Tyler was...
not an ambitious type of guy.
Oh, sure, when he was five years old he'd wanted to be a firefighter, but shortly thereafter, Superman, so it wasn't really all that serious.
He'd been working at a convenience store on the corner for around a year now.
The thing was, he was ambitious, in a way.
He just didn't know exactly what he was ambitious about.
Ambition to find his ambition, or his passion.
But the days rolled on and turned into months. He'd graduated some time ago, but nothing really caught his interest. Sure, comic books, video games, going to see a movie, but those weren't passions for him, just things to fill the time. He spent a lot of time watching old movies, both at home and at work, because there wasn't much happening at a small convenience store and gas station in a small town.
At first, there were a lot of people cheering him on, bright future, all of that.
One by one, they vanished, and abandoned him to his fate.
Tyler understood, although it was sad; who could constantly stick around encouraging someone who seemed to want nothing more but a humdrum life?
He felt listless and purposeless, but without any direction to turn.
He wanted to be really good at something, but absolutely no idea what that might be, and therefore, no way to achieve it.
So he worked behind the counter at the convenience store in his small town, and he was a reliable, decent employee, but everything felt a little gray to him.
Day in, and day out.
Mrs. Ellison, who came in every day at 10.30 am on the dot to buy a roll of toilet paper and a tin of cat food, once surprised him with wanting an item she couldn't find, a windshield squeegee. He fished one out (it was hiding behind all the windshield wiper fluid) and she congratulated him, calling him her 'convenience store hero'.
Something to add to his very short resumé, he supposed.
Tyler still lived with his parents, but that actually had little to do with his current aimlessness. The cost of rent was so ridiculous that he didn't see the point, and he got along fairly well with his mom and dad anyway. He understood there were plenty of people not so lucky, but he had ended up with one of those nice, kind families portrayed on television. A dad who played catch with him, a mom who baked casseroles. Even his kid sister wasn't too much of a pain, depending on the day.
Besides, he figured, better to leave what apartments were available out there to the people who really needed them, since he didn't even know what he wanted to do with his life.
"There's no harm in having a simple life," his mom advised him at the dinner table, while he was picking through his chicken pot pie. "If you just want to work retail or run a store for the rest of your life, that's fine. Peaceful, even."
"Loser," said his sister Trixie, but she was grinning at him.
"Kids," said their dad, as a mild warning.
"That's the thing, Mom, I don't want to have a simple life," said Tyler. "I want to do something. I just don't know what."
"Well, is there anything you like?"
"Nothing more than anything else."
"I'm gonna be queen!" Trixie announced.
"You can't just become the queen, Trix, you have to be born into it."
"Watch me."
"I'm sure you'll figure it out, sweetheart," said his mom, and the conversation switched to the latest baseball game.
Later, while Tyler was watching some old movie, Allan Quatermain or something, Trixie bounded into the room and landed next to him on the couch.
"Hey!" Tyler protested. "You could've hit me."
Trixie frowned.
"Hm. Missed. Will do better next time," she said. "Anyway. I think you should go on adventures. Maybe you'll find yourself."
Tyler gave her a suspicious look, and was surprised to find that she seemed to be serious.
"Like you're gonna be queen?"
"Yeah. Gotta have goals in life, old man."
"You can't be - "
"Pft. That's loser talk."
"Okay, Queen Trixie."
"That's Queen Beatrix to you. And it's not my fault I have an old lady name. If they didn't want me to be queen they wouldn't have given me one."
"I think you have to be a princess first."
"That's only if you're born into it."
"I don't even think you can marry into it. Then you're the queen consort or something."
"I didn't say that was my plan either. I'm going to be so awesome they'll ask."
Tyler laughed.
"Hey, don't mock my royal aspirations."
"Sorry, Your Majesty."
"Anyway. Yeah. If all you do is sit around here doing nothing and going nowhere, you're never gonna find what you're looking for, so I think you've gotta go somewhere else for a while. Adventure."
"And how am I gonna do that?"
"Don't ask me. I'm eleven."
She gave him a strangely canny look.
"But a lazy big brother who goes nowhere and does nothing, but also has a job, probably has some money saved up and could mayyybee afford to go somewhere else, even if it's three towns over. Who knows what adventures await you in, um. Milford?"
"I've never even heard of Milford."
"Neither have I. I made it up. It might exist. I don't know. You don't know! That's the point. Go find out!"
"And if I never find anything out there? Spend all my money?"
Trixie shrugged.
"Well, then you're exactly the same as you are right now."
"Except with less money."
"You can make more, and otherwise what do you even need money for right now? You live with us, Mom and Dad feed you, there's nothing to do with money except sit on it. Or, you know - "
"Adventure."
"Exactly."
"I'll think about it."
"Sure thing, loser."
"Will you knock it off?"
"Sure. When you're not a loser anymore."
"Okay, princess."
"That's queen."
"Right. Sorry. What was I thinking?"
Despite the good-natured ribbing from his sister, Tyler was taking her advice seriously.
Not that an eleven-year-old kid necessarily knew up from down, but he wasn't really accomplishing much on his own, so the wheels were turning now.
The world seemed huge to him, all of a sudden, thinking of where he might go and what he might do. Trixie was right, he did have some money saved. Not very much, but since he had no real interest in moving out of the house and into an apartment of his own, the money was just sitting there until he decided what to do with it. Unfortunately, he didn't really have a direction he wanted to go, whether in life or in travel.
But maybe, he thought, as he warmed to the idea, that was the point of it all. Sometimes, travel was about the journey and not the destination, as the old cliché went. Sometimes, the journey itself was the destination.
So he planned to set out, like some old-timey hobo, and just...go. Somewhere.
No plan. No purpose.
Just adventure.
His mom, he was sure, would try to talk him out of it, because aimlessness while under their roof was one thing, while deciding to strike out on his own and wander around trying to find himself was quite another. Still, it was the first time he'd felt alive in a long time - maybe ever.
"Thanks, Trix," he said quietly, as he passed the open door to her room.
He hadn't expected her to hear him, but the faint:
"No problem, loser," that floated to him down the hall made him grin.
When he climbed into bed, he was finally certain of a purpose, if a very small one:
he was going to go on an adventure.
One without a destination in mind.
Tyler woke up.
The birds in the trees were making all kinds of racket, and the parrots were shrieking as per usual, as apparently screeching is the way parrots greet the dawn.
wait...parrots?
Tyler had never seen a parrot outside of a cage in all his life.
But he looked up, and there they were. Blue and yellow, doing that familiar back-and-forth pacing waddle on the upper branches of the trees in the -
rainforest canopy?
Tyler had also never seen a rainforest outside of a movie or television show or book, which was really the only reason he recognized it at all.
Or was it a jungle?
Semantics were not that important right now.
What was important involved the fact that Tyler had gone to bed in his own room with band posters on the wall and his annoyingly perceptive little sister in her room down the hall, in his parents' suburban ranch house, dreaming of adventure -
and woken up here, wherever here was, with parrots giving him that bizarrely arrogant, knowing look common to all birds everywhere.
"Hey, Joe?" called a deep voice with a thick accent. "You good? We ought to be moving on, amigo."
Tyler sat up, and was startled to see his arms were really buff, like hard corded muscle, but not like, bodybuilder-style. More like a dude who spent all his time hacking through a jungle with a machete -
and he rapidly found said machete, which explained some of that. His arms were hairier than usual, too, and he felt his face - unfamiliar, craggy, definitely older, just not old-man-old...
He had one of those things, an X of bullets, a bandolier or something, across his chest, and if this dude was sleeping on the forest floor with no bedroll or anything with bullets strapped to his front, and yeah, an open shirt to the hairy chest too - he was pretty damned hardcore, this guy. Joe, apparently.
Tyler was really not sure what was happening, but he did what he'd do at the store every day: take inventory, see what was missing, and what could be dealt with or restocked or whatever the equivalent was for whatever the hell was going on.
"Uh. Hey, uh - " Tyler began, standing up and looking at this other dude who was probably around thirty-five years old and built like a workhorse.
"Paco," said the guy, and grinned. "Little too much tequila last night, eh, amigo?"
"Sure," he agreed faintly. "You know me, always hittin' the tequila hard. Uh. Speaking of, what the hell are we doin' out here? No hotels around, where we could, uh. Drink more tequila, but with a little umbrella or something? And ice?"
It was hot, and getting hotter by the minute.
"No hotels out here," said Paco, giving him a worried look. "An umbrella? You sure you're all right, Joe? We're out here because you're looking for the lost treasure of Lemuria, or Mu, but we suspect it isn't the same place as all those other lost lands, but an entirely new, unheard-of lost kingdom."
Tyler blinked at him.
"Oh - we do?" he asked.
"You must have hit the tequila hard," said Paco sympathetically. "Still. We have to start moving, before the heat of the day comes. You will regret it, especially with a head of day-after-tequila."
"You're the local expert," said Tyler, inwardly freaking out - would it be possible to get back home if he left the place where he'd originally arrived? Did it even matter where he was at all? Maybe if he fell asleep, he'd wake up back in his house?
But all of that had to be pushed aside, because Paco was already vanishing into the underbrush.
"Joe. Venga, vámonos! Come on!"
"Right. Yeah. Right behind you!" Tyler called back.
There wasn't anything for it. He would have to follow, or just stand there alone for who knew how long, with no answers.
And so, he hoisted the machete, steeled himself, and followed Paco into the jungle, heading toward who-knows-where.
But at least he was going on an adventure, the kind without a destination, so he supposed, at the very least, he was definitely keeping his promises to Trixie and to himself.