the banner promised tales so its about time i told one. as with most things i probably wont finish it but i'll try

THE LOCKPICK APPRENTICE

Part one : The boy named Jon

Jon was fifteen and he had leukemia. He didn’t really see this as a bad thing and he didn’t really feel sick at all. Not usually. The years and years of chemo poisoning were over and he could almost pretend to be a normal boy again. He did look sickly, however. He had the pasty pale complexion of a man who spent too much time in a dungeon. And his scalp was bare, though more out of choice now than as a consequence of disease and treatment. He liked to make his skull nice and shiny, and he was too accustomed to the absence of hair to wish them back any time soon.
He was thin and had the awkward gangling limbs of adolescence. He looked like a poster boy for UNICEF. But he had lips that always looked ready to smile and a dark, intelligent gleam in his eyes.
Jon was a smart boy but he didn’t really go to school nowadays. He would have started his first year in high school by now had he not spent more time in hospitals where they tried to torture him to health. His mother was a teacher at the school and tutored him during weeknights, which Jon enjoyed immensely. And there were nights when she would come home with new books in her plump arms for him to read. Those times were even better.
As I said, Jon really didn’t see this leukemia business with much sorrow. His only great regret was that he probably wont make it ‘till the millennium. He sometimes told himself that he would brave all the hospital pain he could if it would make him live at least two years longer. Something really special and cool might happen and he wont be there to see it. As a compromise he got a large powdered milk can, filled it with junk from his room, and buried it as deep as he could (which was about three feet). Maybe someday (in the next millennium maybe?) some archeologist will find it and say “Look at this. A boy used to live here. A boy named Jon.”