Brandon immediately ran off as soon as his mother was looking the other way, trying to find a costume to wear. His mother noticed just a second too late, of course.
If he had been older and more inclined to notice such things he might have realized that it was far too easy to get lost in what was, on the outside, a fairly small shop. But he wasn't, and he didn't. Finally reaching a dead end, he glanced over the costumes that were lying around, but none of them looked good at all. No Spider-Man masks, no ghosts or goblins... He saw a box at the end of the aisle and in it were a number of trinkets; it looked like just about all that was there that he could actually wear.
One was a cross on a necklace. He had no idea what it was, but this was a costume shop, so it had to go with some costume, right? Maybe he could find that costume. But when he nearly dropped it while pushing aside a rack of adult costumes, he decided to put it somewhere.
Around his neck.
Suddenly there was a tingling around his neck. His mother, who had just barely caught up with him, heard him say "I feel funny, Mommy"... only to see him disappear completely.
"Brandon!" she yelled. "Come on back! Don't hide or you're not getting any ice cream at the mall!"
Her wayward son didn't appear and she looked around. Just where did that boy go to? It looked like he vanished but it must have been some trick of the light....
"That won't work." said a voice over the store's loudspeaker.
She yelled back, "Where is my son?!"
"Come up to the front desk."
She did, but her son was nowhere in sight. The shopkeeper had turned on a small television set that she had mistaken for a security monitor, and on it was a picture of her son, Photoshopped right in the middle of some cartoon.
"Where did he go?" she asked. "Is that some kind of video room with a cartoon on the walls?"
"It's not a room with a cartoon on the walls," he said. "He's inside the cartoon."
**** **** *
Brandon found himself in an unfamiliar place. The colors weren't normal--there were big patches that made the world look like a cartoon. But it was no cartoon he recognized (as Evangelion had come out years ago, and he wasn't allowed to watch it anyway).
A boy a bit older than him, who looked like part of the cartoon, and was wearing a nametag identifying himself as "Shinji" said "Misato, Asuka hates me and people are dying and Rei is still weird and nobody thinks I'm important except for piloting Eva and...."
"Your name is Shinji? I'm...."
"You're sorry, Misato, I know the drill. Oh, never mind." The boy ran off.
Puzzled, Brandon said "No, I'm..." to the departing boy but it was useless. He looked around; he was standing inside a messy apartment. He tossed aside his long purple hair....
Long purple hair? What was going on?
