The One Minuters reached the university within a minute and The Command’s presence was obvious with a huge bubble floating over the playground.
Together, they repeated the act they had done earlier at the Andheri stadium – Dev made the bubble as small as a pea, Beth moved it towards Tim who swallowed it and everything was calm again.
This triumph over The Command somehow felt rather easy and while the rest assumed that it was due to their intensive training, Beth wasn’t so certain.
“Take a look around, there’s no damage as such. Everything is in its place as if The Command didn’t intend to cause destruction here,” Beth knew something was amiss.
That’s when everyone started carefully looking around the playground.
The halogen lights cast shadows of all the trees and poles around when suddenly Evelyn noticed a woman hiding in the distance.
To everyone’s surprise, while everything around her had shadows on the ground, hers was missing!
The Voice was prompt in reacting, “That must be Quincy working on the bubble effect while her separated shadow, under The Command’s influence, must be near Keith. The Command is now using two hosts – Quincy as one and her shadow as another. We must rush.”
They were clearly tricked into leaving Keith with only Rohit at home.
Then, just as they were about to be transported back home by A Minute, they noticed something very strange.
Tears, streams of them, rolled down Quincy’s eyes, flowed on to the playground forming some symbols, as if she was trying to communicate something.
Time seemed to have halted temporarily when Beth’s phone rang.
“Told you it might come for Keith, rush home… Now,” Rohit had never sounded so scared.
The story continues tomorrow in the next post. Did you notice that I managed to start each sentence of this chapter of the story with the letter T (I have managed to do the same from the B letter post)! This is my 19th post for this year’s A to Z Challenge (#atozchallenge). Head to my previous posts to read the entire story.
Read all my posts for the challenge in the A to Z links below:
A ➡ B ➡ C ➡ D ➡ E ➡ F ➡ G ➡ H ➡ I ➡ J ➡ K ➡ L ➡ M ➡ N ➡ O ➡ P ➡ Q ➡ R ➡ S ➡ T ➡ U ➡ V ➡ W ➡ X ➡ Y ➡ Z
Kids this age in 2022 are actually in a very different phase than those who reached this milestone in the pre-Covid era. These kids have mostly been at home without any exposure to playgroups, preschools, parks, birthday parties and more importantly spending lots of time with kids their age. I am writing from India, so maybe the situation is different in other places, but we went through huge number of Covid cases and never-ending lockdowns. So these kids are suddenly coming out of their home cocoon and I feel really bad that they missed the gradual transition i.e. exposure to the real outdoor world in a way we had.
MOM AND IDEAS 