The Jello Chronicles: Awakening. The Jello Chronicles, #1

THE JELLO CHRONICLES: AWAKENING - Book OneBuffalo has always carried secrets in its shadows. For fourteen-year-old Nigel-known to everyone who matters as Jello-the last day of school should mean freedom, summer chores, video games, and one more reckless adventure with his closest friends: fierce, fearless Alexandria and her calm, watchful twin brother, Drew. Then a strange circus appears on the East Side.
Inside its impossible tent, Jello sees a flash no one else can explain-a burst of light that opens something hidden inside him. By night's end, that single moment pulls him, Alex, and Drew into a chase through abandoned streets, a collision with a mysterious girl named Kira, and a fall into an underground world of glowing symbols, ancient energy, and robed figures who have been hunting children with unusual power.
What begins as a night of curiosity becomes a fight for survival. Beneath Buffalo, Jello discovers Lumis: a living force tied to emotion, will, memory, and identity. His own power awakens as a fluid, adaptive current that lets his body shift beyond human limits. Drew's strength hardens into crushing pressure and controlled force. Alex's spirit ignites into radiant Nova energy, turning fear, anger, and grief into explosive light.
But power does not arrive without cost. Every transformation hurts. Every mistake leaves scars. And the deeper they go, the more they learn that Lumis is not just something they use. It is a reflection of who they are. At the center of the mystery is Elias, a white-haired boy imprisoned for years as a living source of energy, and Kira, whose glowing pendant may be the key to a hidden legacy older than the city itself.
Freeing Elias should end the nightmare. Instead, it opens the door to a much larger war-one involving lost bloodlines, buried archives, secret orders, distorted monsters, and forces that have been waiting beneath Lake Erie and inside Buffalo's forgotten places. As Jello, Alex, and Drew struggle to understand their new abilities, they are pushed into battles far beyond anything ordinary teenagers should survive.
Their friendship is tested by fear, trauma, rivalry, and the terrifying realization that the world now sees them differently. They are not just kids anymore. They are conduits. Targets. Symbols. And when enemies armed with Hybrid Lumis arrive, the trio must learn to fight not as three separate powers, but as one connected force. Their bond becomes their weapon. Their city becomes the battlefield. And when a towering distortion called Gorlath brings catastrophe to Buffalo, Jello, Alex, and Drew must stand together in front of the impossible.
With Kitsarai, a silver-blue fox-like Lumis ally, linking their strength, the three discover that courage is not the absence of fear-it is choosing to move anyway when everything inside you is shaking. The Jello Chronicles: Awakening is a high-stakes urban fantasy action adventure about friendship, identity, survival, and the moment ordinary lives collide with extraordinary destiny. Blending cinematic battles, emotional character drama, supernatural mystery, and a power system driven by the heart, Book One launches a saga where every gift has a cost, every victory leaves a question, and every awakening changes the world forever.
From abandoned factories to hidden chambers, from Lake Erie's buried secrets to citywide battles beneath broken streetlights, Awakening turns Buffalo into a mythic battleground where the ordinary and the impossible collide. This is a story for readers who love heroes growing into their power, friendships forged under pressure, dangerous secrets buried beneath familiar streets, and battles where the fate of a city depends on trust as much as strength.
Before Buffalo can be saved, three young heroes must first decide who they are willing to become.