A/N #1: I was compiling a timeline of Shattered Salvation stuff and discovered I'd never published this! For shame. Here it is. More fun from our favorite inviso-boy.

Dear Diary –

Today I'm going to run away from home and join the circus. For real. Well, sort of. I'm going to move out of my Dad's apartment. And this isn't just because I found that box under his bed. I mean, what does a person need with that many pairs of handcuffs? At first I'll admit I was just confused, until I found the box of condoms. After that, what I wanted to find was brain bleach. Oh. My. God. And he didn't even have any magazines or anything that might be interesting. Just… this other stuff. Where is that guy who erases memories when you need him?

So. Now that I know things about my dad I never wanted to know, I'm going to leave. I have a mission though. I've spent the last week going through his files here, reading up on things and figuring out what's going on. It was the sinkhole that really did it. Not the one in New York, or that one in Guatemala, or the one in Florida (really, what is it with things? Just when you thought it was safe to stay on the land! Sheesh.) It was the one in California that swallowed that whole town. The FBI is all over that.

More about the FBI later. That totally didn't go like I wanted it too.

About the circus. That's such an incredibly overused cliché, so overused that even I know about it and I'm not exactly all that well travelled (though I have wasted quite a few evenings reading TV Tropes). I challenge you to find a single reference to circus folk or carnivals in the popular media that doesn't have them being this insular family of freaks, almost always with "real" special powers. So why am I not surprised to find that the biggest concentration of superpowered people are all in the same circus, traveling around with each other? It's like I'm living in some horribly unoriginal television drama. Maybe if I'm lucky, people will be inspired by my life and write fanfiction about me. Because, as we all know, invisible makes it hot. On the other hand… it'd probably be slash and I'd be doing it with the major villain. So… never mind.

There was this one time I tried to get a job at a traveling carnival and it was nothing like the ones on TV. For one thing, they weren't all this bunch of group-hugging, xenophobic hippies. They were just normal guys. For another, the carnival wasn't their life or their home. Sure, they had places to sleep on the road, but they had homes, like, somewhere else, in real places. With kids that I presume went to school and wives that did whatever it is wives are supposed to do that's not sexist yet still allows them to be home to take care of the kids. I'm not sure how that's managed, but luckily I'll never have to worry about that.

I was trying to get a job there, thinking that a weekend at the carnival wouldn't be all that bad and I'd been walking past the lot anyway on my way back from taekwondo. But no jobs. And not because they were afraid of outsiders, but because of how it worked. You see, they don't even own the rides. Some big company does. These other guys, who are part of a different company, go rent the rides and carry them to different places and run them there to see if they can get enough money to cover the rent, the gas and be worth their while. It's pretty much one driver to the ride and then that driver stands around and operates the ride until it's time to go, so there's no reason why they'd ever hire some teen like me who was just walking by. But they gave me some free popcorn because I hung out and talked with them, so that was nice. I guess my power hadn't kicked in yet.

I imagine that if it had, that would have been really bad for business. I wonder what would happen if I went and stood in front of the door to the bathroom in a public place? Would people push me out of the way, or would they be unable to remember where the bathroom was? I've already noticed that if I take unattended stuff, no one seems to care.

Speaking of which, I talked to that Audrey woman who Dad's files said was the current expert in the FBI on specials. She didn't believe me that I had a power. She even made fun of me about it, calling me an angsty teen and a couple other things. She was really a [censored]. So after she had me escorted out of the building, I just followed someone else back in and went back to her office. When she went to the bathroom or wherever, I copied all her files onto Dad's portable hard drive.

It's going to take me a while to read through all those, but hey, what else is an angsty teen going to do? (Besides try to avoid thinking about what my dad keeps in a box under the bed.)

A/N #2: If you didn't already get the joke, Google "invisible makes it hot."