"I'm not sure what to do or say anymore. These are my days without reason."
— John
A Science Fiction Slice of Life story.
An Ordinary High-School Student and several odd individuals deal with life and the weirdness around them. Hilarity Ensues.
Tropes:
- Batter Up!: John almost always uses bats when he goes on a 'mission.'
- Bad Future: Tori tells of several potenial ones. John, Jenny, Maggie, Tori and Fred get trapped in one for a few days.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Tori and Tollbooth might be very nice, but they're still trained Agents sent to deal with usually dangerous and impossible situations. Piss them off in any way, and doom is soon to come.
- Blade Enthusiast: Early on Tollbooth tells us about his love for blades. J uses nothing but knives.
- Blonde Brunette Red Head: By literal hair colors it's Leah, Jenny and Maggie. Their actual personalities are something entirely different.
- Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Most of the Agents due to the fact they're either not human or their living conditions are odd. The normal people John knows aren't any better. John himself is actually pretty much this even if he doesn't really realize it.
- A Day in the Limelight: Other Agents and characters get chapters to themselves.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: "I want this all to end okay. I swear to god I will fight every fucking thing that gets in my way to do that."
- Gambit Pileup: All of the different factions each of their own agenda and intend to use their Agent to further it.
- Genius Loci: The school on a good day is something like this.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Sort of. Grayson never really tells us just how much human is in him and how much he is an alien.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Maggie erases and horribly damages her Personality Drive in order to give the school a slightly more human and humane personality at the end of the first book. It's going to take her a long time to get back to where she was.
- History Repeats: This is not the first time the Chaos Strings have infected a person and a place. Nor the first time it infected a person like John.
- Insistent Terminology: They are not monsters or freak events, they are Anomalies.
- Mirror Universe: At least one exists and J finds his way from there thanks to the school.
- MacGuffin: Whatever the source of the 'reality sickness' is. Said source is a Hive Mind like entity called the Chaos Strings.
- Missing Mom: Jenny's mother is longer present in her life.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Tori and Tollbooth use this to hide their otherworldliness. John and Fred do this as well. It's really just so that people won't expect much from them.
- No Name Given: John gets calls his town XXXX. We also never learn John's last name.
- Not So Stoic: Maggie gets more of this as her personality takes more shape.
- Ordinary High-School Student: John. Except not really. In a lot of ways.
- Parental Abandonment: Tori has vague feelings of adandonment due to her parents not caring about her time traveling. John never knew his biological parents. He's been adopted all his life.
- Proud to Be a Geek: John and his original friends wear their geek badges with love.
- Proud Warrior Race Guy: Grayson would like to remind you that his race is better than humans in every way.
- Psychic Powers: The 'Operation' utilizes Agents with this. As such, Leah can read minds.
- Reality Warper: The school's 'reality sickness' makes it somewhat like this. It all gets worse as it goes on, due to the Chaos Strings' slow degeneration.
- Shout-Out:
- John explains to Maggie his personal meaning behind the song Paranoid Android.
- Maggie uses crowbars a lot. Her last name is Freeman.
- John names his band the 20th Century Boys.
- During his musings on his
freshman year, John calls his life something like, "the chronicles of a wind-up bird." The story in which this happens is entitled Me, I'm Not. - The last chapter of book three is named Little Lion Man.
- The last chapter of book four is named The Cave.
- One of the Agents of 'the Organization' is a paraplegic with the powers of astral projection.
- Soaperizing: John would much rather focus on the people around him than the strange crap he's always in. It doesn't really work though.
- Stoic: Maggie. John is a lesser version of this.
- Sunglasses at Night: John has a habit of wearing his goggles in any kind of bright light. Sometimes that leads him to wear them during the night.
- Time Travel: Used quite a bit and in different ways. The 'Tomorrow People' use it to send their Agent back to the current.
- Unreliable Narrator: The other Agents tend to be like this in their chapters by putting their cause in a very postive light. Also John John JOHN! John gets a lot of stuff right, but he lies or twists about other things, like his interests, speech patterns and makes it seem like everyone, and everything, looks down upon him in negativity.
- Weirdness Magnet: As the subtitle suggests, John is one of these. This is due to his 'infection' by the Chaos Strings.
- You Can't Go Home Again: Tori: I can't talk to the future anymore. My home is gone.
