• Upon an average neighborhood, peace reigned through out the suburb- “Not again!” for the most part anyway. This cry of despair came from an average house, on an average road, but the boy, whom this cry originated from, was not so average.
    “Arragh, why me!” shouted a rail of a boy, he had a bad case of brown bed-head, aqua blue eyes, and wearing, with five minutes left until the bus came, his pajamas. With fluid movement and speed that only a late schoolboy, who knew that his teachers would hunt him down with no mercy if he was late, made his bed, got dressed, and found all his papers for the day on his messy desk. While cramming the papers into his bag our young friend was missing one important detail that was lying right under his nose.
    “Late again Elden?” asked a fairly tall woman, with short red hair, and amber eyes as she mercilessly attacked a crossword puzzle while sipping a cup of black coffee.
    “As if I need a reminder mum,” Elden said as he bit into an apple, and pouring a small glass of milk. Soon he noticed that his mother was looking at his face funny. “Um, mum is their something wrong with-” before he could finish the sentence, he caught a look at himself in the stainless steel fridge. What was looking back was a creature of colors form red to black, in big swirls and little stars covering the face from forehead to chin. Only the most foul, demonic monster from the bowels of the Eighth Ring of Hell could have done this to him. “Angelinnnnnnnnnaaaaaa!” Elden shouted to the highest reaches of heaven.
    Sitting in her room, Angelina is a young girl, who was wearing a sneer that would scare a devil out of its skin, and cackling like a wild hyena. Angelina considered it her life goal to make her older sibling miserable in any possible way.
    “If I wasn’t late, I swear I would-”
    “Elden, it’s just a bit of marker, it will come off in a few days.” Elden’s mother said, “Besides, you have worse things to think about,” she concluded while a sound came from the street.
    “Aw damn, the bus!” Elden shouted as he ran for the door.
    By the time that Elden got outside, the bus was pulling away, with everyone laughing at him. “Please! Wait! Stop!” Elden shouted as the bus went by, “Aw come on!” For a few second Elden just stood their in his kayaks and blue shirt. When he came to his senses he started walking toward the school. ‘Alright,’ Elden thought to himself, ‘the auctions starts in twenty minutes, it takes me twenty-five minutes walking at five miles per hour, so…’ but before he could finish the thought, he spotted a diamond in the rough. Or to be more accurate an emerald in the fallen leaves.
    It took Elden a minute or two to process this information, but when he did he knew one thing, “Lucky day!” he shouted as he ran to grab it. When he pulled it out of its foliage grave, he saw that it was not just an emerald, but an emerald on a wristband connected. “Oh,” Elden’s face fell, it was much less likely that it’s real, “well at least it look good,” he said as he put it on. “Heh, fits like a glove, wait, ow!” when it fit well on his wrist it clasped on and started to heat up, to the point of burning.
    “Ahhhhh!” Elden shouted in pain, “Get off! Get off!” he started to roll around on the ground wrenching at the thing with his right hand. Soon the heat stopped, but the emerald still would not come off.
    Elden just sat there for a few seconds, dazed by the speed of the action. Then he got up and ran down the back paths that led to the school.
    When he got to the school, he ran to the doors, then stopped, looked through the windows to see if any teachers were coming. As soon as he was sure that the coast was clear, he ran across the hall into the gym.
    Inside was a hussle and bussle that not even the local mall was ever this busy. All over the gym, booths were set up for everything from local corn to old toys. At the center of the commotion was the eye of the storm, an auctioneer going as fast as he could so that as many people’s items could be sold as possible. Plenty of students were there because if they followed the average prices of an item, they would get extra credit in economics.
    Elden was going to come here for the extra credit, but now a change was in order. Elden knew that a Jeweler set up shop on the outer edge of the gym, Azerler or Abe or something.
    When he got to the stand it was crowded with girls of all ages, woman stopped every once and a while, and several older boys and men were looking for a good bargain on a ring for their girl friend.
    “Well, well, if it seems that his young man needs something for a young lover, eh?” the old man running the stand said. He still had his hair although it had turned white with age, and he wore a completely brown ensemble from head to toe.
    “Not exactly, more like trying to pawn something,” Elden said as he, carefully, showed the old man the Emerald bracelet.
    His eyes lit up like a Fourth of July fire works display. “Well now that is defiantly something of interest,” he said then muttered to himself something that sounded like ‘very interesting indeed.’ “Please my fine surveyors I need to talk to this young man in the back, if you come back in I will be ready to ‘talk business’.”
    As soon as the crowd dispersed, the old man opened a flap into his ‘backroom’. In it was an array of gems of every size and type. Not much of it interested Elden, would you be interested in ordinary gems if you found an abnormal gem?
    “Here take a seat,” the old man pointed toward an old stool in the middle of the room. “Now what I would like to know is how you came across the stone.”
    So Elden told his short story about how he missed the bus, how he found it on the road, and how it, “Just… won’t… come… OFF!” Elden shouted as he struggled to remove it from his wrist again.
    “Well I know of only one piece of jewelry that will stick like that,” said the old man. “Of course,” he said as he pulled a small vile out of his pocket, “the likelihood would be,” and he dropped the contenses on the emerald, “unlikely.”
    The liquid started to spark and sizzle, but did not burn. “What is this stuff?” Elden shouted in surprise.
    “It is an ancient substance, used to detect, um, abnormalities.”
    “What kind of ‘abnormalities’!”
    “Abnormalities that give off a certain type of energy,” said the old man “From an ancient artifact.”
    “What?” Elden said still recovering from the shock.
    “The Emerald of the Gate.”
    “The-whatz-of-the-who-now?”
    “The Emerald of the Gate, an artifact as old as the multiverse, itself!”
    Elden wasn’t buying it, “Alright you’re jerking me now.”
    “Now now,” the old man said as he pulled out an old looking book, “I wouldn’t do that to you. Here, look at this if you need anymore conformation.”
    In the book their were several cut-outs of the emerald on different pictures of one man, “Archimedes?”