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?"
