Chapter 1 "A normal life"
My name is Dylan Brown. I always lived a quiet life, a peaceful life. While others might think of that as a blessing, I do not.
From the age of 7, I started watching fantasy films. Until then, I had no interest in that, I only watched cartoons. I started watching more and more, and the stories touched me. People who suddenly were teleported into magical worlds, people whose lives were hiding secrets, people who were lucky enough to one day gain superpowers.
I couldn’t get enough of them. My imagination grew wild, I started thinking of my own worlds and my mythical beasts. Then, at the age of 12, my friends told me about this new kind of fantasy shows they discovered, anime.
As a great fan of fantasy, I started watching anime, more and more. It felt amazing. They were even better than films. They lasted longer, and I had more time to bond with the protagonists. All those characters were... beautiful.
I kept dreaming with my wild imagination, about someday meeting them in real life, or going to their world just as I saw many people in films do. At the age of 15, those thoughts became my reality. I started skipping school in order to put my world into paper, about watching more films and shows.
I wanted to become an animator, to create things as beautiful as I had seen. I thought they would become famous in an instant, or maybe, that I would become a scientist, and make a portal to the world of my imagination.
Things like that were of course, impossible. And I had to realize it. I realized that I am no one special and that things like that can’t possibly exist. I thought... from the 8 billion humans in the world, why something like that happens to...me?
I gave up on thinking I would live in a fictional world, that I would go there and rule as king, that I would marry...her. They all made fun of me. For loving a fictional character so much. But I had to talk to her. I wanted to. I wanted to feel how it feels to live among such creations.
At the age of 16, I tried everything. Lucid dreaming, reality shifting. But nothing could quench my thirst for that feeling. I was convinced that I would live a normal life, with a normal job, in a normal world.
I was truly scared of facing the real world. I was truly...childish... I thought, why bother having a normal life? If nothing interesting was going to happen, then, why should I keep on living?
These kinds of thoughts I usually had. So I focused on school. I was quite popular among my classmates. When people were talking about fiction and someone said something wrong about a film or show, I would prove them wrong in front of everyone, with proof from the creator or from an extra episode that what they said was wrong.
Yes, that made me popular. All my knowledge about fiction made me popular. Soon enough, some people would get scared of saying something about a certain film or show in front of me, because it might be wrong. I didn’t care. That is what they get for having false opinions about masterpieces.
Needless to say how much I would humiliate someone that said that a particular film or show is bad. Either way, I was popular. I had lots of friends and they were concerned about my sadness. About my grades being so low, about everything.
They knew I liked fiction a lot, on a level they thought was crazy. But the love they thought I had for fiction was too low compared to how much I actually had.
One day though, things were about to change. I was walking alone down the street, thinking about the future. I had already decided to get a casual job and thus, study a lot more than I already it. I was so frustrated in my thoughts that I didn’t even correct someone who pronounced the name of a game character incorrectly.
But then, I saw it. A black shade moved behind a corner. I stopped. Looking back on it, it could have been some shady guy and who knows what he would do to me if he caught me. But no, it wasn’t a person.
I thought to myself ”This is it, this is the moment you waited for your whole life."
I ran behind that corner and followed the shade to a gloomy alley. It looked back at me for a brief second, and I saw its red eye in the middle of its face. I thought to myself “This is probably going to lead me into some kind of paranormal world for sure! Maybe even this world hides secrets! This is the time I had been waiting for years!”
I ran to catch it, but it got further away in the alley. It was weird. I was running and running but never seemed to go to the end of it. The walls and floor started taking a purple-red colour, and the shade started disappearing.
My footsteps were silent, I could only hear my voice. And a quiet Tic-tac. I looked behind my back, a digital clock could be seen in the distance. I continued running till the ti-tac became less digital. Behind me was now, an old clock, the one that grandpas have on their wrists.
I kept on running and running. Behind me was now a golden watch, one that I only had seen in museums. At one point the ticking stopped. I looked behind. There was a wooden object. I ran behind and looked at it. It was a solar watch. The one that ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Chinese used.
I blinked, not believing what I had seen. Then, when I opened my eyes, I was feeling numb. I was in some meadow, sleeping under a tree. Everything seemed normal, so I started crying. “No! Was that a dream?! Will I never be able to live in my dream world?”
I cried like that for some time. When I stopped, I looked at the sky, sickening thoughts coming to my mind again. But then, I saw it with my eyes. A dragon was flying in the air.
It wasn’t a dream!!! It... wasn’t a dream?
