Nisha by Miss Artista
 
I am Mira. Nisha is my best friend. She has asked me to tell of her adventures. So I shall. Nisha was doodling on her history paper. She sighed. She looked at question 1. “The people of Earth were different than the people of Kolaris. Explain.” Nisha smirked. She knew the answer to this. Wow, this test is really easy, she thought. She put her pencil down to the paper and wrote: The people of Earth could not fly and they were weak compared to us. Their ears were round, not pointed, and their eyes were small. Ha! Imagine not being able to fly! And non-pointed ears? Preposterous! she thought. All the other questions were as easy as the first, except the last. “Explain how the people of Earth would describe Kolaris and the people in it.” Nisha thought hard about that one, and then wrote: They would have called us “elves” or “faeries” (also spelled “fairies”). Nisha knew what faeries were really like. She had one of her own, a sort of friend more than pet, named Elle. She was a light faerie and she was about three inches tall. Kolarisians were about 8 feet tall at the age of 20. That night, Nisha fell into bed, exhausted. She had gotten more requests to fix more digital alarm clocks, and it had taken all day to fix them all. Why can’t they just learn to stop throwing them on the ground in frustration? was her last thought before she fell asleep at once. She had the strangest dream… Nisha was walking along a dark alleyway. There was something strange about it. What was it? Suddenly she understood, and the impact hit her like a bomb. There was snow in the alleyway. It was even snowing! It only snowed in the winter in Kolaris. Why was it snowing in the middle of summer? Then she realized, too, that there wasn’t a sound. “Hello?” Nisha called. “Hello? ANYONE HERE?” She was starting to get desperate-- CRASH! Nisha sat bolt upright in bed. That definitely wasn’t part of her dream. She leaped out of bed. Robbers! She opened her bedroom door and looked into the hall. It was deserted. She crept downstairs and into the kitchen, where she stopped dead in her tracks. There, in the middle of the kitchen, was a big, burly man with a very mean look in his eyes. “Hello, my pretty,” he said in a voice that was like bones rattling in a grave. “Why don’t you come with us?” he said and the last thing Nisha knew before everything went black was a pain on the top of her head… “She shall not find out how we got through their precious-“ “SHUSH! She wakes!” The voices were those of the man who had talked to Nisha and, she guessed, his apprentice who had hit her over the head. She tried to open her eyes but she felt her eyelids were too heavy. She then became aware that she was lying on something very hard. She forced her eyes open and sat up. Nisha gasped. She had been right! The man who had been in her kitchen was there, and his apprentice. But the apprentice was, she saw, not human. It was a dog/wolf thing with paws the size of her trash can. The thing looked at her hungrily and she was secretly glad to be safe behind the bars that separated her and the thing and its owner. The man spoke and Nisha was reminded, again, of bones rattling in the grave. “I see you are woken. Welcome to Aldator, your new home.” “WHAT?” Nisha was outraged. “I shall never live here, in this dump. I live in Kolaris and that shall never change!” “Silence! You will live here or you will not live at all! Now let me introduce you to my friend Crusher. He has not had his lunch yet. Now play nicely!” the man rasped and with that, he opened the cage door, releasing the repulsive creature, and turned his back on Nisha. Upon leaving, he turned and said over his shoulder, “And he’s very hungry!” Nisha gulped. The Wolfirn (for that’s what it was), Crusher, was advancing on her. He stopped just short of her and something seemed to go out in his eyes. He looked at her, and she thought, He looks so sad, the poor thing. Then, right before her astonished and slightly repulsed eyes, he was growing, standing on two legs. His features became more human, and where he had just been was a man, a bit on the small side, very skinny, about middle aged, and with hair the color of the Wolfirn’s fur. Nisha forgot all about being scared and stood there with her mouth wide open. The man looked at her. His eyes were still sad looking, almost doleful. They were a beautiful hazel color. He took a few shuffling steps towards her and she backed against the wall warily. He spoke, and she now knew who the other voice had been. His voice was soft, but at the same time, it was rough. His words were not threatening at all. “Please, I shall not hurt you. You must trust and believe me, for I am from Kolaris like you. Look!” He held out his arm. There, on his forearm, was the tattoo that only a master Kolarisian Skin Decorator could have done. Nisha stared at him, and suddenly a single word came into her mind. She had to be careful, for if her hunch was incorrect…but no, he couldn’t be…could he? Yet it seemed impossible for him not to be…but what if…? Oh, she couldn’t take it any longer. She had to know! She had to! “I will trust you until you give me reason not to. What is your name, Sir?” she asked, not sure she wanted to know the answer. “My name is Bonowantu,” he replied, and then added, “Ah, I see you have heard of me.” It was a remark, not a question, for Nisha had gasped at the name. Long ago, when Nisha was about four, a man named Bonowantu had disappeared, and it was then that the great Shield had been placed around Kolaris. It was widely known that Bonowantu had been kidnapped, but no one knew where he had been taken. When no one found him, they gave up. “Can you be…that is…are you the same Bonowantu that was kidnapped so long ago? Oh, wonderful!” (Bonowantu had nodded.) “You can come back with me, as soon as I turn sixteen tomorrow! Oh…how do you get out of here?” Bonowantu smiled for the first time. “The evil Kompus-that’s the man who you saw earlier-thinks that I am under his control by fear, so he tells me all his plans, making me promise not to tell on penalty of death. He brought me here because I am, as he says, a “fix-it.” When I refused to fix his machines and such, he put this spell on me. My guess is that he brought you here for the same reason-to fix his things. Just to be warned…he has a whole pile of broken digital alarm clocks.” Nisha groaned. Bonowantu continued his story. “He does not trust me, you see, so he transforms me into a Wolfirn. What he doesn’t know is that I can change back. He got through the Shield by…there is a weak spot on it, the very top. He got in through that, going quite slowly. To answer your question, these bars and walls can be broken by a Wolfirn, and by a Wolfirn only. So…stand back, Miss…uh…” “Nisha, sir.” “Stand aside, Miss Nisha.” Nisha obliged, and backed well into the corner as Bonowantu hunched over and, with a great snarl, he transformed back into a Wolfirn. He ran down the hall and bashed against the bars, breaking them. Nisha supposed this was to distract Kompus, giving them more time to get away. Bonowantu ran back into the room, and transformed back long enough to explain that Kompus hadn’t heard it, but was bound to see it on his way back to the prison room. Then he changed back into a Wolfirn once more and ran at the wall, splintering the plaster and wood into smithereens, and then led an amazed Nisha into the deserted road. Once Bonowantu had changed back into a man, he glanced up at the sky. “Your birthday is August 7th, you say?” “Yes, that would be tomorrow, Sir.”
 Bonowantu gave a little chuckle. “You mean today, Nisha. Look!” Nisha looked up at the sky, too, and smiled. The sun was just beginning to rise and you could see a golden halo on the horizon. At the same moment, Nisha felt a comforting warmth spread from her heart to the very tips of her fingers and toes. “I can fly!” she cried, “I can really and truly fly!” Then she gasped, because she had just realized—she could fly herself and Bonowantu back to Kolaris! “Come on, let’s go,” she said and without another word she grabbed Bonowantu around the shoulders and took off for the sky. They reached Kolaris in record time. When they got to the Shield, she was worried that they might not be able to get through, but they could, and they went straight to the Magic Constructors and told them of the flaw in the Shield. Nisha received two medals—a turning-sixteen medal (every girl got one on her sixteenth birthday) and a medal for finding the long-lost Bonowantu. When she returned to her social life, she found about ten broken digital alarm clocks waiting to be fixed on her bed. She also found that her teacher was not at all sympathetic, and not at all pleased about her absence. The flaw in the Shield was fixed, and no one has gotten through it since. For all I know, which is quite a lot, no one ever will.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007