie

Chapter 1: Blast Off

The loudest alarm of the neighborhood went off on Villeneuve Street. From household 1740 to be precise.

It came from the buzzing of a retro alarm clock, which caused a wooden catapult on a bedside table to launch a succession of marbles across the room. They landed into a neat little filter that made their way down like obedient little ants into a tube, where they landed into a dog bowl with purple letters spelling out "Emily" in coded language.

A little half robot, half Daschund dog that was slumbering under the bed woke up and absorbed the marbles like a vacuum, leaving out the cat eye ones as usual. It checked the calendar in its operating system by blinking three times and licking its nose, and upon noting the big red circle and star emojis on the date, proceeded to pull on the lever beside her owner's bed.

This caused a mechanical hand to emerge from the bed frame and start spinning wildly on top of the snoring princess curled into a ball and hugging her pillow.

Upon waking, she grabbed the hand and pulled it, causing it to retreat into the bed frame. With a wide yawn, she pulled out her trusty recorder from inside her pillow.

"Log day 1476...and day 1 of new College log! Today is finally my first day - and it's going to be perfect!"

Becca Smellie woke up in an especially cheerful mood that morning. She rubbed Emily's belly, and put some of her homemade gourmet oil and bolts in her dog bowls before dressing herself in her long overalls and a freshly pressed shirt her father had left on the edge of her bed earlier that morning.

Despite looking like a doll due to her tiny stature and cherubic round face, Becca was old enough to do everything regular 18-year-olds did. Go to college, fix and race cars, stay up after midnight, build drones, go stargazing in the middle of the wilderness, intercept alien signal messages usually only traceable by government agents, play video games until sunrise...The usual.

Her unusually large brown eyes were offset by her deep, purple bags. She had olive-toned skin with a few freckles and sunspots on her arms and chest. During most of the year, she was either shedding off a farmer's tan or making it more pronounced. As a baby, she was unusually pale, but she developed a semi-permanent tan the summer she went to the Aliva Astro Camp sponsored by her father's work in government. The team she was assigned didn't care for working on a rocket with the record high heat index of the year. The camp counselors gave them, and all teams, a pass to forego the competition this year given the extraneous circumstances.

Hearing the verdict was one thing, listening was a whole other.

Keen to put her fresh new tools to the test, she built the entire rocket on her own. And launched it. Much to the dismay of the camp counselors that had to deal with the evacuations after it successfully blazed...or rather, blasted off. Thanks to her strong legs and great stamina, she was able to outrun any of the counselors trying to grab her and succeeded to run all the way home. This stamina always shocked everyone around her, since no one ever saw her work out a day in her life. Her simple reply to the angry campers of her cohort when she won the Sports Day competitions was: "It's not rocket science. You just put one foot in front of the other."

Tying up her floor-length purple hair into her signature pigtails, Becca flung herself out of her room adjacent to the family 'tinkerbox' lab before running upstairs, making sure not to trip on any wires or gaming controllers. She jumped into her usual seat at the breakfast table and greeted her father and sister good morning with a piece of buttered toast in her mouth.

Bella, her older step-sister, smiled and kissed Becca on the top of her head before handing her a plate of her favorite mini breakfast egg sandwiches. Becca's eyes glowed with happiness.