AN: Hiya…eighteen days and counting until opening day at for the New York Mets. This is actually the Mets final season at Shea Stadium. After this season, they'll be moving into their new field called Citi Field. I'm not fond of the new stadium, myself, but then I've been going to Shea Stadium for more years than I care to recount because of all the losses I've seen. Anyway, I know I skipped over some time to get to this part of the mini-story but there's a perfectly good reason for doing that. I can't tell you what that reason is just yet, though, because it would spoil lots of things that are to come here and in a few other places. This is just a small bit of a larger story that involves a couple of things that all get tied together…if that makes any sense. Thanks to everyone who's actually reading this! I appreciate you taking your time to do so! To everyone who's left me a review…thanks! You're awesome and you rock like a box of socks. Remember, I'm open to any and every opinion and criticism…good, bad, or indifferent!

Disclaimer: I own nothing except the characters I made up and their Real World alter egos. I don't own The Matrix, The Animatrix, or any of that cool stuff. I'm broke and I just finished graduate school for my Master's Degree. All I own are my Pointe shoes.

"He makes no excuses he shows no fear
He just closes his eyes and listens to the cheers." (From "The Greatest" by Kenny Rogers)

When he turned thirteen, Robert expected something amazing to happen. After all, the teachers in school had talked about becoming a teenager since he and all of his friends entered junior high school. They'd said that, when they became teenagers, things would change and everything they did or said would be just a little different. They weren't children anymore, they were teenagers and that meant a whole new set of rules for them to abide by.

Robert--- still being plagued by that whole "Wheeler" nickname thing. It hadn't gone away like he'd hoped it would. ---had taken health, just like everyone in his year, so he figured he was pretty well prepared for the whole "becoming a teen" thing. He'd even had "the talk" with his father, an event that now ranked among the most uncomfortable discussions he'd ever had in his entire life, despite the fact he knew where babies came from.

That said, in theory, he figured he was ready for the big change that was supposed to happen on the day he turned thirteen.

Besides, Robert knew he could count on baseball to still be the same even after he turned thirteen. Still pitching, still showing no wear and tear in his left shoulder despite the fact he'd been throwing breaking balls for about two years or so, Robert knew that baseball would never change. Sure he'd change leagues as he got older and no two games were exactly alike but the game was what it was.

Baseball was timeless...or so his coaches said. It was like in the movie Field of Dreams--- Not Robert's favorite baseball movie but one he'd seen many times over. His personal favorite was Bull Durham. ----when Terrance Mann said that "America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time….It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again." The game, the positions, even the way certain plays were made hadn't changed and probably would never change. America's pastime was destined to stay as it was; just a game that people kept going back to because they had good memories of the unchanging sport that was baseball.

Robert wasn't a poet or anything by any means but he did really like the idea that baseball never changed. No matter how...weird...being a teenager was supposed to be baseball was going to be the same. In his mind, something constant like baseball was a very good thing.

The strange thing was, on the day of his thirteenth birthday, nothing weird happened. He didn't magically transform into some kind of monster-Robert or evil-teenager-Robert. He didn't suddenly become girl crazy or anything like that. No, Robert decided that he was still himself…just one year older.

As for baseball, that, too, remained the same, right down to his ridiculous nickname both on and off the field. Robert had expected that, though, the fact baseball was always going to be the same.

Then he met Calyx in the dugout after one of his games.

Calyx, a young woman dressed all in black and looking very much like something out of one of the comic books his mother didn't know he liked to read, had scared the daylights out of him and said she'd come to speak with him and him alone. She said that his "special talents" had attracted the attention of several different groups of people. One group, disguised as what he thought were agents scouting for other teams, she said didn't want him using his baseball talents anymore. They'd actually do anything within their power to stop him from using the gift he had.

The fact that Calyx had told him that the black suited scouts didn't want him pitching made no sense to him. Scouts were supposed to want to watch people play baseball and show off whatever talents they had. That was sort of their job. As far as Robert understood it, scouts watched people play and reported back to whatever team hired them about how the team played.

Sure it was a little strange that scouts might try to stop him from playing baseball but, then, Calyx, herself, was more than a little strange. She kept staring around her as if the people filing out of the stands were a threat to her. The only threat, in Robert's mind, was his father who'd come to the game. Whenever his father came to watch him pitch, Robert knew he was going home to "practice" for several hours. No matter how well he did, his father would find fault.

Before she darted off into the setting sun, Calyx had told him to look up the story of a girl named Anneliese Rose. Once he found out everything he could about her, he was supposed to dig deeper into the familiar story. There was another story behind the one everyone in Arcadia knew. There was a story that Calyx wanted him to discover.

There was just one small problem with Calyx's request. Everyonein Arcadia, including Robert himself,knew the story of Anneliese Rose. Looking the situation up didn't exactly help him any. There was no new information to be found.

Still and for reasons that escaped him, Robert obliged the shadowy woman. He got on his father'scomputer and looked up the story ofAnneliese Rose. Every article he found--- and there were many despite the fact Anneliese Rose was from Arcadia like him and Arcadia was a very small town to say theleast---said the same thing.

Every story he'd read, every scrap of news he'd found all said the same thing. They all told the same cautionary tale that he'd heard more than once in his thirteen years of life.

Despite what Calyx had told him, there was no place else for him to look. There was no deeper he could dig given what he had. Robert could think of no other way, other than asking around, to find out more information about Anneliese Rose and what had happened to her several years earlier.

"Dad," Robert broached, as he and his father stood in their backyard playing catch two weeks after his run in with Calyx. "Do you remember the story of Anneliese Rose?"

His father paused in mid-throw--- he was playing catcher to his son's pitcher ---and gave Robert a strange look. The question was definitely unexpected to say the least. It was almost taboo to talk about the whole mess that surrounded the young woman named Anneliese Rose.

"Why are you asking about that girl, Robert?" Alan wanted to know, walking towards his son with scowl on his face.

Robert was supposed to be focusing on his pitching, not on some silly little story that the housewives in Arcadia still like to twitter about. His sonwas beyond such stories, in his father's mind. There should have been bigger and better things on his mind, namely getting his curve ball to properly curve or his knuckleball to actually look like the rare knuckleball.

The young teen thought quickly, glancing around the yard before stating, "It's just for something we were talking about in class today. The teacher wants us to get a better grasp on our own history before we take a closer look at the world's history."

The story was a flimsy one but it was the best he could come up with on the fly. School just seemed like the most logical thing to use as an excuse. His father rarely ever asked what he did in school so didn't really have to worry about his father finding out the story was false.

His father only ever asked about baseball and what he and his fellow Hornets were doing. School, and his doing well in it, came in a very distant second after baseball.

Alan gave Robert a curious look but sighed and answered, "You know the story about that girl. I'm sure your mother's told you it plenty of times."

"She has but isn't there something else you can tell me about it," Robert blurted, trying to convince his father to keep talking. "We're supposed to get the story from all angles, like a reporter. I don't want to do poorly on the assignment. The teacher said if anyone did they wouldn't be allowed to take part in after school sports."

The funny thing was, the latter part of the statement wasn't a lie. There was a long standing "rule" in his school that prevented any kids with poor grades from taking part in any afterschool activities. They were supposed to be either held back for tutoring or sent home to work on the assignments they were missing.

Of course, the rule wasn't as hard and fast as it sounded. If someone was an exceptional athlete and their grades were...questionable...things were covered up so the person could still play their sport of choice so their team could continue their winning ways. Much to his mother's delight, Robert had never had that problem. His grades weren't exactly straight A's or anything like that but he did well enough to keep himself playing sports.

With an annoyed sigh, they were supposed to be practicing and not talking about school related things, Alan explained, "The story I know is that Anneliese Rose was just one of those normal kids. She was a Girl Scout, won medals for riding horses and helped to take care of her little brothers and sister. Her parents were good people--- still are good people as a matter of fact so don't go painting them any other way ---and they raised all their kids right."

Robert nodded his head, understanding what his father was saying. He, like everyone else in Arcadia, knew who Anneliese Rose's parents were. The town was small and everyone tended to know everyone else. Not only did they know everyone else, they knew what each of the other individuals in Arcadia were up to. Gossiping was almost a sport in Arcadia among the bored and the boring.

Her father, Jacob, was the owner of the local auto body shop. He wasn't exactly the nicest of people in Arcadia--- there were rumors going around that he had a major drinking problem that started around the time his daughter disappeared ---but everyone sort of tolerated him. After all, as it was said, he and his wife Kathy, a housewife, had gone through a lot after their oldest daughter disappeared. They were allowed their little...issues. Besides, it gave everyone in town something to talk about.

"What happened to her after that?" Robert asked, trying to get his father to continue the story even though he'd told him nothing new. "Mom always use to say that when she started getting into computers, she started acting weird. Is that true?"

"That's what Kathy said. She told all of us that her daughter started spending way too much time on her father's computer with the door locked. They should have known she was up to no good then, don't you think? That girl was probably on there talking to people from the Manhattan or Los Angelis or Houston...one of those big cities," Alan stated.

Staring at his son with a serious expression on his face, Alan asked, "You know what they say about people who live in those kinds of places, right Robert?"

Trying to hide a sigh, Robert mumbled, "Everyone who lives in places bigger than Arcadia have no morals and are only looking to exploit us because we have morals…girls especially."

Robert wasn't entirely sure why his father felt that way but it was what he'd told both him and his brother time and again. For whatever reasons he had--- Robert was starting to think something had happened to him while he was in the minor leagues that involved a place bigger than Arcadia. ---Alan disliked anyone who wasn't from a small town, especially the women. He'd told both his sons that women from larger cities were only out for one thing and they'd do anything to get it. They didn't care about things like commitment and marriage and being loyal to one person. It was best, his father had said, to get involved with a girl from Arcadia. At least they had morals.

"There you go," Alan agreed. "From what they could get off of Anneliese Rose's father's computer--- she did something to it before she ran off so no one could see what she'd been up to before she took off --she'd met someone named Elric online and he convinced her to run off with him. The police said he was some kind of cult leader or something but no one ever found out what he really was and no one has seen Anneliese Rose since."

A small frown crossed Robert's face. That was the same story he'd read on his own computer. The same story everyone in Arcadia knew. Whatever Calyx had meant for him to find by looking at the story, Robert just wasn't seeing it. There was no story behind the story. As far as he could tell, there was nothing there other than the story everyone knew.

The funny thing was that, even as his father handed him the baseball and proceeded to show him the "proper" way to throw a knuckleball, Robert still wanted to look. There had to be something there otherwise Calyx wouldn't have mentioned it. Robert was well aware of the fact that Calyx might have just been crazy--- She acted crazy enough in his opinion. ---and blurted that out for no reason but something inside Robert told him to keep up the search. There had to be some bit of information he was missing.

Besides, it wasn't just the story of a missing girl that Calyx wanted Robert to look up. She'd said that something was wrong with Major League Baseball. She'd said that once he found out everything he could about Anneliese Rose, to look at the website for the Major League Baseball. She said that he'd find that something other than the 19191 World Series was fixed.

Since the integrity of the game was everything--- not just to Robert but to every baseball fan who knew a thing or two or ten about the game ---he figured it was his responsibility to find out what that meant. If there was some way to help restore the integrity of the game then Robert felt he had to do his part. He had to bring that truth into the light too.

Sure the missing girl from his town and Major League Baseball's homepage didn't exactly seem to have all that much in common and it all seemed just a bit weird but, then again, Calyx hasn't exactly been normal. She, herself, had seemed very weird to Robert. Maybe looking at things in a weird way would help him figure out just what Calyx had been talking about.

He just had to figure out how to find out things beyond what he was finding. If there was another story out there, if there was some link between Anneliese Rose, Major League Baseball, and the strange figure that was Calyx, Robert was determined to find him. Besides, he figured it would be something to keep him busy and stop him from turning into the dreaded teenager he'd been warned about.