A kid in a gulch
Welcome to Geargrind Gulch: where the ground sneezes slag, the sky tears itself apart with "Sky-Screams," and the rain tastes like regret and burnt wiring. It’s a town built on bad luck, perpetually crumbling under the weight of spectacularly improbable disasters. Corrosion eats synth-steel overnight. Gravity hiccups. Reality itself sometimes gets the shakes.
And then there's Jax.
Jax hums jaunty tunes plucked from the grind-noise of collapsing mines. He skips through localized gravity surges that send ore-carts tumbling. He picks up still-glowing slag and juggles it, emerging without a singe. Falling debris? Always misses. Corrosive dust? Just brushes off. While Geargrind Gulch devours hope and structural integrity, Jax remains untouched. A cheerful, grubby anomaly radiating pure, oblivious okay-ness amidst the grinding entropy.
His parents, Kel and Marn, survive on pragmatism and grit. Marn utilizes Jax's uncanny ability to fix leaks in resonance fields or fetch tools from danger zones with unsettling calm. Kel, however, practices a different kind of survival: deliberate ignorance. He sees the impossible near-misses, the way chaos bends around his son. He feels the dangerous questions burning in his mind – How? Why? What force shields him? But Kel knows some doors are better left unopened. To question Jax's strange grace might shatter the fragile peace they've carved from the Gulch's chaos. Knowing might make the Gulch notice.
But as the disasters escalate – from reality-warping "Static Blooms" to the terrifying, town-swallowing "Great Slump" where Jax walks unscathed across liquefying ground – the sheer impossibility becomes harder to ignore. The town suffers. People break. And the unspoken truth looms larger: is Jax's miraculous survival somehow connected to Geargrind Gulch's relentless, crushing doom?
A Kid In A Gulch is a darkly whimsical tale of impossible joy amidst spectacular decay. It's a story about a family clinging to normalcy in a place where the laws of physics – and luck – seem fundamentally broken. It asks: How far would you go to protect a miracle you don't understand? And what happens when the most precious thing in your world might also be the source of everyone else's despair? The answer, like Jax himself, remains a profoundly unsettling, beautifully untouched mystery.