Chapter 1: New Beginnings

So the move was completed, a new town and a new start for the whole family. The new house was bigger than the nice comfortable two bedroom semi detached we had been living in, the new house was a four bedroom ranch style house with a barn and several acres of land.

I thought the new house was great. I had a much bigger bedroom than I had been used to.

Since I wasn’t allowed to read ahead in my school books. My parents had conceded to allow me to buy lots of tech toys which I had incorporated into my room. I had a powerful computer to do my company research and schoolwork, it came with a Bluetooth printer and a scanner. I had a 50” Smart TV mounted on one wall so I could watch it in bed. Attached to that was an XBox, Playstation and Wii, underneath it I had a plethora of controllers. I also had installed a separate cable system from the main house, so I could watch whatever I wanted separate from my parents in the main room.

The rest of the house was a lot more spacious. Mom was in paradise in the kitchen which was twice the size of the last house and had every cooking accessory she could ever want. The living room was luxurious with a deep leather sofa for my parents, and a leather easy boy for me. The TV was a massive 80” with surround sound, which was great for watching movies.

My parents really like the master bedroom with ensuite bathroom, I like that too as the other bathroom was mine to use unless we had visitors.

One of the spare rooms was fitted out for a guest room. The other was converted into an office for Dad and Mom.

Another big plus for me about the house was outside. We had a 50x20 foot swimming pool. This would be a big plus in the hot summer months, the jacuzzi my parents loved and would be very welcome in the cooler months.

For me there was one major downside to the new place, the acres of land that came with it need constant upkeep. My parents decided that my pushing for this place would come with a price. Ok I might have more money than they had, but until I was eighteen they controlled my access to the bulk of my private funds. So they were not going to allow me to hire someone to take care of the grounds. No that was going to be one of my new chores. Fortunately, this mainly involved keeping the acres of grass mown. To that end, I was allowed to have a sit on mower that also collected the clippings behind the driving seat.

Dad had decided he wanted to look into a new associate position in a similar type of company as before. The glowing recommendation from previous employer Mr. Brown should mean he would have no problem obtaining a position.

Mom however had decided to go in a completely different direction. Since she was a little girl, like most little girls, she had always had a love of ponies and horses. She was going to look into the viability of opening a stabling business. If it wasn’t technically possible or there wasn’t enough interest to make it financially viable, then the local urgent care or hospital would be happy to have an experienced nurse like her join their ranks. I wasn’t sure if this would be good for me or not. Horses and ponies would keep the grass cropped short, but what other chores would I have to do in order to compensate. Shoveling horse poop sounded smelly and a lot more physical than mowing grass. Plus I’m sure there would be other chores that would land on my shoulders.

Another big change for me would be that I had been able to walk to middle school, which had been only a couple of blocks over. Now the high school was several miles away, there was a bus that would pick the students up, but I would need to walk to the next intersection in order to catch it.

We had looked into whether getting a taxi to school would be more practical. But my parents initially wanted me to catch the bus in order to not alienate myself from my peers, and the bus had the potential for making some friends in the local community.

One of the first things I had done after looking at potential houses, was to check out the local martial art studio’s in the area. When we had decided on this house, I had talked to my previous Sensei, he had contacted the local studio on my behalf to give me an introduction. Luckily the local martial art was a Kung Fu dojo. The only issue being it was a different organization than my former club, this one was a splinter group of instructors, who had broken away to form their own faction. I would have to wait and see whether they would ratify my level of achievement in their club.

For further Ninjutsu training and lessons I would need to travel back to Atlanta, though my Sensei had told me that he had nothing specific left to teach me and that I could continue mainly just training by myself.

One good thing about the problems of attending the old high school. It had given us plenty of time to find a new home before the start of the next school year. There were still four weeks left of the holidays, my parents had decided against a holiday this year with the upheaval and the time needed finding our feet and Dad locating a new job.

It didn’t take me long to work out the new mower, Ok I had to sit through an hour lecture by my Dad on the do’s and don’ts of mower safety. Then I was off bombing around the property chopping down the foot tall grass, perhaps saying I was bombing around is a slight exaggeration. The grass was that long that it took me three passes in each paddock to gradually reduce the height of the grass. I had found this out when I tried to cut it down in one pass, the long cut grass continuously fouled the blades. Which resulted in returning back to the barn as Dad didn’t trust me enough yet to clear them myself yet. Once I had all the paddocks cut back to a low level, we guessed it would only take one cut a week in the summer to keep them in control, a lot less once the growth rate died back.

That had only taken a couple of days so I still had a load of the holidays left. Mom didn’t want me in the main part of the house, she said I just got under her feet as she tried to get everything arranged as she liked. That gave me the options of either my bedroom, or getting out and investigating the surrounding area. Although I loved my new bedroom and all the tech I had, it was the summer and I wanted to be out and about. I knew that I would be spending an inordinate amount of time cooped up there in the cold and wet winter months, to want to spend time there now when the sun was shining.

So after telling my Mom I was going investigating, I dug my trusty bicycle out of the garage and set off down the road.

It didn’t take me long to come across some other teenagers goofing off. Although I wanted to meet some other local kids, this was a group of four, obvious jock types cruising around in an open top jeep. They were on the main road heading out of town, coming up to our roads to turn off. Not wanting to get caught up with their type, I backed off my pace so they would have passed by my junction a good period of time before I reached it. Even so one of them who was standing in the back of the jeep, using the role cage to stay up, threw an empty soda can in my direction as they passed. The can was way off target and landed a good twenty odd feet before me and off to the side of the road I was on. Yet they still acted like it was a good shot and I should have been worried. Idiots!