"I’ve found it!"
A somewhat short and skinny fifth grade boy with messy black hair found himself precariously balanced on top of a twenty foot pile of metal scraps. Jimmy Starboy wobbled uneasily for a bit until his footing became more certain. Beaming from ear to ear, he quickly turned his head back and forth in search of his friends. The red dust of his home planet swirled about in a lazy fashion, making it difficult but not impossible to see the other surrounding piles of garbage and recycling.
Planet 59 had long been the outermost recycling post of the Funky Beltway. Long past its glory, this galaxy once held the homes of all the important intergalactic pop and rock stars: Ajax and the Jazz Squad, Millie T, the XY Chromebeats, and the Gnarly Knolls were legends from the past. With the advent of portal technology, the Funky Beltway soon turned into a dying, neighboring suburb of the massive Megatropolis galaxy.
In truth, the only families who remained on planet 59 worked for the recycling plant. With little else to do, Jimmy and his gang of fifth grade buddies lorded over the scrap yards - building forts, fighting legendary battles (with Jimmy’s side always winning of course), and scavenging for odd knickknacks to entertain themselves after school.
On this particular afternoon, Jimmy felt like he had won the Space Lotto. In his hands he held a working deep space radio transmitter. While the equipment was at least twenty years old, Jimmy did not care. He and his crew were going to become the next big band - maybe as big as the Afro-Space Jammers!
Filling his lungs with as much air as could possibly fit into his body, Jimmy bellowed out the names of his buddies - "WADE!...CADE!...HAROLD!"
Three piles over on his left about fifty feet away, a stout figure with short blond hair managed to dislodge himself from some rubbery entanglement. Whether this was Wade or his elder-by-five-minutes Cade remained uncertain to Jimmy until the next moment as another hulking blond figure a ways behind him yelled, "This better not be another Afro-Space Jammer album!" Wade had always been an Afro-Space Jammer skeptic.
Satisfied that he now knew which was which, Jimmy yelled out, "Hey! Have you seen Haro-" but at that moment, Harold made himself known through a familiar method - panicked screaming. Quickly jerking their heads around to the right, the boys watched in time for Harold to fall down a pile he had only halfway gone up. Harold’s high-pitched screaming rang through the air as he tumbled awkwardly back down to the red dust.
Harold was the smallest of the bunch with already balding brown hair and a large set of glasses that made his eyes look like the size of tennis ball…
(To Be Continued)