Frek and the Elixir Read Online Free PDF Page A

muttered Frek. His face felt hot. “I’m good the way I am.” Turning away, he hurried up the steps to Stoo’s room before Sao could pick on him any more.
    Stoo had his window curtains closed and his lights turned off. He was perched on a big round cushion in the middle of the floor. He was a dark-haired, bright-eyed boy a bit taller and older than Frek, and with a crooked angularity to his jaw. He was handsome and very much his own person, a kid that the others looked up to. Frek wasn’t quite sure why someone as gaud as Stoo even hung out with him.
    Right now Stoo was holding an imitation gun grown by a please plant. A prop gun. It didn’t need an uvvy-link. Because of all the eyes in a house tree’s wall, the toons could track Stoo’s hand motions closely enough to tell when and in which direction he meant to shoot.
    â€œYubba, Frek,” said Stoo. It was the standard greeting for kids their age, though it had sounded odd coming from Sao in the kitchen.
    â€œYubba you,” said Frek. “Here’s some cookies from your mother.” He dragged over a cushion and sat down next to Stoo. Wow lunged for the cookies again but Frek sharply blocked him. “No, Wow! You want to stay at home next time?” He felt around on Stoo’s floor and found a prop gun of his own.
    The Skull Farmers were on all the curving walls of Stoo’s room. Their world was designed around an old-time Y2K theme. Frek could see at first glance that it was another Toonsmithy masterpiece. An oil refinery was burning in the distance, killer giraffes and elephants were silhouetted nearby, and six business-suited figures were flying across the sky on winged motorcycles. Loosely ranged across the foreground were three lively, individualistic skeletons in Y2K garb. Skull Farmers.
    The three Skull Farmers noticed right away that someone new had come into Stoo’s room. Frek happened to focus on one of them, and that one got big; his bony face filled the whole wall.
    Toons had a way of enlarging whatever aspect of their world you focused on. The toonsmiths called the technique “phenomenological autozoom,” but gamers just called it “pzoom.” The toons were letting Frek, and not Stoo, control the pzoom. They wanted to draw him into the game.
    The face Frek had focused on was a goggy shecked-out skull with glowing red eyes, a gold front tooth, and a crumpled black top hat upon the deathly white pate. A rusty nail had been hammered into one side of the skull, with a pair of dice dangling from it like an earring.
    â€œWelcome, Frek,” said the skull-faced toon. His voice was shrill and grainy, as if he’d been yelling all day long. “They call me Gypsy Joker. We need yore smarts and firepower. Seems we’ve got our butts into a bit of a situation hyar.” He hooked one thumb toward the sky, and Frek pzoomed out to view the background. “The six Financiers of the Apocalypse is a-comin’, just for openers. I cain’t promise you an easy run, but it could be hella fun. You wanna sign on with the Skull Farmers?”
    Meanwhile Stoo fired off a couple of shots at the business-suited Financiers of the Apocalypse, who took the damage hits in a shower of green dollar signs and circled back into the distance.
    â€œRight on, Stoo,” said the second Skull Farmer, and Frek brought him into view. He was wearing a red velvet cape and held an archaic electric guitar. He pushed himself into prominence and struck a chord of rich metallic-sounding music, sending images of roses spiraling out. “I’m Strummer,” he told Frek. Some of his teeth were black and he had an old-time British accent. He struck a pose and raised his voice to a warbling shriek. “Are you ready to rock and roll?”
    â€œHold it,” said the third Skull Farmer in a sharp tone. Frek was back to a medium view, now, showing all three of the Skull Farmers. The third one had a heavy