BradenBaum
They were supposed to come home.
Ten childhood friends. Ten years apart. One impossible wish that shattered reality itself.
I'm Braden Baum, and I've lived my entire life in Windsor, California-managing epilepsy, navigating autism, walking the same streets I've walked since I was a kid at Anova. My friends scattered across the world after we grew up. Japan. Russia. Germany. China. Places I could only dream about from my apartment on Old Redwood Highway.
Then they came back.
Not as the shark who collected fossils, or the wolf who asked impossible questions, or the bunny who saved every bug. Not as the teachers, the performers, the people they became.
They came back as gods.
Ten kilometers tall. Twenty. Fifty. Growing.
And the wish that brought them home corrupted them into something unrecognizable-something that sees humanity, sees me, as nothing more than insects beneath their paws.
Sonoma County is crumbling. Buildings explode like dropped eggs. Highways crack like thin ice. And somewhere in the chaos, I'm trying to survive while the childhood friends who once protected me from bullies now flatten entire cities without a second thought.
When the people you loved most become the world's greatest threat... do you run? Or do you remind them who they used to be?