Oh! If you're reading this, welcome to my little mess of an attempt of a story. It's not great, I know. However I have this itch I need to scratch so if you enjoy it, please tell me! I'll keep me on writing this and tell me how I can become better. After all, no one does unless someone can point things out. Great? Great! Anyway, enjoy! ^^ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You know, life as I currently have known it, wasn't always easy. So many curveballs and dead end stops. Surprises, regrets, hopes, and dreams...failures. He told me life is what you make of it but I didn't ask for anything like this. I don't know how one would ask for anything like this. I feel like, maybe just maybe, there's just some things even I am not meant to understand. What do I mean? Well, I'll tell you. What we consume, what we thought as fantasy is real and it all started when I found a rather ordinary looking cellphone. Something one would have 10 years ago. In pristine condition, something I honestly didn't think were made anymore. After all, at this point, it was ancient. I wish the current me could tell the old me not to mess with it. Put it down and forget about it. However, curiosity it seems is something that is way too common in the world we live in and not enough sense to know when something is a bad idea. At the time, to me, it was just a normal cell phone. A Motorola Razor, to be exact. More than a decade old model. Discovered it one day just walking back home, it looked as if someone had just dropped it and moved on or forgotten it. I thought it would've been cool to have another of the first phones I bought for myself. Everything on it was par the course for a 2006 model. And the menus, while primitive, was normal too. Everything was there and a quick search through the menus didn't have anything out of place. I didn't find any phone numbers, pictures, music or anything else. However, it did have one call log. Just one. However, it didn't have an area code and the numbers were more than a simple 10 digit phone number. A check of it had what looked to be a random assortment of numbers in a long string at a length that should've been impossible for this type as I remember only allowed up to 32 random numbers in any single call. Although this string was 96, give or take but that wasn't all. I quickly learned that the numbers, even though it looked like it wasn't a random string of numbers but rather a puzzle. An crudely put together alphanumeric puzzle. Back then, I didn't know why it was there and on a random older model phone, but there it was and at the time I had nothing else to do so I attempted to solve it. I thought it'd be a rather funny puzzle to tell a friend the next day. Unfortunately for me, it didn't have a cypher in which I could use to solve it and it wasn't like I could look it up in order to find out exactly how to do that. However, I wasn't discouraged on that. I gave it a rather simple cypher, supposing all of the numbers were a letter of the alphabet and these dashes were spaces indicating a line break. Not to mention within these numbers had a distinct pattern. Each line, had its own self contained word. A random assortment of numbers beginning and ending with some prime and odd numbers, these numbers would be the same with beginning and end but the numbers in the middle of the line were random but a quick look would tell you that they were supposed to be broken up into columns. It almost seemed like some sort of word search puzzle. Another look at the last string of numbers of each column had a special character. Such as quotation marks, question marks, and exclamation marks too. Honestly, the more I looked at it, the more I started to think that someone did this on purpose and I just happened to take it home with me. Mentally scolding myself because now I thought that now I may be a target of someone and I didn't like that. Although there was no way I was just going to leave it like this, I wanted to know what it said if it said anything so I got to work. A lot of adding and subtracting, long division and multiplication. I was able to narrow it down. After it took me all night and part of the morning to solve it but it only had a single word. For all that hard work with a lot of them leading to incorrectly spelled words, only one did stick out but not many more did. However the word in question threw me in a loop. All it said to me was... [center][i][b]Welcome...[/b][/i][/center] Was all it said to me, I really didn't think nothing of it at the time. Maybe I figured it was just some dumb prank or something of that nature. Something somewhat elaborate that one would go through and ultimately lead to something insignificant. It was the only reason I could guess but I was glad I solved it at least. I put that phone down and I went to bed, didn't even bother going to work that day. If I had, maybe I could've prevented what happened next. Even though I didn't see what happened to the phone, I woke up to my room being completely different to what I had slept in. Not to mention, nothing was the same at all. I figured I may have been half asleep. Didn't really think anything of it until something crashed through the ceiling startling me half to death. I thought I was gonna have a heart attack since it was so sudden. But that shook me awake and I was now aware of my surroundings. I wasn't in my own house anymore. Where this was, I didn't know and I began to panic internally. Well, tried to. Everytime I did, my head would rationalize and keep my feelings from going out of control. Sitting there, on this random bed in the middle of who knows where. Next to me, the pile of wood began to animate and made me fall out of bed in surprise but I quickly got on my feet and hid behind the bed, making sure to slow my breathing, to keep quiet. I heard what sounded like a groan and soon a figure popped out of the broken boards. It was quite a young woman, maybe a whole head shorter than me. Long light lilac hair, two distinct hair clips that reminded of something I used to know long ago even the style in which she had her hair was familiar. "O-Owie...that really smarts! Usually that doesn't hurt, what is this wood made of?!" the woman exclaimed loudly and she kicked it in frustration. I didn't get a good look at her, I was trying to stay out of sight. I heard what was dusting off and ani quizzical look around the room, sounded like she might've been looking for something or someone and was about to walk in my direction until a second voice spoke up. No mistaking it, this one was a man. "Oh, there you are! Not that I'm doubting your methods but...why not use the door like a normal person?" the man quietly said. His voice sounded regal as if he was royalty but I didn't really get a good look at him either as I wanted to keep all of me out of sight. "Me? Use a door? But that's so boring! I think the element of surprise is much greater from above, yes?" she said. "Who...are we trying to catch by surprise?" the man asked, understandably confused. "You don't sense it?!" she asked him actually surprisingly shocked. "Sense it? What? It doesn't feel like the air is any more different than any other inn in town which you shattered a hole in..." he carefully said looking at the person sized hole in the ceiling. "My, oh my. You're so untrained! Here, in this very room!" she started. "My special protagonist senses are tingling!" she pressed two of her fingers to her temples leaving the man thoroughly confused. "Special protagonist? What do you mean?" he asked again, more warily this time. "Oh my gosh, is everyone just as thickheaded as you?! I can't believe you don't feel that! Someone special is here!" she said looking around, darting. Looking in small places in this huge room. Watching her antics, the man was somewhat amused but he couldn't feel anything apart from the drafty air coming in from the hole. However, the man could hear someone quickly come up the stairs, undoubtedly the owner. A quick grab of the woman's coat pulled her away from the bed she was about to check. "Sorry but we got to go! Come on, I don't want to have to pay for the damage you caused again!" he said before quickly throwing her over his shoulder and jumping out of an open window. Just then, a quick entrance of the room of another person and from the sound of their voice it appeared to be another man, gruff and deep. "A hole, in my roof? Where did that come from?! Who did this! I didn't book anyone to be in this room!" he clinched his fists. "Bah, I got no time for this, I need to fix this quick before the guests show up!" a quick sprint out of the room and down the stairs, he was gone too. I come out of my hiding spot slowly. "W-What is going on..." I could only say before moving to a mirror to look at myself wondering if I have suffered some kind of physical trauma to my head or body. A quick look and I seen that, no, I didn't. However, I looked at my hands and these weren't my hands. Another look in the mirror and it wasn't even my body! "W-What is...Who is this?!" I ran up, touched my face and the rest of my body. I could feel and then I pinched myself hard and only met with pain. I didn't wake up or rather I was already awake. I had short black hair now, straight and not as curly at all, just a bit more spiky in the back. I was wearing glasses, they were sort of thick. I was taller, my muscles were more defined especially my calf muscles and arms. I lifted up my shirt, I had the makings of a six pack but wasn't quite there yet. Despite what I was wearing, this was more professional casual than what I was wearing before and a lot more vibrant colors too. My eye color had a deep amber color to them. A somewhat futuristic wrist mounted computer was there on my right arm and in the center was that phone and it displayed a different message in the form of a free floating hologram. [center][u][i][b]'Feeling disorientated? No worries, it will make sense in time. Again, welcome to a world thought to be a fantasy. A universe that exists due to the creation of others, no matter what form it was made. Make no mistake, what you see, what you feel, and what your experience in this world is real. Real as your world is and now, you live here. That phone you picked up was not by chance, you were meant to find it. You aren't the only one who came in this way but this phone is now yours. Protect it as it is your only way back. Your adventure starts here. Welcome to The Land of Beginnings, your name is now Saren. However don't forget your real name and don't use your real name in this world, if you want to go back you must remember both of these rules. Don't dawdle and get moving!'[/b][/i][/u][/center] I literally had no words. What could I say to something like that? How could you? I was stuck here, for the time being. I had no idea how long I was going to be gone from my world, how much time will be passed or how time flowed here. None of it. I was alone. I wasn't scared, something wasn't allowing me to be. I exploited this newfound calmness to asset my situation but first I needed to leave. I took off, hopping out of the window too. Luckily, the inn wasn't that high off the ground and I landed before running off into the center of town. I wasn't too thrilled of being ripped from the place I have ever known but who said I had to focus on that? If what that said was true, I had a new life here. I can let it swallow me or I can make it back home in one piece. I guess, for myself and whoever this body belongs to, I'll see what I am made of and take care of him and me. I know if I go back, no one would believe me but it doesn't matter. I could maybe do some things I never dreamed of. Maybe we'll see...For now, it's time I found out who crashed through that roof, maybe they know more.