1. The Wonder Years

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Memories are a funny thing aren't they?

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Memories are a funny thing aren't they?

You can ask a group of ten people when their earliest memory was and they might all give different answers. The strength of a person's memory differs, and some probably don't have any significant memory if they lived a boring childhood.

My earliest memory was a hum, a low 'dun dudunduh duh duh'. The face that I picture when I think of that hum belongs to a woman with shoulder length black hair that was placing me in front of a door, knocking on it, and running off. I can't even assume she was my mother. She looked too young, but that may have been why she left me there, at that orphanage.

A woman opened the door to the stone building's doors. She was in her early fifties at the time, her hair a mix of grey and brown, her pink eyes were the first show of colour and vibrance that I remembered. Her touch was warm as she picked me up, easily carrying my small frame in her large hands.

That day, July 22nd, X765, I was taken into the Rose-Smith Orphanage located in the heart of Rosemary village.

I wasn't even a month old, meaning the elderly woman ended up keeping me near her as much as she could. Her name was Clarise Smith and she ran the orphanage. The other kids welcomed me quit easily, since babies are cute, and all. They would all scramble at the chance to play with me whenever they could, often crowding around whatever table I was at when the matron fed me.

But as you can expect, being an infant was boring.

There wasn't anything I could do, but my baby brain enjoyed the goofy faces and tickling they'd do. When I turned three years old, I became much more curious. One boy in particular always drew my attention.

His name was William, and had a pension for magic card tricks. The pre-teen made it a competition, always trying to find a new and more elaborate trick since my better memory enabled me to figure out how he did things. He was always the crafty one, but his "magic" always made me so curious as to how it worked that just had to figure it out how it worked.

His tricks slowly became more and more complicated and inevitably I couldn't figure out how they worked. William always practised the tricks in the woods behind the village, only a short distance away from the orphanage. This fixation I had to know how it worked made me follow him, and I was blown away by what I saw.

The cards were glowing in a myriad of colours as the danced through his fingers. The strange aura flicking on and off before going away fully, and once they looked like normal playing cards again, he performed the trick he's been stumping me with for the last few days. The faces of the cards swapped houses.

"Hey! You cheated!"

"L-Lyssa!?"

My abrupt outburst scared him, the jump from fright causing his brown pony-tail to twist around his head and hit him in the face. A rightfully deserved punishment.

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