Chaos King. A Disaster Clad in Overalls

The Sinister Soul and the Lolly-pop of pain

"There are good ships and wood ships, ships that sail the sea, but the best ships are friendships and may they always be!' Irish Proverb

*******************************************************

I am absolutely certain that somebody facing certain death was not supposed to feel as exhilarated as I was feeling right now. I don't have a death wish not in the slightest and I certainly don't take any pleasure in pain.

I feel this way because never in my entire existence have I felt this alive. My whole life up until yesterday had been a series of rooms in which I had been caged. My parents hid my family away for our safety, and out of embarrassment, I was locked in the growing pod for my safety. For seventeen years of my life I had been caged, hidden and kept quiet.

Now though, well now I was screaming at the top of my lungs while flying on a talking cloud around Angel Hollow trying to catch an angel while being chased by flash eating bats and facing the possibility of electrocution at every turn. If that wasn't the most exhilarating thing to be doing after being locked away for seventeen years, I don't know what is.

Not to say that I wasn't scared because I was. I was terrified. If it weren't for Dash I probably never would have climbed up onto Gravel, my cloud, without chucking a tantrum so fierce even Horace would have been proud.

When Ferris had whisked us off to the Traumatram after lunch to a room that was so dark I could barely see my own nose in front of my face, I was only slightly concerned for my safety.

Ferris had explained that the Angel Hollow was lit with a black light, it explained why I could see twenty-one pairs of bright white eyes looking frightfully around the room. It also explained why we could see dozens of tiny white eyes flying about far above us near the ceiling. I also though t I heard the faintest cackling noise but that could have been my overactive imagination.

Angel Hollow, Ferris said, was a huge cavernous area where angels that had finished their schooling lived until they were caught, before that they lived in the even larger Almost Angel Hollow and before that, the prison with their families. Angel Hollow was dark because the angels liked the darkness, until they had been caught that is. When Sita asked if the lights would be turned on for the catching Ferris replied with 'Absolutely Not!". Apparently the angels become murderous around light before they became unlocked.

Unlocked. Such a strange concept. Each angel is put into a bubble so they can fly, they haven't received their wings yet and won't for a long time, the bubble blackens them out so they become nothing but a black shape inside their bubble. Nothing distinguishes one bubble from the next except a small trial of delicate coloured feathers that the bubbles leave behind as they fly. When the angel was caught, the bubble would pop and the angel would 'unlock' and return to its natural colour. Ferris explained that it was for no particular reason other than entertainment that this function had been added to the bubbles.

When he was done giving us the low down on Angel Hollow, Ferris had began to tell us the rules, "There are some rules to this game, rules that if broken will have consequences so I highly recommend you follow them. Now this is your BPOW, otherwise known as Bubble Popping Obligation Wands."

Ferris passed around shining silver sticks about the length of my forearm. When I held onto mine it buzzed and then my name appeared in tiny curving letters on the thicker end.

"Your BPOW is your most prized possession in the catching, you can't pop a bubble without one in fact you can't even touch a bubble unless it is with a BPOW. Which leads me to rule Number 1, if you touch a bubble with anything other than your BPOW, you will be electrocuted simple as that."