Cheyenne Comstock, in conversation with his friends, would spit out phrases like “ all you gotta do is backtweak the tension on the Kurtman bearing fork by three eighths and then the transmuter bar will sing like Galileo.”
Akron Comstock drew pictures of monsters with his babysitter’s eyeliner and filled in the colors by dipping his fingers into exterior house paint he found in the garage.
Akron didn’t like Cheyenne, though he understood some of his brother’s intellectual overcompensation stemmed from disliking a name he thought was too feminine.
Akron was too young to think in those terms, so he mostly told his friends that he thought Cheyenne acted like a genius to hide the fact that he thought his name was sissified.
Cheyenne wasn’t faking being smart, he was smart, but Akron thought Cheyenne overdid it, and besides that, the stuff Cheyenne liked was boring.
Akron finished a large teal Vakantabbala, a three appendage creature he created, waited hours for the delicately applied paint to dry, then flipped to the next page to draw a Tomkikerrand fighting a Nuqueyya.
The jagged edge of a sheet that was torn from his drawing tablet jumped out at him. It might as well have been a possum, or one of the creatures he drew when he was six, before he got good at drawing creatures.
Akron didn’t immediately accuse Cheyenne of taking a page from his tablet, but he couldn’t imagine anyone else doing it.
Jasmine, the babysitter, was always on her phone and Lily Comstock, their mom, was always on dates or sleeping.
Cheyenne was in his room, fixing drone propellors for some older guy who worked at Castle Photo.
Akron walked in and did a poor job of pretending he was interested in the repair job before spying his ripped sheet of drawing paper hanging under one of Cheyenne’s Robotics trophies.
It was a sea of numbers and symbols Akron didn’t understand, nor did he care.
He would reclaim his paper, and he would reclaim it with a brand new, number destroying creature. A Burtombic. Yep.
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