The Maryn Martin Chronicles

"Weep, weep, weep," went the alarm. " Another rude awakening ," Maryn thought to herself as she swung and missed the alarm clock that wasn't there. "Wait. What? Where am I?" she thought as she slowly pushed herself up from the lightly padded floor where old rugs had been overlapped to cover every visible inch of plywood. Looking around, Maryn started to notice what was missing from the place she had assumed herself to be; no bed, no bookshelf covered in stuffies and no dresser. To the right was a beanbag chair with an old baby blanket covering worn marks. Above her was a ceiling mounted poster of a cute kitten hanging from a ledge. To the left was her grandfather's old HAM radio and a shiny Fireman's pole protruding from the floor… " All items that live in the treehouse ," she thought. "Whoa."   "Weep, weep, weep," repeated the alarm. Maryn swung her head left and right looking for the source of the offending n

  Ten minutes earlier …   "Beep, beep, beep," rang the alarm clock before being silenced into submission by a hand slamming down on its hard top. Maryn opened a lone, perturbed eye to check the time, leaving the other eye closed in protest of what she always thought was a rude way to be awoken. The digital display read 7:30 am and despite the objections of her pre-teen internal clock, it was time to get up.   For Maryn and her 6-year-old sister, Abigail, it was the first day of summer day camp and it was a shock to the system to be up so early after two weeks of camping in Northern California with her family and the many late-nights spent around the campfires roasting marshmallows. For her parents, it was the first day back to work and a dreaded "Transition Day," as her mother called it. A ripe setting for overreaction.   For Maryn was prone to overreacting, especially when pushed to do so by her loving, yet trouble-seeking younger sister. Maryn adored A

Up, up, up above, a celestial phenomenon, thousands of years in the making, was about to take place. The planets of the solar system are known to align in useful ways to the advantage of NASA satellite trajectories and fairytale plot-points alike. An alignment here to launch Voyager II and an alignment there to affirm the fate-based love between some storybook Prince and Princess. Because of the orientation of their orbits, however, all 8 of the planets of the Solar System can never truly come into perfect alignment, but every 1000 years or so, they come awfully close.   On July 19th, this awfully close alignment occurred once again and if that had been the only noteworthy event of the day, it would have been enough to have been added to the annals of history. But it wasn't, for two stars in neighboring spirals of the Milky Way had exploded, years earlier, and it was on July 19th when their supernova-charged waves of energy reached Earth after funneling through the Solar System