Thompkens Jenkins, Master of Disguise

     Thus, in an effort to please the readership (and because, I’ll allow, I find Thom amusing too, the little delinquent he is), here I take up the mantle of his biographer once more, and present to you this new three-part story.

     We last saw Thompkens Jenkins on a very eventful day in his young life, which began on market day in the Neovian town square, and ended in his own flat above Bob Thompken’s store between his surrogate father Bob and his new rescue lobster (Maraquan Grackle Bug), Bartholomew — which is a very decent place to leave someone, if I do say so myself! Find me a fellow who wouldn’t like to be left between the honourable Bob Thompken and a lobster, and you’ll have brought me a bloke I wouldn’t much care to know.

     Anyway! I could continue Thom’s story from the events of this day, but I will not. For, to illustrate the point I am about to make, we will have to go back in time some four years, back when Thom was a lad of about eight years old. You must forgive the silly mistakes Thom makes in this story, dear Reader — after all, he was so young! He didn’t know any better.

     But without further ado, to the main subject of this story: Thompkens Jenkins considered himself a master of disguise. It may seem hard to imagine a Ruki with four arms, perpetually dirt-caked green skin, and a prominent set of antennae being mistaken for anyone other than himself. But with a hyperactive imagination outpaced only by a ravenous desire to do something counterproductive to one’s moral standing, you’d be surprised what one can accomplish.

     Thom’s first excursion into the world of the masquerade was a case of outright identity theft, and it happened something like this...

     A bleak day in midwinter. White sleet and black soot driven on an unrelenting wind — sleet being Neovia’s signature brand of wet snow; soot from the countless chimneys that blocked out the sky, under which fires roared in a feeble attempt to ward off Neovia’s signature damp cold.

     The windswept and unprotected corner of Mackintosh and Wellington Street was the last place anyone could wish to spend a day at the best of times, but oh! how much less so in winter. The weather, Thom thought, as he held onto his new hat which had almost been knocked off by the wind three times in the past five minutes, seemed to have been purloined from the peaks of Terror Mountain itself.

     “And barmy you are, Mother Neovian Nature! Whaddya want with their weather, of all the weather on this green planet?” the Ruki grumbled to himself as he used his bottom set of arms to pull his large coat tighter around his small frame. He adjusted the newspaper in his shirt, an extra layer of insulation. If he had known it was going to be this cold, he wouldn’t have left Bob the financial section. “A good deal of warmth it’s providin’m right now, all snug in his shop,” he muttered bitterly.

     Upon this frigid afternoon, Thom knew there was one Neovian citizen who was, or would certainly appear to be, untroubled by the cold, impervious to the gale. Mrs. Dinsley the old green Aisha had stood every day at the inhospitable intersection of Mackintosh and Wellington since the autumn of that year, wearing no overclothes but a Tyrannian fur cloak for protection, bearing no other object of comfort than a crate that had once held potatoes, which she turned upside-down and used as a stool on which to sit, whilst she begged her daily bread from passersby.

     This had seemed a phenomenon to Thom. The old gal’s hardiness and resolve must have been super-human — either that or she was too feeble-minded to realize there were other corners in the world — or simply too old to walk any further.

     This is what Thom had thought originally. Then, after days of observing the lady on his way to and from school (often Thom didn’t even make it to school he became so transfixed with her progress), he realized neither of these was the case.

     Mrs. Dinsley was smart, she was! The corner of Macintosh and Wellington was a good corner — if not pleasing to the eye, or any of the other four sensory faculties, it was traversed frequently by friendly and well-to-do Neopians on their way to their various employments in Neovia’s business district. And, perhaps most fortuitous of all, most of them seemed to like Mrs. Dinsley! It appeared almost everyone she encountered had a smile or a kind word to exchange before cheerfully handing over their Neopoints!

     Thom found it all astonishing. “Some people ‘ave all the luck,” he mused aloud to himself. It was a lonely, dreary day, the kind built for musing aloud to oneself. “I wish I was her. An’t nobody ever gave me Neopoints for free.” Thom kicked at a pebble with his hobnail boot and watched it skitter into the street. When the Whinny-drawn carriages cleared, the Ruki could see straight across the road to the corner he had spent so many hours watching from afar. But something was amiss today. Here was the famous Mrs. Dinsley’s corner...

     “What the blazes...?”

     ...but Mrs. Dinsley was nowhere in sight!

     “Where in bleedin’ blue blazes could she be?”

     Thom turned this question over and over in his head as he plodded his way through the slush-laden streets of Neovia. He was so deep in thought that when he finally reached the door of 1114 Dowderby Street, he forgot he was wearing his new hat and practically lopped off its top in the doorway.

     “Good gourd, lad! What in the name o’ Jim have you got on your head?”

     “I won it in school, Bub!” Thom proclaimed proudly. “It’s a scholar’s cap... of sorts.”

     “A scholar’s cap, eh? Well done, lad!” The great rainbow Tonu thudded his protégé on the shoulder. “Why so tall and pointy though, if you don’t mind me askin’? Thing stands a foot off your head! Reminds me a bit o’ a clown’s cap.”

     “You’d be surprised how of’en those two are one in ‘a same, Bub,” said Thom, with a truly disappointed frown. “New teacher at school, he’s nought more than a clown himself. ‘Twas babblin’ on at the older fellas some political jargon about Fyora ab-ductin’ the throne — that means givin’ it up, far as I can tell. He had such a borin’ way about explainin’ things, though, me mind wouldn’t stop going to wand’rin’ and I couldn’t make any sense of what the man was sayin’. So I told him that, and the clot asked what I did know — real hoity-toity-like, of course! That’s when I got an idea. You know Bub, I haven’t been truly ‘appy at school since I graduated from the first shift and the sand desks, way back on me second day. I realized that then and there, and that’s when I got me idea!”

     “And?” prompted Bob, who had been waiting with bated breath, hands on his knees, for the conclusion of Thom’s speech.

     “The idea was,” said Thom with a laugh, “the idea was that I would pretend I couldn’t write — didn’t even know the alphabet — so I could go back to drawin’ with sticks in the sand with the l’il kiddiewinkies.”

     “And for that you were awarded the scholar’s cap?” questioned Bob, incredulous.

     “He called me a dunce or some such when he gave it to me,” admitted Thom, “but yes, he said I could keep it! Looks proper stately, don’t it? With its sheer height and sharpness, this cap lends a man the air of a king!”

     “Indeed, lad,” Old Bob Thompken chuckled. “Anythin’ looks good on you when you wear it with that much pride.”

     Bob returned to roving about his shop — a place of miscellany, infamy, olfactory sundries and universal curiosity, which I have already once described in such detail I need not introduce it again. The Featured Item Stand on this particular day contained an assortment of books: volumes on science and agricultural, filled with half-legible notes and doodles scrawled in pen by their former owner. A cardboard sign sat next to them: “Includes commentary from famed scientist—“ here a line was scribbled as if the famed scientist had signed his own name in minute handwriting. Or as if the maker of the sign didn’t know how to spell the scientist’s name, or didn’t know his name at all, and had left this unintelligible squiggle to cover up the fact. “That’s a bargain, those books!”

     Against the back wall of the shop, upon the clothesline where used articles of clothing hung on haphazard display, a startlingly familiar item caught Thom’s wandering eye.

     “Bub, you know Mrs. Dinsley?” the Ruki asked suddenly, as the shopkeeper organized a shelf of canned goods — most recently expired cans up front. “Mrs. Dinsley?”

     “The old beggar lady. The green Aisha who stands at the corner of Macintosh and Wellington, askin’ for alms day and night,” expounded Thom.

     “Ah, Mrs. Dinsley! A fine, respectable sort o’ lady if I ever met one. I always gives alms to the old gal when I pass that way, and you should too.” The Tonu squinted to read a date he had once written on a dusty can of peas. The ink was too faded to discern.

     “It’s just that today she was missin’, Bub,” continued Thom. “The corner was there, so it wasn’t effaced from the map by some dark wizardry (though I did wonder for a moment, Bub) — but the lady was not there! Gone! POOF! as if she was washed clear away in the last great rain.”

     “Poof,” mumbled Bob absent-mindedly in reply, as he strained to determine whether the peas were really peas at all, or if they had once been corn, some long bygone day.

     “The reason I mention this now, Bub, is because that cloak looks an awful lot like hers.”

     Bob looked up now to see the Tyrannian fur cloak on the clothesline, as it was indeed this item that had arrested Thom’s attention so. “Does it look like Mrs. Dinsley’s cloak?” asked the shopkeep. “Think some bloke brought it in earlier today. Or was it yesterday? Gave ‘im fifteen Neopoints for it. I bet we can get twenty-five, easy!” Bob guffawed.

     “But you don’t know who brought it in?”

     “Not a clue,” asserted Bob, who had better recall for the faces on coins than on Neopets.

     Thom’s first thought was one of sorrow for Mrs. Dinsley. The cloak seemed to him the clincher, the deciding factor, the coroner’s statement. Mrs. Dinsley was well and truly gone. Thom hadn’t really known her except through association (well, and through watching her from the bushes for three and a half months), but she seemed a right good-hearted woman. She must have been well-liked for ladies and gents to be always handing over their Neopoints to her!

     Suddenly Thom’s antennae stood on end. (They tended to do that when he had an idea.) He’d thought he was a genius for getting demoted four shifts in school, but this! This was the crown-prince of all ideas! Perhaps people didn’t know yet that Mrs. Dinsley was gone. It would take time for them to realize and word to spread — after all, they didn’t know about the cloak, as Thom did.

     The cloak! Thom recalled the words he himself had spoken as he’d approached the beggar’s corner that day: “I wish I was her.” Now why couldn’t he be her? He was green, the same relative size... he even had his own set of antennae! And any other little discrepancies, his extra limbs for example, would be covered by the cloak.

     “Can I borrow this?” asked Thom, unpinning the Tyrannian fur cloak from the line.

     “You want to borrow me twenty-five Neopoint cloak? What for, lad?”

     “An incredible feat of infamy you’d assuredly condone!” boasted Thom. “If my plan works, we’ll be makin’ far and away more than twenty-five Neopoints! Far and away more..”

     Bob considered this for a moment — but by no means a long moment. “You’re right, lad, I do condone it,” the Tonu said shortly. “Take it with my blessin’.” He was going to say, ‘Don’t get it dirty’, but the cloak was already in such a filthy state of disrepair, there was probably no such thing as a deeper degree of dirtiness for it.

     “Good luck, lad! Make me evil heart proud,” said Bob, as the eight-year-old rapscallion gathered up the cloak and scampered away, intending to do just that.

     “Oh, and lad,” said Bob, just before Thom would have ducked through the door: “you might want to leave the hat.”

     “You know, it almost blew clean off me head three times today!” Thom laughed. His guardian held out a firm hand. “Good thinkin’, Bub.”

     And with that, Thompkens Jenkins beat his eager retreat, wild to initiate his Master Plan.

     To be continued…