Here goes:

The Teller family and other Cherinians are attacked by an alien. He kills many of them and they decide to leave their bodies and go to the void where their souls can remain safely within the Kaleidoscope World. While there they come up with a plan to entrap the alien. For it to work, Luigi volunteers to return to his body so as to give the alien the information so that it can be trapped by them. Luigi does so and the alien leaves. A member of the family, Elpida, who had not been at home returns and finds Luigi. She worries about the alien returning to kill the rest of them and Luigi tells her the alien has gone to their spaceship, where the family are hiding.

Elpida lashes out, calling him a traitor and kills Luigi.

When the alien has been dealt with, the family bring back all those who had died, but Elpida, though not dead, is not in her body. They search for her and find her in a world created within the mind of Meli (one of the family). Luigi goes with, hoping to show her she need not feel guilty, he is alive. They find she no longer recognises any of them and has made up her own story of why she is there on her own, abandoned by her father, a prince.

Candy sings her a song and they become friends. Then the mother of Elpida, Sol, goes to her and is accepted as a friend of Candy. Then Luigi is told to go to her and her decides to tell her the story of his life. When Elpida sees Luigi, she panics, for she has the feeling that he is evil. She cannot leave as she wants, as Candy thinks of Luigi as a friend and Elpida fears for her.

Solace is the sister of Elpida.

Luigi tells his story:

As Luigi came close to them Solace left us, walking over slowly too. Robbie asked Maria to leave with him and they flew off at great speed. When we saw where he was going we had a good laugh. They were collecting green coconuts to drink. They came back with enough for all of us, Maria holding them up with her powers as they flew to us.

Robbie sat down with a wry look. “It seems this is going to be a family affair so I might as well relax, enjoy my coconut milk and snooze for a while.” He did lie back with closed eyes, but I could feel him watching with us.

“In all the stories I’ve read, when an adult comes across fairies they disappear. Don’t leave, I’ve been wanting to speak to some fairies for a long time.”

“But if we are fairies we have to leave!” Candy pretended.

Elpida just stared at him. Her face clouded over. “Candy, we must leave, he is a bad man.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I can feel it.”

“He is not bad. He is a friend of ours.”

“A friend?” We felt her wanting to leave, she was desperate to do so, but she did not want to leave Candy with him. The fact that Candy thought he is a friend only made it more important she stay to watch over her.

Luigi sat on the grass, keeping his distance so that she will not feel threatened. “I would like to tell you a story.”

Candy, overdoing it a bit I thought, clapped her hands with glee. “Another story!”

With a gleam in his eyes he struck a dramatic pose. “Ahh, but I am Italian, Miss Candy, we do not just tell stories, we bring them alive so that you feel what the characters feel and hurt when they hurt; the best of all is that you love when they love.” He bunched his fingers to his lips and kissed them with a flourish. “Amore, that is to die for!”

Candy earnestly explained what ‘amore’ means to Elpida, but she soon saw she did not have an audience. Elpida was staring at Luigi as if he has hypnotised her.

“This story is about a little boy who discovered magic in words. He was born on a farm in Southern Italy. The farm had mostly olive trees and some pigs. From when he could walk he was expected to begin helping in any little way he could. He was a good little boy and he really tried to help, but he would forget. Si, he would see a piece of wood or a leaf drifting on the stream and he would feel it was dancing for him as it swirled and bobbed on its voyage past him. At other times he would see a butterfly and he would be captivated by its beauty and the way it moved, dancing on an invisible breeze. On a farm there are a million things to capture the eyes of such a boy, even the patterns spilt straw make upon the earth.

He was lucky to have a brother who worked twice as hard as he should have, so that he could say they had both done the work. The brother was a farmers’ son also and sometimes would call him back to work because he believed it was not good for his brother to dream so much.

The little boy discovered a new magic. He would take a stick and make marks upon the earth. Not long after that he noticed for the first time that a picture his mother had showed some funny lines at the bottom that resembled his marks upon the dust. He asked his mother and she explained that the picture was from Cairo and the squiggles were Arabic writing. When she explained what writing is, he became very excited.

‘If I could write like that and I think of something and write it, I would never forget it?’

She laughed. “You will learn to write in Italian.’ He begged her to teach him and at first she refused, saying that he would begin school next year and learn there. He pleaded until she taught him the alphabet.

He was not really a clever little boy, but he did have a gift for the written word and by the time school started he was reading and writing. His one drawer was becoming full of scraps of paper, thoughts he wanted to preserve.

At school he did badly. He was thin and hated sports. Geometry, Science, Arithmetic, all those he hated and failed. The only subjects he was good at were Language, Geography and History. His real love though was reading. He preferred stories with action, but he also read love stories and drama. Anything that showed how people think, love and hate. He was fascinated by the human mind and soul.

An uncle of his mother, he worked in a bank and the family thought of him as being very clever, one day was present at a meal when the father of the boy was angry. He told the boy that the school had complained about him, that he is lazy and does not study.

‘They told me that the only lessons you show interest in are those that are totally useless! How do you think history and geography will help you earn a living?’

‘Perhaps you should send him to a boarding school.’

‘What? Do you know how much that would cost?’

His great uncle convinced his father to send him to a school in a nearby town. It was run by the Catholic church and was not expensive. Perhaps the boy will become a priest, he suggested.

Now began the most miserable years of the boy. At least twice a week he would get beaten for not paying attention. The other boys picked on him and he had bruises most of the time. He was one of those children who need a family to love and school had no love in it, not even from the nuns. At first he found love and consolation in only one place. At about eleven years old he became intensely religious. When the nuns or priests talked about God he believed and listened, questions teeming within his mind that he could not ask. Some of the questions he would not have known how to word them.

This change in him made the school like him and they sent reports to his family that he might choose to serve God one day. Perhaps he would have, if not for two events.

One day, after lessons, he returned to his dormitory to get a book to read. Three other boys were there. They were known as bullies and he felt nervous. He tried to hide it, but then they began to tease him. Suddenly one of the boys told the other two to hold him and make him lie down on the floor. He tried to run out but they caught him and forced him to lie on the floor and one of them, the strongest, began to hit him with a thin cane.

The two of them held him down on his stomach while the one boy hit him across his back. The boy did not cry or scream. He waited for it to finish. Then one of the other boys wanted to hit him so they changed places. When they let him go they warned him that if he told anyone they would find him…”

“I don’t like this story.” Candy said.

Sol looked grim, even Elpida forgotten for the moment as she listened in horrified attention. “Let him finish it, Candy.” she asked.

“Don’t worry Candy, the purpose of the story is to show that even out of bad, good can come.” Elpida was sitting with eyes closed as she listened and she opened her eyes now and stared into the eyes of Luigi without saying a word. “The boy, who was not so little anymore, went to a toilet cubicle and locked himself in there and cried from the pain and the humiliation of not being able to stand up against the bullies. When he came out, he took his book and sat in the play area reading. Within minutes he had forgotten his pain as he became engrossed in the story. For him, if the writer was even halfway good, the characters would come alive thanks to his vivid imagination.

Somebody gasped behind him and then one of the nuns he did not like came before him. ‘Take off your shirt.’ she ordered. He tried to, but the shirt was stuck to his back from the blood. She stopped him and took him to the headmaster. They took him to the school clinic where his shirt was dampened and gently pulled off him.

They were all horrified at what had been done to the boy. His back was torn open from at least twenty lashes. They thought he was terrified and spoke softly, promising that those who did this would be punished, even expelled from school. The boy refused to speak. Then the headmaster became angry and demanded to know the names. Still the boy would not speak. He was locked up in the office of the headmaster for nearly an hour. Then the door opened and the three boys walked in, their faces white with fear, the headmaster behind them.

‘As you see we found them anyway.’ The boy had to stand and watch as the headmaster shouted at them. He told them their parents would be told what they had done and they would be expelled. One of the boys began to cry and pleaded with the headmaster not to. The headmaster turned to the boy.

‘You are the one that suffered so I will let you decide. I can either expel them or else they can be punished by having the same whipping they gave you. What do you want?’

The boy thought about it and asked if he could choose anything he wanted. Whether out of a sense of justice or curiosity, the headmaster agreed.

‘I don’t want you to do anything to them.’

The headmaster became very angry. He sent the three away and continued to tell off our little boy. He called him a coward. Then he asked whether he was afraid the three would hurt him again. He said no. ‘Jesus said we must turn the other cheek.’ This enraged the headmaster, but he was of the church so he let the boy go.

The three boys came to him and said they were sorry for what they did and they warned all the others that if anybody picks on him again they would beat them up. For the first time he was not bullied for nearly the whole week and he decided he had done the right thing and that Jesus was right.

On Saturday his father collected him from school and took him home. During the trip the boy could see his father was furious and could not understand why. When they arrived home his mother made him take off his shirt. His parents stared at his back, the bruises fading already, but the cuts still visibly healing.

‘The headmaster told me he offered to punish them any way you wanted and that he would protect you from them. Why did you make him let them go!?’

‘In the Bible it says that Jesus told us to turn our cheek.’

‘Nonsense! The headmaster was right, you are a coward! I will not have a coward for a son. I’m going to teach you to not be a coward!!’

His father took him to the shed and beat him worse than he had ever beat him before and the boy cried as he had never cried before. He did not only cry because of the pain; he could not bear the thought that his father thought he was a coward. He adored his father and it hurt to think he had disappointed him so much. He was also very confused. Why did both his father and the headmaster think Jesus was wrong? They had taught him that everything in the Bible was correct!

The next Monday he sought his usual refuge. He went to the school library to take out some books. On one of the shelves he picked up a book and saw it was full of poems. From his school work he knew that poems were boring to read and was about to put it back. For no reason at all he opened the book and he began to read. It was a poem about someone who was suffering, reviled by the world because of a misunderstanding. He read through the whole poem and the imagery floated in his mind so brightly and yet so darkly!

I do not remember which poem it was or who wrote it, but fate had decreed that he should find it at just the right moment and he began to read poetry. He also began to write. He found words that danced with a magic that even music could not better and put them to paper. Scenes, ways of looking at things that did not seem to be the same as other peoples’ thoughts, tumbled out in a mad crazy rush, as if they were laughing and happy to be free at last. The more he wrote the more there seemed to be for him to write. Sometimes his poems would be as if he were standing in the sun and his words glowed with a golden light and then it would be as if he were standing, tiny and unnoticeable under a dark leaf, light hidden from him so that he could see the truth the sun had hidden.

Luigi the poet was born and Jesus lost a priest.” He smiled at his memories. “The magic of words is still in me. They dance around in my mind forcing me to put pen to paper. You see, words and ideas, right or wrong, they have a life of their own and they demand to be set free. Even if they are yours, they do not belong to you. Well, they do, but only for those magical first moments when they came to you and showed you a new way of looking at things. After that they want to spread their wings and fly through every other mind, setting free other thoughts and words within their minds. Never be afraid to look at your own words and ideas, they are what make you human.”

He stood up and walked over to Elpida, resting his hands on her shoulders.

“Let your thoughts be free Elpida. Right or wrong they are yours. If they made you do something you should not have, bring it all out into the light and examine it. Learn from what you did or else you will make the same mistakes again.”

She cowered, no longer having the strength to run away. Sol stood up.

Robert, come here now. Fast!

Robbie always responds to any of us instantly. If we were wrong he may explain or even tell us off, but at the time, he does not question. He says questions are for afterwards. He appeared next to Sol.

“Elpida, I am Sol, your mother. This is Robert your father. I am a Sparkler and he is that crazy man I told you about. He is also the prince you talked of. Close your eyes and open your mind to me daughter, let me show you.”

By now we had all arrived and we watched with awe as an emerald light shone out of Sol and was met by another from Elpida. They joined and the light flowed between them. Elpida collapsed in a faint.

“She will be well soon.” Sol sat on the grass and cradled her daughter’s head, softly running her fingers over her face, as if still amazed that she had created her. Robbie joined her, his one arm over her shoulder, his eyes filled with love.

Elpida opened her eyes and stared up at them in wonder. “It’s true!”

“Yes my love. I’m not really a prince like you imagined, but I am worth far more than any prince is. I have you as my daughter.”

She still has not recalled the truth and we do not push her. She sleeps apart from us, for she only recalls that she is Robbie’s daughter. Her mind still needs to protect itself so we wait for it to heal as and when it wishes to. Themi spends a lot of time with her, not as doctor and patient, just as a friend, but a friend who knows how to lead her mind to re-discovering itself. Luigi also jumps over often and talks with her – they are fast becoming close friends.