She had been seeing things since she was twelve.

Naturally, she thought she was going crazy. One day she was just an ordinary preteen student, then the next she began having visions, for lack of a better word for it. Ghosts, she had thought, or something like them. She would pass by a derelict building, do a double-take, and suddenly see a completely different place there for a few seconds. Even students who purportedly had a 'third-eye' thought she was making it up, to her utter frustration. She had always turned her nose up at anything that stank of conspiracy theory, so to be scoffed-at by these psychics was embarrassing.

Some part of her, though, knew that the things she was seeing were real things. Maybe not from this reality, but from some other plane of existence. It was all she had to go on, this unexplainable gut-feeling. She had, on occasion, had very vivid dreams when she was smaller: magical creatures, a castle, a golden-haired woman wearing armor while sitting on a throne who looked suspiciously like her mother. Or her. She had dismissed them later on as the fancies of a child who wanted adventure, but after the first real visions it somehow wasn't far-fetched to related those childhood dreams to them.

For the sake of her sanity, and her day-to-day interactions with people who couldn't understand her dilemma, she decided that it was better to keep these visions to herself. She passed through the next few years of her life normally, or as normally as one could get with this strange double-vision. She was nineteen now, still a student but now in college.

Before going home, she stopped by the restroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Aside from her tanned skin, brown eyes, and short, dark hair, she was starting to look like that woman in her dreams. Of course the woman in that vision looked a full head taller than five-foot-her, but still. Did that mean she'd enconter some sort of fantasy adventure soon? Akira snorted at the thought and shook herself out of it.

Outside, people were growing restless. Frowning after someone had accidentally shoved her aside, she walked cautiously and listened to people nervously exchanging news. Mother Nature was wreacking havoc on some other part of the country--more so than usual, it being a country battered by storms periodically. No, this was something else. People had been disappearing. Tornadoes popping up where there had been none before. It had been going on for a few days, but it seemed like the strange phenomena wasn't letting up; in fact, it sounded like things were escalating.

A shiver ran down her spine. Why hadn't she realized it before? This was it, what the visions had been preparing her for. Instinct taking over, she felt a real fear for her parents back home, and she squirmed in the bus seat, itching to run to her house. She sprinted for home the minute the bus stopped, ignoring everything else, even the sky, which had now taken on an ominous purple hue. Nobody else seemed to notice it,n either Mom. Dad. Please still be there, please still be there...

She arrived at an empty lot. And it wasn't just empty; weeds had overtaken the squarish space that had once held their two-storey house, as if it had never been there. Akira dropped her satchel, mouth open in shock. Where was their house? And where were her parents? It was only then that she had noticed the raging sky, and to her it had taken on the hues of a bruise. What the hell was going on?

Winds blew angrily down the street, whipping her hair about her face and kicking up dirt and debris, making it hard to see. Akira felt a lump in her throat as her confusion grew, and as she whirled around trying to see whether or not there was a tornado nearby, the visions had kicked-in: the whole village transformed into something else, into a weird ghetto, with people she didn't recognize. Just a few yards away was the suburbs where her house had been, but as she ran towards it, the ghetto expanded, swallowing up everything familiar. The purple skies roiled like a raging sea and turned darker, turning into the coal-black of a moonless night.

The suburbs were gone. She was standing in the middle of a potholed road she had never seen before, and she was alone. Her body had yet to register grief, or sadness, or anger. There was only the eerie silence of panic. "Where am I?"

Did you want to make character sheets so we have some point of reference? This is still a WIP obviously. Not in a very creative mood today. I Do have about half a post written up, but I want to get the idea of this character down first.

Name: Ronald "Rebel" Benson
Age: 26
Race: Human

Appearance: (Top-Bottom) Short, reddish-brown hair topped the man's head, kept in a slightly messy style. His forehead was somewhat large and bare, lending the severity to his heavy brow. Eyes hard as steel looked out from slightly sunken sockets, watching everyone with a silent rebuke, denying the world. Bits of metal were visible around his left eye, tiny enough not to attract notice unless they caught the light, raising just above the level of his skin. His nose was thin and rounded, though his mouth was often turned into a small frown. A thin stubble outlined what would have been his beard, giving his face a dark red shadow across his jawline and chin. He had a heavy neck and large, powerful shoulders that almost seemed to bristle with strength when he moved. His arms were corded with muscle, though they were the muscles of heavy lifting and hard work and looked natural on the human's larger body. He had a barrel-like chest, sitting atop a flat stomach. His thighs were as big around as a man's head, capable of supporting the muscular man. He often keeps wrapped in a cloak of some sort over-top of slightly baggy camo pants and a tank-top.

Abilities/Skills: Rebel possesses no magical abilities, coming from a version of earth without magic. He has augmented himself with a few bits of technology from Merge to make him capable of competing with the more advanced raced and powerful creatures of the universe.

Occular Implant- Functions like a HUD in his left eye and allows him to remotely interact with certain electronics, has zoom capabilities and can switch to both night vision and infrared. When performing an action it becomes visible as a slowly spinning ring in his pupil, but otherwise is invisible save for a pair of metal studs near his eye. The studs are manual connection ports.

History:

Gear:
Firewall Ring- A band of metal with interlocking gears and some fairly advanced electronics. It's not of human-make, but has been adapted for human use. When worn it prevents the wearer from being affected by the Merge events, which will keep you from being phased into a wall or ripped from existence. It won't stop a house from falling on top of you or you form being buried inside of a hill, since it only protects a small area around you. It can also be programmed to copy certain magical energies

oh, right, sure. Been a while since I've used a character sheet, so it slipped my mind >.< I hope it's alright if I use an image, anyway it's my own rendition of my character. Also this is a rather rough CS, so if you need other details please give me a heads-up.

Name: Akira Aldana

Age: 19

Sex: Female

Physical appearance: Around five feet tall, medium build, short black hair, and olive brown skin.


Personality: She can be a bit tomboyish, has an adventurous streak that would arise sometimes from frustration at her rather humdrum and sheltered childhood. It is also precisely because of this that she can be pessimistic about exciting ventures and cautious of anybody she isn't well-acquainted with, sometimes to the point of paranoia. However, when she trusts someone, she trusts wholeheartedly, and it is this loyalty to the few that she loves that may enable her to take risks.

[Background An otherwise ordinary young woman--only child living in the suburbs with her parents and attending school regularly on an Earth much like ours-- the most remarkable thing about Akira is her awareness, albeit a confused, muddled one, of the existence of the multiverse. She sees glimpses of these other worlds in dreams and visions that sometimes overlap with her perception of this reality. Sometimes she would see what she fancied was a grown-up version of herself but was in reality another version of her living in another universe, a woman who was also a Paladin.

What Akira is also unaware of is that she has latent abilities that would later on manifest due to her being next in line as a Paladin, people gifted with the ability to travel between worlds and the capability to, presumably, protect them. Right now, however, her world is experiencing a merge with other worlds, causing strange phenomena such as unexplainable weather, disappearances, and sightings of otherworldly creatures.