(The Loud House! and/or other related titles are rightfully owned by Nickelodeon)

(The following is a work of fanfiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer's imagination or are used fictitiously. All statements, activities, stunts, descriptions, information, and material of any kind contained herein are included for entertainment purposes only and should not be relied on for accuracy. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.)

Chapter One:

The Traveling Man

To say that Conner Pingrey was having a really bad day was quite an understatement. Of course, anybody could have a bad day or a good day here and there. But for the twelve-year-old Conner, yesterday was by far one of the worst days that he has ever had in his young life. The simplest of words just could not describe his level of frustration at what happened that had landed him in serious hot water in the first place. His hands turned into balls of fists, his fingers coiling tightly around the straps of his gray-blue backpack like tiny snakes squeezing the life out of their prey.

He huffed through his nose, the events of the earlier day before playing out in his brain like a film reel. It was a very quiet ride home from Giovanni Chang's Italian Chinese Bistro. Conner and his family; his mother, Leslie, and two sisters, Carol and Cassy, silently sat in the white 2014 Sedan as they drove down the road to their house, each one of them covered in Italian meat sauce and lo main noodles.

After about two minutes of intense silence, Leslie Pingrey was the first to open her mouth to speak, and she was not in the least bit happy with her son - for very obvious reasons.

"Conner, I cannot believe you!" Conner remembered his mother saying quite sternly. "Just what on Heaven's green earth were you even thinking, young man?!"

"Mom, it's not that big of a deal!" Conner argued as he wiped away some of the meat sauce from his stained orange shirt with some Kleenex tissues.

His older sister, eighteen-year-old Carol, who sat in the front passenger seat, scoffed at his words after wiping off much of the sauce away from her purple button-up with a damp paper towel. She turned her head around and shot her little brother a very unamused look.

"Not that big of a deal?" she spoke irritably to him. "That little stunt of yours got us kicked out from one of the three best fusion restaurants here in Royal Woods! Ranking at number one just above Aloha Comrade! Do you have any idea, and I mean any idea at all, of the chaos you started back there?!" Conner only rolled his eyes.

"Oh, give me a break, Carol!" he shot back. "It was just a little prank! Nothing more!"

"Well, it was your 'little prank' that caused everybody inside to break out into a food fighting frenzy!" Conner's eleven-year-old sister, Cassandra, or just Cassy for short, spoke monotonously as she sat on the opposite side of the back passenger seat next to her brother, cleaning off some of the sauce from her clothes. Conner could not help but snicker a little bit upon hearing those last three words.

"Food fighting frenzy," he muttered, trying to suppress a giggle. Try saying that five times fast.

"We're being serious, Conner!" Mrs. Pingrey snapped, eyeing him sternly through the rear-view mirror. "Now because of you, we're no longer allowed to even go near the bistro within twenty feet! And for all we know, we could be banned for the rest of our lives!"

Right after that moment, Leslie let out a tired yet frustrated sigh. When they had finally drove up and then stopped right in front of a red light, she tenderly massaged the sides of her head to try and relieve herself of the headache that had begun to grow. Conner crossed his arms and frowned, the sauce-stained Kleenex still in his right hand.

"Pfft, whatever," he muttered. "The food over there was terrible anyway." Carol stole an offended glance at his direction from the front seat.

"They are most certainly NOT, little brother!" she chastised. "You only say that because you don't have an appreciation for the crafts of fine dining!" Conner shot her an almost surprised, yet also offended, look.

"Are you kidding me?" he retorted, resting his hands on his hips. "Their pizza gyoza tasted like smelly feet! Oh, and for the record, big sister, I do understand what good food is! I suggested that we should go to Jean Juan's French Mex, remember? I wanted to try their new Tartiflette-Chimichanga special, but you guys said no!"

Carol only rolled her eyes and shook her head as she continued to wipe away any Italian meat sauce left that had stained her checkerboard skirt, just about completely done with her brother's nonsense.

"Oh please," Cassy piped up again suddenly, a small pinch of irritation in her near emotionless voice. "Since when did you, of all people, begin to understand what good food is? The only kind of 'good food' you understand is a Big Belcher special with a side of jalapeño chili fries over at the Burpin' Burger."

Conner glared at his little sister, and then a sneering expression morphed on his face. Like anybody asked you! He sighed petulantly under his breath. Finally, the traffic light turned green, signaling Mrs. Pingrey to press down on the gas pedal, and off they went down the road. After nearly a brief minute of silence, Conner opened his mouth again, much to the family's further annoyance.

"You know, for the record," Conner went on, "none of this mess would have happened if we had only just gone over to Jean Juan's in the first place!"

"Uh, no!" Carol snapped suddenly, stealing an angry glance towards her little brother again. "All of us wouldn't be in this mess to begin with if you had only just behaved yourself like Mom had told you to! And not to mention, little brother, that even if we did go to Jean Juan's, you would more than likely get us banned from there too!"

"No, I wouldn't!" he countered back. Carol folded her arms across her chest as she pressed her back up against the front passenger seat. Cassy did the same as she rested her own back against the back passenger seat next to her brother.

"Knowing you, I find that very hard to believe," Conner's glare hardened and his crossed arms tightened around his small chest.

"That's because you guys won't give me a chance," he grunted. Carol could not believe what she had just heard. She audibly scoffed at his words.

"Give you a chance?!" she just about exclaimed. "Conner, you've had plenty of chances more times than you care to count the fingers on your hands! And yet somehow, you always manage to screw them all up! Every! Single! Time!"

Once again, Conner flashed his older sister an offended facial expression. His hands turned into balls of fists. His face flustered into a shade of red as the sauce that stained his clothes, his anger beginning to take hold of him.

"Oh, so that's it, huh?!" Conner asked, raising his voice a little to almost a shout. "Is that what you think I am?! I'm just a major screw up when compared to you?! The oh-so perfect yet overachieving, social media-obsessed Carol Pingrey?!"

"Conner, don't you dare take that tone of voice with me!" Carol warned, without even facing him this time. "I did not say you were a screw up! And I did not say that I was perfect!"

"Well, you sure act like it sometimes!" Conner countered.

"Oh yeah? Well, you act like a little brat sometimes!" Carol countered back.

It was at this very point that Conner and Carol had now continued to go back and forth in their arguing, eventually to the point where they were so loud in volume, all the other cars around could almost hear them, after they had reached another red light. Harsh words were exchanged, insults were thrown.

Fortunately for Cassy, she had her headphones on, and she turned the music up so that she could drown out the arguing. Leslie, however, was not so fortunately privileged.

Her hands tightened around the handle of the steering wheel so hard to the point her hands began to ache. Her left eye twitched in a mixed combination of annoyance and anger. Her blood pressure now rose to insurmountable levels, Conner and Carol's fighting and arguing voices ringing loudly in her ears to the point where she couldn't hear herself think.

With her two kids still arguing for what felt like an eternity, her heartrate increased, and her stress level was rising to the top. If she didn't say anything now, it was going to get worse.

It was time to put a stop to this monkey business, NOW.

"THAT'S ENOUGH!" she bellowed, her voice surging all through the car, startling the two Pingrey siblings to immediately become silent. She even managed to grab Cassy's attention as well, despite the fact that she was wearing earphones.

"That is it, Conner!" she shouted furiously, staring him down through the rearview mirror. "I have had it up to here with your rotten attitude! All day today, you have been nothing but a little pill, and right now I am sick and tired of it! You refuse to behave yourself! You mouth off at your sister! You are out of control, buster!"

"Mom! Mom!" Carol spoke, placing a calming on her shoulder. "Please, calm down, or you're gonna have a heart attack!" Taking in her daughter's words, Leslie took in a slow and deep breath, and then she breathed out through her mouth, her mind now coming back together and clearing up again. But her anger towards her son had not once faltered. With this, she gazed back at Conner through the rearview.

"I am very disappointed in you, young man," she said, her voice even though it was now calm, it still carried that same essence of severity from earlier. "So, if you are going to continue acting like a bratty kid, then just like before, you will be treated like one."

Oh boy. Conner knew exactly where this whole thing was going, and he had been grounded many times before in the past to know what was about to happen next. And so, it was right here that Leslie Pingrey had laid it all down to the twelve-year-old boy that when they get home, he would be grounded for two and a half weeks with no television as well as no video games, and his laptop would only be used to help with his homework and nothing else.

She went on to say that he would also no longer be using his gaming apps as well as other forms of social media on his cell phone, and that it were to be used for emergency purposes only. And if she ever found out that he wasn't doing what he was told, his grounding would only get worse. And of course, there was always the usual, "Just wait until your father gets home."

Conner frowned and then he crossed his arms again and lifted his right leg over his left.

"Yes, ma'am," he grumbled.

"I'm not done yet," Leslie added. Conner lifted his head up and eyed his mother confusingly. There was more? What more could she possibly include? Conner wished that he had never wondered about that as his mother seemed to have read his mind and told him exactly what he feared would happen.

"So, from now on, during those two and a half weeks," she said authoritatively, "you are now going to be walking home from school every day." Conner's jaw slackened, and his eyes widened. He could not believe what he had just heard.

"What?!" he exclaimed.

"Either Carol or I will help drive you and Cassy there every morning," she further explained. "But right after that, you are on your own. And it starts tomorrow." She had to be joking. She just had to be. She couldn't do this. There was just no way that she could.

"M-Mom, that's not fair!" Conner argued. "Our house is like several football fields away from school!"

"It's only two and a half miles," the mother stated. "You will live."

"But that's not even fair!" Conner repeated. The Pingrey matriarch shrugged her shoulders indifferently.

"Well, tough peanuts," she answered. "You got yourself in this mess, and you're going to see it through until you actually learn something."

"No, Mom! Please!" Conner begged, almost desperately. "Please, don't! I'll do anything! Anything at all! Look, I-I'm sorry, okay? You're right! I never should have done that prank in the first place! I swear, I won't do it again! I will do better this time! I-I promise!"

"Well, why didn't you 'do better' back in Giovanni's? Huh?" she mentioned. "Why didn't you behave yourself then? Like I told you to begin with?"

Sad to say, Conner could not find the answer that he was looking for to give to his mother, and all he could do was stammer and barely even get one word out of his mouth. All he managed to say was a weak, "I..." Leslie's tired eyes turned into slits, and then she sighed through her nose.

"That's what I thought,"

"But... But, I..." Conner stammered further. Mrs. Pingrey instantly raised her left hand up to make him be quiet.

"I don't want to hear any more about it, Conner," she ordered. "Not a single word. This is your punishment, and it is final. Starting tomorrow, you are going to be walking home from school for the next two and a half weeks. Now, have I made myself clear?"

The twelve-year-old Conner gritted his teeth angrily until his lower jaw ached. Now utterly humiliated in front of his sisters, again, he growled under his breath, his face now flustered red with anger. Screaming internally, he pulled down his white beanie over his entire head and he folded his arms tightly across his small chest.

"Crystal," he grumblingly answered, his voice slightly muffled from his white beanie.

And now here he was, on the first day of his grounding the following morning, walking his way home from Royal Woods Middle School, backpack hanging behind his shoulders and a sour mood permeating from his being. He checked his digital wristwatch and saw that the time was now 3:20. Twenty minutes. It had been twenty minutes since after he left school.

And he only had less than two and a half miles to go. Having to remember all of that made him furious.

It was not fair. Not fair at all. Conner could have been fine with a simple grounding, to be alone in his bedroom, to be alone with his own thoughts. And maybe play a little bit of calming music on his MP3 player. That probably would not have been so bad if his mom hadn't also taken said MP3 player, as well as his earbuds, under the suspicion that he would try and ignore her.

By this point in time, he was practically use to being grounded this much. But did his mother have to go the extra mile? To take it this far? Or at least he believed it to be so. Conner grumbled under his breath as his mother's words played out repeatedly in his head. It wasn't fair. It just wasn't.

If only they had just gone over to that stupid French Mex instead of that stupid Bistro, he wouldn't have acted the way he did. He wouldn't have pulled that prank and get them kicked out – and quite possibly everybody else inside as well – and drive back home covered in pasta sauce. Conner was just so mad that his face practically flushed red like a cooked lobster.

But then, just when it seemed like he was about to blow a gasket, a sudden thought came to him from out of nowhere. A thought which had quickly subsided his anger and replaced it with a feeling of... What was it he was feeling now all of a sudden? And just where had it come from? And why was it making him feel... sad? It was beginning to become quite familiar now, but he couldn't precisely remember the word that went along with it.

That feeling only began to grow when his mind had wondered to what Carol had said to him that day.

All of us wouldn't be in this mess to begin with if you had only just behaved yourself like Mom had told you to! Remembering that made him frown a little bit and he hung his head low only slightly.

"Maybe she was right," he muttered to nobody but himself. "M-Maybe... If only..." His shoulders slumped in defeat. "Maybe if I had only just behaved like mom said..., then I probably wouldn't be where I am now."

Guilt... That was the word he was looking for. Guilt. But it was extremely weird though. Sure, there were a few times where he did regret his actions in the past, but this was on a whole different kind of level. Never in his twelve-year-old life did he feel this increasing level of shame before. Just what on earth was going on here? Just what was happening to him? His hands slid deep and rested inside his pants pockets.

That same sad feeling continued to grow and became worse when more thoughts began to rattle through his brain. He suddenly growled in anger, this time to himself. He felt like he was possibly the biggest idiot in existence. Just what in the world was he thinking? If he hadn't been so stubborn about what he wanted, if he had just swallowed his pride for just that day for his family's sake, this entire disaster could have been easily avoided.

But no, my pride and my stubbornness wouldn't allow it, so I decided to mess it up for all of them, he mentally said. He then sighed under his breath, and soon his bottom lip began to quiver a little as another thought had come to him.

Maybe I am a screw up after all. Maybe all I ever do was make it hard for everybody else... And... Maybe it would be better for them if I was completely out of their lives for good. But before he could dwell any further in his growing shame, he was immediately pulled away from his thoughts when he heard a sudden noise that was close by. The hairs on his back tingled as another feeling came over him... Dread.

He looked over his shoulder, and to his moment of relief, nobody was there. But then, that sense of fear came back as quickly as it had left him. Conner just could not shake off that terrible feeling that someone was close by, watching his every move, with intentions that which he hoped were not the case.

He looked around and found himself in a somewhat familiar part of town, a part of Royal Woods that he vaguely recalled driving past with his mom in her Sedan a couple of times. It was so strange. Royal Wood was one of the safest of neighborhoods in all of Michigan, at least ones that Conner knew of, and yet why could he not shake off that nagging feeling that he was being watched?

Or worse... followed. It was not possible. Muggings and criminal activities were always very low here in this town.

He eyed around the streets and sidewalks. There was scarcely anybody around, but that growing sense of fear just would not go away. His heart pounded loudly against his small chest. Sweat began to form around his face and his breath started to become short. He felt so terrified that he was just a moment or two away from crying.

He turned back around to face the sidewalk in front of him and he gulped down a nervous lump in his throat. His eyes shifted around, and he continued his trek towards home, passing by some of the empty stores and low apartment buildings that bordered around him.

"Easy there, Conner," he assured himself unnervingly, wiping off some of the sweat from his forehead. "Just try and take it easy, man. It's only your imagination, that's all. It's all in your head. Hehehe, I mean, you live in Royal Woods, one of the safest neighborhoods in America. Crime rarely ever happens around here. So, what are you afraid of?"

That little self-assurance did next to nothing to lessen the wave of fear that still grew within him. In about a minute, his walking had eventually become a little bit faster, anxiety further building up inside to take a hold of him. His fast walk then turned into a timely paced jog, when his senses told him that the danger was coming closer, and then in seconds, he sprinted into a full-on run, fleeing for his dear life.

Everything around him had become nothing but a fast blur in his eyes, zooming past down the street until he was just about now close to a full mile. Thinking quickly, he made a sharp turn towards the right, only to come across the mouth of an alleyway that stood as plainly in view for the eye to see.

But Conner did not care what it was. All that mattered was being able to get away as possible from whomever it was that was following him.

He darted straight inside the alley, and he quickly hid himself on the left opposite side of a large green dumpster which rested on the right-side wall of the alley. Conner pressed his back firmly against the side of the dumpster, his fear-stricken heart still pounding heavily in his chest, his entire body quivering with dread. He swallowed another lump in his throat as beads of sweat ran down his face.

He unstrapped his backpack, unzipped it, and then rummaged through inside until he found his half-drunk bottle of water from lunch. After his trembling fingers twisted the cap off, he brought the bottle to his lips, and he drank the remaining half of the water until it was empty.

After that was done, he let out a tired breath and he discarded the plastic bottle, not even caring if he was littering or not, with his main goal of staying alive as much as possible being his number one priority.

When one's life was in danger, trivial things such as littering no longer mattered in the world, because those with ill intent would not wait. Eventually, his breathing steadied, but his heart still pounded to no end. He pressed his back against the dumpster again, and he shut his eyes tightly and shook his head furiously. Please, don't let them actually be there.

He took in a long deep breath and then exhaled, as he carefully but slowly emerged from behind the side of the dumpster, and he eased on over to the corner of the alley wall. He stuck out the right side of his head, allowing his right eye to peek out at what he hoped that he would not see, and what he saw to his relief that there was nobody there. The sidewalks and street were completely barren of human life, nothing more but the earie silence that surrounded him.

Conner pulled back into the alley and rested against the brick wall, letting out a sigh of relief, and heartrate slowing down to a normal beat again.

Huh, I guess it was just my imagination after all... he mentally said, as he dusted himself off. He smiled lightly to himself, and he made a small chuckle. I can't believe that I got myself worked up over nothing. What was I thinking? Well, I've managed to get one mile down. Just one more to go, and I am home free.

But before he could even get a chance to take one step outside of the alley, Conner suddenly felt a pair of strong hands grab him and then pull him back inside. In that instant, his eyes widened in shock and his heartrate immediately jolted back into fear mode. He then felt himself being quickly thrown and then firmly pressed up against the left opposite wall of the alley on his torso and the right side of his face.

Conner could feel his attacker's smile as he whispered into the boy's left ear.

"Gotcha,"

Well, ain't this quite a cliffhanger. What did you guys think? Was it good? Bad? Meh? What parts do you think could be improved? Be sure to send in your reviews at the bottom and give me your inputs. Until then, have a good weekend. ;)