The Nominal Hero, Chapter 2: Situation Nominal
by Tasha K. Rookswater
Chapter 2: Situation Nominal
Caden stared. The person--thing?--facing him was like nothing he’d ever seen.
It was sharp-edged and blocky, as though made up of thousands of Legos, but the blocks seemed to ebb and flow as it moved, appearing and disappearing at its edges. It was human-shaped from the neck down, in what looked like normal clothes, orange shirt and grey pants, except for the texture. Its hands were four-fingered and coloured a uniformly flat beige--actually all of it was made up of flat patches of colour, without the shadows of a normal object, as though it generated its own light.
But all this weirdness was secondary compared to its head. It was a bright pink cylinder, too narrow to be hiding a normal human head, with a cartoonish smile and flat square glasses identical to the ones Caden was still wearing. He wondered for a second if this was some kind of projection on the lenses of the glasses, like a hologram, but Ruth, backed up against the fridge, obviously saw it too.
“Well!” it exclaimed, rubbing its hands together briskly. “I can see we have a lot of work to do!”
It turned and bent toward Ruth in a sort of bow, and a glittery cloud hissed toward her from the top of its cylindrical head. She shrieked. Caden jumped, banging his head on the open cupboard door. For a second he was dazed.
When his vision cleared, he half expected Ruth to be on fire or dissolving into slime or something, but she seemed fine. She was not, however, unchanged.
Ruth always wore her hair short and straight, in a pageboy bob that framed her face. Now it stood straight up in a row of spikes from one ear to the other, like the Statue of Liberty’s crown. Paz chortled. “Nooms!” she exclaimed.
“Everyone okay in there?” their dad called from the hall.
“Fine!” Ruth managed in a high, strangled voice. “Just fine! Caden knocked the cereal over! I’m cleaning it up! Don’t come in, you’ll step in it!”
Hairspray, Caden thought. It’s got a can of hairspray for a head. We were just talking about hairspray, and it’s got those same glasses--
Glasses that were somehow conveying a look of satisfaction as it surveyed its handiwork. “Now that’ll make them sit up and take notice!” it said, and turned to Caden. “Now, yours is a little short for anything really daring, but--hmm--”
“The cupboard, do the cupboard!” Caden said quickly.
“The cupboard? Oh. How pedestrian. All right, I suppose I can.” It tilted itself toward the cupboard and sprayed. Even the spray looked made of tiny blocks, Caden saw, but it seemed to turn to ordinary liquid when it hit the wood. Caden grabbed a handful of paper towels and started scrubbing. Mercifully, the lines and blobs of marker wiped away easily.
They heard footsteps. “Hide!” Ruth whispered.
“What?” the hairspray creature said indignantly. “I will not! I am an artist! I stand by my work!”
Caden pulled the glasses off his face, with a vague thought of trying to look more intimidating, and with a startled yelp, the visitor vanished.
Caden’s dad stuck his head around the door. ‘You sure you’re okay?”
Caden gave the kitchen a swift glance. Creature gone, everything clean, Paz giggling on the floor. “Fine!” he said. “Thanks for asking! I put the cereal in jars!”
“Ah--okay--“ Mr. Keller looked a little nonplussed. Usually they weren’t so prompt about tidying. He studied the faces of his two older children, who gave him identical nervous smiles.
“Okay, well, I’m making lasagna for dinner,” he said, giving up. “We’ll be eating in an hour or so.” He grinned. “I like the new hairdo, by the way.”
Ruth opened her mouth to speak, clearly puzzled. “It’s cool, huh, Dad?” Caden interrupted her. “See, I told you it was cool.” Ruth was touching her hair tentatively with her fingertips, her eyes starting to widen in shock. “Hey, you were going to show me that thing, remember? On the internet. In my room. The thing.”
Paz tugged at their dad’s pant leg. “There was a Noom,” she announced. “It went psshhhttt at Ruth and it was pink on its head.”
“A gnome, huh?” their dad chuckled. “No kidding. Did it have a hat?”
“It had a glasses and it went psshhhttt!”
Taking advantage of the distraction, Caden grabbed Ruth’s arm and dragged her down the hallway. He was aiming for his room but she broke away halfway there and dodged into the bathroom. “Don’t scream!” Caden hissed after her.
“I’m not! I’m not. Oh my god, Caden, what is happening?” She stared goggle-eyed at her reflection in the mirror, poking gingerly at the spikes.
“It’s these somehow.” Caden pulled the square glasses out of his pocket. “That thing was wearing the same ones, and we were talking about hairspray, and I said hairspray--”
He stopped, struck by a thought, and looked around carefully. Nobody was there but the two of them. Just holding the glasses wasn’t enough, then.
“That’s a really stupid magic word,” Ruth commented vaguely. She sniffed at her fingers. “It didn’t look like hairspray, really, but it does smell like it.”
“How do you know?” Caden asked. “Mom doesn’t let you use chemical hair products.” It had been the subject of a number of loud arguments in the past year.
“Not the point, Caden!”
“But yeah, it looked like special effects. Like in a video game.”
“Well, the guy looked like he was from a video game too,” Ruth said. “All sort of--digital. Maybe it was a hologram--that--sprays real hairspray,” she finished, seeing the flaw midway through the sentence. “Okay, no, probably not.”
“You know what else, though,” Caden said. “What are the odds we’d just guess a magic word like that? I mean, if that was the only--thing in there.” A Noom, Paz had said, and their dad had thought she said gnome, but that wasn’t it. A Noun was what the ad had said was in specially marked boxes… and “hairspray” was a noun, but… surely Paz drawing on the box couldn’t just make something appear? Okay, well, who knew what made this Noun appear, but the glasses were real, solid and heavy in his hand. She couldn’t have just conjured them up by drawing them. Things like that didn’t happen in real life.
Ruth was nodding, seeing his point. “So either we hit the million-to-one chance, guessing the right word, or else mayge any word would work and if you’d said, like--” she looked around the bathroom, “--uh, electric razor, we’d have gotten Mister Electric Razor Head.”
“I don’t want to meet Mister Electric Razor Head,” Caden declared. “At least spikes wash out. Probably. Come on, Ruth, I need to look something up.” He pulled her toward the door. She went reluctantly, glancing back at her reflection.
The iPad was still on Caden’s bed, but he’d closed YouTube and anyway you couldn’t just go back to an ad. He tried googling “nouns” and got dictionaries and school help sites. “Nouns specially marked boxes” came up empty. “Nouns ad” gave him grammar checkers.
“No luck?” asked Ruth.
“I know I saw it,” Caden muttered. “How about you?” he asked, seeing she was on her phone.
“What? Oh. No, I’m looking up how to get hairspray out. Mom’s going to be home in like half an hour.”
Caden rolled his eyes. That was so--so practical. Didn’t Ruth realize that everything had changed? This was the start of an adventure, a real one, the kind of thing he read about in books. They had just seen actual magic. (Or actual super-science, possibly from the future or from aliens; he was trying to keep an open mind.) Nothing could be more important than that.
Although, Caden admitted to himself, if it were his hair that their mom was going to throw a fit about, he’d probably be a bit distracted too.
He turned back to his search, still fiddling with the glasses in his left hand. “Nouns glasses” turned up a lot of people arguing about whether “glasses” was a plural noun. “Hairspray head guy” led to personal grooming tips. “Hairspray head person magically appears” got nothing.
“Ugh, I give up,” Caden said.
“Yeah,” Ruth said, half listening. “Do you think we have clarifying shampoo?”
“Why would I know that?”
“Because you read everything, maybe you read the shampoo bottles?”
“I do not.” Caden glared at her. He was used to grownups making comments about his constant reading--one of their uncles called him “the little professor” in a truly infuriating way--but it bothered him more when it was someone closer to his own age, who ought to know better. “How about I just summon up Clarifying Shampoo Head and--”
He stopped.
“That’s it,” he said. “Forget all this searching. We’ll just call up one of these--guys, things, whatever, and ask.”
Ruth bit her lip. “It might not be safe,” she said dubiously.
“Well, I’m not going to try for Ninja Sword Head or something,” Caden pointed out. “We just need someone who’ll answer questions. If it gets scary I’ll take the glasses off. The hairspray guy vanished when I did that.”
Ruth nodded reluctantly. “Okay. But not the hairspray guy again.”
“No,” Caden agreed. ‘We want someone who knows stuff. Like--like a Science Head.”
Before he could lose his nerve, he fumbled the glasses onto his face. “Science!” he announced.
Nothing happened.
Maybe it wasn’t super-science, then.
“Magic?” he tried.
Nothing.
He took the glasses off. “We’re missing something.”
Ruth glanced over at Caden’s alarm clock. “I’m going to take a shower and think about it.”
Caden nodded. “If Mom gets home early and asks what you’re doing, I’ll just tell her you’re freaking out about your zits again.”
“Don’t you dare!” Ruth glared at him. “Anyway, I’ll be quick.” She turned and left, surreptitiously touching her cheek to check for new pimples as she went.
Caden lay back on his bed and thought. He was pretty sure they were on the right track with the noun thing. So why hadn’t it worked? A noun was a person, place, thing or idea. “Science” and “magic” were nouns, just like “hairspray.”
But, hang on, they weren’t just like “hairspray,” were they? Hairspray was an object, something you could touch; science and magic were ideas. After all, what would a Science Head look like, really? Caden imagined atoms, test tubes, explosions, rockets--but all of those were things, they weren’t Science itself.
It was probably just as well, he reflected, that they hadn’t gotten an Explosion Head.
No, what they needed was a real object, one that could tell them stuff. A computer? Well, but googling hadn’t gotten them anywhere. A library? Caden imagined an entire library building trying to appear inside his house. Better not.
He looked around his room, seeking inspiration. Bed, lamp, Legos, dresser, wood-carving stuff, drawing stuff, closet, bookshelf--bookshelf.
He could hear the shower running on the other side of the wall. It would be dinnertime by the time Ruth was done, and then they’d probably have family time, board games or something (Mrs. Keller was very big on family time), and then Paz would be going to bed and they’d have to be quiet. If he waited for Ruth, he’d end up having to wait until tomorrow.
Caden put the glasses on again. “Bookshelf,” he said firmly.
There was a pop and a flicker, and Caden had a split second to realize that things were once again going very wrong.
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