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FILIPINO FABLEAUX: Stories for the Child & the ChildHearted

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"Today is a picture of tomorrow taken yesterday." With this magical caption on a piece of note, the boy Aaron the 3rd, together with the most unlikely association of people ever assembled, enters the bookworld of FILIPINO FABLEAUX, a tome which contains an eternal wellspring of stories for the child and the childhearted.

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Chapter 1
This is the story of a note.   Legend tells us that this note, just like any other ordinary note which is passed around inside a classroom by students behind the back of their witty yet unwitting school professor, is never really read, but is merely passed around from person to person, then from room to room, even from house to house, possibly from city to city, then even extraordinarily from country to country; until it mysteriously settles itself on its own accord on the lap of a child, inside the go-bag of a lady or a diary of a princess, between the bible pages carried by a pope, or even extraordinarily in the hands of a summarily confused school principal.   Or even, fate forbid, a character one will usually avoid in such an organized and logical world.   This very, very ordinary note apparently began its life as a small bit of data inside a sim card’s memory, a text which was somehow saved as an unsent message inside a cellphone’s drafts folder, and which, for reasons unknown up until now, was neither used nor deleted, and was then clandestinely transferred to a school computer’s hard disk. There, legend tells us that the note was kept in a sort of virtual state of cosmic inertia where, in the absence of any outside force, it inexorably remained at rest. There, the note secretly waited in absolute internet obscurity. Until one day, after thousands of covert online gaming and surfing hours as well as a limited period of official and hands-on computer practice, a high school freshman in the name of Aaron the Third, with pimple-studded cheeks and eyeglasses as thick as a Graham-cracker-crusted icing layer of crema de fruita any doting grandmother of fifty-eight would ordinarily mix up from her well-furnished kitchen, would do the geekily unthinkable.   The dreadful school computer shutdown.       That one day, of course, was the most perfect day of the year for any shutdown. New Year’s eve. Thus, at exactly the hour of twelve midnight, our unsung hero left-clicked the red button icon from the screen monitor of the school’s lone desktop and consigned the fate of his only real link to the outside world to the first lonesome moments of the passage of the first day of the novel year.   He was rather lucky enough to be granted a free pass by his grandmother, Lola Tere, for such a worthy academic endeavor; for who, in her right frame of mind and on New Year’s eve at that, would let her grandson show up at school only to shutdown and reboot a decrepit, old hag like a school computer? As if the thing could whip up a cupcake for her sweet baby boy Aaron! But the boy knew his Lola Tere’s weakness, and repeatedly harped on how the school principal, Sir Raymond Damasco, was grooming the high school freshman to be the science-and-technology editor of the school paper. Well, not really an editor, if one must pry, but more of the logistics adviser of the school-run publication. In short, the staff’s errand boy. (For all his computer knack Aaron should have settled for, at least, a layout artist position!) But the truth didn’t really matter to Aaron anymore the moment his grandmother took his well-crafted piece of white lie hook, line and sinker. Or, as Lola Tere would say – caramel, cream and cracker.   Turning back to our very, very deliciously exciting story, legend tells us of young Aaron’s error as he went straight to the improvised couch of the computer laboratory that time, in order not to celebrate New Year in the customary fashion every other high school student on earth did, and, instead, saved all his energy for the morrow when he, along with the astute yet cool professoress Miss Pineda as his guardian angel, would excitingly boot up the precious school computer to life again. That, in his haste to digest in hibernation his grandmother’s obra de fruita, Aaron the Third did not actually click the shutdown button but the sleep button of the desktop was the young man’s first error which would be forever recorded as the most fortunate mistake in the long and colorful history of the note.   Thus, at an hour past midnight that early new morn of the year and with the fireworks seemingly at its penultimate stage of winding down the celebration, the desktop woke itself up after an hour-long nap and started to hum its familiar whirring tune. Quite methodically, it re-started where Aaron the Third had invariably left off earlier, and thereby continued to update online the old version of its anti-virus software. After a few minutes or so, however, the updating hit a veritable snag and out popped a window prompt. The computer, on its own sweet accord, had identified the existence of the note, filed under the name of Filipino-Fableaux.hid, and had rigorously examined and classified the note, in accordance to the file and file extension names retrieved, as similar to no other application inside its mega-sized memory. There on the screen of the monitor the window prompt remained, befuddled it seemed, and patiently waited for a corresponding human response, until the screen saver of a wonderful picture of Aaron the Third’s grandmother sitting on her rocking chair with a baby boy on her lap who was somewhat large for his age and obediently flashing at the camera the most wonderful of toothless and drooling smiles (both the grandmother’s and the baby’s) abidingly took its effect.    At exactly ten minutes past four that morning, however, a lone renegade mosquito, a survivor of the New Year’s haze, began to beat its wings to reconnoiter the area of its jurisdiction, which was the computer laboratory, while toting along its long, heavy, and virilously sharp proboscis. It was snack time, of course, and the sight of Aaron the Third’s pimple-studded and plump cheek excited our vigilant insect to no end. It quickly maneuvered itself for a soft landing dead center on the freshman’s left cheek. After it landed dead on target, the mosquito immediately poised its proboscis like a jackhammer.    

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