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07/30/00 Never, Never Land. By Eddie Nambulous Kids and amusement parks, remember the way you never wanted to leave? Mom and Dad had finally had enough of the gum on their shoes, walking around soaking wet and you wanted to stay forever. There just weren’t any rules there (except for the height requirement on the really cool rides). It was like the place was built for nothin’ but fun. Well guess what, merry-revelers of the alien squashing variety? The Gua were banking on that, and this time they were gonna make it so that every teen could get their hearts desire – they were making "Playland" a place of permanent residence and permanent war. A real-life "never, never land" nestled away in a quantum pocket. But I’m getting ahead of myself already. Allow me to backtrack a tad. Kids need supervision. And even though when you went to your favorite water park or local Six Flags megalopolis you felt like you were free from adult constraints, able to run as wild as you wanted, the truth is your parents and the park security guards always had an eye on you. Same thing in the Gua version of a park called "Playland." Big Brother alien was always keepin’ a watchful eye on his land. Seems the Gua had plucked a bunch of disassociated, homeless kids and teens off the streets and tossed them into a quantum pocket – playing on the kids’ natural will for survival and sweetening it by encouraging and rewarding violence. Foster, prompted by Nostradamus of course, entered the pocket and immediately became embroiled in a constant gang war. There were two teams brawling in the park – the "Reds" and "Blues." Cade was stuck in the pocket – a long story I won’t tell here. He knew the best way out was for everyone to work together. Foster called a "town meeting" of sorts – made a plea for blue and red to join forces. No body was too psyched at the prospect. Foster was the lone "ay-dult," the word these "tribes" of misdirected youths used for anyone older and wiser. And the kids weren’t about to leave. In this world they got to sleep when they wanted to, play when they wanted to and eat as much junk food as they could – as long as they tried to kill each other first. The Gua had a high-tech surveillance system set up in a shack at Playland. It rated and analyzed the kids – figured out just how hard they’d blow when set loose in a mall in the real world. It was a good plan, a good way to turn our kids against us and make societies future look real, real bad. And just like any kid in a candy store the citizens of Playland were all too happy to get rid of anyone who didn’t want them to have their way. It’s like when your mom wouldn’t let you have sugar cereal when you’re a kid and then you move into your college dorm and yearn to subsist on nothing more than Lucky Charms and Cocoa Puffs. Kids figure you can never get too much of a good thing – unfortunately for Cade, he was just the bearer of the bad news that everything comes with a price. Now I don’t know if Foster likes roller-coasters but I sure know he wasn’t thrilled when he was strapped to the top of one waiting to get slammed into by a car full of screaming Reds. Cade, being twice bless’d and all, naturally got off the track before going splat but that wasn’t the end of his problems. He still had to figure a way to get through to the kids in the park. He had to show them that going home was the right thing to do. Turns out the Gua hadn’t taken every ounce of humanity out of the leader of the Blues and Cade was able to convince the kids that violence wasn’t always the answer. Foster convinced these kids that the world outside could be better than the false-reality of "Playland." Thing is, we couldn’t deliver on that. No matter how you look at it the world itself is a whole lot darker than it is in those places we find bliss as kids. The teens in Playland were placed in a false reality where they were suffering injustices. What Foster and I discovered after helping them get out was that sometimes one reality is just a shade off from another. Injustice lives everywhere. So go and have a good time in a place where you can really let yourself go. Enjoy that time. Live it to the fullest – but know that it isn’t where you belong. We all gotta find our way in the real world one way or another. And that’s something, however unfortunate, that we all gotta believe.
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