The Story Prologue Where Charlie Began The Names For Kids Author

A middle-grade novel

CHRONOS

Name: Chronos
Author: Scott Cornfoot

Book One of The Chronos Protocol

A girl who notices everything. A locker that shouldn't exist. A vice principal who is not from around here.

Middle-grade science fiction·Ages 8–12·Series potential

Read the prologue Representation inquiry

The story

The war ended with a betrayal. The peace begins in detention.

Chronos concept cover: Charlie, Niles and Moira holding the Chronos device

Concept cover art

Light-years from Earth, a peace summit between two warring worlds collapses in a single night of betrayal. A princess vanishes protecting the android who promised to stay with her. A prince spends the rest of his life searching. The war grinds on without them.

Then, on Earth, a scholarship student arrives at Dover Cliffs Academy. Charlie has studied every ancient language, built a laboratory in the garage, and never met a school she fit. Dover Cliffs is her fresh start: a lab partner named Niles who considers explosions a form of optimism, a counsellor in a Dracula costume who introduces himself by species, and a vice principal whose silver boots rise and fall even when she is standing perfectly still.

Charlie notices things like that. Noticing is what she does instead of fitting in. And in the corner of the vice principal's office stands a silver locker with no power source and a keypad in symbols that do not belong to any system on Earth. One small explosion later, switching it on becomes Charlie and Niles's official punishment.

"Did anything explode?"
"Lots. That's why I got moved to the garage. I started in my bedroom."

Charlie counts to stay calm, files field notes on everything, dislikes inaccurate expressions, and prefers knowing the exact order of events, especially the difficult ones. The book never names a diagnosis and never needs to. Her way of seeing the world is not the obstacle in the story. It is the instrument that solves it.

The cast

Four people. At least one is lying about her species.

The Scientist

Charlie

Highest entrance scores Dover Cliffs has ever recorded. Keeps field notes, counts her breathing, and has never encountered a symbol she couldn't place. Until now.

The Accelerant

Niles

Charlie's lab partner. Burnt off half of Moira's eyebrow last week. Loyal, unsinkable, and constitutionally incapable of heating one element at a time.

The Counsellor

Mr. Barry

Wears a Dracula costume for recreation purposes, and for humor. Walks like a metronome. Says "Ha." Species: Homo sapiens, allegedly.

The Vice Principal

Ms. Telsa

Teaches a philosophy class called Never Trust What Adults Tell You. Loves alien movies a suspicious amount. Her boots rise and fall when she stands still.

Charlie, Niles and Moira pulled through a time vortex

From the prologue

The peace summit

The prince had been warned not to trust the Amtari. His generals had said it plainly, standing shoulder to shoulder in the war room of the Tangor flagship, their faces lit by the glow of tactical maps. They called it a trap. They called it foolish. Old General Kast, who had lost three sons in the war, had slammed his fist on the table and said, "They will smile at you with one mouth and bite you with another."

But Prince Daedalus had gone anyway.

He had gone because the war between the Tangor and the Amtari had lasted longer than anyone alive could remember. Because children on both sides were growing up without parents, and parents on both sides were burying children. Because when the Amtari King and Queen had sent a message offering peace, real peace, sealed by marriage, Daedalus had read the words and felt something loosen behind his ribs for the first time in years.

Hope. That was the word for it. A dangerous word in wartime.

The full prologue and sample chapters are available to agents and editors on request.

In print now

Charlie's Colorful Outer Space Candy Adventure

Picture book · Ages 4–9 · Available on Amazon

Charlie's page

Where Charlie began

Readers can already meet her.

Before Dover Cliffs, there was a trip to the candy store that spiralled into a galactic adventure. Charlie's Colorful Outer Space Candy Adventure, Scott's published picture book, is Charlie as a young child, meeting Niles for the first time. Chronos picks the two of them up years later, when the friendship is old enough to survive a shared detention.

The picture book and the novel share more than characters. Both are built on the same conviction: that the kid who gets called different is usually the one seeing clearly.

The names are clues

Charlie would tell you to look them up. So look them up.

The book never stops to explain its names. It doesn't have to. For readers who like to dig, and for the teachers who hand them the shovel, here is what the names have been quietly saying the whole time.

Chronos

In Greek thought, Chronos is Time itself, the oldest thing there is. He gives us the words chronology, chronometer and chronic. For most of history he has been confused with Kronos, the Titan who swallowed his own children, until the two figures melted into one. A book about time hiding inside a school is named for a god who spent centuries hiding inside another god's name.

Daedalus

The greatest inventor in Greek mythology: builder of the Labyrinth, maker of the wax-and-feather wings. The myth is a warning about what happens when something you built is used for something you never intended. A prince named for an inventor is a prince who would rather build a peace than win a war.

Moira

Moira is the Greek word for fate. The Moirai were the three sisters who spin, measure, and cut the thread of every life. Charlie's roommate, the one with the KEEP OUT sign and half an eyebrow, is literally named Destiny. In a series about time, that is not an accident. Watch her.

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And one more thing

The author has prior professional experience with Greek gods. Scott Cornfoot toured the world as Hades in Disney On Ice's Hercules, three feet of blue flame and a permanent smirk. He has been on a first-name basis with this mythology for thirty years.

For curious kids

Build a clock out of water, like the ancient Greeks did.

FIELD NOTE #4Project: Clepsydra (water clock) · Difficulty: one rainy afternoon

Long before batteries, the Greeks timed everything with dripping water, including how long people were allowed to talk in court. Their word for it was clepsydra: "water thief." Charlie won her scholarship with an essay on the mechanisms of time in quantum clocks. She started somewhere. Start here.

Ask a trusted adult first. The adult handles all the cutting and hole-punching. That part is non-negotiable, and Mr. Barry agrees.

You need

An empty plastic bottle, a pushpin, water, tape, a marker, and a phone stopwatch.

The build

Adult step: cut the bottle in half and punch a small pushpin hole in the cap.
Screw the cap on, flip the top half upside down, and rest it in the bottom half like a funnel.
Tape a strip of paper up the side of the bottom half.
Pour in a measured cup of water and start the stopwatch.
Every minute, mark the water level on the paper strip. That strip is now the face of your clock.

The real experiment

Run it twice. Keep a field note like Charlie would: Does your clock keep the same time both times? What changes it? Warmer water? A bigger hole? A different bottle? Congratulations. That gap between two runs is the entire reason humans invented better clocks, and roughly where Book One begins.

Publishing information

Complete middle-grade science-fiction manuscript with series potential · Approximately 27,000 words in twenty chapters · Seeking representation · Full manuscript and synopsis available on request

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The author

Scott Cornfoot

Scott Cornfoot has taught Grade 2 in Ontario for almost twenty years, which means he has spent almost twenty years in a room full of Charlies and Nileses, watching what happens when a school makes space for the way a child actually thinks. He is the author of a published picture book and his adult memoir, What Ledger Couldn't Count, is currently on submission.

Before teaching, he competed for Canada in pair figure skating and toured the world as Hades in Disney On Ice's Hercules. He knows exactly what it is like to be the kid whose difference turned out to be the whole point.

Email Scott