Chapter 1: A Birthday Present

Disclaimer: The first names of the characters here, with the exception of Emilio's father, belong to Nightow.I've made up specifics about them, so I guess that... they're sort of mine? I don't know. Whatever. I own nothing.
"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth." - Nyarlathotep, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

72 A.F.

"Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you..."

The singing was enthusiastic. It was cheerful. The fact that it was far enough off tune to kill small animals was irrelevant. If anything, this made it more endearing to those present. Even the family cat, a cute, mostly black thing with a calico ear, was yowling along (although whether this was in joy or pain would be hard to say). A red-headed, fair-skinned boy sat at the head of the table, looking slightly embarrassed.

"Happy Birthday dear Emilio! Happy Birthday to youuuuuuuuuuuu!"

The boy whose birthday was being celebrated was either slightly less than four or exactly seven years old depending on which of the two Gunsmoke calendars were used to calculate his age. Many places throughout history have used two ways of keeping track of the dates at once, but the inhabitants of Gunsmoke faced a rather perplexing chronological problem the moment they stepped foot onto the brave new world they had been forced to exist in. Namely, the problem of how to reconcile the (approximately) 643 twenty-six hour days it took their rather dusty new planet to travel around its twin suns with the 365 twenty-four hour days their minds were used to. In the end they had decided to keep their old calendar for things like holidays, birthdays, and keeping track of dates while the Gunsmoke calendar was used to determine things like agriculture, astronomy and a whole bunch of other things the average person really didn't care about (farming was nearly impossible on the desert planet, and astronomy was nothing more than a useless hobby to people who had to almost literally fertilize the ground with their own blood to survive).

Emilio Triballus didn't know any of this. He only knew that his dad had woken him up before the suns had come up to tell him that he was now seven years old, and that his dad and mom had agreed that he was responsible enough to help in his father's bakery (though there had been much debating over the proximity of ovens and sharp objects). He had been expecting this; his dad had been mentioning giving him some stuff to do in the bakery with him after school, but being woken up before the suns to receive a special breakfast and being told that he would be paid for the time spent in the bakery (which was itself an honor he had fought long and hard to earn) was something else. And now a cake (homemade, of course), and presents. Lots of presents. His father had elected to homeschool him rather than place him in one of the dubious public schools available in town, but Emilio had never been particularly introverted, and he had made plenty of friends. Friends were good to have any time of the year, he reasoned in his childish way, but they were great to have on a birthday. The presents were wrapped in all sorts of shiny paper, glittering in the late afternoon sunlight. He wondered which to open first, and was so lost in his thoughts that he almost didn't notice when his dad cut and offered him the ceremonial first piece of cake. It took a nudge from his mom to snap him out of it.

"Wha... Oh, sorry," he fumbled as his dad pressed the plate of cake into his son's hands. This was good for a laugh from the guests, and he blushed slightly.

Joseph Triballus hadn't really known what to get his son for his seventh birthday. So when he walked into Shinita's General Store a week before the party to see what could be had, he was lost. Utterly lost.

"Hello, Joseph." Shinita made it a habit to greet his most regular customers by name, and Joseph had been coming to buy groceries every Wednesday (minus the ones when he was sick or the store was closed) for nearly nine years. This was a Monday, but Shinita was aware that things came up. "What do you need?"

"A birthday present for Emilio."

Shinita chuckled.

"What's so funny?" the baker asked, feeling slightly defensive.

"I feel stupid for even asking. You've done this every year for the past six years. You even know what you're doing about a party?"

"Uhhhh..."

"Nevermind. Maria handed me an invitation last week anyhow. You need a present. What do you think he wants?"

"You got an invitation last week!" Joseph wailed, "I didn't remember it until this morning!"

"Calm down. You've got a week to get something..."

It was useless to try to talk him out of his panic though. The sad, disorganized man was zooming up and down the aisles. Shinita decided on a more direct method.

He walked calmly over to the baker, grabbed him, spun him around, looked him in the eye (being all of five-foot-three-inches in height, he had to grab Joseph's collar and drag him down to get the full effect), and screamed.

"CALM DOWN!"

This seemed to have the desired effect. Shinita didn't look like the screaming type, despite the fact that he couldn't keep hired help (he had two people working for him at a time) to help him run the small store for more than a year. The record, in fact, was eleven months and twenty-three days, and that had ended with Shinita hurling a barrel of beef jerky at the poor slob and shrieking about what the ex-employee's fate would be if he ever reentered the store in very precise (and obscene) terms. It had happened on a Wednesday, and Joseph had been present at the time (he hadn't known what some of the words meant, and he still wasn't sure if that had been a correct use of the word "disembowel").

"Joseph, listen to me. I keep toys, models, and anything else like that on aisle three. Look there. And if you can't find anything..." he shrugged, "you're a friend. And a regular customer. You can go to another store every once and awhile and not offend me."

Joseph meanwhile, was already on aisle three.

"Man, you're fast. You've got a week, thirty seconds ain't gonna make that big a deal."

"This is perfect!"

Shinita frowned. Joseph Triballus usually took his sweet time shopping. He didn't move slowly, only without haste. Nonetheless, for him to find something so quickly was astounding.

"What's perfect?"

Joseph picked the item up and took it to the front of the store. Shinita stared.

The item held by the baker looked good. It was quite obviously handcrafted, and the craftsman had quite obviously known what he was doing. Emilio was a creative kid; he'd have all kinds of fun with something like that. Over the years, Joseph and Shinita had evolved from a customer/salesman relationship to honest-to-God friendship, and the retailer felt sure he and his family would be invited to all sorts of little productions involving the thing. But he was uneasy.

He rang Joseph up without mentioning any of that. The item wasn't marked, so he made up a price ($$150 seemed about right, carved out of wood as it was, he sold it to Joseph for $$75 saying that it was on clearance). He didn't tell the baker that the reason the item had been unmarked had been because he had never seen it before in his life. He had done some straightening on aisle three earlier in the day, and he hadn't noticed it.

Oh shut up, he told himself, you just missed it before. Maybe it was under some other stuff.

Not-quite-rational thoughts rose in his brain and were squelched. By the time of the party, he was completely fine with it.

The cake was pretty good. Some say that familiarity breeds contempt, and Emilio was certainly familiar with his father's cakes, but this one was perhaps as close as a person could come to literal death by chocolate. It wasn't the kind of thing his dad brought home every night. His friends knew it too. His best friend, Matthew and Olivia, Matthew's little sister, were both eating like the cake would disintegrate if left alone for more than five seconds (Joseph suspected they'd just heard the Bible story of how God provided the Israelites with manna from heaven that would rot in a day). They would feel awful later, but for the moment they were on top of the world.

Shinita and Miranda, his wife, sat on the Triballus family couch, engaged in a good-natured squabble about the rather large amount of chip dip Shinita had taken. He insisted it was fine; if you were invited to the party and brought the kid a present, you were good to go. She countered that the "good to go" he spoke of did not extend to half a container of ranch dip. Emilio didn't know all that his father did about Shinita's assistants, but he often wondered how Mr. and Ms. Yanez managed to get along all the time. They seemed so... different. He was constantly annoyed, easily frustrated, and incredibly sarcastic, though he balanced it out with a fair amount of intelligence, a good sense of humor, and an extraordinary capacity for charity. She was a born optimist, who, while not stupid by any means (she was rather smart, actually), was rather literal-minded. They both enjoyed debating however, and they could out-logic nearly anyone who dared to take the opposing side of an arguement. As a result of this, Shinita's General Store had become an informal meeting place for the town's would-be philosophers.

Their daughter, Yuuno, two years old and at peace with the world, was eating a little piece of cake happily. She had seen this before.

The rest of the guests were scattered throughout the house. Shinita's son Galpez sat by Matthew. He was two years younger than Emilio (his fifth birthday had been last month), and he nearly worshipped Emilio and Matthew. Pfeiffer, Joseph's part-time assistant, sat in the kitchen joking with Maria about how he was going to quit as soon as he found the box of Triballus family recipes. Isabel, his daughter, sat beside him eating cake. She had been eight for three months now, but the age difference wasn't bothering her; the fact that not a single person would let her near their hair with a curling iron was responsible for that. She couldn't understand why. It was a nice curling iron.

And then it happened. The one moment everyone ("everyone" meaning Emilio) had been waiting for.

"Alright, gather around. It's time for presents!" Maria announced.

It watched the party from outside of town.

Everything seemed to be going well. Of course, it wasn't familiar with the human custom of celebrating the aniversery of one's birth (it wasn't even sure how old it was, let alone when it's birth would have happened on the human calender), but it didn't think there could be much to it. If there was a ritual to be followed, it seemed to be rather relaxed (of course, the apparently bad singing and random conversation of the guests could be strictly proscribed). Nevertheless, it was curious, so it watched.

The humans were gathering around a table filled with packages. Ah. It had researched this part extensively. This was the part where the friends and family of the celebrated person ritually presented him or her (or other) with presents. This seemed strange to it, because the presents were things that the celebrant could acquire for him/her/itself. It thought much exchanging might be saved if the participants simply all bought themselves a present every time there was a party of this nature.

The boy of the hour opened the presents with great enthusiasm, though not all of them were to his liking. Another noteworthy aspect of the ritual was that even if the boy's displeasure with the offering was easily sensed, he had to reply to the effect that the gift was acceptable. It also noted that the boy's displeasure seemed to be evoked by the more practical of the gifts, such as clothing. This was strange, but there was probably a perfectly good reason for this, if it wished to look.

It shifted. Features rearranged themselves and it became a he.

If you asked him why he watched the party, he would have had no answer. He did many things simply because he felt like it, and this sense had always been rather trustworthy. However, he began to grow impatient as the boy waded through the sea of gifts to get to his father's offering. He nearly lost control of his/its form once or twice while it waited for the child (this was important, he didn't know why, but it was).

Finally, the boy reached his father's gift. The creature fastened his attention on the scene before him. This would be worth watching.

Emilio opened his dad's present last, not knowing what to expect. His dad had a history of getting questionable presents. He would remember the baby sand rat (a omnivorous rodent-like creature that could grow to be four feet long) with mixed laughter and horror until his death ("No one told me they used poison to paralyze their prey..." Joseph had said). This was different.

He lifted the thing out of its box. He looked at it for a second. It looked like...

"A doll?" He was confused. He certainly hadn't asked for a doll. And if that was what it was, it wasn't even a nice doll. Just plain wood in the shape of a miniature person, with bendable joints. No soldier outfit or toy gun or anything. And all those strings... what for?

"It's a puppet," Joseph explained after a short pause. He took the strings from the boy and attempted to demonstrate. It was probably for the best that Joseph was bad at puppetry. What was meant to be a quirky little dance (Joseph believed very firmly in preserving ancient Earth traditions, and so had attempted to learn the macarena from an old book on dancing) turned into deadly puppet kung-fu. Emilio was impressed.

"Cool! What's his name?"

"His name?" Joseph asked.

"He has to have a name. Remember when that guy came to church and he had the one on his lap named Howie?"

Joseph actually did remember that. Of course, that had been a ventriloquist's doll, but people probably named marionettes too.

"His name is Leonof Unica Donatello da Medeci." That sounded good.

The monster grinned.
PREVIEW

Emilio: Mr. Bluesummers and his friends are great. I thought it might be weird, having a blind Sunday School teacher, but he isn't so different from the rest of us. But he has something on his mind. You can tell by the way he opens every class with the same prayer: peace, safety, the usual things, but he means them. He appreciates them. He thanks God every time we all show up alive. And the way he talks about God, you'd think they were penpals. I never knew you could learn such things in...

NEXT CHAPTER: SUNDAY SCHOOL