derp derp more fanfic bs

[sincerelyironic]

You are Jade Strider, and you are one year old.

It is your birthday today. Whenever you're out with your brother, people claim to have never seen a happier baby. You coo more than cry, frequently smile at everyone whether they're strangers or not, and show very little fear to the world at large. Unhappiness is a concept for which you lack all understanding to. Your first word is, quite distinctly 'bro'.



You are Jade Strider and you are six years old.

You have just started school today. It is a wholly different world but you are determined to keep your cool. It helps that you were well-rested even if you have started feeding yourself lately so it means your energy levels are still adjusting to a diet entirely made of carbs and sugar, but you sleep quite a bit. Tonight that changes, you have your first nightmare. You quickly forget the details of the golden city below your window and a sky filled with clouds showing a black and green menacing figure and the massive destruction caused in his wake. You startle out of your dream and are too terrified to scream, staying up the rest of the night quaking in fear. You're awake for two more days after that before you finally succumb to fatigue, but even then you do so only with the stolen safety of your brother's bed (something you haven't done in years). You are too exhausted to dream.

That is when your insomnia begins.



You are Jade Strider and you are eight years old.

You don't sleep a lot these days even if you've entirely forgotten the reason why. It doesn't matter. You get about a day's worth of sleep over several, which makes it a testament to your well-trained speed that you're only just slightly faster than other people while suffering under the sleep deprivation. Instead your immune system suffers and you get sick a lot.

During the day you're loud and run around like a hyperactive chinchilla, settling down only when it's time for the Squiddles cartoon. It's a tactic you developed, because you don't want your Bro to worry. You hope by being such a distraction during the day he doesn't know how quiet you can be when you go to your room for the night but just stay up instead of sleeping.

You start playing video games with your headphones on, because you don't have much else to do at night. Your already not great but still passable eyesight degrades down to straight-up 'bad', and you need glasses by the end of the year.



You are Jade Strider and you are ten years old.

You like the extreme sports games your Bro has well enough (because, obviously, everything he does is sooo coooool) but you think you have found the most perfect game ever in the old emulator version of Earthbound. For once you stay up for days at a time not out of primal long-forgotten fear but out of actual excitement and desire to see what happens next.

You like the idea of having a perfect friendship out there just waiting to be discovered, even if you haven't met them yet.



You are Jade Strider and you are eleven years old.

You meet a boy named John Harley on a Squiddles fan BBS. He's so weird, you think he's kind of full of shit with some of the stories about his life he tells you, but after talking with him for a while you start to find him to be a genuinely nice person.

He introduces you to a girl from Maple Valley (a small town in Washington), and from there a boy from New York.

You were looking for friends you had never met, and now your life will never be the same.