Two of My Kids Write Stories Together

So tell me. Should I worry?

The Start To a Short Story by Alex (who is bored) and Andrew (who is avoiding studying for a test)

Let me get one thing straight. I always wanted to be a potter. I’ve always thought that I could do much better in that vocation than say, oh, a tyrannical sorcerer. I’ve always enjoyed the quiet life. True, I’ve also enjoyed inflicting serious pain in others. There was that time I bit that other boy’s ear off in fifth grade. He gave me a look that I didn’t like. So I bit his ear off. When I was young, my mother died in a tragic accident. I was aiming the goddamn crossbow at my father. But I got him with the second bolt. This kind of thing just comes naturally to me. As a result, I was cast out onto the street, with no job and no parents. They broke my crossbow, too.

My name is Nathan Hands. If I had friends, they might call me Nate. Or, perhaps Handy. Until I would have killed them for being unsatisfactory companions. If I was in a good mood, I might just have inflicted serious and extremely traumatic pain on them. Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not lonely or misunderstood. I’m evil. That’s why I never made it as a potter. I kept trying to stuff clay down the other boys’ throats. After a few days at potter school, I was sent to a correctional facility for psychopathic youngsters. However, this “facility” turned out to be a façade set up by an evil sorcerer to attract young apprentices.

The early years were difficult. I didn’t learn much magic. A fire-bolt there, a ball of all-consuming oblivion there, that sort of thing. Some of the boys really took to it, though. I recall one of them cornered me, and threatened to summon a voracious nether-beast if I didn’t give him my lunch money. So, I stabbed him in the eye, and took his lunch money. Sorcery is ok in the proper time and place, but I prefer pointed objects made of metal in a pinch. Eventually, all the other boys at the school were dead, incapacitated, insane, or banished to the nether hells. I noticed this when the line for lunch got much shorter. It struck me as odd at the time; I hadn’t killed that many of them. They must have killed each other without me. Pity about that…
I was sent to the headmaster’s mansion, near the edge of the school grounds. It was there that the evil sorcerer revealed himself to me, and informed me that I had won an apprenticeship under him. Initially, I didn’t want to be his apprentice. I simply wanted to be a potter. However, his argument was very persuasive. For a split second, he moved every single molecule in my body independently of one another. It hurt quite a bit. I decided to become his apprentice. It was that, or die in the most painful way imaginable. I’d been his apprentice for about three years when this story begins.

In that time, he had unlocked my creative side, and I had devised literally thousands of ways to kill people or to inflict massive pain. This was partially thanks to my master’s large army of people who got paid to stand around, and have our rage vented on them. No point wasting perfectly good underlings with that kind of thing. There was also the myriad of adventurers, questers, do-gooders, and heroes who tried to kill my master. These attempts, whether made by experienced questers or insane men with sticks, inevitably failed.

Of course there was this one hero I don’t like to think about. This hero was pretty standard: tall, handsome, square jawed, muscular, in armor, riding a big horse and carrying quite a large blade. His apprentice was around those lines, only more so. The hero was killed, of course. But the apprentice was able to escape. That was my fault. It is my job to take care of the apprentices of the heroes. However, I failed to do so under extremely embarrassing circumstances that still keep me up at night. My master was less than pleased. It is shortly after this incident that this story truly begins. It begins, as most do, with an epic hero and an evil antagonist, facing off on the field of battle…