The Launch

Chapter 8

Before Corey left, they made one final trip through the human world together, carefully and after dark.
They stocked the cabin with food, paper, pencils, replacement drawing supplies, batteries, and everything else Nifty might need. Corey also spent hours going over the work they had been doing online.
The website. The accounts.
The collection. And now the token Nifty had decided would become another piece of the strange little world he was building.
Corey walked him through everything again until Nifty finally pushed his chair back. "I know how to do it." Nifty barked
"I know you do." Replied Corey
"Then stop explaining it." Nifty sanpped back
Corey smiled.and said "Just making sure."
Nifty rolled his eyes. The following morning, Corey had to leave.
Nifty followed him back and watched from the trees until the sound of his vehicle disappeared. Then he returned to the cabin.
It was exactly as it had been before Corey arrived in his life.
Quite.
And Nifty had once preferred it that way. Now the silence felt different, he felt alone.
Alone Again Nifty filled the silence with work. He drew.
He refined old drawings. He experimented with the digital tools he had spent months learning.
He organized the collection, changed things he disliked, redrew faces, adjusted details, and started over when a memory did not feel right. Every drawing pulled him somewhere else.
A face reminded him of a street. A street reminded him of a voice.
A voice brought back a night he had almost forgotten
He was just a youngling, and he was playing with his friends by a creek.
Hr smiled, and sometimes he laughed while he worked.
He would even he stop drawing altogether and stare at the page.
The cabin became covered in home.
Some drawings came easily. Others did not.
There were nights when Nifty could remember every crooked grin and every line of a familiar face, yet his hand still refused to make the page feel right. Those were the nights that bothered him most.
He would sit at the old table long after the cabin had gone quiet, staring at a face he missed until the memory behind it felt almost close enough to touch.
Then he would erase a line and try again. Eventually there was nothing left to prepare.
Corey had helped Nifty build the pieces before leaving, and Nifty had gone over them so many times that even he had run out of things to change. The token was ready.
Nifty stared at the screen. For someone who had spent so much of his life hiding from humans, he had somehow reached a moment where he was about to ask them to believe in something he had made.
Not in him. They could never know about him.
But in the strange little identity he had built online. The gremlin they thought was just a character.
Nifty launched it. Then he waited.
At first, almost nothing happened. Then a buy appeared.
Then another. Then messages started coming in.
People staring sharing his posts. They joked with him.
They talked about the art that was coming. They bought his token, they held onto it, and began gathering around the strange little gremlin account they had been watching.
Nifty sat in the cabin staring at the screen. A grin slowly spread across his face, it was the first time he hadn't felt like he didnt belong.
The humans thought there was a person somewhere pretending to be a gremlin. They had no idea there was a gremlin, pretending to be a person.
Nifty liked it better that way. The token gave the project room to grow.
It helped Nifty keep building, keep creating, and prepare the artwork he that would follow. For the first time, the strange world he had built online no longer felt like something only he and Corey understood.
Other people were becoming part of it too. And Nifty was more excited than he wanted to admit.
The NFT collection was nearly finished. Nifty had polished every piece until he could look at it without immediately finding something he wanted to redraw.
The release could have happened at any time. But Nifty waited.
Corey had been there when the project was only drawings scattered across a cabin. He had brought the supplies.
He had listened to the stories behind the faces. He had helped Nifty navigate a world that still made very little sense to him.
Nifty could launch the collection without him. He simply did not want to.
"He'll be back," Nifty told the empty cabin. The cabin offered no opinion.