Chapter 1 - The Mission

Kyan Pufferly had only one mission in life: to never ever, never-never ever, never-never ever-EVER become his father. Ever.

His father—Mr. Peter Pythagoras Pufferly—was quite possibly the dullest man on Earth.

Accountant.

His father was an accountant.

Oh, the horror of that day when Kyan was a mere lad of five, the day his father revealed and explained just what it was he went off to do every day—the feeling of total and utter disappointment still haunted him.

That was the day Kyan’s big, beautiful head of curly auburn hair deflated, becoming stick straight and fading to a murky moth-brown. His parents never could figure out what had happened.

As Kyan understood it, his father’s job consisted of sitting at a boxy desk in a boxy office and looking at numbers—LOTS of numbers—on a boxy computer. He analyzed these numbers using various combinations of charts, graphs, reports, and spreadsheets. And his tool of choice? An adding machine. That’s a calculator that prints out all those numbers. Snoooooooze-fest!

When Kyan asked his father why in the whole-wide-alarmingly-gigantic world he had chosen to become an accountant, Mr. Pufferly had simply said, “I wanted to be like my pop when I grew up.” That was it. No other attempt at a reasonable explanation. Kyan could not for the life of him understand how anyone could have such a sentiment when their father was an accountant. Ugh. And to make matters worse, Mr. Pufferly’s non-working hours were filled with equally uninspiring activities. At any given moment, if you gave him four guesses, Kyan could tell you what his father was doing—because his father was only ever doing one of four things:

1.  Working in the endless sea of numbers.

2.  Reading the paper or watching the evening news on TV. (Mr. Pufferly voraciously consumed massive amounts of news—primarily focused on business, science, and technology.)

3.  Tinkering with one of the windows in the house. (For some reason, one or another window always had something wrong with it.)

4.  Watching baseball on TV.

The only one that sparked any kind of interest in Kyan was number four, but even then, his father never took him to any actual games. In fact, his father hardly ever left the house except to go to work or to buy another doohickey to fix whichever window was having problems that month.

Kyan would have turned to his mother for some inspiration, but unfortunately her interest factor was only a piddly smidgen above his father’s. Mrs. Poppy Orion Pufferly was a nurse—not bad as an initial jumping off point—but she specialized in Labor and Delivery. One would think this involved working with your hands and mailing stuff, but no, it had to do with babies—babies being born to be exact. Kyan was fine with babies, he just wasn’t particularly interested in them. Mrs. Pufferly would come home excited, bursting about what happened at work that day, but most of what Kyan gleaned from her news was either, “So-and-so had her baby today!” or “We waited and waited, but no baby yet!”

Apparently, because his mother’s job was so immensely exciting and intense (her words, not his), she tended toward the opposite end of the spectrum with her free time: knitting and gardening and other meditative activities. Sometimes, as he watched her doing these things, Kyan couldn’t help but think she was preparing for retirement. He didn’t have any grandparents with whom he could verify this information (Mr. Pufferly’s parents died before Kyan was born, and Mrs. Pufferly was an orphan who never got adopted), but he had visited his friend’s retired grandmother once, and she seemed to be occupied with similar activities.

Kyan had to admit, he was quite impressed by one aspect of his mother’s gardening: Mrs. Pufferly had a knack for experimenting and was continually splicing different plants together or cross-breeding to produce hybrids. At this very moment, there was a tree in their yard heavy with oranges, lemons, limes, and grapefruit—all four on one tree!

But even so, his mother’s horticultural prowess didn’t make up for the fact that both his parents would be voted leaders in the Society of Boredom Inducers, if such a society ever existed. However, belonging to a society would imply that they socialized with other people, which would be false. His parents didn’t have many friends, preferring to keep mostly to themselves—another fact Kyan found quite disheartening.

Instead of rose-colored glasses (which cause a person to perceive everything as great, or at least hunky-dory), Kyan began seeing everything through beige-colored glasses (beige makes everything blah-blah-blech). For example, every time Kyan looked in the mirror, what he noticed (besides his wretchedly dull hair) was the yawn-inducing plainness of his face. And it merely got plainer and plainer with each subsequent viewing. The three freckles on his right cheek that once formed an amazing equilateral triangle were now just regular old freckles lost in creamy beige space. (Ah! Beige!) His once “cute as a button!” nose transformed into a very plain, undeniably bland, squishy pug nose. And his once mesmerizing caramel eyes looked darker somehow (Did someone just call them light brown?! Such ordinary descriptors!), and was it just him or did they look a little irregular? Nope, not irregular. They were equally sized: not too big, not too small, just normal—plain, like the rest of his face.

Even now, at the hefty age of nine, the disappointment (which consumed his soul and made him feel hopelessly hollow inside) showed no sign of subsiding. Kyan could not foresee a point in time that it ever would. His parents led wretchedly boring lives, following wretchedly boring routines, and somehow this was leaking all over his own daily activities.

But Kyan was determined to change this unjust hand dealt by the cosmos (He would not go down in a burning ball of boringness without a fight!) and constantly looked for ways to create a hiccup in the tedium. However, nothing seemed to work. He begged his mother to perm his hair, which she eventually did, but the curl wouldn’t hold. After two agonizing hours, all he got was the same stick straight hair, along with the putrid chemical smell of a hair salon. And even worse, he now had a cowlick that wouldn’t cooperate for all the hair gel in the world.

One time, he tried to use his pogo stick to bounce off the roof and into the pool (while the babysitter sat glued to the TV), but his father came home just moments before take-off and forced him to come down the regular way. Needless to say, the babysitter was out of a job that day, and Kyan went back to being the boy who did NOT perform a death-defying feat. Not impressive at all.

In his latest attempt, he managed to trap an entire hive of bees in an old fish tank using a giant world atlas as a lid. He miraculously accomplished this without incurring any injuries and was very pleased to think he would have the most unique pets in the entire neighborhood. And free honey! But this little escapade into beekeeping ended about four hours later when his mother found the tank in his room, shrieked as if the thousands (Yes, thousands!) of angry bees weren’t encased in glass, took the whole thing outside, dumped it, and ran. She then proceeded to remind him that bees can’t make honey, or for that matter survive, if they can’t go out and collect pollen. He had forgotten that one minor detail.

Kyan’s well of ideas eventually trickled dry, and he teetered on the verge of accepting the inevitability of an unremarkable existence. He would just have to accept the fact that his father was the dullest person on the face of the planet, his mother came in a close second, and it really was true that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. This depressing thought was in the process of crushing its octopus tentacles around Kyan’s already shrunken soul when one fateful night, everything took a most unexpected turn.