AS: Hey! Look, I wrote this is a sort of fling of self-pity late tonight, and this is the prologue and the first chapter will follow tomorrow first thing, so I want you to tell me exactly what you think of it so that I know whether I should continue. No flames, cos they will ultimately be ignored.

I hope you like it. I'm going to go to bed now and await reviews.
I hope this isn't going to get deleted because it's too short. It IS only a prologue after all.

Prologue

Under such circumstances, I'd say we were doing Ok. Me: Max Tate, and Kai Hiwatari and Tala Ivanov, as we live in this newly built

high-rise apartment block in Brooklyn. Such circumstances weren't exactly expected and it's not like we planned this after the last World

Championships came to a screeching and confusing halt.

I didn't really foresee my Mum's brand new research centre in Mumbai needing so much of her time. So much of her time in fact, that she

decided to move there. And I couldn't predict that my Dad would get a girlfriend, the whole thing to turn serious and the pair of them to

go on a ridiculously-long world-wide cruise, leaving me in the lurch in the States.

I don't think Tala entirely mapped out being in a coma either, nor the stuff he had to go through afterwards such as compulsory therapy

and about a billion checkups. He came through all of that, and was left with no where to go apart from care. He wants to help out putting

money into the apartment, but he can't get a job. He never got any educational qualifications. He can't prove he was home-taught at the

Abbey or is generally smart, so to the working world he may as well be illiterate and back in his coma. Every time he's turned down for a

job, he comments: the only thing I'm good for is drug-smuggling.

And I doubt Kai really could foretell the nasty, awkward clause at the bottom of Voltaire's will that said Kai can't benefit at all from his

fortune until he is eighteen years old, leaving him with no home, no money apart from a weekly allowance that the judge ruled he needed,

and the prospect of having to go to a care home for two years.

So, as we staggered around completely reeling in shock, the BBA decided not to let us flounder around in the gutter, and Mr Dickenson

brought us a rent-controlled flat. Close to the USA's BBA headquarters, where he can watch over us when he's in the country. He

announce that the three of us, reprobates from the shadow of the Third World Championships, would live together until things were

sorted for the three of us.

Mr Dickenson pays the rent, and we pay for everything else. He takes the reporters and media from our backs, and we try to keep it

together when one of us can't and won't eat thanks to being fed through a tube the last month or so. He ensures that he'll pick up the

slack when he can, and we try to get as many crummy jobs as possible at one time to make sure that slack isn't going to show. He sets us
up with people who help organise kids who work at home so that I can still study and Tala and Kai can start. And, sometimes flailing, we

run around in the background and try to look after each other under this one roof.

The last rent cheque Mr Dickenson sent got lost in the mail the other day. I had to go to the landlord and explain. I think he was won over
by my excuses and big, open smiles, showing him I wasn't cheating him out of the rent, merely a victim in bad circumstances.

Too true.

And he let me off.

It's all in the smile.

AS: please review! Dont be mean. The next chapter will be our first day looking into what goes on in an apartment lived in by three world championship bladers with serious emotionalbaggage.