Tales of Earth-Prime: Everyone, This Is Kevin (Short Fiction, Three Electronic Formats)

Everyone: This Is Kevin
A short story set on Earth-Prime
Author: Eytan Bernstein
Editing: Jaym Gates
Graphic Design: Hal Mangold
16 pages, three formats: PDF, ePub, mobi (Amazon Kindle)

Even robot superhero boys need to go to school, but Kevin soon learns that there is more to an education than pencils and chalk.

About Eytan Bernstein

Eytan Bernstein lives a curious dual life. By day, he works as an editor in educational publishing, developing print and digital educational materials for history, geography, and other social sciences. Eytan sees this as the time he gets to write about “the real world.”

By night, Eytan writes and edits fantasy roleplaying games and speculative fiction, creating and populating worlds that do not exist. He has written or edited over 50 print and digital games and supplements and over 60 magazine articles in the RPG industry for companies including Wizards of the Coast, Goodman Games, Kobold Press, Legendary Games, and many others.

Curious duality aside, Eytan lives in a small apartment in LA his dog Hiro, though he is certainly a New Yorker at heart. He is a passionate civil rights advocate and is always looking for ways to highlight diversity in games and fiction.

This story marks Eytan’s first published fiction. He is currently working on a queer urban fantasy novel.

Eytan's Inspiration

"I’m particularly drawn to the day-to-day lives of superheroes and others with supernatural powers, so I tend to focus a great deal of my life on work/life balance. I’m as interested (if not more so) in the classes our hero takes, their day job, how they pay their taxes, and what they buy at the supermarket as their latest battle with a villain. That led me to wonder what it would be like if Kid Robot was invited to go to school.

"For this story, I drew from my own personal back-to-school experiences. As a child, I was always overwhelmed when purchasing school supplies. I wasn’t a particularly organized kid, but I was bright. I loved school supplies, but found shopping for them overwhelming.

"Bullying plays a small, but important role in the story, and is an important element in my writing. As an outsider, Kevin is an unsurprising target for Lance, the bully in the story. But Kevin has a very positive approach to his situation. He is lucky to have a support network, which a great deal of children in similar situations lack.

"Overall, the story has a light and positive tone, but there is an underlying current of something sinister brewing just below the surface that I plan to expand upon in future episodes. Kevin’s origins are mysterious and are only hinted at in this story. The recent film Midnight Special was a strong influence on me when imagining where Kevin came from and where he might end up (or at least where some people might want him to end up). That film has a much darker, edgier tone than what we’ve seen here, but I thought I’d mentioned it as a bit of a teaser for shades of what we might see down the line."