31/31 - DAY 5 - DAVID GALLOWAY, BRAIN IN A CAGE

“That’s my brain in here. In there, I mean. In the cage. The rats, they think for me. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was supposed to get smarter. Then they would like me more at school. They called me stupid and stuff like that. I wanted to get smarter, so I went to the library. I found a book. My pet rat, Richie, couldn’t hold all of it at once. All of my brain. My dad let me get more rats and now I have Richie, Dorothy, Alice, Franklin, Lucy, Tom, Harry, Barry, Stevie, Jill, Anais, Percy, Merlin, Pepper, Judy, Joe, and Nora. Richie shared it with them and they pass it around, so now they do all the thinking. Rats are smart like that.” 

David Galloway is a twelve year old boy with long blond hair and an oversized shirt. He is FORGETFUL, CURIOUS, and LOVES HIS RATS. David found a ritual that allows the caster to become smarter by using other people’s minds to process more of reality at once. The ritual, however, was not meant to be used on rats, and now he relies on them to do the thinking for him. He has difficulty understanding language and math when he’s away from the cage. 

David has 17 rats. They are very intelligent and most of them move in unison when David is thinking hard about something. One of them, a brown and white rat named Richie, reliably looks in David’s direction whenever he is speaking. If the rats are separated, he will have more and more difficulty understanding his surroundings until he enters a coma. When asked a question, the rats will communicate amongst themselves before telling David the answer. Anyone who can speak with animals or pick up on subtle cues from the boy will be able to determine that the rats are sapient, however they are in a sort of stalemate with him. They want their freedom but also want to keep their intelligence, which they would lose without him binding their minds together.