Chapter 1: Awaken

EMETT

I awoke from the dream. It's funny, even though it was happening in a sort of remote third person, and the main character in the dream was a girl, I felt like it happened to me. Part of it was definitely that it was so incredibly vivid and real, that there was a distinct sense of immersion. There was also the fact that our names were etymologically related. Both Alethea and Emett referred to the word "truth." As an amateur linguist, and general scholar, I got this significance right away. But I expected other people not to, so maybe it was just a coincidence. In any case, since I had no idea if it was supposed to mean something, I ignored it and got myself out of bed. After all, the town seemed to have rules to it that weren't true of any town that he knew of in the world.

I was around eighteen this year. I have a father named Alex, a mother named Bianca, a brother named Ash (like the tree, he insists, not like soot after things are burned), and a sister named Willow (this was before Buffy the Vampire Slayer became a television series). I was spending a vacation with my parents, as it was now July. Many people at my age couldn't wait to move away, starting on work in order to become independent and pay for their own college, or skipping it entirely and going straight to work. I wasn't most people. I loved my parents, and always felt off-sync with the rush of the rest of the world. Despite being fascinated by several subjects of study for their own sake, everyone else seemed to know something about the world that didn't make any sense to me. Or maybe they just believed something to be obvious.

I guess I was always a little strange, even as a child. I was born in Sharon CT, but we moved when I was four to Virginia. From there, we moved every few years due to my father's job as a priest, but always within Virginia. I was always a religious child. I used to pray for the weirdest things, and not like a normal child might. One time, I prayed simply because the amount of time it took to say the prayer would be enough to cool things down. And sure enough, once the prayer was done, it was indeed stone cold. It wasn't my words that cooled it down, that was for certain. But my feelings on the other hand, I discovered later, had a powerful effect on reality. But at the time, I didn't know any of this. What I did know was that growing up, I always felt like I had weird senses. I could always seem to know when it was going to rain by a sort of feeling, and I seemed to be very good with animals and raising plants. Outside my back door, a forested hill emptied out into a dock. I always had all sorts of outdoor adventures growing up.

But lest you think that I was some wild hippie child that never got a decent education, let me dissuade you of this. I read encyclopedias growing up. I learned that the tallest waterfall was Angel Falls and the deepest part of the ocean was the Mariana Trench. Or was, before the Mandela Effect. After that, everything including the name of the Berenstein Bears was fair game. But I would eventually learn about that too. I learned about biology, physics, algebra, and all the rest in school, for I got a normal education. It was my extracurricular activities that tended to be strange. These were things like inventing languages (everything from some sort of squiggles, to pictographs of trees or snowflakes), coming up with different systems of government, or imagining what happened before recorded history. I always wondered why I had such hobbies.

When I had friends, these were mostly normal. I would play video games, go to sleepovers, and watch anime with friends. As a kid, I had a friend named Kyle growing up. Later on, I had another friend named Charlie. No matter who I met, it always felt like I had the same five or so people that I hung out with, or rather all of the friends I ever met fell into one of five archetypes. For some reason, I pictured them as five girls named much like that dream. The one I dubbed Autumntwig was athletic and into the outdoors with a friendly and outgoing manner, the one I called Aellisa was always tagging along with the first friend but seemed more prim and aloof, the one I called Arboria was very calm and almost bookish, the one I called Marina was very clean and organized, and Rena was incredibly approachable and usually my dearest friend at the time.

I made friends of both sexes, but I seemed to be better relating to girls than boys. I thought there was something wrong with me, but my father Alexander tells me that he once walked in on a daycare where the ladies there were telling everyone that men were all savages, and women were all angels. Needless to say, he switched daycare after that, but even though it was a repressed memory, I always felt more like I had interests in common with other girls.

Later on, things got weirder. My brother Ash decided to crossdress me for this play about some historical figure, and these feelings of belonging more with girls than boys really cemented. I wondered if I was gay, but I decided after some soul-searching that this wasn't really so. I liked girls, as much due to being attracted to pretty things and people and being grossed out by things like body hair and body odor, but also because all things boyish turned me off. I wasn't gay, but I didn't understand what I was. So I hid this, until I was nearly thirty. As such, dating was filled with awkwardness because I really wanted to be close friends rather than romantic, but I had awkward hormones and even more awkward social norms about behavior around the opposite sex. That is, I couldn't just hug a girl I wasn't dating. Nevermind that as a child, that had been just fine.

We moved away from my old home, into a small city. I went from having a few friends from school that I regularly hung out with to knowing practically nobody. I met people mainly through church from there on, as I was simply too shy after the sudden move. Little did I know that the trouble was about to start.

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