A/N Because of my incurable ADD, I must be focusing on more than one plot at a time and so I start another. This should hopefully increase the frequency of my update on Mentors Mentor as well. I know that this has been done before but I hope that this will be different enough to be worth reading.

Chapter 1

It was an unusually cold morning for so early in September and, as is customary when it seemed things couldn't get any worse, it had started raining. This of course was not your average passing rainstorm; it was heavy and so overbearing that one only had to be outside for a quick minute before being soaked to the bone.

This miserable weather should have kept everyone at home, safe and warm with their families, but there was on brave soul who ventured outside. Or perhaps he hadn't ventured at all, for this little boy had been brought to this little town, hundreds of miles from home and left there by his relatives on what would have been his first day of school.

His cousin (who was the same age) had been going to school for three years, and while school for three-year-olds was more of a social event than actual learning; this little boy would also have liked to go. Alas, the little boy's aunt and uncle had been quite clear that school was no place for a freak like him.

No matter how badly he wanted to go, he was able to accept the fact that he wouldn't go to school as he was able to teach himself quite well and was already reading at a higher level than his cousin and he also secretly suspected that he was at a higher level than his uncle also.

As it was, the night before his cousin had been to go to his first day of the first grade, his uncle had shoved him into the car and drove for hours before dropping the little boy off at this bench in this little town around midnight and ever since then, the little boy hadn't moved at all. The boy wished that his uncle had left him some clothes or money as it had been two days since he had eaten anything and it was starting to become painful.

The little boy had always known that he was different than his family, what he didn't know was why. He knew that it was odd that he didn't have a name, and while he suspected that he did have one, he had no memory of ever being addressed as anything other than boy or freak.

The boy also knew that he was very small for his age and not just compared to his cousin (who was quite a bit larger than the average child) but compared to other children he had seen from a distance. This little boy also had no parents, well he had parents, but he had no memory of his parents and had no idea where they were now or why he wasn't with them.

By far the oddest thing about this little boy, as he or his family would surely tell you, is the way odd things seemed to happen around him, without any explanation. His uncle always used these weird things as an excuse for his frequent beatings which had been progressively getting worse as he got older. The little boy knew though, that the beatings were not solely because he remembered being treated the same long before the odd things had started.

As the nameless little boy sat quietly on the bench, both hoping his relatives would return for him and praying that they wouldn't he didn't notice a rather plump woman watching him from inside a store across the narrow street.