My Act 3 started with an incredibly thrilling search-and-recovery mission.
A mission so intense that it would give you nightmares during the day – daymares!
My own mother’s child would weep if he heard the story of – wait, I’m my own mother’s child.
Never mind.
It was way easier to get into Duncan’s lab than I thought it’d be. He had never deleted my biometric data, probably because he wasn’t able to touch anything.
It was, in fact, the easiest thing in the history of all things ever. I literally walked in, stole borrowed the capsule, and left.
You’d think something as important as Project Blackwood would be way harder to get.
That sounds like a bad-guy thing to do, but the good intentions balance it out. And if it didn’t work out, I wouldn’t remember any of it at the end of the year anyway.
I booked it back to my room and slammed the door shut, thinking I’d be alone, but I was wrong.
Noah, Penny and Jordan were there, hanging pictures on the wall.
‘What’re you guys doing here?’ I asked, leaning against the door, feeling the weight of the Magic Lamp in my backpack.
They all looked at me funny.
‘Where else are we supposed to be?’ Jordan said. ‘It’s, like, nine-thirty at night.’
‘Plus, I got those pictures in the mail,’ Penny said, excited.
Glossy photos hung on the walls, pieced together like a giant puzzle. They were the pictures from Penny’s phone. Our room had been eerily transformed into the Kepler Cave.
‘Oh, those pictures,’ I said, feeling woozy all of a sudden.
I wasn’t sure if it was because of what I had in my bag or the wall of photos in front of me.
Whatever it was, I knew I had to get outta that room. The lamp felt like it was getting heavier in my backpack, and I didn’t think my buddies would be on board with the fact that I had it.
I turned the handle and pulled the door open, but only had a foot out before Noah called out.
‘Dude, wait!’ he said with a laugh. ‘Is that … Elvis Presley?’
‘It is!’ Penny said. ‘Or at least a kid wearing an Elvis mask!’
‘Well, it could just be a really short dude,’ Jordan said.
I stopped in my tracks.
Were they being serious?
My curiosity got the better of me, and I stepped back into my dorm. When I looked at the photos on the wall, my jaw dropped.
‘… What?’ I whispered.
They were right.
Dozens of Elvis Polaroids were pinned together in rows, each one a different selfie taken by the same dude in the mask.
Kepler had them strung up in his creeper cave.
Every selfie had a date written on it starting from 1963.
Each photo jumped forward a few years with the same dude in the same mask in the same outfit, all the way up to 2018. Like he didn’t grow or change clothes at all for over fifty years.
And if the Kepler Cave were still standing, I knew there’d be another photo with the current year, too.
I saw it in Kepler’s tenth-floor apartment.
I was there when the Polaroid was taken.
‘I know him …’ I said.
‘Uh, say what?’ Penny said.
‘I mean, not personally, but I saw him at the beginning of the year. On the way to school, I saw him with that mask outside a cafe.’
My friends looked at me like I was a wack job.
‘You saw this guy – the guy Crazy Kepler has a hundred pictures of, wearing an Elvis mask – at the beginning of the year,’ Noah said. ‘And you didn’t tell us?’
‘It was no bigs at the time!’ I said. ‘He was just a random dude hangin’ out in front of a cafe!’
‘Holy buckets!’ Penny said, holding the class photo with Fifteen next to the photos of Elvis. ‘They’re wearing the same outfit. These are all Fifteen!’
‘Wait, Elvis Presley was a descendant?’ Jordan asked. ‘This is getting hard to follow!’
‘No! It’s just a mask!’ Penny said. ‘The kid in the Elvis mask is Fifteen – that’s all you need to know!’
‘But what’s that mean?’ Noah asked. ‘Like, if it’s the same kid … He doesn’t age? So that’s definitely his superpower, but why isn’t he in the yearbooks? Who is he?’
‘Man, I didn’t believe you guys before,’ Jordan said, ‘but this … This is a full-on crazy train that I don’t wanna get off of.’
‘All these pictures, and still no name,’ Penny said. ‘The school tried so hard to make it like this kid never even existed.’
Like he never existed – Headmaster Archer had threatened me with that exact same thing.
Was I gonna be someone’s great mystery someday? Who’s the weird, chubby kid in the background? They’ll be bummed to find out it was a nobody.
Just then my eyes landed on the articles about the Reaper and the world ending, and I imagined the worst of the worst – a thought so vile that it made me feel like I was gonna cry.
‘What if these articles aren’t fake?’ I said quietly, as if we were being listened to. ‘What if they actually happened, and the world forgot?’
Noah looked at me like I was crazy. So did Jordan. Penny, too. Okay, all three of them looked at me like that.
‘What’re you talking about?’ Penny asked.
‘What if Headmaster Kepler’s nephew became a straight-up evil supervillain, and what if he destroyed these cities?’
My friends stared at me wide-eyed.
I tapped the article about the Reaper. ‘What if this is Headmaster Kepler’s nephew? And what if … What if the world ended?’
Nobody said a word, because at that exact moment, the school’s red alert went off.
