Introduction   -    Introduction                                                

            Names Tisdale… but people call me Niko. Before you say anything, yes, I know “Niko”, isn’t anything like, “Tisdale”. My parents once told me that they had flipped a coin, to decide on my name. –Such is an omen of my own fate perhaps?- Between Nikolai, and Tisdale, the bloody coin chose Tisdale. I, however am equally as fond of the name “Tisdale”, as I am of the name, “Toad”. This being the tails side, for my middle name. I dodged that one with a lucky flip to the heads side of the quarter. So being named, Tisdale, I’ve always gone by Niko. Wouldn’t you? We make our own fates, as they say.

            I have here a story to tell you. Better called, a particularly consequential series of events, than a story, but for simplicity’s sake, I’ll call it a story. As I write this story out for you, you may expect that I, like so many story tellers before me, might exaggerate my deeds, enunciate my valor, capitalize on grand speeches. You would be wrong in this thinking. You might expect me to save every passerby in need of a hero, and you may very well be angry with me when I do not. I fear not your opinion. I do not know you, therefore you mean little to me. The same as these people you may so strongly will me to help. You are but characters in a fictional book. Not literally of course. The very fact you’re reading this right now tells you –and I- that. But in my own mind…

well… shadows and dust.

            This is of course, only the introduction to my story, as indicated by the one-worded title of this “chapter”. And being simply an introduction “chapter”, I will start small.

            I am nothing. I am nothing to myself, or to my father. Nothing to the woman working at the checkout at the local TastyBurger, and probably if you saw me at the mall in your town, you too, would think, nothing. Fate of course, has plans for us all, and it is possible, that even fate, has written no special footnotes in the brief chapter that is my life. That’s how insignificant I am.

            I don’t recall much of my life before my seventh birthday, and even the several years after that, are just a vague memory. I was born in Orlando, Florida. Or what used to be Orlando anyway. My insignificant life began there. That's what people tell me anyway, though I certainly don’t remember to witness it. Soon after my birth I was made an orphan along with my brother and sister, and placed in an orphanage. I also know nothing of those happenings, however, we were not there long before, me and my blood-kin, were adopted into a family. There is lots I could say about my childhood there, good and bad. But it is not important. What is important is my life leaving home.

            Since leaving my parents home, I have done nothing, been nothing. I have traveled aimlessly, picking up dead end jobs, and getting fired from them. I am in a word… useless.

Until now.