The Tale of Pip Karo

They were all orphans. Parentless kittens, lost children, the epitome of broken destinies.

Of course they were, how much more cliché could that be? Such a predictable tragedy.

Pip didn’t remember exactly when it happened, it had been so long ago that his memory of the incident was dim and fuzzy around the edges, but at one point in his life, he vaguely recalled having parents.

The one thing he remembered in vivid detail was living alongside Alison, his older cousin of three years. Though she had always been short in stature due to her flavor as a Sugarfloss, he had always looked up to her in a metaphorical sense.

Since she never saw her own parents again after they had both passed in an airplane crash long ago, Alison was like the elder sister that Pip never had. She took the time to teach him the wonders of card tricks and entertained his every whim while his parents were away for their boring office jobs.

One day, at the mischievous age of five, while fooling around with some matches Pip had discovered in the kitchen, curiosity sparked within him. In an attempt to perfect a magic trick he had seen on television once, he struck a flame.

Only to drop it out of instinctive fear. As soon as the fiery matches had collided with the floor, mayhem was unleashed.

A horrible fire was born.

In the few minutes that it took for a teary-eyed Pip to flee the scene, the flames had increased in no time. They ate away at the floorboards and walls. Acrid smoke fumes clouded the interiors of the house, making it difficult to breathe, let alone scream.

Pip tried to run into his parents’ master bedroom, that was the first course of action he had taken, but the door was bolted shut. They were still asleep, still oblivious to the madness that was bringing their home into ashes.

With no other choice, he then hurried to see Alison.

By then, Alison had already been awake. She did smell something akin to cooked wood in the air earlier, that’s what had kept her alert and on her toes.

After hastily dialing for help, and with a squad of firefighters now on their way, Alison tried to break down the door to their parents’ room, but to no avail.

Nothing worked. They were only children, after all. There wasn’t much they could do. In the end, they could only escape the chaos with just themselves. In their attempt to leave, they climbed out of a window from the living room before it was too late and waited for help to arrive.

The wails of sirens drowned out the rest of Pip’s toddler memories from there. All he could think back to were flashing red lights and his cousin’s congested screams as she cried over the loss of their parents in the fire.

With no other relatives to fall back on, Pip and Alison were later sent to an orphanage in the dirty outskirts of their city. It wasn’t the best area to walk through, especially since it bordered the slums and poverty line. However, it was better than nothing at all, so they took what they could get.

After the incident with the house fire, Alison’s attitude toward Pip began to morph into something bitter and glassy. The change in their family dynamic was a gradual process at first, with bits of stoic silences and harsh stares being sprinkled here and there over time.

But eventually, she had enough.

One day, Alison confessed wanting nothing to do with Pip. While seething with pent up rage, she blamed him for the house fire that ruined their lives. She’d been blaming him for months and it was only now did she finally reveal the razor sharp truth.

Pip was absolutely crushed.

He tried to plead for mercy, tried to beg for her forgiveness, for a chance at redemption, for anything at all, but Alison refused to even look his way. Her eyes had darkened with cold, shiny hatred - an expression he’d never seen her wear before in all his years of knowing her.

And with that, the Alison that was his cousin was deceased. Gone was his only family member, replaced with a complete and utter stranger.

With no one left to rely on in the orphanage, Pip resorted to playing with the deck of cards that Alison had once gifted him.

He would also hole himself up in the library, surrounding himself with a plethora of books, most of which were made up of funky riddles and poems. For some reason, his orphanage’s library had tall tales and riddle books more than anything.

Not that he minded. Aside from his playing cards, he grew to love the literature that he would immerse himself in. He would sink his brain into the beauty of the words, for they were his outlet away from reality.

One day, while practicing some card tricks yet again in a corner, an orange Popfloss with black stripes approached him. Her name was Sasha.

Sasha had noticed Pip ever since he had been introduced into the orphanage with Alison, but she had never bothered to talk to him until that moment.

She had only struck a light conversation out of curiosity. She didn’t intend to befriend Pip, she considered him a weirdo and was only wanting to know some of the card tricks that he knew so that she could perform some herself later.

She basically just wanted to use him to appear more cooler to her fellow orphans.

However, since Pip had never been close to anyone else besides Alison, he misunderstood her reason for talking to him as a freebie invite for him to bother her whenever he wanted.

After suffering from crippling loneliness for so long, it made sense that he was a tad socially inept.

He’d come up to her during lunchtime without warning, borrow her belongings without asking, and just annoy the ever living crap out of Sasha overall. Breaking social norms was a routine for him. He would even just speak to Sasha in puzzling riddles, perhaps to mess with her mind.

Pip was fully aware of the fact that Sasha didn’t like him all that much. But she was also his only link and the one Floss that he could speak to anyway.

So, he just continued being an asshole because that was a much better life to live than feeling lonely again.

Sasha had tried many times to ward Pip away with feisty one liners and petty insults, but that only drew him closer to her as a friend.

Eventually, she did concede with having Pip be her ‘sidekick’, as she would quote. Her ego was still fat and had a bit of a narcissistic flare at this point.

If Pip was going to stick around like the parasite that he was, then Sasha needed to at least take advantage of him. She started making Pip run errands for her, such as doing her homework and tidying her bed.

And Pip did whatever she wanted, so long as he received some attention by the end of the day. Eventually, they’d hang around each other so much to the point of being inseparable.

Sasha was also becoming fluent in Pip’s bullshit riddle language.

They became the best of friends, or at least they were in Pip’s point of view. He knew that the same might not be true on the other side of the coin, but he would shove that thought aside and pretend it didn’t exist. Ignorance could be bliss, as he would say.

One day, just when everything seemed to finally be settling down in relative peace, another problem began to arise for Pip, who was now eight years of age at this time.

While sneaking around and fetching a glass of water for Sasha in the middle of the night, he happened to eavesdrop on a strange snippet of conversation from one of the staff members at the orphanage.

“When are we selling the ten-year-olds?” was what he heard.

Trafficking.

That was the first thing that had popped up in his mind. Though he was only eight when he heard this, his range of vocabulary was higher than the average kid due to his love for riddles and reading.

His intellect was his saving grace.

After giving Sasha her water, Pip tried to swallow the dread that had been clogging up the back of his throat since his discovery and tried to put two and two together for her to understand. He spoke in hushed whispers and murmurs, and there was a tremble in the lilt his voice as he fumbled over some of his words.

By the time he was done giving away his horrifying conclusion, terror was painted all across Sasha’s orange face.

“We need to get out of here,” she told him, after a few moments of tense silence had loomed over them. He could tell that she was scared, her jawline was clenched and her hands were shaking, but he didn’t comment on it. “We leave next week.”

He could only nod in agreement.

Pip didn’t sleep much that night.

Too many thoughts were tackling his brain all at once. One of his hands couldn’t stop trembling. All of the aged cracks etched into the ceiling above him were becoming burned into his retinas.

Then, as the weight of his horror finally boiled within him, he wondered if Alison had truly been ‘adopted by a nice family’ on the day that she had left the orphanage half a year ago.

He couldn’t help but shed a tear at the thought. Even though she had cut ties with him already, even though he would never admit something like this aloud, a part of Pip still missed her and hoped that she was okay, wherever she was.

Once a week had flown by, it was time for Sasha and Pip to launch their runaway plans. They snuck out in the middle of the night and never came back.

The problem of survival came a couple of weeks after they had ran out of supplies in their backpacks. They were not accustomed to the gritty lifestyle of a stray street rat.

One day, a blind and old Zeta Floss by the name of Rapunzel decided to take pity on Pip and Sasha when they had both collapsed near her vacation home in the Iota Clan. She had found them after accidentally stabbing Sasha’s abdomen with her walking stick.

Once they had eaten the food her personal chef had offered them and finished explaining to her their circumstances, Old Lady Rapunzel decided to take it upon herself to let them stay in her vacation home.

She offered them a deal with certain terms: once they had finished all of their schooling (with high school being the last step), they were allowed full ownership of her vacation home.

Old Lady Rapunzel wasn’t going to stay in the Iota Clan for long, she still had a grandchild to see back in the Alpha Clan, but she was generous enough to at least provide them with shelter and her personal chef to help with food from now on.

The rest they had to somehow find on their own, but they could manage. They’ve already made it this far.

“Why?” Sasha had asked, her tone rightfully skeptical. “Why leave us with all these things when you barely know us?”

Pip frowned. “We could be little imps in sheep’s clothing, for all you know.” Each word was punctuated with a theatrical hand gesture. “A classic case of wickedness waiting to sink its fangs in your utmost kindness.”

With the most puzzled face ever, Old Lady Rapunzel just stared blankly in his direction. “Does he always talk like this?”

“Yeah,” Sasha chimed in. “He really does.”

“I may be blind,” Old Lady Rapunzel said, in that cracked and wobbly voice of hers, “but I’m not blind to what you two are going through. I used to be a kid from an orphanage just like your old one back in the Zeta Clan. It was a long, long time ago... it was quite a painful fate.”

As her words trailed off, there was a pinch of pain in her expression.

With her walking stick in hand, Old Lady Rapunzel rose from her chair. “I know you’re only children right now, but I wish you two the best of luck. I wish I could be of more help, but I still have family back home.”

“We‘ll try our best,” Sasha declared. “It’s the least we can do.”

And so began the next chapter in Pip’s life.

However, this is not the end. Sayonara is still a long way ahead.

For the finale of the story does not occur just yet. There are many more pages soon to be written and read, especially when it comes to how Pip eventually joins a biker gang, becomes less of a saint, and gets into the art of spray paint.

But that’s a whole different anecdote for another day.

For now, the beginning has come to a close.

Farewell, adieu, and may there be more to the tales of Pip Karo.