The Gnomes of Tucson

By Kenneth Jorgensen

To sixteen-year-old Randal Regulus nothing is more important than his goal to be a monster hunter like previous generations of his family. To accomplish this goal he and his friends are spending their summer training in Tucson, Arizona, at the headquarters of the premier monster-hunting organization in the world: the Round Table. Their training includes martial arts, marksmanship and a class on how to fight particular types of monsters, but also includes academic classes like English, math and physics.

Near the end of summer, with final examinations looming, Randal, Kate, Grant, Kirby, and their new friend Gabriel get some pizzas and hole up in the freshman dorms to study for final exams. No sooner do they set down the food than small men invade the dorm seemingly from nowhere, tape Kirby to a chair, and steal the pizzas. The friends learn that the men are gnomes, monsters with unique abilities to manipulate the physical universe around them.

At first the gnomes are a mere nuisance, but the situation quickly escalates when the gnomes kidnap Gabriel and hold him for ransom. It will take all of the wits and ingenuity Randal can muster to rescue Gabriel and escape from monsters that can literally walk through walls.

The Gnomes of Tucson is the second book in the Randal Regulus, Monster Hunter series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kenneth Jorgensen
• Release date: Mar 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465866530

Kenneth Jorgensen

Kenneth Jorgensen lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two children. His life growing up was much likes Randal’s, except the parts about monsters.

Book preview

Randal Regulus Monster Hunter

The Gnomes of Tucson

By

Kenneth Jorgensen

Special Smashwords Edition

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Randal Regulus, Monster Hunter - The Gnomes of Tucson

Special Smashwords Edition

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Copyright 2012 by Kenneth Jorgensen. All rights reserved, including right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Cover Art By: Lisa Cheney-Jorgensen

Cover art copyright Kenneth Jorgensen

Books By Kenneth Jorgensen

The Randal Regulus, Monster Hunter Series:

The Werewolves of Riverside Park

The Gnomes of Tucson

The Troll Under the Eighth Street Bridge

The Kusunoki Chronicles:

Pride of the Samurai

To learn more about the books by Kenneth Jorgensen visit

http://www.kenneth-jorgensen.com/

Randal Regulus, Monster Hunter

The Gnomes of Tucson

CHAPTER 1

Tucson is hot. Don’t let the natives tell you otherwise. They will say things like, Tucson is where people from Phoenix go to escape the heat, or some such. That is a little like saying the frying pan is the place to avoid the fire. Tucson is hot.

I had spent my summer here, and the average high temperature was as close to one hundred as made no difference. That’s right, 100. As in degrees. The kind Mr. Fahrenheit invented.

I threw in that reference to Mr. Fahrenheit just so you wouldn’t think I wasn’t going to school. I am going to monster-hunting school, but I have to keep up with my regular schoolwork in addition to the monster hunting stuff. Monster hunting school is much tougher than normal school. Tougher in so many ways.

My name is Randal Regulus, I am now sixteen years old, and shockingly good looking in an under-appreciated way. I am also a monster hunter. I would say professional monster hunter, but no one has paid me yet. Let’s call it semi-pro.

I had been in Tucson for the summer, but even so had yet to acclimate. By acclimate I mean get used to the heat. Did I mention that it is hot here in Tucson?

Technically I was several miles out of Tucson, as close to nowhere as to Tucson, in fact. The place is called Camelot. Yes, that Camelot, with King Arthur and the Round Table. Well, maybe not exactly that Camelot, but certainly its direct descendant. The Camelot here in Tucson could trace its origin back Arthur and Merlin themselves.

If you came to Camelot expecting grand post-Roman English castles, however, you would be sorely disappointed--as I did and as I was. The whole place appears to be a nice modern office complex. The main complex has three office buildings, a small airport (really just a landing strip and a windsock), several well-manicured shrub beds (too hot for grass), and an athletic track and field. There is also a fence with a gate at the entrance and a parking lot where the employees come and park before heading to work.

But there is a lot more here than what is apparent.

As I mentioned, Camelot is where I am currently going to school. I thought it was just going to be summer camp, you know, with swimming and basket weaving and a few hikes, but this was no doubt a school. I was learning more here than I ever had at Hillside Junior High in Boise, Idaho. After a close call with some werewolves back in Boise my friends and I got sent here to learn to be monster hunters with the Knights of the Round Table.

Yes, those knights.

Like many things in my life these days, training to be a monster hunter and knight was not what I thought it would be. For example, the school part. I still have to do regular high school classes on top of my monster-related education. One of those regular classes is PE.

Physical Education is the first class we have in the mornings. Apparently you have to be in good shape to hunt monsters, or at least have a high pain tolerance. So every morning, before the sun really gets going, we are up doing calisthenics and runs. Today it had been about forty-five minutes of exercises and then a run.

It was not even eight o’clock yet.

Dang, it’s hot, I complained. It really was not that bad, but the temperature had risen a good ten degrees since we had started, and it had been warmer outside than inside even then. It was still short of how hot it would get, which I figured was a degree or two short of boiling.

Could be worse, Grant responded. Could be raining. Grant is my very good friend, one of the three who had accompanied me here.

Thanks, Eye-gor, I responded.

In truth, my response was more, [Pant] Thanks [pant, pant] Eye- [pant, pant] gor [pant]. This was because we were, at the time, running. We were not chasing anything, and were not being chased, unless you count Coach Filippo, the sadistic PE teacher. We were instead running around the nice track on one side of the nice office complex. Even though we were not being chased we ran hard; if we didn’t make a good time on the mile run Coach would yell at us until he was purple in the face. Even that would not have been so bad if Coach did not spit when he yelled.

Now that I think about it, I wouldn’t complain so much about the heat if I didn’t have to run in it. It would be perfectly fine if I only had to endure it while walking casually from one air-conditioned building to another like pretty much everyone else in Tucson.

Move it, maggots! Coach really does think he is a drill instructor. He looks like one too; about average height, but wide at the shoulders, strong, and with a flattop hair cut. His hair is jet black, but I suspect he dyes it because he is too old not to have some gray. He also has a scowl that had to be the result of years of practice. No one scowls that well without practice.

Grant and I must have made good time because he gave us only a half-hearted scowl as we