Jack Clonan

Welcome to the home of my first book, Silhouettes!

[jclonanwrites]

Chapter 7

The day hadn’t improved much. After the fraction incident earlier, Mr. Gardnell had remained in a foul mood for the rest of the afternoon. During the class’s end-of-day pizza activity, he visibly grimaced when Luke began eating the pepperonis before they made it into the oven.

“Early pepperoni,” an inside joke his older cousin Asher had come up with years earlier, was one of Luke’s favorite things to do, and the slightly mischievous grin that spread across his face at the sight of Mr. Gardnell’s reaction nearly sent the paraprofessional into hysterics.

Luke stayed after school for Unified Basketball, which meant he had to walk home instead of taking the bus. By the time he left the building, the sun had already begun to set, leaving the world suspended in a soft twilight while a cool breeze whispered through the air.

As Luke trudged along the sidewalk with his head down, he looked up to find the black dog blocking his path. This time, the animal held direct eye contact with him.

At that moment, Luke realized there was something unusual about the canine that seemed to be following him. It did not come across as wild, stray, or even domesticated. If anything, it seemed aware, as though some deeper intelligence was quietly observing him from behind its eyes.

I think I’m going to call you Cheerio.

He began closing the distance between them to properly meet his new furry friend when, without warning, the back doors of a white van parked along the side of the road burst open.

Two figures clad in black body armor and tactical masks jumped from the vehicle. A symbol resembling a black flame was emblazoned across the center of each of their chests. They each carried a weapon, though Luke was certain he had never seen anything quite like them while hunting with his father in the Adirondack Mountains.

“We have found the target. I repeat, we have found the target on Bleecker Street. Reinforcements necessary!” one of them barked into a device attached to his lapel.

The look in their eyes behind the masks and the way they carried themselves immediately told Luke they were not afraid to hurt someone here, and the realization sent his heart racing.

As though sensing the boy’s growing fear, Cheerio stepped closer before turning around and planting his feet firmly on the pavement. The dog positioned himself directly between Luke and the strangers, almost as if he were protecting his new friend.

“Engaging with regular rounds now,” the other added into his communications device.

Luke felt as though time itself had slowed, even though he knew it really hadn’t. He had experienced the sensation once before earlier that year during the final seconds of a basketball game when he made the winning shot. In moments that somehow felt important in the grand scheme of things, the world always seemed to stretch itself thinner around him.

He knew he had to protect Cheerio from the evil men, but the moment he tried to move, something stopped him. It was as though the creature standing in front of him was somehow placing a feeling directly into his mind, a reassurance that everything was going to be okay.

With time still seeming to crawl around him, red blasts erupted from both weapons and rocketed toward Luke and Cheerio. Just before impact, what appeared to be hardened golden light suddenly materialized in front of them, emanating from the dog and intercepting the rounds in a burst of sparks.

Time abruptly snapped back to its normal rhythm, and Luke’s eyes widened in amazement at what he had just witnessed.

“Awesome doggy!” Luke exclaimed.

Luke noticed that Cheerio’s collar had mysteriously vanished while the shield was active, but he barely had time to process the detail before the dog barked.

Golden sound waves exploded forward from Cheerio’s mouth in visible rings, striking with impossible force as they violently hurled the masked men backward through the air.

In the stunned silence that followed, both Luke and Cheerio seemed to understand the same thing.

This was their chance to run.

[jclonanwrites]

Chapter 7: Luke meets a dog with a bark powerful enough to bend the world around it

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[jclonanwrites]

[jclonanwrites]

Chapter 6

Five years had passed, but Asher finally understood the meaning behind the colors that had emanated from the skeleton during the social media video. If the clue had always been meant to lead to Yu-Gi-Oh!, then together the red, yellow, and blue represented the Egyptian God Cards.

He’d had to brush up on certain plotlines over the past few hours, but he was certain now that Battle City was the answer. In the second major arc of the series, Yugi Muto and his more confident alter ego, Yami Yugi, used the three Egyptian God Cards to battle powerful enemies. 

A blue one called Obelisk the Tormentor, a red one called Slifer the Sky Dragon, and a yellow one known as The Winged Dragon of Ra. According to the show’s lore, the cards contained the spirits of ancient gods trapped within them and were considered unbeatable.

When he reached Episode 130 of Yu-Gi-Oh! in his research, something impossible happened. 

At the exact moment Yugi Muto successfully obtained all three legendary cards  and held them together for the first time, the screen suddenly glitched. 

Golden text flashed into existence across the display. 

The symbols spread beyond the video window, superimposed across the entire laptop screen as though something had momentarily taken control of the machine.

Somehow sensing that the moment would not last long, Asher quickly reached for his phone and snapped a picture of the next puzzle in the mystery, various strings of letters.

FPPJ WRME FAJP NSZM AAPA

Immediately after the camera snapped, his laptop abruptly shut down. The sharp smell of smoke filled the room, and Asher realized with disbelief that the computer had just been fried. 

For his own amusement, he’d tried to recreate the phenomenon later that day on his phone, but nothing unusual happened. He’d come to believe that whatever had happened would never occur again, and that somehow it had been deliberately caused. Probably by whoever had sent him down this rabbit hole in the first place.

[jclonanwrites]

Chapter 6: The instant Slifer the Sky Dragon, Obelisk the Tormentor, and The Winged Dragon of Ra were reunited, something impossible touched Asher's computer

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[jclonanwrites]

Chapter 5

Mr. Gardnell was an explosion of anger waiting to happen. Every time Luke tried to be himself around his assigned paraprofessional, he was met with disapproving looks or, in the worst cases, shouting. He’d learned to keep himself in check, but sometimes, no matter how hard he tried, the less glamorous parts of having an extra chromosome still slipped through.

A few months earlier, Luke had gone through a phase where he repeatedly said the word “soap” while rubbing his hands together because he thought it was funny. Mr. Gardnell clearly did not share the amusement. In front of the entire class, he yanked at what little hair he had left and snapped at Luke until the room fell silent with embarrassment. Another time, during a school field trip, Luke wandered off to eat leftover fries from abandoned plates in a museum food court and was screamed at incessantly afterward, as if he had committed some kind of crime.

Sometimes Luke wondered why Mr. Gardnell had chosen paraeducation in the first place, since he seemed to go out of his way to avoid interacting with him. He kept himself wrapped up in conversations and only helped Luke enough to meet the basic requirements of his job. 

As Luke flew his Krypto the Superdog action figure around inside his locker, Mr. Gardnell walked over. His eyes stayed mostly on his phone, where he was playing Candy Crush Saga, and he didn’t bother to greet Luke or ask how he was doing, as usual.

“Class time, hoss,” he said lackadaisically. 

The man had been to Texas on vacation last summer and now acted like a native, sprinkling cowboy jargon into conversation as if it were his new purpose in life.


Luke was too engrossed in his fantasy to notice much of the world around him. In his imagination, Krypto had just used his heat vision to blast an opening in the side of the evil Brainiac’s spaceship, freeing his owner, Superman from captivity. He made quiet sound effects under his breath and, for a moment, felt like he was on top of the world.

After not seeing any movement out of the corner of his eye, Mr. Gardnell finally looked up and was immediately irritated by what he saw. He let out a long sigh and shook his head, already exhausted by what he viewed as yet another pointless distraction.

 “Luke! It’s school time, not time for horsing around.”

Luke’s mind snapped back to reality, his cheeks flushing with embarrassment as he once again wondered why he was always criticized for simply enjoying something.

The one thing that seemed to irritate Mr. Gardnell more than anything else was Luke’s love for superheroes. He never understood the appeal and treated it like childish nonsense. Anytime the subject came up, he launched into the same tired lecture about staying grounded in reality and focusing on “meaningful” things like math or science instead.

Luke muttered a quiet apology and hurriedly gathered his things, a routine that had become far too familiar. He reached for Krypto, intending to bring the figure with him to class, but Mr. Gardnell snatched it from his hand and shoved it back into the locker, insisting he didn’t need toys at school. 

Luke watched silently as the small figure, a friend in its own way, was locked away behind the metal door. Without it, the classroom suddenly felt much less safe.

– – 

Most of Luke’s classes took place in the special education room, a “separate setting” as the school officials called it. At first, being grouped with a smaller class had felt special, almost like belonging to an exclusive club, but lately Luke hated feeling isolated from everyone else. To make matters worse, most of his school day was spent working one-on-one with Mr. Gardnell.

Math had never come naturally to him, no matter how badly he wished he could understand numbers as easily as Reed Richards, the genius leader of the Fantastic Four. 

Today’s lesson involved doubling ingredients in a muffin recipe. Mr. Gardnell spread the worksheet across the table and pointed to a problem involving one-quarter cup of blueberries.

“If we double the recipe, what happens to the fraction, buckaroo?”

Luke stared at the number, realizing that he knew how to double.

Four times two is eight. 

A smile spread across his face as confidence rushed through him. For one brief, shining moment, he felt like he had finally gotten something right.

“It’s one-eighth!” Luke said proudly, sounding as confident as Spider-Man facing down his archnemesis, the Green Goblin. 

Mr. Gardnell sighed heavily. “Luke, that’s not how fractions work. You have to divide by two, not multiply by two. Have you been paying attention at all this week?”

Fractions always felt like some alien language designed specifically to confuse him.

“I just got confused,” he said quietly, struggling to force the words out clearly enough to be understood.

Mr. Gardnell’s patience finally cracked. “Maybe if you spent less time in la-la land with your superheroes, you’d know how to solve the problem. All that nonsense is clogging up your brain.”

The words hit Luke harder than the math ever could. Superheroes were not just toys or stories to him. They were comfort and hope, the one thing that made the world feel manageable when everything else became overwhelming. Luke lowered his head and fought back tears, truly realizing for the first time that he could never fully engage in his interests around Mr. Gardnell. 

That was when his eyes strayed toward the classroom window, and he saw the same black dog from that morning standing alone outside it.

He could tell it was a black labrador, just like his childhood dog, Moose, with a yellow, almost golden-colored collar around its neck.

At the sight of the animal, Luke felt a strange sense of connection wash over him, as though their paths had always been meant to cross.

[jclonanwrites]

Chapter 5: The weird thing wasn’t that the dog kept finding Luke. It was the impossible feeling that fate had already decided their paths would cross long before either of them understood why

[jclonanwrites]

Chapter 4

Silas Doyle called himself a “scientist” to friends and family, though it was simply the closest word he could find to describe what he did. 

In reality, he spent each day completing strange tasks he barely understood.

Two years earlier, he had stumbled across the job posting on Craigslist late one night. The pay had seemed absurdly high, especially for a position that required no prior experience whatsoever and somehow came with full benefits. It had felt too good to be true, but his desperation had outweighed suspicion at the time. Somehow, he was still here.

The only red flag had been the location. Each evening, Silas drove deep into the woods until the paved roads disappeared and the trees swallowed everything else. Hidden at the end of the route sat a collapsing shack that looked abandoned long before he was born. Inside was a rickety elevator that carried him down to a pristine laboratory filled with unrecognizable devices.

A man named John had been there on his first night to explain his duties and the process that the technology provoked. Input and output were described, but never much detail on what happened in between. The conversation seemed rushed, and Silas never saw him again afterward.

As Silas stood in his workplace pondering these things for what felt like the millionth time, he reached into a receptacle near the center of the room and lifted out a white mouse. 

As the mouth squirmed and squealed, Silas carried it back to his workstation and secured it into its restraints with practiced ease before turning to prepare further.

The machine on the right side of his desk resembled a toaster oven, its front a clear hinged door and the rest a smooth metal shell enclosing a hollow interior. 

Transparent tubes snaked from the back of the contraption and disappeared into a baseball-sized hole in the ceiling, though Silas still didn’t know where they led.

He pressed a button embedded into the left side of his desk, and a blue, semi-transparent holographic display flickered to life in the air above. With precise fingers, Silas manipulated the floating information like he always did. There had been a time when this unreleased technology fascinated him, but those days had long since passed and the novelty had faded into routine.

He navigated to a window filled with dozens of multicolored rectangles and tapped a blue one marked “1221B.” After giving a small nod of approval, he shut off the projection.

After a few seconds, a female mechanized voice spoke in a flat, emotionless tone. “Please insert a blank artifact into the chamber to initiate the merging process.”

He reached down to his right and picked up the incision scalpel that had been set there earlier. Then, he placed the tool onto the tray inside the toaster-like machine before closing the door.

Almost instantly, a faintly glowing blue gas began flowing through the tubes. Through the clear door, he watched the fumes bathe the scalpel from every direction. The vapor twisted and folded over itself, ensuring every inch of the tool was coated.

It ended as quickly as it had begun. The strange mist retreated and vanished upward into whatever hidden system had produced it.

 A loud ding, reminiscent of a microwave, echoed through the laboratory as though something were ready to eat. He had always loathed that small detail of the process.

The machine was programmed to lock itself after the procedure, so Silas placed both palms on the scanners mounted on his desk. A soft click echoed through the room as the chamber became accessible once again.

He opened the chamber using the handle, and retrieved the scalpel, which had taken on a bluish tint. Blue, glowing incandescent particles drifted from the sides through the air before dissipating, almost like sparks carried from a campfire by the wind.

Silas was always afraid to touch things the machine created at this stage. It was a reflex he couldn’t shake, likely brought on by the undeniable power pushing against his skin, even through the thick protective gloves that he wore. The sensation felt unnatural, as though the scalpel carried something that did not follow the rules of existence.

He carefully pressed the tip of the scalpel into the mouse’s abdomen. Frost immediately formed around the incision point, spreading outward across the mouse’s body. Within seconds, the animal was frozen solid.

Silas placed the mouse and scalpel into a small containment box. A black flame was embossed on its lid, the same symbol that appeared across much of the equipment around the facility, though he had never been told what it meant.

 He slid the box into a chute in the corner of the room and went to grab another mouse.

[jclonanwrites]

Chapter 4: The machine coated the scalpel in something science couldn’t explain

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[jclonanwrites]

Chapter 3

On the same morning, Asher Roberts sat at his desk with a mug of black coffee slowly cooling at his side. He had taken the day off from work, worn down by the constant social interaction and unsettled by the strange dream that still lingered at the edges of his thoughts.

Dual monitors cast a soft glow across the room. One displayed the unforgiving world of Dark Souls, where every movement and attack had to be timed with careful precision. The other held a meticulously organized spreadsheet tracking achievements, collectibles, and every other bit of progress he had made in the game. Beneath the desk sat a powerful computer glowing red through its transparent casing.

He took a sip of his coffee, now lukewarm after the gaming session, then set aside the plugged-in purple controller and turned back to his research.

For five years, Asher had been trying to figure out the mysterious social media post that appeared on Omnia. At first, the post had simply been a curiosity, another way to occupy his time on his computer, but the feeling the video gave him the first time he watched it kept drawing him back more than any of his other interests ever had.

A little over a year ago, Asher ran the video through editing software and slowed it down frame by frame, extracting each individual image for closer inspection. Most of his tests turned up nothing, but after pushing both the brightness and contrast far beyond normal levels, he finally found something interesting. 

For a single frame, when the fire behind the skeleton flickered at its strongest, a handful of objects appeared at the edge of the screen. Even experts might have missed them. They blended into the scene, easy to overlook, as if they had always been part of the room rather than deliberately placed.

A golden ankh, a silver trident, and a horned helmet that felt strangely familiar.

Each of the objects seemed capable of carrying countless meanings, leaving Asher with no clear place to begin. Instead, he pursued every avenue he could think of. Old Egyptian mythology texts, Greek fables, Aquaman comic books, and medieval artifacts were only the beginning.

As Asher looked at the frozen frame for what felt like the millionth time, his gaze drifted to the photo sitting on his desk. It was an action shot of him and his father playing pinball together at an arcade museum. His chest tightened, as it always did when he looked at it. 

His father had been missing for seven years. 

One night in April, he simply never came home. At first, Asher assumed he had just gotten held up somewhere and would eventually stumble through the front door with a halfhearted apology and a bag of Arby's in hand. But morning came and went, and he still hadn’t returned. There was no call, no text, and no sign of where he had gone.

As the familiar ache in his chest passed, he found himself drifting back to his childhood like always. This time, he was in the living room. 

He and his father sat on the couch beneath an old beige blanket with a faded brown panther stitched across it, pulled close to the television for the best view, sharing a carton of Chunky Monkey ice cream as reruns of Yu-Gi-Oh! played on the screen.

He hadn’t thought about this memory in years. It was a painful reminder of how often the two of them had lost themselves in the same fantastical stories.

Suddenly, the memory shifted. 

The living room within his mind’s eye dissolved to reveal a figure draped in white robes and a turban, his face calm and unreadable.The image lingered longer than it should have, pressing itself into Asher’s thoughts with a clarity that felt almost intrusive.

He snapped to his computer without hesitation, fingers already moving as he chased the fragment before it could fade from his mind. Search results flooded the screen almost instantly, rows of images and links blurring together as he scanned them faster than he could properly process, until one image abruptly stopped him in his tracks. He clicked it immediately, excitement flickering through his concentration as the page loaded and revealed the same robed figure from his memory, a character apparently named Shadi.

The revelation registered only faintly as his eyes moved across the page, searching for something he could not yet define. He skimmed episode summaries and wiki pages, his attention narrowing with each passing second, drawn toward a detail that felt just out of reach.

Asher leaned closer to the screen as he continued reading, his focus tightening when he learned that Shadi wielded a golden ankh known as the Millennium Key, a mystical artifact from the show’s lore.

It was just an image from an old cartoon, nothing more than a fictional object tied to a character he had not thought about in years, yet the way it hung from Shadi’s hand fed into a growing certainty he could not ignore.

This was where the social media post had been leading him.

[jclonanwrites]

Chapter 3: A golden ankh, a silver trident, and a horned helmet that feels strangely familiar