The Hardyman, page 1 by Susannah Breslin
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uld betray him in the end, clinging desperately back onto itself rather than morphing into a fusion cannon powered by black holes or a combat-deck equipped with radiated weapons. Ultimately, Jack would prove no match for any mecha-overlord worth his servos that he might encounter in the bot battle.
In the reality of 1984, Jack couldn't shape-shift in the same way that his newly acquired Transformers had morphed between his hands all day. He was simply an eleven-year old boy, who slept with his toys, struggling to grow up in the cool shade of his frustrated accountant of a father and his depressed housewife of a mother in a small house tucked into the curve of a suburban cul-de-sac. But in his dream, as Jack marched through the crunching steelscape, an exoskeleton began forming around him. A monstrous metal cage grew out around his head, a huge steel-barreled chest expanded from his mid-section, iron limbs outfitted with massive talons and giant boots extended from his limbs. Totally transformed, twenty-feet tall and armed to the teeth, Jack wondered, for the very first time, if he was, in fact, quite capable of anything.
With that, Jack's dream world turned into a replica of his living room. There, Jack reached out to his mother and father sitting on the couch, and with his strong new mecha-hands, he lifted them both off the sofa by their thin and fragile necks. As his engines began to whir and to spin, he wondered what the kids at school would say if only they could see him now.
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At thirteen, Jack's long forgotten collection of Transformer toys had been stored in a dusty shoebox at the back of one of his closet's higher shelves. Since his father had been felled by a heart attack a year earlier on a subway train in the middle of rush-hour traffic--surrounded by people who, fittingly, did not know him--the majority of Jack's time had been spent alone in his bedroom, the door locked, the shades drawn. These days, Jack was engaged with the contents of quite a different box, hidden undern