A rainy day

Clac! Clac! Clac! The rain continously hit the window, gently at first then harder.

"Nhuuuuuhhhh nooooo" 8 years old Toby sights and scold at the rain. He knew his mother will never let him go meet his friends at the "playground " after the rain stops but Toby and his new friends ,Julian and wren felt old enough not to be kidding around since they discovered the old factory.

They couldn't figure out what was created in that factory, but they liked the complicated mechanisms they found there and every time they told their parents they were going at the play ground they went there instead, creating new adventures and theories on the different machines they discovered every day.

He leans his head on the window but the continious clac!clac! Reminds him he will not get out of the house until the next day.

He lazily begins to sing the only song that comes across a kids mind during the rainy days.

"Rain rain go away" he abruptly gets up from the window and walk around the little parlour, his mother called it the pink drawing room, there were so many rooms in their new house with complicated names like this one. But Toby called every room where he saw chairs "a parlour"

"Go away little children want to play" but he doesn't think of himself as a child he is already eight and a half years old for crying out loud plus melissa parker, the blondie girl at his new school said he was a man "a real Man" her words not he's.

He walks around the room and goes to the large brown cupboard in the corner not far from the window where he was leaning. He goes through the different drawers and he finds; old pictures he recognizes his grand father on one of them where he seems younger and other people who seem to be relatives on the black and white pictures.

He keep going through the drawer finds an old chess board or it looks like it. He keeps going through his search but he sees the board glittering from the corner of his eyes . He ignores it conscious that a chest board doesn't just glitters but the little lighting's keeps doing it.

He finally turns to it and take it out of frustration but the thing doesn't react anymore. He takes a close look and realizes its larger than any board he'd seen before not that he was a chess fan but this one was made of heavy wood and was big as a little box.

He feels carvings on the sides he is holding and held it up to see that they are runes or he thinks so. ( thats how they call complicated ancient drawings in the animes he watch on tv) and these drawing have the same style.

He sits down to take a close look at these runes and recognizes the initials of the viatorem manor in a little circle, its the name written at the entry of the manor where they now live a family inheritance from his father's father.

He remembers his father saying Viatorem is the latin word for Travelers. He touches the little circle with the family initials again and feels a chill through his spine before a light appears on the circle and a noise comes from the box, like when you open a door with a key.

He is frightened but hypnotically opens the box, he is now scared of what he will find in the old chess board or board what ever it is.

"Oufff , nothing to be scared about" he lets a sight of relief talking to himself when he sees there is no monster or the ghost of one of his ancestors coming out from the box.

He retrieves what looks like a map or a plan in the box, its folded and thick which means it should be pretty big when unfolded. He place the map on the little table and keep going through the box.

He finds a plastic bag with failure pawns and next to it he find a silver pen with the manors initials. He sits there not knowing what to do next with what he just found, if you remember what was said above, little Toby is not a big fan of chess, though he knows the shape and name of every pawns, atleast.

He sights heavily and look back at the window, but now the rain is even worse with lightnings added to it

"Great!!! Just great!!" He says putting his hands up as a sign of surrender and turns back to the chess board/box and what it contained . " At least I'll learn chess from a magical board."

He empties the little plastic bag on the table but there are usually 16×2 pieces, 16 pieces for each player but in this one there are only peices for one player.

When he takes the pawns one by one and see they are all pawns exept for the king which has the same runes on the side like the one he'd seen before on the box.

He opens the map and like he expected its pretty big. He looks at it and sees nothing but blurred lines and yet he could have sworn he saw writings on it when he took it out of the box.

He places it on the ground and walk to the other side to see if he can decipher it better from another angle but nothing changes except from the little box drawing which appears on the corner of the big map asking for the name. He doesn't think twice and take the pen he saw in the box to write his name while asking himself why a chess game will need a large map like this one just to explain the rules.

Once he is done writing his name, the blurred lines becomes clear and shows a plan with names of each place.

He lets his fingers run on the map " west allele, east allele..." he trails his fingers not really understanding what he is reading until he sees a rectangular box with the word kitchen in it and next to it a larger box with Pink room written in it .

When he looks closer at the pink room box on the plan he sees the king pawn drawn in it and he scrambles to takes all the pawns he left on the little and place the king in the box where i was drawn.

The same golding light glitters at that moment, Toby understands the pawns are not for the board its self but for the map, the plan of the viatorem manor.

With the king representing himself in the pink drawing room, he place a pawn in the kitchen, where his mother was probably doing lunch and the same light appears like he activated it by putting it on the map. He stares at the strangeness of the situation for a while, still hearing the faint noise of the rain.

He moves the pawn from the kitchen to where the king is and next he knows is, his mother is standing in the room with him , completely disoriented and looking around her like she just landed from the sky.

"Toby?" She questions his presence just like he does, both in shock as Toby realized he just made his mother appear or teleport in the kitchen. He'd be grounded forever if ever she finds out its his fault.

" yes mom ?" He answers trying to suppress the shock on his face , his mother just stares, opens her mouth and closing it , probably abstaining from saying something crazy . Now he feels guilty seeing how disoriented his mother looks "mom?" He calls with a little voice

"Don't worry honey , go on with... whatever you are doing, but make sure you're done before lunch " she says giving an reassuring look and goes out like she doesn't remember what had just happened .

Toby is still sitting there in the ground with the map and pawns spread infront of him. He just stares at it with his eyes wide open, not knowing if what just happened was good or bad sign and he find himself smiling stupidly at nothing in particular.

Now he could go where ever he wants even when its rains he will just have to practice how to use this... whatever this old chess board is, not to repeat what he'd just done to his mother.

A king and fifteen pawns , Toby is the king...he feels a soft heat on his neck, the rain has stopped.