AN:
Hey, I updated! Thanks for the reviews, people who reviewed!
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Ch6: Visiting
The campground that the Aquato family was staying at had been divided into lots seemingly at random, with far too much variation in shape and size to have been done by a sane mind. One of these lots in particular, A42, covered more ground than all its neighboring lots put together, had its octagonal boundaries containing both an open field and wooded area with a small duck pond. The Aquato's trailers and two campers stat on opposite sides of the field, campers on the right, storage on the left. A tightly strung clothes line, hanging between two trees on ether end of the lot, wavered slightly as the breeze gently pushed on the clothes that had been so carful hung upon it. One of the campers, small but brand new and belonging to Gretchen and Douglas, lurked near the edge of the woods, its spotless silver frame catching the last of the daylight filtering through the dark green foliage overhead. The other, a double-decker painted in the red and orange colors of the Aquato family, stood by a huge slab of rock that jutted out of the ground, half-shading the hulking vehicle for most of the day.
It was the inside of that camper that Caspian, the already introduced younger brother of Raz, was desperately trying to straiten up their tiny, tiny shared room.
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A long time had passed since Raz had been home, and Caspian really, really missed him. Raz wrote home every week, yes, but his letters kept getting shorter and shorter, shrinking from several long pages which told the family about all the crazy things and people he had seen, to sad little scraps of paper which had been barely more than a line or two telling them he was okay.
So, like most little brothers who idolized their big brother, Caspian really, really, really was exited to see Raz come home. Their parents had already set up Raz's hammock, and found the old green step-tool so he could climb into it with his broken arm, and Caspian had spent all day gathering up his True Psychic Tales magazines, just in case Raz hadn't read them yet. Raz would need something to do while everyone else practiced their acts. And, some of the newer issues even had Raz in them! Caspian really wanted to ask Raz about issue 746, because if Raz did ever fight a crazy guy who thought pudding was evil, it would have been really awesome.
Grinning happily, Caspian grabbed his dirty laundry hamper, which was overflowing with his faded hand-me-downs, hopped down the steps without dropping even a sock, and scampered over to the clothes line.
"Mom! Mom! I found all my laundry!" He said as he dropped his basket at her feat.
"Did you check the pockets, dear?" His mom turned away from the wash board and basin to look at her youngest child.
"Yep! An' I found a quarter and the rubber ball I lost last week!" Caspian beamed.
"See? I told you would find them if you picked up your things. Did you finish cleaning your room?"
"Nope, but I will soon!" Caspian paused. "How long until Raz gets home? Dad left to pick him up an hour ago."
She reached over with soapy hands to ruffle Caspian's hair, which was exactly color of Raz's.
"He'll be here by the time you finish cleaning that room of yours."
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Thu-Tunk-Thu-Tunk-Thu-Tunk-Thu-Tunk-Thu-Tunk-Thu-Tunk-Thu-Tunk-Thu-THUD-Thunk....
Raz was jolted awake when the car hit an exceptionally large pothole in the middle of the road. Blinking rapidly to clear his vision, the faded orange interior of his father's old sedan swam into focus around him. He found himself staring into the smilie face that he'd drawn (With a permanent marker, mind.) on the back of the driver's seat years ago. Repeated attempts to wash it away hadn't accomplished much more than to smudge the edges and create an aura of dark blue stain around it.
He straitened up, stretched, rubbed his eyes, then blinked some more.
"Are we there yet?"
"No."
"Really?"
"Yes."
-------
After an evening of being jumped on by his younger siblings, hugged, forced to consume an insane amount of his mom's delicious cooking, catching up on family news, and the hugged and jumped on some more, Raz, now exhausted, made his way to his room. He hoped that they hadn't moved his stuff into storage, because he'd left most of his other things at his room in HQ. Barley had he opened the door to the camper when his younger brother jumped out of the darkness inside, starling Raz and causing him to fall off the steps.
"Hey, Raz! Raz!" Caspian was dressed in black-and-green-striped PJ's, clutching an arm full of comic books as he leaned out of the camper. "RAZ!" Caspian looked down at Raz as Raz gingerly picked himself up off the ground "Can you read to me tonight? Like you used to?" Caspian held out one of the comics.
Raz took the comic book (True Psychic Tales 746: The Man Who Feared Pudding. Why did that ring a bell?) from his brother. He hadn't been keeping up with them, not since he'd moved out, anyway, so this was something he'd secretly looked forward to doing. True Psychic tales was somewhat of a joke among the psychonauts. It was toned down and made more heroic for a younger generation, they told Raz, so that new recruits wouldn't know quite what they were getting themselves into when they joined.
"Yah." Raz said with a smile. "I try to stay awake for you."
A few minutes later, Raz was resting on a stool next to Caspian's bed, the comic open in his lap and a flashlight in his good hand.
"Are you sure you don't want to see the pictures?" Raz asked.
"Nah. I've already read it a lot, an' I know what all of the pictures are." Caspian said from on top of his hammock. He peeked over the edge at Raz. "I want you to hear you read it."
"Okay. On the first page, it says 'In an innocent looking house on an innocent looking street, a not so innocent basement is the lair to a mad man. Meet Mr. Alex Smith. He might live in your town, or be your next door neighbor, or he could even live in a different country than you. There is one thing you need know about Mr. Smith. There is one thing he fears, one thing he hates so much that he has dedicated his life to destroying it.'"
Raz fumbled the flashlight as he turned the page.
"'.... Pudding. He spends every hour of every day, even when he's sleeping, thinking of ways to erase it from existence.' And there is a nock at the door to the basement, and a voice says 'Honey, are you still down there?' and Mr. Smith says 'I'll be up in a minute.' and shoves some papers in his desk with diagrams of ray guns on them.'"
Raz paused and squinted at the diagrams. He's seen those before, he was sure of it. He looked up to see Caspian grinning down at him.
"Keep going." Caspian said.
"Erm.... So, Mr. Smith walks upstairs, and sees that his wife has made dinner. So, he goes and sits at the table, and she asks 'How is your job going?' And he says 'Peachy. Just peachy.'"
Raz turned the page.
"Okay. On the next page it says 'The next day.' and it shows Mr. Smith in a lab. He's messing around with test tubes with lots of different colored liquids in them. His coworkers are laughing and pointing at him. Then it zooms in on the the logo on his lab coat. Oh no! He works for Mrs. Puddingcup incorporated! One of the coworkers walks past and tosses a pudding cup right in front of him! Mr. Smith jumps and drops the test tubes he's holding. 'SMASH!'. 'Hahaha!' His coworker says 'Your such a coward Alex. It's just pudding.' Then all of the coworkers leave the room and Mr. Smith starts cleaning up the mess."
Raz turned the page again.
"So, Mr. Smith has a mop and is cleaning up the stuff on the floor, and the pudding cup on the table says to him." Raz cleared his throat used his best scary voice. "'You don't have to put up with this, Mr. Smith.' and Mr. Smith turns too look at it with a terrified look on his face. 'You could stand up to them. We both know you could.' Mr. Smith whispers 'Shut up.' and slowly reaches for a pair of tongs. Then the pudding, which is grinning in the most evil way possible through its packaging, says 'They're all the same. Its people like them who got you stuck here in the first place!'. Mr. smith picks up the pudding cup with the tongs as it keeps talking. 'You could destroy them. You could destroy them all! Wait- What are you- AAAAAAAAHHHH!' Mr. Smith has thrown the pudding cup down the incinerator shoot! But what's this?"
Raz, who was getting more into the reading with each passing moment, accidentally dropped the flashlight as he turned the page.
"The pudding cup's words stay with Mr. Smith for the rest of the day and haunt his dreams. Suddenly, he gets up and grabs his coat. Meanwhile, at psychonauts headquarters, Agent Sasha Nein, one of the best agents in the psychonauts, is working on a machine when gets a call. 'It's from dispatch.' he says to the gorgeous" Raz had put more emphases on that last word, but what the heck? "Milla Vodello as he listens to it. 'There is a firestarter attempting to burn down a food processing plant.'."
Raz turned the page.
"And so, psychonauts team Alpha Five headed out. The brilliant Sasha Nein, genius scientist and skilled marksman.... Milla Vodello, the Psychonauts' best levitator and best dancer..... And Razputin Aquato, the youngest agent to ever... join... the psychonauts.... Caspian, did you want me to read this just because I'm in it?"
"Yup." Caspian started giggling.
Oh, he'd known that he was in True Psychic Tales. Heck, he'd even read the first issue featuring him when it came out, featuring him trying to help a very crazy cat lady get over the loss of one of her cats, and he'd gotten a laugh out of their depiction of him. Now that he thought about it, hadn't he fought someone who had believed that the foods he'd been developing wanted him to kill people? It made sense that they'd changed some of the details around for that case; Raz hadn't wanted to eat snack foods for weeks after that one.
Raz rolled his eyes and grinned.
"Haha. Very funny. So, they all climb into the jet and head out on their adventure...."
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Breakfast the next morning was awkward.
So very awkward.
Raz knew from the way the sun hung in the sky that he had woken up later than the rest of his family. He stumbled out the camper, still wearing his levitation ball print PJ's and sleepily scanned the area around him, trying to figure out where everyone was. His father soon found him staring out into space, and he was lead over to an oddly placed, rather badly battered tin table in the middle of the cluster of trailers. Raz noted the tin was already hot to the touch when he stat down- exactly how late had he slept in? Before he could ask, his mother slid a large plate of potatoes and omelet in front of him. He starred at it for a bit before remembering that he was hungry, then began shoveling huge bites of it into his mouth.
"Hungry today, son?" His father asked, amused. "I haven't seen you eat that much since you were nine."
"Thm hmsumtal fud wa turible. Th hd mu un a 'luquid dut' twu das." Raz mumble through a mouthful of food.
"Eeeeew! Mom, I can see Raz's food!" Raz's little sister Elena said from across the table, pointing and making a face as she did so.
"Don't talk with food in your mouth." Raz's mom said. "So, how has being a psychonauts been going? I get worried about my little boy while he's away." Her eyes lingered on Raz's bandaged arm.
"Eh. Its okay... I guess." Raz said.
"Razputin, have they been giving you a hard time?" Raz's father asked.
To say that Raz's father had approved of Raz's decision to join the psychonauts would not have been entirely truthful. True, he had allowed Raz to fly off on the mission to save Truman, and he had even happy that Raz aced the entrance exam (except for that one part...). But when Raz asked, a half a year later, if he could join the psychonauts full time, his father had nearly blown a gasket. At the time Raz had believed that the ensuing argument was caused by him needing to move into HQ. Raz had argued that they wouldn't be able to pick him up every time there was an emergency, so he really had to move closer. His father had said that they needed Raz to be home. In the end, it was because Sasha and Milla lived there, that Raz had eventually convinced his father to let him move out.
His Family had sent him on his way with food and blessings, but as Raz levitated onto the jet, he saw the most disapproving, saddest expression on his father's face. He hadn't forgotten it.
"Son...?"
"Oh, sorry. Zoned out." Raz said. "Well, a while ago they shuffled all of the teams around. Truman didn't like it very much, but I think the people who wanted it to happen called homeland security or something." Raz to another bite out of his eggs. "They must have gone over his head."
"Well, who are you with now?"
"Erm... They way they have it set up now is that there are twenty or so agents on a team, and they get assigned into sub teams based on what the missions need."
"And?"
Raz sighed.
"I'm being treated like a cadet. I'm still a full agent, I mean, I haven't been demoted or anything, but they won't let me help them. I'm being forced to stay behind and stuff all the time.
"And you know what's worse? Now that they moved all of the teams around, Oleander, Milla, and Sasha aren't even in the same sections anymore, and a lot of their friends are in the same situation. I think everyone's having a hard time with it. But I've met some nice people lately."
"Like this 'Hervon' man who nearly got you killed." Raz's mum said. It was such a blunt statement coming from her that it took Raz by surprise.
"His name's 'Huron'. And I don't think he meant to, mom. He's just a jerk, not a guy trying to kill people he doesn't like."
It was quit for the rest of the meal except for chewing sounds. Soon enough the rest of the family went off to do chores, leaving Raz to his own devices. Raz wandered around, doing his best to avoid his family until he found a large tree to sit under. He didn't know what kind it was, but it would have been a great one for climbing. It's think and twisting branches would have made great hand holds, and they were packed just densely enough to make climbing easy- if he could have climbed it, of course, with his arm the way it was.
Raz groaned. It was going to be a loooong week.