Since Oliver was little, he had always considered himself a mystery. He had worked hard to shield his true interest and become an intriguing shell, questioning everything, while answering nothing. His ambitions had begun with a riddle, he thought being somewhat of a modified prototype would do it. But no riddle takes more than a couple of minutes to figure out, thus hangman was out of the picture too, what kind of mystery let's reveal itself by a 1/26 chance?So after studying his case more carefully he aimed for a puzzle, breaking all his components into isolated characteristics, hard to find and buried in his core. But action figures have always been more entertaining than puzzles, and Oliver was not an action figure.

So as time passed Oliver figured out that being a simple game just wouldn't do it, mysteries ought to challenge more than a simple game, mysteries ought to have a crime and a police persecution, or at least that's what he thought. And so for his ninth birthday he plotted all out. He would go missing and go to a tree house near the creek, no one knew about the house, it was perfect. So as any good mystery he left inconclusive clues behind him, along with coded messages. And then he ventured into the danger, going two hundred feet away from home.

After a few hours in which Oliver was already expecting cops to be searching the woods, or at the very least his parents and a bunch of his friends with a flashlight, he was disappointed. Instead he had to go home walking in the middle of the night while wondering how might his parents be after his disappearance, had they at least noticed the messages? But when he got home, the truth was undeniable, his parents had not even noticed. So that was Oliver's carrier as a big mystery, so instead he chose to be a common mystery, a person that has an apparently common life, yet they hold secrets about themselves, existence and other trivialities. They are also called teenagers.

But even as a teenager Oliver tried to be at the very least intriguing, if not discrete. He told nothing about him to no one, he always made up storied about his life, which later on he declared them to be false, the boy was good making a fake identity. And so people new who Oliver Hendricks was, they knew his favorite color that month was blue and that he hated math class; just as other million fifteen year olds in the world. What they didn't know, was that he loved watching sitcoms, that he was the anonymous writer of a pet-peeve column in the school paper, nor did they know he used to run away every six months for a whole day, neither did they cared.

And his flaw was not making a false identity, nor making his activities intriguing an interesting. His big fat flaw was that he was never a mystery. A mystery by definition is a well kept secret that is intended to remain unknown, all Oliver ever wanted was some Nancy Drew to find out who he really was, which was a hard one, for not even he knew that.


[Series may return once the tick is gone]
By I'm the penguin