Disclaimer: I don't own stuff . . . etc, etc. Sigh.

This is just an idea I had last night. I'm not going anywhere in particular with it as of right now, but if enough of you like it and want me to continue I shall certainly try my best!

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David Ethan Jones walked slowly down the empty hall, the slap of his sneakers on the floor echoing eerily past the uniformly closed classroom doors. Early morning sunlight lanced through the windows and dust motes swirled as he passed by. Dave E. Jones. His friends called him Davey Jones; they thought it was a riot. He wished they wouldn't; it made him nervous. He paused.

"All right," he said in a quiet, meant-to-be-but-not-quite encouraging voice. "All right. There hasn't been anything in ages . . ." He wasn't comforted; the complete lack of . . . of *anything* was precisely what had him worried. He had been coming here every morning since school let out. It was already mid-way through July, and there hadn't been so much as a seashell. It was weird.

David forced his feet to continue down the hall, still thinking positive thoughts: Today will be just like yesterday and the day before all the way back through June. Maybe . . . maybe it's over. Ever think of that? Maybe it got switched off somehow and I'll never have to deal with any of that crap again, and when my friends call me Davey Jones I can laugh, too.

He paused once more; this time it was not because he didn't want to reach his destination but because he already had. David regarded his locker from a safe distance. Davey Jones's locker. Ha, ha, ha. His locker was indistinguishable from the other lockers; they had been painted last year, so there wasn't even any middle-school graffiti or faded, age- old stickers that could no longer be read but had never been scraped off. David inched forward, half expecting some kind of explosion to make up for its previous lack of activity. But nothing happened. With a resigned sigh, David reached forward and twirled the combination lock. 35 . . . 45 . . . 5. Easy enough to remember . . . not, David thought sarcastically, that he could ever forget it if he tried. David lifted the latch and swung open the door.

Immediately he was forced to leap back as a 17th-century cannon slid out onto the floor with a deafening clunk. But it was not the cannon that David found upsetting as much as the wet and bedraggled pirate that was strapped to it. The cannon could have been rolled, with some difficulty, out of the building and into the nearby pond, out of sight and out of mind. He'd done it countless times before, usually with old pistols, trinkets, or the occasional locked chest. He had never had to deal with a live person before . . . and he had never wanted to. This was the last thing he needed.

"What . . ." the pirate looked thoroughly confused. His dark eyes focused sharply on David. "Who . . .?"

"My name is Davey Jones," David said, voice dripping with sarcasm, "and you have just fallen out of my locker." He raised his eyebrows. "Do you have a name?"

"Bill Turner," the man said bemusedly. He looked wonderingly around the hallway, as if he had never seen anything so fascinating as a bunch of deserted classrooms, a row of empty lockers, and a rather unattractive tile floor, complete with cannon-induced gouges. Then he began to fumble at the ropes around his feet. David didn't move to help him; he was doing some very fast thinking. As soon as the pirate had climbed unsteadily to his feet, David nodded at the cannon.

"Can you carry that thing?"

"I suppose." The pirate hoisted the cannon onto his shoulder, stooping slightly with the weight. "But why?"

"Because we have to get rid of it, that's why," David said, trying hard to keep his voice even. "It's bad enough that it gouged up the floor. Follow me; we're going out the back way."

"Out?" The pirate frowned. "This isn't the afterlife?"

"No, it's not. This is the middle school. The afterlife is where you go when you're dead . . . and you are not dead." David led the way to the small pond behind the school. As soon as the cannon disappeared beneath the surface, he turned to the pirate and sighed. "What am I going to do with you?"

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So. what do you think? Worth continuing? Review and you will have my undying gratitude! :D

~Platy