My first name was Barney. My last first name was Amy. I'm what you humans call an imaginary friend. We know ourselves as Aer. You can only see me from the time you are born up until your society crushes your belief around the age of nine. I can take any form that you can imagine. One child may see me as one of you. Short little boy with crazy red hair and brown eyes that is just a touch shorter than them, because they always want to be taller than their friends. Another may see me as a green skinned kangaroo that speaks in the same voice as their mother and will listen for hours on end. What ever they need me to be, I change to fit them.
Now, that sounds bad. I don't change so that they will like me, I love who I am. I change because that is what my job requires me to do. Without the imagination of a human child I am nothing. I have no form at all. No gender, nothing. My world lives alongside yours, you just never see it. We use more than our eyes to find each other. We feel eachother and sense what we want to say. I suppose that it is a better system, because you can't hide from eachother. But, it does make it difficult to keep track of your friends if they are always changing what they look like.
I guess I'm a little jealous of the ghosts, those are also Aer. People believe in them much longer. For some reason, a menacing ghost is easier to convince people is real than a friend that you can't see. The ghosts tend to have longer positions and get to stay in their place of residence for decades. Imaginary friends last on average three years.
When I started the job I was excited. I was ready to change the lives of kids around the world, or around the city that I was born in, we don't really travel much. We get to choose between being an imaginary friend and being a ghost. You can usually tell which type of spirit and Aer is by their energy. At the basic level the ghosts feel like bad energy, make you cold when you walk through them, and the imaginary friends feel like good energy. I also want to make sure that you understand that the ghost Aer aren't evil. In fact, I have many ghost friends. We just have different energies. Neither of us can physically touch you, so I see where your faith waivers, but we still wish you would continue to believe. Anyway, I chose to be an imaginary friend and after the first day of training I knew I had chosen the right one. When I say training, it basically means you follow another imaginary friend around for a few days. It doesn't really work that well since every kid is different and their minds haven't been constricted by adults yet.
I followed Bob around for my training. At the time he was a bright red alien with black lines across his face. His kid had just watched Star Wars when he was assigned to him. We spent the day at the boy's daycare chasing other kids around and driving little metal cars around with our hands. Bob's kid was great. I could feel the imagination power growing within me, urging me to transform into another friend for Bob's kid. At the end of the first day, right before I went back to our base in the library, Bob found a moment to get away from his kid while he was telling his parents a story to tell me something.
"I don't know what type of kid you are going to get, but there is one thing you have to remember," he said. I leaned closer, excited for what I was going to learn. "Never get too attached. I know, sounds bad, and you might even think that I am losing my touch, but that is the only thing that has kept me happy in this job. You've heard about the imaginary friends that go bad? Well, fading away is one of the hardest things on us. Live your life and enjoy every second with the kid, but just remember once you fade you will always get another, and there will always be more play times."
The Aer that went bad. Those are the only horror stories we have. Tales of the best imaginary friends around clinging to their child. Doing anything to get them to keep believing. The only time one of us was able to move an object was when one friend went crazy. She had spent years with a child. Helped the kid through so many tough times with different families and then one day she was almost completely faded. She begged the kid, screamed, flew through her to get her energy up, but nothing helped. Until, she got so upset that she decided to steal the kid away from the family that the kid was with. She poured all of her energy into lifting the child that the kid floated around the house and down the street. She only got half a block down before she had wasted all of the imagination energy she had stored and the kid fell, breaking a leg and cutting up an elbow. That Aer returned to the library with cold energy. They say she was kicked out right on the spot even after begging for another child to befriend. Now, she is a ghost, like most of the friends that go bad. Those tend to be the best at being a ghost. They don't have to pretend they are miserable, they don't care about anything anymore.
