Wakey wakey

There is no time. No time at all. We have nowhere to go, no place to be, and nothing holding us down whatsoever. We can do whatever we want, wherever in the world, no matter what the cost. And yet, even without all of these rules, restrictions, with nothing holding us back at all…

My brother still wakes me up early.

I hear the creek of the door as his little feet patter across the wood. Everything inside me aches as I wait those agonizingly long few seconds for it to happen. There is a creek in my bed, and I move when the bed is shifted downwards. His little grunts torture me as he tried to get on the bed. Though I know it's inevitable, I squeeze my eyes shut and pray, please no. please no. It's too early. How can he wake up this early? Let him change his mind. I want to sleep. Please, please, please…

My prayers went answered.

"Wakey Wakey big brofer," my younger brother yelled at me. I groaned and flopped over on my front. I could FEEL him glaring at me. The next thing I knew the bed was jolting up and down as he jumped on the bed. "Wake-down. Wake-down!"

"The expression is 'wake-up' doofus," my words were mumbled out of my pillow. He stopped for a second to process that, then continued on his jumping spree. Groaning I pulled one of my pillows off the bed and threw it at him. My bed got lighter, and I heard him land on the ground with a thump.

"OW!"

I snorted a bit, surprised that he had said it out loud instead of with telepathy like he normally did. "Oh you'll be fine you big baby," I told him, turning my head just enough so that I could see his pouting little face. With a groan I regretfully admitted, "Whatever. I'm already awake, and you suck." Instead of acknowledging my pain, he just smiled and made a halo appear above him. "Yeah yeah yeah." Flipping onto my back I covered my face with my hand. "Anyway, yawn, what name do you want today?" my brother paused, as he thought about it.

"Mm…Hakuyuu." Huh, he actually said it right. Couldn't get brother right, but could say Hakuyuu right?

"That's a stupid name," I told him just to tease him. "It sounds too much like Hakuryuu. Pick a different one!"

The annoyance in his voice was easy to hear. "No!" He yelled at me, annoyed.

"You really want to go around all day with me calling you by that stupid, silly name? All day? Well if you want me to HAKUyuu," I said, exaggerating the first part for exaggerated effect. Just to clear my alibi, I don't hate the name. My uncle would probably kill me if he heard what I was saying. But what do you expect? He's my little brother. It's my job-no, my DUTY to try and poke holes into everything he says.

His face started turning red in embarrassment. "Stop it!" huffing, he started talking to me telepathically, since he couldn't say the words he wanted to say on his own. Stop making fun of our uncles name brother, you know very well that it's very rude to say that about a dead person! How is it that in his head he somehow sounds older than me?

"Whatever you say," I sang, flipping back onto my front "Now leave me alone. Big boys have got to sleep you know," I teased him, waving my hand in the air and stuffing my face in my other pillow. There was the sound of him shuffling around a bit, then silence. For a fleeting moment of innocence, I thought he had left.

Than my bed disappeared.

"Oof!" I forced out as I hit the cold hard floor. My head ached, with the only sound reaching it was my groaning, and my brother laughing. With a growl I hoisted myself up with my elbows, and his laughing stopped immediately. He gulped, and tried giving me an innocent smile. Like that would work on me! "You're dead meat kid!" I yelled at him, scrambling to my feet. He yelped, and spun around so he could sprint out of the room. The soon to be dead boy ran through the small hallway and slid down the railing on the stairs with me following close behind. I could hear his little panting as I pounded down the stairs to catch him. Glancing back nervously he shrieked when he saw me so close to him. When I was about to grab him he pushed the rukh and floated in the air, just above my reach. Because of my miss, I slipped on the stairs and fell into our table, making it break in the middle and the chairs to go flying everywhere. I groaned for what had to be the millionth time that morning.

Having a little brother is okay. Having a MAGICIAN for a little brother on the other hand, sucks.

…

I'm not sure how long it took for us to actually get breakfast. See, we don't really need to eat too much where we are, so my brother thought it was pointless to try. But I said that I wanted bacon because it tasted good. He thinks I'm going to get fat if I keep eating for no reason. Was he kidding? He had to have been kidding. Have you seen me? I'm super strong! I work out! There is no way I am going to be getting fat any time soon. That kids just jealous because he's 8 years old and hasn't gotten rid of his pudgy cheeks yet. I on the other hand, look young and handsome at the same time!

You're not young. You're old.

"OLD? I am not old you jerk!"

Are too. Oldy oldy old!

Grabbing a plate I threw it in my brother's direction, not surprised when he was able to jump out of the way in time. I keep forgetting that my brother can read my mind. Come on bro, is nothing sacred? He just shrugged to my unspoken question and sat up so that he could take another bite out of his scrambled pancakes. That's what I call them. Even though we've been living on our own for our entire lives, neither of us can really cook. At all. I'm the worst cook I'll admit. I get it from mom.

It didn't take long for my brother to give up and make a loaf of bread with his magic. After he had finished gobbling it up he looked up at me with a big smile. Where do you want to go today? I took a swig of goat's milk (My brother loves the stuff. Crazy, right?) As I wondered what to do. The option I wanted to pick was go visit some friends from other universes. That was always fun to do, especially if we went to some of the crazier universes. Brother likes the one that is devoid of most gravity. That sounded the most fun, as long as we weren't being hunted down where we went. Those guys in weird black robes and veils seemed to be able to find us everywhere.

But I knew that we had to do something at least a little bit practical during the day. "Let's go search for mom and dad again." My brother nodded, though I could tell he didn't like that idea. My brother wouldn't complain though. He knew that it was important, just as much as I did.

Leaning back in my chair, I put my feet on the new table that would probably be destroyed soon and glanced out the window. We didn't have what you would call a…traditional view. No forests or beaches or neighbors houses. Pff, you think any neighbors would stick around with how loud we are? Naw, what we got outside our window is a bit more…unique.

We've got a bunch of different universes outside our window.

Okay, okay, that probably doesn't make any sense. But that's what happens to kids like us. (Backstory time!) We were supposed to be born in a regular world, with regular parents and in a regular city. But see, we didn't get that. Our world was crushed and then put back together in a different spot. Leaving us behind. I'm not sure how old I was when I popped into existence. My younger brother is better with ages. I couldn't have been a newborn, because I remember crawling around. I'm not sure how it happened. I had the knowledge of how to eat, process things, stuff a newborn wouldn't know. Too bad I didn't know how to deal with all the alternate universes around me. I kept on falling into different ones randomly. Luckily it turned out to be a blessing for me. A few of the universes I went to helped me figure out how to live on my own, and when my brother came around, how to take care of him. Other than that though, it's been the two of us.

It wasn't until I'd gotten a djinn in a different universe that we were able to learn about the rules of traveling through the universes. My djinn is a time-space one. Lucky is, part of its abilities is to let us control which universe we go to instead of accidentally falling into them like we used to. It's a bit confusing still since it can also travel through different times of these universes too. Once we went to a little city with two brothers who were always trying to destroy monsters. They already knew us since in our future we'd visited them in their past. Very confusing, huh? Even though I'm really strong, cool, powerful, a vision of awesomeness, there are some things that I still can't do with my djinn.

One, we can't have too big an impact on the universe that we visit. If we do, we'll get stuck there. And in the state that we are in, so far we've only been able to stay in one universe without getting sick has been a few months. Two, we can't stay in a universe too long. We'll get sick, and when I say sick, I mean we'll start to fade until there is nothing left of us. Hasn't gotten to that point yet, but we'd rather not risk it. Three, we can't go to a universe that is too close to the one we were supposed to be in without being invited. That's because I'm not strong enough to get in, but also because of what some weird guy with long blue hair told me one time.

A day that I'll never forget though is the day we met some guy named Solomon. What mostly freaked us out was how much he knew about us. He knew that we'd popped in-between universes randomly. Somehow he knew my brother was a strong magician at a young age and I'd gotten my first djinn not long after I'd turned 10. (Again, ages are confusing for Me. was I 11? 12?) He also knew why the guys in black robes always hunt us down. (Apparently kids born in-between universes are high on al-thamens evil-market-of-darkness) He even knew who our parents were. Until that, we hadn't even thought that we HAD parents. We'd never had much of an explanation to us, but parents just didn't make sense. Wouldn't we have had to have met them? Solomon gave us the whole run-down though.

We had to find our parents. There were tons of versions of them everywhere, but only one world was the one that we were supposed to be in. If we didn't find them and help them fix a few things that had been messed up when their universe was destroyed, we'd be in trouble. As in, dead. We don't know when that's going to happen. Heck, we could die one day when we're eating breakfast out of the blew. So that's why we keep looking for our parents. WE don't want to die. Sure I'm not powerful enough to enter the world even if we did find it, but we still need to find it eventually.

Meeting our parents would be pretty cool to. We've seen different versions of them, but I can't help but wonder what THEY are like. If I ever met dad, what would he say? What would either of them say if they knew they had kids looking for them? They'd probably freak out. That's what I'd do. But would there be a chance they'd still accept us? Do you think, maybe, they'd be proud of us? Happy to finally meet us? Who knows? My brother talks about his hopes for meeting them. He's got big dreams of running up to them and giving them both a big hug. I'm a bit more realistic. We've got to face the facts that maybe they won't want us around. But it would be an adventure to find out.

Anyway, back to the view. If you were to give it a quick glance, it looks pure white. If you look closely though, you can see different images going past. Different scenes from different universes. They are too fast to really focus on any. With so many going by at once, the place almost looked like a very light rainbow setting. With my djinn I can cut through them and open an entrance to them. Sometimes I pick wrong ones, but over the years we've come to memorize which is which. Nothing ever really happens on them unless we're jumping through them.

That day was different though.

You can probably imagine my surprise when I was just carelessly glancing at the worlds, minding my own business, two people jumped out of them.

My eyes must have been the size of dinner plates. My brother choked on his burned bacon in shock. Two figures fell onto the ground, or the white surface we called the ground. By instinct, I grabbed my sword and my brother pulled out his two magic wands, lightning sparking at the ends. My brother can do lots of types of magic, but lightning is his specialty. Behind me my brother prepared to make our house disappear again. He knew the drill, take down one house, get to safety, then build another one when it is safe. Our first thought was that it had to be people from al-thamen. They were the only ones who'd ever made it there, and they were always hunting us down.

Only problem with that, neither of them were wearing black. One had blond hair, wearing a white, brown and black outfit with some kind of shoe thing on one side I just didn't understand. He had a sword at his side which put my guard up immediately. If I had to guess I'd say he was taller than me, but since I was tall for my age that could have meant he was a lot older. Maybe an adult? And why did part of his hair look like a horn? The other one had blue hair tied into a freakishly long brain and sticking out of the white turban on his head. He wore just a vest and some really baggy white pants. No shoes. Even my brother and I got shoes, and we just grab cloths from whatever universe we happened to be in last. This one was about my brother's height, but considering us being taller than average, that didn't mean much. They both looked fine, and very quickly, they started to pull themselves to their feet.

What should we do brother, my little brother asked in my head. It wasn't a question that should have had to be answered.

"We fight, obviously."

Hi everyone! Hopefully that makes their story a bit easier to understand. I'll try and post every week like last time, but it might not go that smoothly, especially with summer and school starting soon, ext. anyway, thank you all for reading!