The Enigma of the V

Many played an important role in the development of this story. Some of them you may or may not consider villains... but they also had an important part to play. What does it mean to be a hero or a villain? In some cases it is clear as day. In others... the lines between heroism and treachery may seem to blur. Perhaps it is for you to decide.

Out of the many people that played a role in this story, Jonas may have been the most important of them all... and he was about to enter a new reality filled with immense possibilities.

We first met Jonas at the psychiatrist’s office being diagnosed with a mental illness. While he was there listening to what the doctor had to say, he also heard some people talking about him. He couldn’t quite place where the voices he heard were coming from. It kind of sounded like they were right there next to him. Perhaps behind him... or maybe just outside the office. It wasn’t really clear. But there was no mistake... Jonas could hear them.

“He always does that. It’s all he knows to do well”

“Yeah, playing the victim is his favorite card”

“I think he’s really sick, you know? I couldn’t live with myself if I were him...”

“Nah, he’s fine! Look!”

“He did this to me! He knows it!”

“Poor guy... He would have been a great kid, you know?”

“He doesn’t know anything yet. I can’t believe a person like him exists...”

“Do you know what Jonas did to me? I’m gonna make him pay...”

This was quite a common occurrence. The thing is… sometimes the things he heard these people saying didn’t seem to make much sense at all. But then other times they were oddly specific.

{“Who are those people?“} – he thought to himself, unsure if it was all a part of his delusion or if the people around him were all insane, just pretending to be normal. The voices where there, but there were never faces to match them. They were always only voices... conversations of people that sounded 100% real... albeit only real to Jonas.

He didn’t use to talk about them or what they would say... except for this one time when he got really agitated and ended up telling his parents, who then decided to have him see a psychiatrist because of it.

He never wanted to go to a psychiatrist in the first place. His parents didn’t give him much of a choice, though. They set up the appointment for him, but they couldn’t go with him in the end because they were working. So he ended up going to his appointment alone. This felt better than the alternative for Jonas.

It was difficult to tell if he was actually sick. He looked like a normal kid. He felt normal. But he would constantly hear things that, apparently, weren’t really there.

Jonas was a seventeen year old kid just trying to survive high school. He would usually arrive late to school, but besides that he was a pretty average student. He was one of the quiet types, and was fond of the ones he called friends (or friend... he actually only had one friend who happened to be his best friend as well). He went everywhere with his best friend Maurice, who was kind of a creep.

The fact that Maurice wasn’t expelled considering all the times he was reported for creeping around the girls’ bathrooms was really baffling. He was quite harmless, though. People never did understand how the two of them were friends, seen as how they didn’t seem to have anything in common.

Jonas’ interactions with the rest of the people his age were usually awkward, but there were few things he loved more than the pigeons that came daily to visit him looking for food. Every morning he fed bread or rice to the pigeons that came to hang out.

The place he called home was located on the fifth floor of an apartment building. There was a passageway that led to all the different apartments on each floor. In front of each passageway from the third floor up, there was a metal platform that served the purpose of funneling rain water away from the building. He would feed the pigeons on that metal platform. That’s how he met Meg.

At first he thought Meg was a female (hence the female name) but later realized that males were bigger, fluffier and always chased after the females with their particular cooing noises. Despite learning this detail, he didn’t bother changing the name of his best pigeon pal. Meg seemed to like Jonas, and ended up going home with him.

One day, Jonas was feeding the pigeons with Meg on his shoulder. Meg was quite lucky because he got a lot more food than the other pigeons in the flock. This was just a normal morning, with a normal pigeon attendance and Jonas was in a pretty normal mood. It was a day just like any other.

Many pigeons where there. He even used to make a list and keep attendance (yes… that means he named each and every one of them). After finishing a batch of rice, he went inside the apartment to get some more. At the very moment he entered the apartment, there was something other-worldly at work that would probably make anyone think they’d lost their mind.

There was a light in the corner of the dinning room that looked like a ball of fire, but was somehow not fire at all (just like something he had seen a very long time ago in his childhood. He always lived with the uncertainty of whether or not it was a dream).

The entire room got really bright and then both he and his pigeon friend blacked out. At this point he started to see things… visions that had no apparent connection to him. In one of those visions there was a child carrying a sword with a blade made of light running with Meg flying beside him, in a familiar looking yet strange place. They were running towards a blurred out figure... an ominous shadow from which the only thing that was clear were its dark wings, as black as the night.

As he came to, he saw Meg next to him staring.

Jonas told him about this dream with the child and the blurred figure with dark wings (weird or not, Jonas would from time to time talk to Meg. He never heard Meg speaking back to him, but sometimes he would pretend as though Meg understood him. It seemed to help him in some therapeutic way of sorts), and Meg replied: “Interesting... And how are you feeling now?” To which he replied: “Actually... I’m great...”

Looking around him he realized he wasn’t home anymore... and then it finally clicked... Meg, the pigeon, had just talked. Like, really talked.

Jonas was now inside what seemed to be a castle. It looked pretty old and dusty... But luckily, it didn’t stir up his allergies. As if it wasn’t weird enough to suddenly be transported to this strange place...

Jonas felt different. The best way to describe it perhaps was to say that he felt as if he was someone else. In his confusion, his heart rate became elevated.

“{Was I kidnapped or something?}” he wondered for a moment. He walked around trying to understand where he was and what was going on. Moments after, he stumbled across an old breastplate of a Dark Knight armor. It must have been polished before being abandoned there for ages, because he could see his reflection on it… and a kid was looking back at him in the reflection. That was weird considering how Jonas was seventeen, and the kid in the reflection looked like he was eight or so.

Jonas had no idea who the kid was, of course... which made his situation all the more upsetting...

“It’s official. I’ve completely lost my mind!” – he said while sliding into despair.

He was in a long corridor of an old castle. There were a few torches lit on the wall so it wasn’t completely dark (the torches were cleverly placed inside skulls... so flaming skulls were the only source of light there. They looked like Halloween decorations... or maybe they were actual skulls of dead people...)

All while trying to understand what was going on, he saw a man that was closing in from the corner of the corridor, and he seemed to know the kid Jonas was now somehow trapped inside of.

“Get it together, runt! What’s the matter now?” – the man in dark ninja-like clothing uttered once he got closer. He was a shady-looking young man. An average person would have probably tried to walk away if they had seen him in a dark alley at night. “Did you hit your head or something?” the shady-looking man asked.

“Who are YOU?... What is this place?... Where are we?... What am I doing here?! How did I get here???!!!! WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON????!!!!”

For obvious reasons Jonas was losing it. Maybe it was just the fact that he wasn’t home anymore… or that he was in another body... or that he seemingly just by chance appeared to be in another world.

Meg, the pigeon that for some reason could now talk, tried to calm him down. “Listen... I’ll explain later. For now let’s just focus on retrieving the hilt and getting out of here alive!” With a surprisingly calm and sassy attitude, Jonas retorted: “You do realize I have no idea what you’re talking about... Don’t you?!??! And by the way... How come you can talk??????” Hearing Meg talk back to him was a trip and definitely a first.

Meg tried to get closer to him to attempt once more to calm him down. Jonas, however, suddenly passed out due to all the commotion. Then the shady looking man dressed in the black ninja-like clothes said “Legend! We don’t have time for this! Meg... What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s experiencing something you wouldn’t understand... Just make sure you keep him safe!” - the pigeon explained with a pretty stern look on his face. It almost appeared as though Meg, the pigeon... the TALKING pigeon, was the leader of that small group of individuals.

“As if I had any other choice...” said the ninja garb-wearing guy.

While they were talking, strange creatures were closing in. They weren’t particularly strong ones, but they could definitely kill someone if they let their guard down.

Yes, there were monsters in this world. You could think of them as wild animals with a particular grudge against humanity. Monsters could be found anywhere humans were not. And when humans strolled around these places, monsters attacked… aiming to kill. Many different kinds of monsters inhabited this world… and some were definitely more dangerous than others.

Meg started to panic, and battle ensued. There were three different monsters after them (one of them looked like a giant wolf that walked on two legs; another was a slug-like monster that had a spiky shell and the other one a spider the size of a grown man), and they were coming at them in a full frontal attack. This made things less complicated, because they definitely didn’t want to be surrounded.

Shin (which was the name of the shady looking guy in the ninja garb) dispatched the monsters with astonishing ease. Meg, then quipped after a sigh “So you are useful after all.” Shin had a short blade (Kodachi) hanging on his back. He also was equipped with a wide variety of throwing items such as kunai, shuriken and other bomb items called skeens that ninjas from that world usually used. Shin told Meg in response: “I find your doubt in my skills offensive...”