The Nomad

**Grim Tales: The Nomad** is the sixteenth installment in the *Grim Tales* series by Elephant Games.

 Plot

Luisa Gray is working at a museum which has been subjected to an unusual robbery. She calls on her twin sister Anna, whose unique psychic abilities will likely enable her to discover what the police can't, so Anna goes to meet her at the museum. Luisa remembers a man coming to check the storeroom the previous week, but the police couldn't see him on the CCTV cameras; Anna, however, can see two teenagers on the footage. Touching an origami elephant the thieves left behind, Anna travels to their past. She learns that they are a part of "The Outcasts", a group consisting of four people with special abilities. They have stolen the artifacts from the museum in order to help them control their powers.

Searching their hideout, Anna is shocked to discover that one of the Outcasts is Luisa's nephew Jared, Jackie's twin brother, whom the family all thought had died at birth. Anna returns to the present and goes to the Outcasts' hideout to learn the truth about Jared. She locates him, but before they can have any kind of conversation, Anna is attacked by Thunder, the leader of the Outcasts, who then escapes with Jared before she can react.

Exiting the hideout, Anna finds Jackie waiting by her car, which has a flat tire. Jackie apologizes for not having responded sooner. As it turns out, she and Jared have already met and formed a bond; she was anxious to keep him out of prison, so she urged him to run. She says that Jared may have gone to his guardian to hide, so they can head there once they get the tire fixed, and she promises to tell Anna more about Jared on the way. As they drive to vist Jared's guardian, Jackie explains that for their entire lives, both she and Jared felt like they were missing something, and when they met a few years earlier, they had an instant connection. Not knowing why they were separated at birth and never told about one another, they decided to keep their knowledge of each other a secret.

Jared's guardian is a retired Navy captain, and he explains how he adopted Jared when he was six years old. Things were peaceful until Jared started skipping school and getting into trouble, and he even spent some time in a juvenile detention facility. Anna gets into the house and finds Jared in his bedroom; he creates a magic abyss in the floor before fleeing through the open window, but Richard gives Anna a scroll with which to undo the spell. She searches his room for clues and, in a locked box, discovers a photograph of the night he and the other Outcasts used their powers to escape from the juvenile detention facility. Traveling back to that day using the photograph, she learns that Jared and Jackie met just prior to his being sent there. She finds another photograph of the Outcasts robbing a supermarket together.

This one brings her to the day in question, but instead of being frozen in time, the Outcasts are still able to move. Jared summons a giant monster illusion, but collapses from how his powers exhaust him, and the other Outcasts flee, leaving him on the ground. Anna finds the means to revive him, and Richard provides a mirror with which to dispel the monster. Once awake, Jared apologizes for trying to hurt Anna and explains that he has a hard time controlling his powers. He wants to help her undo all the crimes the Outcasts have committed, and says that Jackie told him about her powers. He gives her a bracelet with the Outcasts' emblem. Anna heads into the past, thinking that if she can fix the moments when each of the Outcasts' lives went awry, she can undo all of their crimes. Visiting their childhoods with Richard's help, she is able to help Tinman make friends, save Firegirl's parents from dying in a car crash, and prevent Thunder from committing his first robbery. Back in the present, Jared has been brought back into the Gray family fold, and he uses his illusions for the amusement of his sister and their other relatives.

### Bonus Chapter

Jared's powers, instead of creating an illusion, transport him to some kind of dark alternate dimension. He finds Richard there, who explains that the world they are in was created by the dark side of Jared's soul. He has to visit three distorted memories from his past and collect the soul fragments found there; once he has all three, he can return to the present. In the first, young Jared fell into a deep hole and was afraid of ghosts lurking nearby, and his present self banishes the ghosts and helps young Jared climb up to safety. In the second, he must revisit the day on which a friend of his was murdered; Jared is able to prevent the crime. In the third, he goes back to when his girlfriend Marie died in a terrible accident, and is able to save her. Using the sigils collected from all three of his past selves, Jared is able to unlock the door and return to his life.

## Characters

* Anna Gray: A psychic detective who can travel through time.
* Luisa Gray: Anna's twin sister, who is working in a museum and asks for help resolving a theft.
* Richard Gray: Anna and Luisa's father, a ghost bound into his own skull; he assists Anna in her work.
* Jared Gray: Luisa's nephew by marriage, whom the family all thought died at birth. He was actually given up for adoption due to a prophecy that he would possess dark magical powers, which has turned out to be true.
* "Thunder": The leader of the Outcasts, a young man with storm-related powers.
* "Firegirl": Thunder's girlfriend, a young woman with pyrokinetic abilities.
* "Tinman": The fourth member of the Outcasts, a bookish young man with telekinetic abilities.
* Navy captain: Jared's adoptive father, who was good to him.

## Connections

* Jared and his twin sister Jackie were born in the bonus chapter of the previous installment, *The Hunger*.

## Trivia

* This is the first time we've seen Luisa since the events of *The Heir*, in which Richard performed a ritual which restored Anna to a state of perpetual youth. Luisa does not appear to have been on the receiving end of the same spell, as she looks older than her twin.
* According to a document Anna finds while searching for clues, Jared was an inmate at the Grayshades Correctional Facility. Luisa, meanwhile, works at the Grayshades Museum. Given the family surname, this is amusing.
* Other than his birth in the previous game, this installment marks the only appearance of Jared Gray in the series to date. Neither he nor Jackie have been seen since.
* Richard at one point refers to Jared as his grandson, and in the bonus chapter Jared repeatedly refers to Richard as his grandfather. This is a mistake; Jared is only related to Anna, and thus Richard, by marriage, being the nephew of Anna's sister's husband.
* Although the credits give Allan D. Villatoro credit for providing the voice of Tinman, there is no indication of who voiced Thunder or Firegirl.

## External Links

* *Grim Tales: The Nomad* at Big Fish Games
* *Grim Tales* at TV Tropes
* Elephant Games on Facebook