• My life has been a weird one, ever since birth. I mean, with a name like Riyu, you can tell I’m not going to be a normal person. Yeah mum, taunts and cracks about my name all through school? I love you too.
    But my life has been stranger than you probably would think. Unless you’ve read a good fantasy novel. But anyway, imagine the weirdest person you know. Mad old lady down the road? Not even close. Random guy who walks down the road talking to post-boxes and lampposts? Getting closer, but still cold. What happened was worse. But I’m not going to tell you what has happened right away. Oh no, that would be boring. I’ll start with all things normal.
    It seems like a dream from long ago, like it never really happened. It must have been about 3 years ago now. I had a pretty normal life (apart from my “imaginative” name), growing up through school, gradually learning that in this world, anything different is a threat. Of course, I learnt it the hard way but, hey, “that’s life”.
    I had an average family: Mum, Dad and a little brother called Lunick, again with the weird name. I swear Mum got the names from books or something. Lunick was a little terror, but unlike me, he wasn’t bullied because of his differences. He was the bully. Mum had to go and sort him out many a time, like when he actually dunked another boy’s head in the toilet. Yup. But he got sorted out, and never did anything quite as bad as that again. Quite.
    Dad loved to make things: ships in bottles to radios and weird inventions, he made them all. But he worked in his workshop, in the nearest town. 5 miles away. So we didn’t see him a lot, we only really saw him when he wanted us to test something out for him. Like guinea pigs. Daddy’s little guinea pigs.
    So this left Mum unable to work, and so she was stuck at home looking after Lunick. But she was happy, and always used to treat us with trips to random places, she used to bake too. She used to make awesome lemon meringue pie.
    One day in that fateful summer, we all took a trip to the beach. Dad decided to tear himself away from his tools to come too, so we were like one happy family. I finally got myself a tan, Lunick subdued his aggression and went paddling, and Mum and Dad snuggled on a beach towel. One day of normality. But then that stormy night, when we were slumped in our beds, exhausted from all the fun and ice-cream, the incident that would change my life forever took place.