Amanda FANTASTICAL Mind Muser on Hollow City By: Ransom Riggs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mind Muser

* The parts in bold are taken directly from the book

If anyone was watching as the eight-thirty train made it's way into the station with a hiss, they wouldn't have seen anything odd about it. Not the conductors, or the drivers or the passengers, or the train itself. If they gave the people on the train a bit more attention, perhaps they may have noticed something peculiar about them, but no one did. No one gave a second thought to the children who stepped off the first-class car and onto the platform, with no parents following behind them, thought the oldest of the group looked like he was only sixteen or seventeen.

On an ordinary day, any children as lost and forlorn looking as these would've been approached by some kindly adult and asked what the matter was, or whether they needed help, or where there parents were. But today the platform teemed with hundreds of children, all of whom looked lost and forlorn. So no one paid much attention to the little girl with tumbling brown hair and button shoes, or the fact that her shoes did not quite touch the floor. No one noticed the moon-faced boy in the flat cap, or the honeybee that drifted from his mouth, tested the sooty air, then dove back to whence it came.

No one's gaze lingered on the boy with dark-ringed eyes, or saw the clay man who peeked from his shirt pocket only to be pushed down again by the boy's finger. Likewise the boy who was dressed in a muddy but finely tailored suit and stove-in top hat, his face drawn and haggard from lack of sleep, for he hadn't allowed himself in days, so afraid was he of the dreams.

No one glanced at the girl in the big coat and simple dress, who was built like a stack of bricks and lashed to her back a steamer trunk nearly as large as herself. None who saw her could have guessed how stupendously heavy the trunk was, or why a screen of tiny holes had been punched into one side. Overlooked completely was the young man next to her, so wrapped in scarves and a hooded coat that not an inch of his bare skin could been seen, though it was early September and the weather still warm.

None noticed the girl, the one with the red rain-boots, whose skin glimmered green like it was covered in tiny fishes scales. No one noticed the way she swiftly dodged the puddles and water fountains dotting the platform. The way that, though it wasn't raining, she carefully covered herself with a bright yellow raincoat and the way her eyes shone with fear beneath her thick glasses every time she came close to the snack bar.

Then there was the American boy, so ordinary looking he hardly merited notice; so apparently normal that people's eyes skipped over him - even as he studied them, on tiptoe, neck swiveling, his gaze sweeping across the platform like as sentry's. The girl by his side stood with her hands clasped together, concealing a tendril of flame the curled stubbornly around the tendril of her pinky, which happened sometimes when she was upset. She tried shaking her finger as one might to extinguish a match, then blowing on it. When that didn't work, she slipped it into her mouth and let a puff of smoke coil from her nose. No one saw that, either.

In fact, no one looked closely enough at the children from the first-class car of the eight-thirty train to notice anything peculiar about them at all. Which was just as well.