Lilo Pelekai had a rough day. The girls, Myrtle Edmunds, Elena, Teresa and Yuki had been rude and they had been rude to her for as long as she could remember. After explaining to her hula teacher, Moses Puloki, for the fourth time that Tuesday was sandwich day for Pudge the fish, she felt like history was repeating itself when she was met with the atrocious, galling remark, "You're crazy" from Myrtle herself.
It wasn't her fault that she had to be rambunctious and inquisitive. Perhaps she was born with it. Perhaps it had something to do with her parents' ultimate fate while coming home from an anniversary dinner, using her silliness as a smokescreen for her true emotions. After heavy rains caused her mother and father's Porsche to fly violently off the Kaumualii Highway, resulting in a serious impact to the ground below the lookout point of the Waimea Canyon, Lilo had randomly selected Pudge, being a rare species of fish, to be directly responsible for controlling the weather.
And yet, despite her previous tirades with Myrtle and her posse, Lilo was even more furious than before. She came back to her house by the beach with blue walls and a peach roof and slammed the door open. It created a disruption throughout the household for a second before the sound of the slam died away and she quietly closed the door behind her.
"Myrtle that stupidhead! She ought to be canned and flogged!"
Lilo's twenty-year-old sister Nani, who could easily pass for a young woman in her mid-thirties and perhaps Lilo's own mother, had to counter-attack the younger girl's offensive remarks with a calm lecture.
"Myrtle will soon get what is coming to her, but I suggest, Lilo, that until that time comes, you ought to keep a civil tongue in front of her. You should be thankful that we are not in Ancient Hawaii anymore. They would have handled things more barbarically."
"What if they didn't do things barbarically back then?"
Nani was stymied before she found the answer. The contradictions of historical accounts by others were making less sense to her.
"Well I know it did seem like a perfect time for myths and legends to exist."
Lilo tilted her head to the right by five degrees, flummoxed.
"Then how come they don't exist now?"
To Nani, the stuff of myths and legends were both historical and fictitious from a certain point of view. Her perspective was that of a historical one, the magic having died out after the Industrial Revolution came into play.
"Well, I guess you could say that when Hawaii was first industrialized, we didn't need demigods anymore."
The word "demigod" struck Lilo like lightning. She rushed over to her room in the top dome of the house via a futuristic elevator—made from alien technology.
About a year ago, she befriended one—an ocean blue furred experiment mistaken to be a dog of a rare species numbered 626. She named the creature Stitch and it wasn't long before the unruly alien became a civil member of the planet Earth, taming his monstrous past and accepting the offer of a peaceful future under the permission of the Grand Councilwoman, leader of the Galactic Federation and an honorary member of the Galactic Senate.
Also in Lilo's home were two other boarders, aliens to be exact—Jumba Jookiba, Stitch's creator and his assistant, the one eyed "Wendy" Pleakley. All three beings from separate planets became the additional members of Lilo's "ohana", the Hawaiian word for family. Rather than being biologically related, Hawaiians had a different sense to the true meaning of ohana…nobody gets left behind or forgotten.
When Lilo came up to her room, comprising of an aquamarine-green bed that matched her night gown, eight Polaroid snapshots festooning the wide window, a hula dancer lamp on the bedside table, a bed for Stitch attached two feet above hers and a 1957 RCA record player for her Elvis LP's, she walked right over to the bookshelf and found the exact book on the bottom shelf in the middle. It was covered in a rich layer of earth brown and on the top of the front cover were five gold letters written in cursive.
"Moana".
Jumba, Pleakley and Stitch were already there, pre-occupied by their own personal interests. Jumba, the heavy-set scientist of a four-eyed Kweltikwan was looking through his own laptop for materials needed for future experiments, thinking that Lilo's room had more than what his own room could hold with the menagerie of ingredients, weapons, tools and machinery used to manufacture and fertilize his experiments and Stitch's "cousins". Pleakley, aiming to be a fashion designer, was looking through the book Aloha Attire: Hawaiian Dress in the Twentieth Century by Linda Arthur, which Lilo often used for ideas and possible modifications for her hula costume. Stitch was simply rolling about on his bed like the dog he pretended to be. He was bored from being cooped up in the house, and he wanted to spend more time with Lilo, even though she wanted be by herself in case Stich tried to attack some innocent civilian for random purposes.
"Lilo, the next time you ever think about doing your homework," Pleakley observed in a friendly tone. "You should share it with us, it might improve my knowledge of Earth from before I even came here."
"And I suppose you wonder why I am doing so?" asked Lilo as she completely pulled the book out of the shelf with obvious tones in her voice. "It's always nice to get help from others."
"It's most intriguing when one shares his knowledge with a former evil genius," Jumbaa added with pride. "Like a story about what Earth was like before aliens came here."
"Story?!" Stitch exclaimed, snapping out of his boredom.
"It's a good one," Lilo announced. "Sora told me a story about Ancient Hawaii once, and I thought I'd share it with you for the first time."
"I hope it's not disturbing," Pleakley sucked in a large lump of air into his lungs, trying to regain composure. "After taking a full read of that horror-tale Lord of the Flies, I couldn't sleep for weeks."
"Civilized schoolboys descending into savagery are a lot closer to the truth than you think, Pleakley," Lilo assured with a kind smile. "But this one's more…safe and adventurous."
"By safe and adventurous, what do you mean?" the one eyed extraterrestrial asked out of suspicion.
"Like a fairy tale, silly!" Lilo wanted to laugh, but she had to keep herself under control as the narrator of the story not conceived nor written by her, but a legend known to the few but faithful historians of Hawaii and her islands. It was no wonder why some who preferred to be traditionalists were familiar with the story of a Polynesian princess and her collaborator, a demi-god with the strength of a volcano.
"Now if you'll allow me to read peacefully, I shall begin."
Stitch nodded at Lilo's words. Jumbaa, expecting a proper opening, asked out of the blue.
"What is that phrase you Earth people use to start a story?"
Lilo opened up the book to the very first chapter and took control of the story word for word with a powerful voice that compared with the island deities.
"Well…Once upon a time…."