The Quantum Coloring Book: Special Edition - The Complete First Season Read online

  the Quantum

  coloring book

  - SPECIAL EDITION -

  the complete first season

  J.G. Kemp

  dedicated to:

  All those who add color in Grayille - or who try.

  Copyright © 2017 by J.G. Kemp

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  The author is not liable for any objects, creatures, monsters, evil robots, black holes, or other disastrous events created by this book - such mishaps are the sole responsibility of the unfortunate owner who chooses to color on these pages.

  For contact information visit:

  storiesinscience.com

  CONTENTS

  Episode 1: the thing with fangs!

  Episode 2: bigger, better, and BAD!

  Episode 3: too many troubles!

  Episode 4: travels in time!

  Special Features: super awesome stuff!

  Prologue - Episode 1

  the black hole

  Hey. My name is Brandon. Brandon Black. And you may be wondering why I’m sitting here, staring into this hole. This hole that is devouring everything. This black hole that has already swallowed my sister, and my parents, and my best friend, and my house, and the school, and the entire town of Grayville.

  I’m sitting here, staring into the darkness, because it’s my fault. I made it. I drew the black hole — in the coloring book. And I have to stop it, before it grows even bigger, and swallows up the next town, and the next, and the next, and the whole state, and the country, and the Earth, and the Moon.

  I have to stop it before it swallows the entire universe!

  

  I didn’t mean for this to happen. But only I can take it back. I know that. And I know what I need to do, but I’m afraid to do it. Because you see, that means I have to use the quantum coloring book again. Even though I swore I wouldn’t.

  I swore I’d never use it again after I learned how to draw giants which almost destroyed Grayville. I swore I’d never use it again after I drew a robot that tried to kill me. I swore I’d never use it again after I made the black hole the first time.

  But I have to use the book again. I have to. Because only I can save the world now.

  

  I’m sitting here, staring into this black hole, because I’m about to go back in time. Back before this whole thing started, back to when everything was normal, back to before the quantum coloring book ruined my life! Back to the beginning.

  But before I do, I need to tell you how all this happened. So that if you ever find a book like this one, you will NEVER USE IT!

  My name is Brandon Black, and this is my story…

  episode 1: the thing with fangs!

  Chapter 1

  three months ago

  “Mom! Mom! The mailman is here. He’s holding a package! It’s the new books!”

  That. That’s my sister. She’s three years older than me and super annoying. And not just normal annoying, like most sisters. She’s off the charts, the most annoying sister that ever lived.

  “Mom, come quick!”

  My best friend Spencer, he has a sister, and she’s not so bad. She doesn’t jump up and down screaming with excitement when the mailman comes. She doesn’t go crazy over a package of books. Spencer’s sister keeps quiet, and stays in her room, and never looks at me. Spencer’s sister is normal.

  “Mom! Mom! Mom! This has to be it. This has to be it! Ahhhhh! I’m so excited! Mom!! Come here quick!”

  See what I mean. My sister is not normal. That is not normal behavior. Her name is Hazel, like that plant, witch-hazel. Sometimes I think she must be a witch, because not a day goes by where she doesn’t do something crazy. Just yesterday she was perfectly happy all day and then she looked at her phone for two minutes and ran to her room crying. Crazy, I tell you.

  ding dong. The doorbell rang.

  “Mom! Come on!”

  As I watched Hazel run to the front door and fling it open, I hoped that the package wasn’t her new books. Because maybe then she would sulk off to her bedroom and leave me alone.

  But it wasn’t my luck. She grabbed the package from the stunned mailman, slammed the door in his face, and ran to the dining room. She tore open the box and scattered its contents across the table. Her eyes gleamed with a crazy glint. “Just like a witch,” I thought.

  “Ahhhh, this is the best day of my entire life! Ahhhhh!” Hazel shouted as she pulled out three new coloring books. Then she started jumping up and down with glee.

  I looked at her and rolled my eyes. “More coloring books?” I said. “Don’t you have enough of those?”

  She stopped jumping and stuck her tongue out at me and said, “You can never have too many coloring books. Come on Brandon, just join the fun already. Why are you so grumpy all the time?”

  Just then my mom finally came into the room. “Brandon, stop fighting with your sister. Oh wonderful, my new books came too.”

  That. That’s my mom. Sometimes she is just like a grown-up version of my sister.

  “Oh, the board game your father wanted. Brandon, you might like this.” She handed me a big box. “And do stop scowling. Lighten up a little. You might enjoy coloring too if you’d just try it.”

  “Mom, I used to color, when I was a little kid. I’m not a little kid anymore.” I looked down at the box in my hands. It was some game called Jumungee, or Jumongi, or something impossible to pronounce.

  My mom always wanted to play board games. “Family-time,” she called it. I think they should be called bored-games. They’re boring because my sister always takes forever, and my mom always gives me clues like I’m still a little kid.

  * * *

  Well, gave me clues. As annoying as I thought they were, I miss them now, now that they’re gone, devoured by the black hole. Why am I telling you all this? Because what happened next was the beginning of it all. What happened next is the thing I have to stop. And it’s the only way I can bring them back. It’s the only way I can bring everything back.

  Chapter 2

  the strange book

  I couldn’t take any more jumping and shouting by Hazel—my ears hurt. And I certainly couldn’t sit there and watch her color in those coloring books like she was in kindergarten. So I went out into the backyard.

  

  I had an awesome fort in my backyard, which I had built from old wood my dad didn’t need. It was set up against the fence and had a small doorway covered by an old black blanket that used to be on my bed. Hazel never went in my fort. I had built it far away from the house, near the alley, so I could sit inside it and look out of a hole in the fence. Here I could watch what people were doing in the street or in their backyards.

  It’s not like anything exciting ever happened, but it was a good way to pass the time. There was Ms. Violet across the street who walked her dog in circles around her backyard every ten minutes. There was Mr. Brown in the next house over who always sat on his patio, reading books all day, whether it was raining or snowing or hotter than an oven. He was bald. I think I liked watching them because they didn’t bother me. They didn’t even know about me.

  Well, that day, as I was sitting there watching Ms. Violet walk her dog for the third time, something caught my eye. Something wedged underneath some old boards in my dad’s woodpile on the other side of the fence. A gust of wind blew and the thing flutt
ered. It was made of paper. It was a book. It was THE book.

  I wasn’t supposed to leave the backyard without asking first, so I crawled out of my fort like a ninja and snuck into the alley, making sure that my mom wasn’t watching out the window. I ran to the wood pile, grabbed the book, ran back, and closed the gate behind me.

  When I was in my fort again, I inspected the book. It was new and had a strange cover. It was black and shiny. Across the top it said the words Quantum Coloring Book in greenish blue letters that almost seemed like they were glowing. “Oh great,” I thought, “not another coloring book. Why does everyone like these so much?” I flipped through the book and was surprised to find that it was blank—no drawings or words or anything.

  “Why would it be called a coloring book if there isn’t anything to color?” I wondered to myself. I looked at the cover again. Were the words glowing? I couldn’t tell. I tilted the book left and right to see it from different angles. I could swear the words were glowing.

  “Hey Brandon, you in there?”

  I jumped, as if I had been awoken from a trance. The voice came from across the alley. It was my best friend, Spencer. He lives next door. We’ve been best friends since we were three, when he moved to Grayville. I don’t know where he lived before that. I poked my head out of the fort and shouted back, “Yeah, can you come over?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be right there!” he answered.

  When he came into the fort I showed him the book. “Hey, look what I just found in the woodpile. It says it’s a coloring book but there’s nothing in here to color.”

  Spencer took the book and flipped through it. “Huh. That’s weird,” he said and gave it back to me.

  “Yeah, the cover is cool though. It’s so strange looking. Hey, do those words look like they’re glowing to you?”

  “Eh, not really.” Spencer shrugged. “What’s the point in a coloring book if there’s nothing to color?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I said and looked away. Even Spencer liked coloring. That was the only thing that he liked that I didn’t. Otherwise, we liked all the same things: baseball, beetles, digging holes in the yard, building forts.

  “Hey, you wanna play baseball?” Spencer asked.

  

  “Yeah, okay.” I set the book down, and Spencer and I played catch in the backyard for awhile.

  Later on, when my mom called me in for dinner, I grabbed the book and took it to my room and stuffed it in my backpack. I didn’t want Hazel finding it. I knew if she saw it she would say something like, “Look! Brandon likes coloring now!”

  I was not about to be caught with anything that said “coloring book” on it.

  * * *

  I sometimes wonder how things would have been different if I hadn’t put the book in my backpack that night. Then I would never have brought the book to school, and the thing with fangs would never have come out.

  Chapter 3

  grayville elementary

  My school is called Grayville Elementary School. Pretty interesting name, huh? Grayville. They named the boring school after the boring name of the boring town. They could have at least called it something exciting, like Excitement-ville, or Amazing-town, but I guess that would have been lying. Nothing exciting or amazing ever happened in Grayville.

  The same went for my school. Nothing exciting or amazing ever happened. I’m in 3rd grade and in all the years I’ve been in school, I can’t remember a single exciting or amazing thing. It was always the same: walk to school, go to class, learn math and reading, go to lunch, learn more math and reading, and go home. Some days we had music and gym, but those were usually just as boring, we mainly filled in worksheets.

  The teachers were just as boring as the school. They weren’t exciting like some of those teachers you see on TV or in the movies, you know, teachers that do fun stuff in their classrooms, like smile. Every teacher I’ve had at Grayville Elementary school: Ms. Bleak, Mr. Dull, Mrs. Sullen, Mr. Bland, Mrs. Lackluster, and Mr. Stale, has been boring.

  Mr. Stale is my teacher now, my 3rd grade teacher. He has a mustache and wears a brown tie everyday.

  It’s not like my teachers are mean or anything, and I’ve never been in trouble, but they’re not nice either. They’re just sort of — blah.

  Anyway, before I went into Mr. Stale’s classroom that morning, I hung my backpack on the hook outside the room and took out my lunchbox and the coloring book. I tried to hide the book behind my lunchbox because Olive Mauve was right behind me.

  “Hey Brandon Black, what’s that?”

  That’s Olive. Olive wins first place for the most annoying award, right above my mom and sister.

  “Nothing,” I said and turned away, trying to shield the book.

  “It doesn’t look like nothing,” Olive craned her neck to see around my lunchbox. “Is it a coloring book?”

  Olive loves coloring more than anyone in Grayville, and she always talks to herself in a sing-song voice when she colors: “Don’t go outside the lines, Olive”, “Use a complimentary palette, Olive”, “Sharpen your pencil, Olive, you can’t make clean lines with a dull pencil.” It’s so annoying. And she’s always trying to get me to color. “Why don’t you color more, Brandon, maybe you wouldn’t be so grumpy.”

  “No, Olive, it’s just a blank book,” I said and tried to turn away again but I was smashed up against the coat rack.

  “Let me see it,” Olive said and grabbed the book from my hands. “Quantum Coloring Book, huh? I’ve never heard of that. What’s in it?” She began to flip through the book.

  “Nothing’s in it, it’s blank, see? It’s not really a coloring book. I told you it was nothing.”

  “A blank coloring book? That’s just silly. You’re silly Brandon Black.” She gave the book back to me and walked away.

  “Whatever, Olive,” I thought, and followed her into Mr. Stale’s room. I walked to my desk and shoved the book inside and forget all about it as Mr. Stale started talking about something boring.

  * * *

  Poor Olive. She was the first to go into the black hole. I never thought I’d say this, but I even miss Olive Mauve.

  Chapter 4

  lunchtime trouble

  That day at lunch we had slimy green peas with mushed red beans and soggy white rice.

  “Yumm,” I said as I scooped up the red and white slop with a plastic spork and dumped it back on my plate. “Same thing we had yesterday, and the day before that.”

  “At least we got red jello today,” said Spencer with a grin. I always sat next to Spencer at lunch. Spencer was an optimist. You know, the kind of person who is always looking for the good in everything. The kind of person who says things like: “It could be worse,” and “Look on the bright side.” Spencer was my best friend but sometimes his positive attitude could be more annoying than Olive Mauve’s obsession with coloring.

  “Yeah, runny red jello.” I added. The pool of jello on my plate had spilled over and onto my tray. My napkin was absorbing the red jello like a sponge. It looked kinda neat. I dropped some slimy green peas in it and imagined they were dead fish floating around in bloody water.

  “BRANDON BLACK! What are you doing, young man!?”

  I froze. It was the lunch lady, Mrs. Goop, standing behind me. She hated it when kids played with their food. If she caught them, they had to stay after lunch and help clean the cafeteria and couldn’t go to recess.

  “Um—” I started, but couldn’t say anything else. Mrs. Goop was scary. She wasn’t just blah like the teachers. She was mean.

  “After you eat ALL that jello, young man, come and see ME!” she commanded before waddling away back to the kitchen.

  After lunch Mrs. Goop made me wipe down all the trays with a rag that smelled so strong it made my eyes burn. I told Mrs. Goop that I thought the skin on my hand was dissolving from the cleaning fluid, but she just glared at me and snapped, “Those trays better be clean in the next TW
O MINUTES or you’ll be going to see the PRINCIPAL!”

  I knew Mrs. Goop would somehow tell my mom what I had done. Then my mom would sit me down and talk to me. I didn’t want my mom to talk to me. That was the first time I ever got in trouble at Grayville Elementary school. But my problems were about to get much worse…

  Chapter 5

  blue marbles

  The rest of that day was normal, until silent reading time. That’s when it all began. At 1:30 we always had silent reading time. This is when Mr. Stale would sit at his desk and read a book and the whole class was supposed to read quietly. I didn’t want to read that day. I didn’t want to read any day. I hated silent reading time.