Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Chapter 19: Secrets in the Mountain Dew

Study hall was fourth period. On the way to the bus I ran into Fay.
"Sky!" she yelled excitedly, trying to get my attention.
"Hey," I said. She caught up to me.
"I was looking over Grandpa's postcards for some reference to the armor," she said.
"Did you find any?" I asked her.
"No," she answered, "Well, sort of. This is gonna sound kind of weird. I was drinking Mountain Dew, and I spilled some on one of the postcards,"
"That sucks," I answered, wondering why she'd told me this.
"It did this," she said, elbowing me. I stopped and turn to look at me, as she handed me a postcard.
It was from St. Louis, with a picture of the Gateway Arch on it. It was damp, from where something had spilled on it.
"Look at the back," she said.
I looked. In the margin, by the place where you put your address, was a paragraph of writing. At least I think it was writing. It was very tiny, in a script I had no idea how to read. It looked kind of like Arabic, but not quite. It really didn't look like any language I'd seen before. It had a lot of triangles.
"After we found this," said Faye, "I decided to try dipping the same part of another one in Mountain Dew. They all have it, in about the same spot. Some have more, some have less. And no one seems to know what kind of writing it is,"
"Weird," I said.
"I know," she answered, "Isn't it cool though? I mean, secret writing, a suit of armor, all this cool, like Lord of the Rings kind of stuff happening to us?"
To be honest, this was was one of the more boring things I that had happened to me that week. But I didn't want to spoil her mood.
"Yeah, it's really something," I told her, "I have to go catch the bus now,"
""Oh, sorry," she said, "Bye! "
I tried to give the post card back to her.
"Oh, keep it!" she said, turning the opposite way, "Try and figure out what the writing is,"
"K!" I yelled back at her as she vanished into the throng of people.

1 comment:

Nathaniel Cornstalk said...

Sorry it's short, but I figure it's better than nothing. We're on the edge of a breakthrough, which will generate much faster updates till the end of part one, but I have some story stuff to work out before that happens. I have to make sure all three plotlines run smoothly and get to the right places at the right times, and on of them I've barely introduced.