Reincarnated ~ A Modern Newsies Au (Nowsies)

12 | Finally, Some Answers

They're doing research. :)

So I'm back, don't know when this chapter will be posted.

I got like...10 hours of sleep. It was great. 

And I woke up to snow! I'm writing this right now and I can see snow out my window.

So I did have a plan, kind of, then I took a break, so this will be interesting.

Sorry for taking so long to publish this.

Anyway.

Enjoy! :)

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Freaking finally, it's New Year's Eve.

They've all been wanting this for some time now.

Not only because this year has felt like it's taken forever, but now they're all together to try to figure out who they were in their past life.

And in the moment, absolutely nothing is more interesting than the newsies strike of 1899.

Tony is still proud that he was the one who figured it out.

Right now, they're all in Jack's living room, with their devices out, trying to find anything online that they can.

They agree to look at any and all articles that mention the newsies and/or the strike.

They start with the first article that Tony found; The Newsboys Strike of 1899 on editions.covecollective.org.

"So there was the Spanish-American War in 1898," Tony states. "That's why the newspaper company changed the price of the papers. Then on July 18, 1899, that's when the strike began."

And that feels right. To all of them.

There's one name there that stands out to Louis.

One paragraph of the article says:

July 24, 1899: a rally was held at Irving Hall and almost eight thousand newsboys from all over New York attended. Many people made speeches, the most notable being Louis "Kid Blink" Baletti who was seen as one of the leaders of the strike...

The sentence drags on, and mentions a David Simmons, but all Louis can focus on is Louis "Kid Blink" Baletti. Because whoever that guy was, that guy shared a name with Louis.

Of course, it could be a mere coincidence.

Or it could mean something else.

Nick, being Nick, notices the name too. "One of the strike leaders shared a name with you, Louis."

"That could mean something," Charlie says.

"Yeah," several others agree.

Louis is sort of tuning all of their voices (except Nick's) out right now. He just reads the paragraph over and over again.

He opens a new tab and looks up louis kid blink baletti 1899 to see what happens.

He clicks on The Untold Story Of The Newsboy's Strike Of 1899 on grunge.com, not knowing what he'll find.

The intro paragraph seems good.

He sends a link of it to Nick, who in turn sends it to the rest of them. All of them start concentrating on reading.

And then there, in the section titled The Main Players of the Newsboy's Strike, in the second paragraph, it read:

The initial leaders of the Newsboys' strike ... were 18-year-old Louis "Kid Blink" Baletti and 21-year-old David Simmons. At one point, Kid Blink was even awarded a floral horseshoe during one of their rallies for giving the best speech, having roused the crowd with the words, "Ten cents in the dollar is as much to us as it is to Mr. Hearst  the millionaire. Am I right?"