I liked to hang around near the brick building sometimes.
It was certainly interesting. No one saw me all that much but when they did, oh how fun it was to scare them! My broken mask shifted slightly, and I absentmindedly moved my fingers against its sharp edges. The perpetually grinning mask was stuck to the one half of my face, but that was completely alright. After all, it gave me the ability to Shift. Shifting was useful.
Right now, I wasn't worried about my mask or about scaring the boys out of my tree. Right now, I was focused on a human girl. Black hair, blue eyes. Her name, I remembered, was Dani.
***line break***
It all started when I left my home.
I didn't quite care for company, but I did have a knack for making people laugh. So I left my home to pull pranks and make believe that someone noticed what I was doing. That was the only time I didn't care if people were near me, as long as I made them laugh. My pranks were all in good fun and I was doing really well. I made people happy. Then I ran into a certain salesman. An ancient treasure called my name and nothing was ever quite the same.
I had panicked when the mask had first latched itself to my face. I thought it would be a normal mask, something that I could take on and off. I ended up breaking it in half when I tried to pull it off, and it had hurt to rip off even that one part of the mask. The second half had long since been lost and unable to be found. I didn't want anyone to see my face now that I had a mask stuck to me, but the next time I had been staring mournfully at my face in a mirror I had realized something...
My reflection wasn't my own.
Instead, it was a handsome calico cat with markings that matched the mask. Confused, I had reached down to touch it- and then I had gone through the mirror.
When I had turned, my reflection showed the human me. When I looked down, I saw the calico cat. I realized that I could switch forms at will as long as I had a reflective surface, I could Shift. As a cat, I noticed that not many people could see me; those who could ignored me. As a human, I was noticed and people sort of stared. A lot.
So I had wandered for I didn't know how long and I turned up here, in this place called Amity Park, Illinois. The human girl seemed so familiar that I had taken to following her invisibly, finding out where she went and such. She unknowingly led me to the brick building and I had taken up residence in a pine tree. Every day, I watched her. She interested me greatly, and I- I didn't know why. I wanted to know.
I should have explained that I wasn't alive.
No, I was just a ghost. I didn't watch her because I was a stalker. I didn't watch her because I loved her- or perhaps I did love her on some sort of different level. I watched her the way a pet cat might watch its owner. I watched her the way an older brother might. I had some sort of affection for her, I knew that. But I didn't love her the way a man might love a woman.
I was a ghost; ghosts weren't allowed to love humans that way, nor did many of them want to. I certainly didn't. She simply interested me, so I wanted to know more. There was something about her that just looked so-
familiar.
***line break***
It started to rain.
I didn't really like the rain. Not because it got me wet (though that was part of the reason), but because the girl didn't come outside when it rained. Tail flicking, I slowly climbed out of my tree (wincing as I did so, because there were a lot of splinters in my hands now) and wandered over to the brick building. Phasing through the walls, I began to wander.
It was nice and dry in there, warm too. There were a bunch of mini-rooms that branched off of the long room, and I entered one that had kids in it. I kept invisible, of course. No need to scare anyone yet. There was an overweight bald man writing something on a board, but I found that incredibly boring. So I decided to have a little fun.
Now it was time to scare people.
I grabbed a piece of chalk (it was chalk, right? Oh, how I hated the human names for things) and began to scribble all over the board. The man stopped, looking appalled, and I took that as my cue to keep writing. I grabbed a get-rid-of-the-lines thing and got rid of it all. Then, in nice big letters, I wrote out two simple sentences that even humans should have understood.
Hello, young human children. My name is Illusion and I am "The Boy With The Mask", as you all seem to have named me.