~~~
“Ricky! You’re standing right in the way again, ya goober!” said Donald.
Of course, Kile had maneuvered back in front of the cousins again while they played a first-person action game together on the video console, but it wasn’t intentional. He simply wanted to see what it was all about. The troll learned quickly from the television he’d hidden in the troll caves what the moving pictures were all about, though he hadn’t decided whether it was actual magic or not. He’d even figured out that he wasn’t always watching the humans as they were doing things, especially since he sometimes saw the exact same story playing out on the TV, even within the same day. Certain shows which declared they were “previously recorded” gave the final clue, particularly after Kile learned what those two words basically meant. He’d decided that the television did the same thing as their own carvings, paintings and few statues the trolls had created over the years. No, all that was pretty well understood during the last twenty years or so Kile had with the TV’s he had seen and used, and with what Queen Isabel had taught him from her own reconnaissance. What Kile found most intriguing about the so-called “video games” was that the two cousins seemed to be controlling what was happening on the screen.
At one point Kile had sidled up to the younger of the two cousins, a human girl apparently named KJ, and tried to push one of the buttons on the controller she was using to move her side of the screen around and perform all kinds of stunts. When he did, something went flying from the hand on the TV screen and blew up like a firework in a brilliant glowing blue light. Cousin KJ was livid. That was apparently her last plasma detonator and she needed it to get up to the next level of the structure she had been climbing to catch up to her older brother’s side of the screen.
When Kile had slowly positioned himself in front of Donald for the fifth time, drawn to the screen like a moth to a flame, and Don chewed him out yet again, that was the end of it for Robert.
“You guys! He just wants to have a turn playing,” Rob blurted loudly. Then more reservedly he mumbled, “and I do too.”
“Dude!” cousin KJ replied, “You guys get to play this all the time. We don’t have it at home so you need to let your guests try it out.”
“You try two hours!” Kile said.
“What’s wrong with you Ricky? Can’t you speak in full sentences today?” Donald replied.
Robert thought if there was anyone he’d ever met that he hated, it was probably his cousin Donald. His Aunt and Uncle thought they were better than Rob’s family just because he ran his own stone and brick supply company, and they tended to be pretty rude sometimes. But Donald thought he was the only one with a right to exist sometimes, and he seemed to revel in putting Robert and his little brother Ricky down all the time. Today, perhaps because the new video game had distracted both him and his sister more than usual, Donald was mostly content to play the ignoring game with Robert and Kile disguised as Little Ricky.
But when Kile looked to Robert sheepishly yet again and returned to his side where he was sitting in the rocking chair, Rob had decided enough was enough. This wasn’t a visit. If anything, it was playing butler to the cousins in case they asked for the disc to be changed or to have a fresh cup of soda brought down to them from the kitchen.
Robert stood and quietly said, “C’mon Ky…er…Ricky.”
Fortunately, the slip was quiet and unnoticed. Though Kile couldn’t very easily drag his eyes from the large TV screen, he did follow his human host up the stairs and out the back door of the house into the back yard.
Once outside in the sunlight, Robert grumped under his voice, “Jerks. I hate those cousins.”
Kile kneaded his hands together. He wanted things to be going better for his host, and he felt he must be to blame, although he wasn’t entirely sure why. “Did Kile make those humans angry?”
“No,” Rob said, throwing a rock out into the field behind their house that he’d picked up from the yard. “Well, maybe you made them mad by standing in the way, but they’re always like that. If you didn’t get in the way, they’d be mad that you weren’t massaging their feet or something else dumb.”
“Massage?” the troll placed his index finger on his bottom lip again. “Was Kile to massage mean humans’ feet? What means massage?”
“Don’t worry about it, Kile. I was just saying, they always find something to be jerks about. It’s not your fault.”
“Oh…” Kile replied, nodding his head in an effort to confirm the idea for himself.
“Kile?”
“Yes, brother Robert!”
“First! Stop calling me that!” Rob said with irritation still in his voice.
“But what does Kile call you then?”
“Well…” Rob thought for a moment. “Actually, I guess you’d better call me Robbie.”
The troll was not using his glimmer on Robert and the human boy could see his perplexed troll grimace and concentration in his brow. “I not hear that name. Why Robbie?”
“That’s what Little Ricky called me all the time,” Rob said, tossing another rock. “Mom might just notice that you…I mean Ricky, stopped calling me Robbie, so I guess you better call me that.”
“But human Mom and cousins not call you Robbie,” the troll continued to ponder.
“Yeah…well…I don’t really like it very much. It’s kinda a baby name…but it’s what Ricky called me.”
“Oh…So, it is like Queen Isabel. She can decide what each troll must call her too,” Kile said finally figuring it out for himself and smiling at Robert again.
“Well,” Rob snickered, “Not exactly. Humans generally get called what other people decide to call them. Usually you don’t get to pick your own nickname.”
“Nickname…” Kile went back to pondering. “Well…okay, Robbie.”
Robert turned to Kile and smiled. It had only been twenty-four hours but he realized he kind of missed someone calling him that. And Kile really was trying to be a good friend it seemed like.
As they finished discussing nicknames both heard the familiar buzz of a model RC plane flying above them as it banked around town and then flew back up towards the hills and the cavern where they first met. Watching it return to its owner for a buzz past the meadow, aka: the Maple Springs airport, Robert had an idea to get free of the family visit for a while. He’d made his decision final when he noticed Kile watching the plane, mesmerized, as well.
“Hey Kile?”
“Yesssss...” the troll’s voice trailed off as he watched the plane circling back towards them.
“I got an idea. Follow me.”
“Okay!” and Kile bounded over a couple larger boulders placed in the back yard as decoration and followed his adopted human brother out of the back yard and into woods beyond.
As they started hiking, Robert asked, “Kile? What does Queen Isabel have you call her?”
“Well…” Kile fussed a bit as he trotted to try and keep up with the human’s stride. “She give me special gift.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“She let me choose what to call her.” Kile was getting a little out of breath, so Robert slowed his stride a little.
“Really? How’d you get to do that?” Rob asked as he planted a hand on a particularly thick scrub oak trunk and stepped up over a slight ridge.
“Oh…Um…Queen ask Kile to work with her. We learn about humans together. She say I earned special right.”
When Robert stopped and turned for a minute to await the little wheezing troll he noticed the troll was smiling to himself.
“I get it. Special assignment, special name then, eh?” Robert said, finding his own smile. At some point he was going to need to pin down why it was the trolls were so interested in the humans lately, but for now he thought of Kile as just being another Little Ricky; annoying, but lovable at the same time. Though he’d never let Ricky know that’s what he thought.
“Yes. S
pecial.” huffed the little troll. “After that, other trolls not pick on me as much.”
Robert was starting to get more of a picture of what being a troll was like. It wasn’t a whole lot different from life in a middle school apparently.
“So?... What do you call her?”
Kile finally caught up with Robert on the ridge. He grinned ear to ear at Robert when he replied, “I call her Ti’eir Dorna Scharpfen. But usually just say Dorna. Dorna sort of mean “Queen” in troll.”
The two stared at each other smiling, though Rob didn’t exactly know why. Kile continued.
“Ti’eir Dorna Scharpfen sorta means, “my secret queen”.” Kile then averted his eyes. “Also can mean “My secret friend”…”
He huffed a little and tried to meet Rob’s eyes, but dropped them again bashfully. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Then, smacking his lips a bit, he turned and started walking up the hill again. Rob grinned when his back was turned and then moved to take the lead again.