Marcus was seven problems deep into his homework when Mara barged her way into his room. He had been despairing slightly over indefinite integration - definite numbers had been alright, but it was the vastness of the numbers and formulae that was starting to fry his brain. By the time she had arrived with armfuls of manga in tow he had begun to google “jobs that don’t require math”, a trancelike state interrupted by the smacking of cracked spines onto the desk.
“I wanna play pretend at something!”
As the preteen looked into his sister’s mismatched orange and purple eyes he was already thinking up excuses that would allay her will. “I’m busy” wouldn’t cut it. Neither would “I’m tired” or “I have stuff to do” or even “I’m gonna poop my pants”, which had only resulted in Mara parking herself outside the bathroom for an hour to yell words of encouragement to his bowels. But even as he engaged in this time-honored exercise in futility, he knew there was no preventing the inevitable. Still, he had to try, or she’d never learn.
With the gentlest tone of voice he could muster, Marcus asked, “Could we… could we maybe play pretend a little later on today? When I’m done with my homework?” It had seemed a reasonable enough request, but nothing was ever reasonable with Mara, and she instead prattled on as if she hadn’t heard the request at all.
“Sooooooooooo Marcus,” she said without pausing for breath, “I was just reading this manga which is about this amazing kingdom that’s being corrupted by this super evil emperor and then there’s a hero that saves it and it has sword fighting and magic and a talking cat and the evil emperor is actually the coolest and the best and I would be the coolest evil empress ever so i thought maybe we could-“
“Stop. Stop stop stop.” Marcus made a T motion with his hands, trying to put a pause on the cliffnotes rambling she had already begun. It was the start of the same pattern as always. She got excited about something new she’d read or watched or played, he’d get dragged into playing pretend with her, something got broken or someone got hurt because she couldn’t contain herself. Every time. But the least that he could do was try to limit some of the collateral damage. “We’ve talked about this. You can’t do villains.”
“WHAAAAAT???” Puffing her cheeks out chipmunk style, Mara was now sitting on top of the table and pouting at championship level. “I don’t see why I can’t play a villain,” she whined. “I’d be a very very good villain. The goodest villain.” The younger girl stopped short after that sentence, eyebrows scrunched up as she reflected on what she had just said. “Well, okay, goodest villain doesn’t make sense. You can’t be good and a villain. The bestest then! The bestest at being a villain.”
“Yes, you would… but being the best at being a villain isn’t always a good thing, you know?” He had to say these things slowly. Carefully. “Because that makes you… evil…”
“But I WANNA play the evil emperor and I WANNA BE EVIL! I WANT TO RAZE KINGDOMS TO THE GROUND AND TRAMPLE OVER MY ENEMIES AND CONSIGN THE WORLD TO DOOM!!” Mara’s voice was growing shriller and higher pitched with every word, the lights beginning to flicker and burn even brighter as she spoke. Around the two the walls and ground were beginning to shake, shadows beginning to stretch ever longer and converge in the center of the room. Outside on the street car horns were beginning to blare with ever-increasing volume, a chorus of alarms crying out to Marcus to hurry, hurry, stop her rampage.
“What about… I’m the villain? And then you get to play the good guy who defeats me! Because the good guy is always the winner, right? And they’re the coolest and the best and everyone throws them a great big party at the end!“ It was never clear, when Mara was in one of her moods, whether she would take the bait or not. Sometimes it ended with a relatively peaceful game of pretend, with only minimal damage. And sometimes it ended up with the Normans in the hospital and half a street levelled. But thankfully, she seemed to be in a generous mood, grabbing Marcus by the wrist and dragging him out of his room, bounding down the stairs, and right outside the house.
“Welcome to the Kingdom of Sod… Sor… Sonaria!” Beaming with pride at her totally original fantasy kingdom name, Mara then looked back to face her brother, seeking an approval she received via a singular thumbs-up. “The Kingdom of Sonoria was once a very happy and joyous land where there were lots of cute animals and friendly people and suchlike.-* Already the exterior of their home was transforming, the lawn suddenly overflowing with two-dimensional rabbits and thickly outlined facsimiles of deer frolicking about. Friendly stickpeople in their angular clothing or lack thereof waved at Marcus, and abandoning all semblance of normality Marcus waved right back at them.
But then,” whispered Mara in her version of a husky voice, “A very bad and evil demon named Sabator heard about Sonaria and he decided that he wanted it to be HIS! That he would take over the kingdom and become its emperor by force! So he wrangled an army of his deadliest demons-”
“Skeletons,” Marcus interrupted, “skeletons please, nothing with blood or guts.”
The storyteller wrinkled her nose at the suggestion. “... Fine. So he wrangled an army of his SKELETONS happy now bro to conquer to the Kingdom of Sonaria, and he ruled over it with the most iron of fists from the Fortress of Evil! A super scary fortress with those pointy tower bits and a moat and everything!”
As she spoke, the skies began to darken with oppressive thunderclouds looming low over the town. Thunder rumbled overhead as lightning began to streak across the sky, illuminating the ever growing towers and parapets bursting out of their home.Twisting tendrils of thorny vines began to curl across the walls, spreading across a house already morphing into a sea of granite and cobblestones. Water began to pool and collapse the ground surrounding the ever-growing fortress, prompting Marcus to scurry away and hide behind the nearest tree before Mara took notice of him.
But it was too late. It had always been too late.
“And you are-“
And he was Sabator, the Emperor of Darkness. For a thousand long years he had reigned over the Kingdom of Sonoria, ruling with an iron fist as sovereign of this darkened kingdom. Under his oppressive rule demons and witches stalked the earth, exerting their dominance over the hapless souls of the kind and good-natured. How foolish. How weak. How pathetic. The arch-demon stretched his batlike wings, taking in his appearance. Forearms all muscle, covered in blood-red skin and hardened chitin. Where his feet had once been were cloven hooves. Tenderly he reached atop his head, feeling the spiraling horns that were jutting forth from his skull fully formed. Mom was so going to kill him
Standing before him were his undead army, an unthinking and unfeeling mob of summoned skeletons who would follow his every command. Rather than being truly animate, possessing the spirits of those who had once lived, they were merely puppets of bone for the demon to manipulate as he so pleased. Not that it made Sabator feel any better about being cast in a role where he had to command legions of the undead.
“And I am-“
The archdemon sneered, infusing his voice with a note of disdain. There was a depth to his baritone, carrying with it both the weight of a thousand years of legacy and the weariness of one who must accommodate childish fantasy. “I know who you are already, foolish chit of a girl. Yours was the birth they foretold in the stars.”
And he did. This was the long-prophesied of hero of old, she who would bring peace and prosperity to the kingdom. Pure of heart and lithe of foot, looking for all the world as if she’d leapt off the pages of Shojo Beat. The heroine Allura, who had been born during a lunar eclipse, the champion of the common man. After all, this was the truth of Mara’s birth, too, though whether her ability to distort reality was a gift granted to her by the stars or something else was a question the family tried very hard not to think about. Already she was no longer side by side with her brother but on the opposite side of the street turned moat, and here he was atop the house turned castle at the ready to bid the skeletons attack.
While Mara was busy rallying a crowd of what were presumably commonfolk and confused looking knights she had summoned out of nowhere, Marcus took the time to bury his face in Sabator’s massive hands and sigh as loudly as he could. This time she’d gone too far! He wasn’t human, the whole house had changed, the STREET had changed, there was a massive army of skeletons that had to be ordered around, the neighbors were looking. But, well… at least they were both still humanoid?
The exuberant cheering of the now bustling crowd drew Marcus out of his misery, forcing him to acknowledge the ongoing situation. Mara as Allura still looked very much like herself, though now she was clad in slightly scuffed leather armour and wielding a ruler-straight broadsword like it weighed nothing. Her companions looked as if they’d come right out of her manga pages - if Sabator’s demon sight was to be believed they actually were from the pages of Honehone Knights, all flash and no substance. It was at this point Mara gave her big bro the thumbs up, the signal for this triumphant battle of good and evil to begin. And so, with a flick of his obsidian clawed hand, Sabator ordered his legions of skeletal warriors to march just as Marcus’ phone began to ring.
And ring.
And ring.
Nothing good ever came from answering phone calls as a teenager, especially not ones that came directly from mom. Marcus did his very best to ignore it and watch the clash of bone against steel and fireball against skulls, but somehow the more he observed the proceedings the louder the phone became until he couldn’t stand it anymore. With a gnarled claw of a hand, Marcus inched his finger closer and closer until hitting the dreaded receive icon.
‘Heeeeeey, mom…” The demon emperor winced at how low his voice came out, doing his best to make it sound like a teenager and not the Lord of Darkness. “How’s the… how’s the grocery store?”
“Marcus? Marcus, did you get turned into a chain smoker?” Through the tinny speakers of his smartphone, Marcus could tell that like always she had no time for foolishness or shenanigans. “You need to finish up whatever game you and your sister are playing right this second. The Turners told me that their shed has been turned into a tower? And that there are skeletons inhabiting it?”
Turning towards the Turner’s house, Marcus spotted the offending shed in question. Or rather, what had once been a shed but was now a guard tower dedicated to the protection of his castle. It had therefore ceased being shed-shaped and was much more cylindrical in structure, with extra windows through which bow-clad skeletons were peaking their bony skulls out from.
“Well, mom, you have to admit it was a pretty ugly shed. I mean… this’ll raise that property value like they want, right?” Marcus winced as he said it, aware of how weak an excuse that was.
“That’s not the point, Marcus. You KNOW that things can’t stay this way.”
Out of the corner of his eye Marcus could see his sister practically mowing through the army at top speed. But of course - they were mere skeletons trying to fight their makers. What chance did those bony buddies of his have when this was her world? Her story? These were the chosen years, after all. The best years, when the world trembled at your feet. From the phone he could hear another sigh, this one deeper and more prolonged than the last.
“Marcus,” said his mother after an eternity spent accepting the truth, “I’ll be back in ten minutes. Do… whatever you need to do. Life and death battle or what have you. Just make sure everything’s back to normal when I get home, okay?”
For a moment, Marcus wanted to tell his mom that was impossible because normal didn’t exist. Because at any moment reality could be upended and changed upon itself at the whims of a 12-year old girl who had yet to learn that one day everyone grows up, and that playing pretend was simply escaping from reality. That no power in the world could protect you from the universal truths of death and homework no matter what whim of the imagination you summoned, and that ten minutes was not enough time to realize a whole story. But instead he simply muttered his two syllable OK, hung up the call, and locked eyes with his destined foe.
These ten minutes were going to be the ten longest minutes of his life.