I'm continuing on with providing yet another introduction to the fourth of four storylines present in my newest reader-directed story "The Gift". All versions of this story will involve a high school graduate moving to a new city from their original home without friends and without family, accompanied only by their own thoughts... and four spirits. It is also important to note that each storyline will involve a different human protagonist and four different spirits-- to be chosen soon by you, the readers!

As a proviso to my earlier statement about this being the fourth of four storylines, there will, in fact, be a total of SIX presented, and it will be up to you, the readers, to choose which we will pursue! So, keep an eye out for two more storylines, one involving a __________ as the initial spirit contact, and the other being a _____________.


Please be advised that any, or perhaps all of the "The Gift" stories may include adult material of a m/f, m/m, or f/f nature-- of course, that entirely depends on the paths the audience chooses.

Also, yes I HAVE noticed that the story letters are not in order-- that will only get 'weirder', and it is for a reason. :)

The Gift
Intro D
copyright comidacomida 2018

All around Oregon are rivers, cities, and forests named after Native American tribes or people or words. I grew up with names like Winema, Umpqua, Klamath, Chiloquin, Willamette, Tillamook, and Clatsop but that didn't have anything to do with my day to day life... except for laughing with my friends about tourists who couldn't pronounce them right. There's even a joke among people in the Willamette Valley when people from out of state call it "Will-uh-met-E"; the little rhyming saying goes "It's Will-am-it, damn-it."

Still, it's one thing to know how to pronounce a few words and entirely another to actually see anything more than a passing white-wash of their culture. I didn't get my real Native American experience until the summer after I graduated high school. Dakota and Ashton, two friends of mine and I were looking for a good road trip and one of our goals was to choose our sites of interest based on silly pieces of trivia. One of those stops-- the last one, in fact, was Astoria, a city on the Pacific Ocean in northwest Oregon. Why did we choose it? Well, the movie "The Goonies" was filmed there.

The second goal was to find something interesting in each town completely unrelated to the trivia that brought us there. We got to Astoria at the end of our trip after passing through Portland and we were right on time for a celebration of the Chinook culture. The Chinook Nation was a huge collection of tribes spreading throughout the Pacific Northwest-- specifically Washington and Oregon. Considering it was an irregularly held exhibition for a single day and happened to be taking place on the very day of our visit it seemed like a no-brainer. Better yet: it was free. For recently graduated high school students 'free' is a very strong magnet when it came to event planning.

The audience had maybe eighty or ninety people, which wasn't too bad for a tourist event that didn't get much publicity. Dakota and Ashton settled onto one of many woven blankets already set out for the audience and I chose a place on the grass next to them. They spent time talking and laughing between themselves while I watched a dozen performers setting up for what looked like some kind of drum-accompanied dance. The moment it started I was completely enraptured by not just the movements of the dancers, but the beat to which they danced.

The performers were all dressed in a collection of leather, hide, and feathers, and the all had performance masks that looked like they were shaped to imitate animals of some kind. No two masks were alike, and the same could be said for the dance moves. While it might seem like several dancers following the music in different ways would be chaotic the fact that they all kept the beat perfectly in their own way made it work, and I found my foot tapping along with them.

A voice spoke up from behind me and to the left from the walk way through the blankets set out on the park's grass. "You look like you should be up there dancing too."

I didn't know exactly what the man meant; being mistaken for Native American was never something I would normally expect since I'm about as white as cotton but, as I turned to look at him, I saw what appeared to be another performer, except his mask was particularly odd. I had trouble figuring out what animal he was supposed to be. Rather than address his question I choose a different topic. "Is... is your mask supposed to be a monkey?"

The figure snickered from behind his mask, the long, flowing dusty-colored pelt laying across his head jiggling with the motion; he put his whole body into it, causing the hanging tail from the back of his outfit to give off the impression that it was wagging. "What? You can't tell? it is supposed to be Man."

At that point, Dakota turned look at me and noticed the man for the first time. A quick elbow later and Ashton also took notice. "Wow... audience involvement too? Cool!"

The performer laughed again, twirling once before almost kneeling down next to me even as his mask raised to look over my shoulder, and he announced quite clearly in what must have been his native language. "Kopet, pelton ten'as. Naika tikekh mesi'ka sikhs, wake mesi'ka."

Both of my friends shrugged and went back to talking between themselves; they obviously didn't feel the attraction to the amazing music that I did-- I could almost feel it mimicking my heartbeat. A moment later I realized that, even though the man was kneeling, the tail hanging off of the furs on his back was still flopping back and forth on the ground. It left me confused. "What-- I-- is that...?"

The man kneeling next to me laughed again. "Do you like my mask? I made it for you, you know. Well... not SPECIFICALLY for you, but for the person I chose."

I glanced back to Dakota and Ashton, who were pretending as if the man weren't there, then back to the performer, who was removing his mask. "The--- what?"

Everything stopped when I watched the mask come free of his face and beneath the hood of feathers and hides there was... nothing. I was so surprised, in fact, that I barely registered it when he put the mask into my hands, and then, suddenly, everything became so much clearer, and so much more complex. Looking down at the mask I was holding I saw my own face staring up at me, as if perfectly rendered on a porcelain doll. Shocked, my attention rose again to the emptiness where the performer's face should have been, and it was no longer empty. The wide, sharp-toothed grin of a coyote had filled in the absence.

His canine eyes held in them an otherworldly purple hue, almost like an amethyst held up to a light source, and his expressive face was full of humor. "So... do you like it?"

My eyes were glued to the strange figure as my brain caught up with the situation at hand. The man was, in fact, a coyote-- a coyote that walked on two legs and wore Native American clothing... only less of that was animal hide and more appeared to be his actual fur. When I continued to fail to answer his questions his grin only grew, almost to a surreal expression of complete and unadulterated humor. "Coyote got your tongue?"

When I finally gained enough brainpower to do anything other than stare slack-jawed I immediately looked back to Ashton and Dakota for support but, despite glancing my way they didn't seem to realize that anything was any different than how it appeared at first. The coyote man snapped his fingers to get my attention. "They can't see me. I didn't want them. I chose you."

I had no idea what he meant by that at the time, and it was obvious he expected a response. Taking a deep breath, I--