The Beginning

Chapter 1

Nifty doesn't remember how he got here. There was no doorway.
No flash of light. No journey he can remember taking.
One moment, there was home. The next memory he has is opening his eyes beneath unfamiliar trees in a world that wasn't his own.
He was alone. Lost in a forest filled with unfamiliar sounds, unfamiliar creatures, and distant signs of something he would eventually learn to fear more than anything else in this strange world.
Humans. For days, Nifty wandered.
Eventually, hidden deep among the trees, he discovered an old abandoned cabin. The roof leaked.
The floor creaked. Nature had already begun reclaiming parts of it.
It wasn't home. But it was safe.
So Nifty stayed. For a long time, the forest was Nifty's entire world.
During the day, he remained hidden inside the cabin or wandered beneath the cover of the trees. At night, curiosity pulled him farther.
That was when he first began watching humans. Always from a distance.
He wandered empty streets after businesses closed. He searched through things people left behind.
He watched this strange civilization from alleys, rooftops, tree lines, and shadows. The human world confused him.
Machines moved without animals pulling them. Tiny glowing screens seemed to contain entire worlds.
People carried more technology in their pockets than Nifty had seen in his entire life. But among all the strange things humans had created, one caught his attention more than anything else.
Art. Nifty discovered graffiti before he ever understood what humans called it.
Colors stretched across concrete walls. Characters stared down from abandoned buildings.
Names, symbols, creatures, and stories covered places humans seemed to have forgotten. He understood none of the words.
He understood exactly why they were there. Someone wanted to leave something behind.
Someone wanted to be remembered. That feeling was painfully familiar.
Because Nifty had begun forgetting. At first, it was little things.
A street from home whose name he couldn't remember. The sound of a familiar voice.
The shape of a building. Then faces started becoming less clear.
Gremlins he had known his entire life became fragments in his mind. Some memories remained vivid.
Others felt like dreams he had awakened from too quickly. That frightened Nifty more than being trapped in the human world ever had.
If he couldn't return home, his memories were all he had left. And eventually, even those would disappear.
The humans had unknowingly shown him how to fight back. He would make something permanent.
Nifty stood about three and a half feet tall, roughly waist-high beside a grown human, but there was nothing delicate about him.
He was squat and broad through the shoulders, with green skin, oversized pointed ears, a jagged purple crest of hair, and hands made for gripping, climbing, and getting into things that probably should have been left alone. One eye was dark with a purple X set into it, the other pale with a black X.
In the human world, there was no mistaking him for anything ordinary. The cabin fit him better than the world outside did.
Human chairs were too tall, counters sat near his chest, and an ordinary pencil looked almost long enough to be a tool in his compact hands. He adapted
anyway. Nifty had become very good at adapting.
Nifty returned to his cabin carrying an old pencil and a few pieces of discarded notebook paper. He sat down.
And he drew. At first, his hands struggled to recreate what his mind could still see.
But slowly, something familiar appeared on the page. A gremlin.
Someone from home. Nifty stared at the finished drawing for a long time.
For the first time since waking beneath those trees, home didn't feel quite so far away. So he drew another.
Then another. Some were strange.
Some were troublemakers. Some were friends.
One face appeared more often than the others. Rook.
Nifty never needed a reference for him. Even as other memories softened around the edges, Rook remained stubbornly clear: the uneven grin, the nick along one ear, the look he wore whenever he was about to suggest something that would almost certainly become a bad idea.
Rook had been there for more of Nifty's life than Nifty could neatly separate into stories. Friend was the easiest human word for it, though it never felt large enough.
Whenever Nifty worried that home was disappearing from him, he drew Rook again. Some were creatures he remembered only well enough to know they had once mattered.
There were gremlins from the water. Gremlins that lived among stone.
Old gremlins. Wild gremlins.
Creatures unlike anything Nifty had encountered in the human world. Night after night, memory after memory, Nifty filled the cabin with pieces of the world he'd lost.
And slowly, he began healing. Around the same time, little things began happening.
A pencil wasn't where Nifty remembered leaving it. A drawing appeared on the floor after he was certain he had left it on the table.
Food disappeared. Late at night, something scratched along the outside wall.
Once, a shadow moved past the cabin window. Nifty ran outside.
Only the trees were waiting. He told himself there were explanations.
The cabin was old. Animals lived in the woods.
He had spent a long time alone. Maybe memories could play tricks on you.
Maybe staring at drawings for hours could make familiar shapes appear where there were none. So Nifty kept drawing.
And he kept hiding. He still trusted no humans.
He had no reason to believe that would ever change.