Chapter 1: Unical

It was a time full of turbulance in all meanings of the word. The war kept escalating, neither of the three sides would back down, even as almost two dozens hurricanes hit the conflict ground and its premises in under a month. It was almost as if Mother Nature was fed up with the bickering of her unruly children.

Where was I in all this mess? Dead in the center of it.

The wasteland that was being used as a glorified playground where three toddler were hitting each others used to be a beautiful land... in a way. It wasn't a big country, heck, even calling it a country is quite a stretch as there were almost no distinct governor, neither was it a rich one. The soil was barely good enough to support a self sustaining community of less than a hundred thousand. All, not most, all of the economical growth came from what little tourists were willing to pay for a meal or a bottle of water. There were no buildings higher than two floors nor any vehicles better than a motorcycle. Even with all that, we were fine, peace was everlasting and we were living a free life.

Then came a group of archeologist.

They claimed to have discovered a stone tablet with runes, and after decoding them, it led to the town my five members family was calling home. They dug around for a month, and stumbled upon a network of intertwining tunnles. Of course, this piqued their curiosity, and before we knew it, the number of archeologists and their assistants had grown to nearly the number of locals. They shared their discovery everyday, and was overall accepted to be there. According to them, the tunnles were many millennia old, at the deepest point they got to at the time, it was almost as old as ancient Akpt, and it wasn't even the end of the tunnles. Things calmed down for a while, then they found a stone door frame older than the earliest proof of civilization by three millennium, which apparently was a big deal. What was bigger was the fact that the huge door was wholly intact, as if no time has passed at all, and it would help with technology and stuffs, very fancy words that I couldn't understand then, and not even now.

The day after that the group of archeologists who discovered it was found dead in their room. The group apparently consisted of many big names of the world from each of the... -isms things, they blamed each others, then somehow escalated to a full blown war, while no one seemed to found the stone frame again.

Right as the three major forces declared war with each other, they dropped nukes all over our country, six days, each with an ashen mushroom appearing in the horrizon. Their troops, for whatever reason, chose to fight it out in our town, probably still hoping to study the frame after winning the "skirmishes".

In the first week after Nuclear Week, it was just small squads shooting at each other out in the streets, then it seemed that the Gangists got impatient, and launched an assault on the locals. I lost my dad that day. He was just out for groceries.

...

Everything went sideways for another week, and they started pulling out the big guns. That was when it truly went downhill. The first hurricane hit, while the fighting never stopped. Every minutes, every seconds, the sound of gunfire and explosions never ceased. Two weeks after the Gangist assault, a stray Collaborism missile destroyed our home, taking my mom and brother away.

The only one I had left was my sister, and together, we hid around the town in fear of another attack and scavenged whatever we could. I cried myself to sleep for a week after the missile, but she was there to comfort me, and my presence seemed to cheer her up no matter how little it was. It felt like it would went on forever, but the war intensified yet again. In a Compatriotist ambush two months later, while I was reduced to a wet, shivering mess, my sister fought back, and she told me to run away and stay alive as she did. I stumbled out of the building we were in and ran like the little bitch I was. I wanted to return there, if only to tell her I'm sorry, but the Compatriotists assheads had made it their base.

With my sister death, I was broken, I had no will to live, but remember her last words, I just couldn't. Living off of the rations left by a group of builders and rain water, I hid like a rodent in the under renovation town hall. As the supplies dwindles, I was forced to go out to grab more, and almost got spotted by a group of Gangists. Almost traumatised, I wasn't going to go out any time soon, and decided to explore the town hall a bit.

The frame was there.

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In the center of the basement, stood a block of unblemished white stone with red gems embedded on it . The stone surrounding the gems was noticeably carved in and a lot of shades darker than the entire block. The pattern on the door was intricate, depicting impossible shapes, even as I walked around. There was a part of my mind that wanted to get closer to the door, and as I approached it, that feeling turned into a voice, then two, then three, untill it felt like an entire city worth of people was talking into my brain. It was surprisingly not unpleasant, the closer I got to the door, the closer I felt to the truth. As I stood right before the door, I felt the voices merged into a single concept flowing into my mind, no longer going through the extra step of sound. In a trance, I reached out to the door, and it opened, as if it had always welcome me.

Darkness came.

All of my senses were gone.

Each thoughts seemed to stretch out to infinity but at the same time squished into a singular moment.

The concept grew louder, but not necessarily "louder".

Anything seemed like nothing and everything.

It felt like I should be feeling pain.

But all is unique.

I was feeling pain.

All was define the same yet were not the same.

But I wasn't.

As sudden as it went, all of my senses came back at once, but something was wrong. My limbs felt like it had molten into a type of soup, the rain hitting my skin felt like droplets of lava getting shot at the speed of a spaceship lifting off, and my vision was spinning like never before. As I writhed around on the ground in agony, a lightning bolt ripped the sky in half, and in a split moment before my consciousness faded, I could feel ITS ATTENTION ON ME.

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