August 4th, Eastern Ohio, 8:28 A.M.

It was early in the morning, and a cool fog still clung to the trees like a lifeline. The forest was already teeming with hidden life; there was the howl of coyotes hunting their prey, the songs of early-to-rise birds, a rustle of dried leaves as a family of deer bounded over a rotting log. The sharp aroma of pine trees mixed with that of wildflowers and the unpleasant stank of a skunk.

Stank of a skunk, Samwise Kirkland mused, grinning. Hey! That rhymes! Sort of.

He stepped on an unfortunate spider without knowing it.

The teen didn't actually go by Samwise. Nah, that was the name of one of the Hobbits in his father's favorite book series, The Lord of the Rings. It was a great trilogy but nonetheless gave him an embarrassing name. Instead, he signed all his papers as "Sam," without the "wise." Everyone had called him that since kindergarten. Well, when they weren't making fun of him, which wasn't very often.

That was why he was out here, in the forest behind his house. He liked animals much better than other people. Animals, he'd found, wouldn't betray you... except for spiders. Those little buggers were never to be trusted.

Sam pushed deeper into the forest.

Okay, he wasn't spending one of the last Monday mornings of summer here for that reason alone. Last night, his dad had told him a story over dinner. Before the American settlers came and claimed the land, the American Indians populated the area. There were many legends stemming from those times, but one in particular caught Dad's eye. The old Indians apparently thought that a hole in the ground just a few miles from Sam's home was holy - - early cave writing perfectly depicted the spot, and a scroll locked in an ornate wooden box said that the hole, now called Old Man's Shaft, led to a place of magic and wonder.

Of course, it was highly unlikely that was real. Geologists had scanned the area and reported that the Shaft definitely had a concrete bottom. Perhaps not literally concrete, but you know. A definite bottom located on EARTH.

Even so, there was still some mystery regarding Old Man's Shaft. Every year, at least one team of cavers went out to it. Most of them were never seen again, and those that were babbled insanely about dragons and evil wizards and people becoming enslaved to raise said evil wizard once more. Naturally, the officials decided the cave was filled with a hallucinatory, possibly poisonous gas and declared it unsafe.

Sam's dad didn't think so.

Sam's dad was also of American Indian decent.

So, in a nutshell, the teen was here to prove everybody wrong. He wanted to find out whether Old Man's Shaft really was some sort of portal. It sounded like a fantastic adventure, and although he was fourteen, Sam had never quite grown out of the dreaming-about-adventures phase. And thus, he found himself trekking through the lush forest, lugging all the equipment one would need to repel down a 400-foot rock wall. He probably wouldn't need all 400 feet of rope, but it never hurt to be safe.

"Wait until I find that world of magic," Sam laughed. "Maybe I'll befriend a wizard. Maybe I'll become a wizard myself! Ha! Dumb old Jimmy would never be able to make fun of me again! If he did, I'd introduce him to... to... a horde of ten thousand dragons! Ha! Ha... Ha. I thought I'd be there by now... haven't I been walking for almost an hour?"

A branch whipped him in the nose. He stumbled forward, sputtering indignantly.

"Ow!" Sam complained, nursing his now-red nose. He rubbed away the momentary pain, and when he looked in front of him again, he saw a small hole in the ground.

It was about twelve feet wide, enough for two adults to lay horizontally across it. It was dark; incredibly dark, as if it had eaten up all the daylight and sent it to oblivion. There was a strange, unwelcoming air to it. As Sam stared, a squirrel darted out towards the hole like it was going to attempt a suicide jump, but suddenly stopped barely a foot away. Then it spirited itself away.

This was it.

Sam swallowed. Old Man's Shaft was creepier than he'd imagined. How deep was it, if it was that dark?

He shrugged aside his unease and went to work. First, he slipped off his green backpack of supplies and pulled out a small hammer and a tent pin. He hammered the pin firmly into the ground. Next, Sam replaced the hammer with a long coil of rope and looped it through the pin, tying a knot tight enough to make a Boy Scout jealous. He wrapped the other end of the rope around his waist and again tied the same knot, and then winced. It felt like he'd accidentally cut off blood circulation.

Well, it was better to cut off circulation than to fall out of the rope.

Sam made sure he had a flashlight, firmly gripped the rope, tugged on it a few times to make sure the tent pin wasn't going anywhere, and finally began to walk backwards to the edge of the Shaft.

For a few seconds, he just stood there, with his heels hanging in space but the balls of his feet planted firmly on the ground. Sam gulped and wondered if this was a good idea after all. Nervously, he took his first step into the yawning abyss. He was now hanging on the wall of Old Man's Shaft, like he was rock climbing with no hands, but the taut rope kept him in place. He sighed in relief and descended several more feet.

After about ten minutes, Sam was starting to get the hang of it. He was now repelling a good fifteen feet with each step, though he did wonder how much deeper he would have to go. After all, he had to be running out of rope! He was surprised he'd made it this far, actually.

Well, Sam thought with a grin, at least the rope hasn't broken! I passed some pretty sharp rocks...

Perhaps he shouldn't have thought that.

There was an audible SNAP!, and the rope suddenly went slack. Sam's upper body, which had previously been supported by the rope, quickly fell, carrying his legs and feet with it.

With a shout of surprise and terror, Samwise Kirkland tumbled into the darkness.

August 5th, off the coast of Kamakura, Japan, 6:37 P.M.

Alanji Welwood stared up at the ceiling of her parents' yacht. The boat bobbed up and down on the waves, but she wasn't enjoying the view above deck like she should've been. And would've been, if it had been any other evening.

Too bad that this morning, her parents had dropped the worst bombshell a parent could. (Besides an actual bomb, of course.)

She was adopted.

Alanji had always suspected she was different from them. She didn't look even remotely like them; her blonde hair was unnatural for a true Japanese. Also, Japanese stuff just didn't come as easily to Alanji as the rest of the kids in her school. She did, however, excel in English and (strangely enough) German. She thought her fellow students were cool and colorful, but just couldn't fit in, no matter how many friends she made. Her fame didn't help matters much; she was the lead singer of a band so good, at least four or five of their songs were featured as anime openings/endings. Not that she really understood the appeal of anime.

Even her last name was a hint. Welwood was not her parent's last name, because Dad was a true Japanese. They had claimed it was her grandparents' on her mother's side; Mom was an American immigrant who had flown overseas to design video games for Nintendo. Mom's parents had died just a year before Alanji was born, and they had allegedly put down her last name as Welwood in honor of them. That made no sense, though. And after she'd done a little research this morning, Alanji found out that her grandparents were still alive and happy. And currently off on some archaeological dig in South India. (They were still going strong, despite being almost eighty years old.)

There was a particularly violent rock of the boat, causing a golden pigtail to fall in her face. Alanji huffed and brushed it away.

Her phone buzzed. She blinked and looked down at it to see a message from her drummer, Suzumiya Yuki.

You okay, Alanji? Yuki had texted. I only just got your text a few minutes ago. Dude, that sucks! And hey, your parents do know that there's supposed to be a major storm out there, right?

A major storm? There hadn't even been the slightest of showers.

Even as Alanji thought that, rain pattered against her porthole window. She looked out it in surprise, only to see the sky darkening and the waves getting larger.

The door to her room opened.

"Ali!" her mom - - no, wait, adoptive mom - - called, poking her head in. "There's a storm coming. A really large one."

Alanji grinned. She had always loved the forces of nature. Besides, even though she had just found out something life-changing, she couldn't be mad at Mom and Dad forever. She rushed past her mom and up the stairs to the deck, saying, "I'll be up here if you need me!"

"But, honey, it's dangerous!"

Too late. The pop idol was already grasping the smooth metal railing, leaning out over the choppy seas with excitement. And boy, were they choppy! With each passing minute, the waves grew anywhere from half a foot to a full twelve inches. The wind was picking up rapidly, howling as it ripped across the motorized yacht. The sky was now completely overcast, covered in black cotton balls that expelled buckets of rain each second. Alanji whooped, reveling in the thrill that came with being on the open sea in the middle of a potentially dangerous storm.

(She was a bit of a thrill-seeker.)

But something was wrong. Suddenly, the ocean bulged and started to curl upward. Water built itself into a high wall that easily passed the height of the deck, then the roof of the living quarters. As Alanji's eyes grew wider, and her wide grin changed to a gaping O of shock, the massive wave crested mere feet from their ship, which was a dwarf in comparison.

The last thing she tasted was a mouthful of saltwater. Then there was a sharp impact on the back of her head, and Alanji blacked out.

August 5th, Chicago, 7:38 A.M.

Breathe in, breathe out. Don't think about the target as a living person. Pretend you're not aiming a perfectly loaded and perfectly deadly sniper rifle at the current President of the United States. Pretend you're pointing a water gun at a mannequin. Breathe in, breathe out.

Leanne Malone, better known to the criminal underworld as "Black Raven," decided it was hopeless.

Her hands shook as her finger hovered over the gun's trigger. She'd received plenty of orders to eliminate all kinds of wealthy people before, and she'd completed the assassinations flawlessly. Who would suspect a normal-looking, healthy thirteen-and-a-half year old girl to have been behind the shootings of England's richest man, Russia's Secretary of State, and the Egyptian Ambassador, among others? The young teen had pulled off countless missions and had been doing so for years.

Kidnapped by a terrorist organization called MEDUSA at a young age, Leanne had barely had time to live a normal life. She remembered very few details about life outside assassinating. She only knew the gentle touch of a mother, the sibling rivalries with an older brother, the warmth of a father's kind smile, and the joy of birthday parties in fleeting dreams. The most kindness shown to her in recent memory was about five years ago, when one of the terrorists, named James, had momentarily shown pity to her and bought her a Pillow Pet at the local Wal-Mart. He'd gotten a job in the jungles of South America soon after. Nobody had every heard from him again. Since that day, Leanne had had a strange weakness for all things cute... especially pandas.

Even though it was early in the morning, the sun was already shining brightly.

How ironic, Leanne thought.

A gust of wind blew across the rooftop she was currently squatting on. She'd been in Chicago for three days now, scouting out the area for the best vantage point, making sure she had an ideal escape route, and double-checking that she'd gotten the President's destination right - - and the wind had hardly stopped the entire time. Leanne had heard people call it the Windy City before, but had never quite understood how windy it was. It made sharpshooting someone a thousand feet away rather difficult.

Not that she actually enjoyed the barbaric business.

Leanne shuddered at the thought of her bullets piercing President Jackson's skull. Okay, Lee, calm down, she told herself hastily. You're not killing him, really. You're just... putting him to sleep for a while. Yeah. Putting him to sleep. With a heavy sniper rifle. That will probably puncture his brain and - - Just... calm down. Deep breath. In, out, in, out.

She squinted through the scope to make sure she was on target. Taking into account the strong wind, the added weight of the muffler, the kickback, and the distance of the shot, was it aimed in a spot that would ensure her bullet smashed through President Jackson's skull? A thousand feet away, through the glass window of a medium-sized, modern building, the President, his son, and his entourage of Secret Service agents were enjoying a concert for a new classical music group. Leanne had done her homework and learned that they were listening to a live performance of the soundtrack for the son's favorite video game. A few weeks ago, the White House had received an invitation in the mail from the leader of the group herself.

With tumultuous fingers, she gently pulled the trigger just as the classical band hit their last chord.

The window cracked, but didn't shatter completely. Cries of fear and confusion rose up from the streets below. Leanne tensed. A minute later, men in black suits rushed out of the building in full badass mode, several carrying the limp body of the President. Leanne peered through the sniper rifle's scope and swore. He was clutching his shoulder, pale but alive.

For the first time in her life, she'd missed.

Leanne swore. Quickly, she threw the large rifle down to the floor of the roof and lay flat on her back so she wouldn't be seen. She disassembled the gun - - it was the newest model, able to be broken apart and put back together in less than a minute. The young assassin slipped the pieces into a slick, black, empty violin case (her cover story was that she was a musician from out of town, hoping to get some money to start a band herself, and two of the adult assassins in the terrorist organization acted as her parents).

"Okay, go, go, go!" she hissed to herself.

Leanne scooped the violin case off the cement roof, stood up, and dashed for the door to the stairwell. She threw the heavy door open, heart pounding, adrenaline rushing a hundred miles per hour. As she raced down the stairs, descending floor after empty floor (she had chosen an abandoned office firm), Leanne cursed the name of every god she could think of.

Why, why did she have to miss her one shot today? Her, ahem, "friends" at MEDUSA had promised her freedom if she could complete this last mission. Besides that, they'd also sworn to stay away from her family, whom they'd threatened to kill if she made any attempts to escape. On the flip side, they had told her that if she failed, they would ensure nobody would see them again. And just to make matters interesting, they'd only provided her with one bullet.

"A tragic accident," they had said. "It'll be all over the national papers."

Apparently, her parents were well-respected enthusiasts in technology, and were even selling their own popular video game consoles in a shocking cooperation with both Nintendo and Sony. They had made headlines across the world multiple times. Leanne knew that they were doing everything in their power to find her and rescue her, but so far they had failed.

Finally, she reached the bottom floor. Lugging her heavy "violin" case with her, she pumped her legs like pistons and tore out the door, into the street that was now filled with panicking pedestrians. Cars had had to stop so they wouldn't accidentally run over somebody. People were running about crazily. They might not have heard a gunshot thanks to Leanne's state-of-the-art muffler, but they had definitely heard the window crack, and the Secret Service searching everyone and everything wasn't helping anything. Leanne breathed a deep sigh of relief. Maybe she could use the confusion to sneak in close to the President, use her throwing knives to finish him off. They'd get her for sure, but at least she could spare her family from MEDUSA's inescapable - -

"Hey, you! Freeze, drop the weapon, and put your hands in the air!"

Leanne froze. Icy terror washed down her spine and made her shackles raise on end. Unconsciously, she'd already slipped one of her throwing knives out of her jeans pocket and started to make for the President. It slipped out of her hand along with her violin case and fell with a clang to the street.

Slowly, Leanne turned around.

A row of men in sleek black suits were pointing rifles at her.

Shit, shit, shit! she mentally howled. I'm screwed!

The row of Secret Service agents parted, and a man with an impressive pompadour stepped forward. In spite of the situation, Leanne couldn't help but find that hilarious. Didn't he know pompadours had died in the '60s? Only stupid people with too much forehead had them. Despite the whacky hair and lack of a gun, the man was heavily built and broad-shouldered. He looked like he could go a few rounds with a wooly mammoth and barely break a sweat.

"I am the Head of CIA, Fred Johnson," he stated gruffly. "Are you Black Raven?"

Leanne gaped. Wait, what!? How do they know my codename?

Well, she could at least confuse them for a moment to think of an escape plan. Thanking MEDUSA for the first time in her life, she used her Foreign Languages training to switch into fluid French: "Je n'aime pas les corbeaux noirs!" I don't like black ravens, she'd said.

Agent Pompadour huffed and narrowed his beady eyes. "I don't care whether you like them or not. I'm asking if you are the assassin known as Black Raven, who has coldly killed more than thirty government officials and business executives, as well as Justin Beiber... though I can't say I can really blame you for the last one. Anyway, I've been hunting you for months. Imagine my surprise when I received an anonymous tip that you were in the area, carrying a violin case and probably a knife!"

Leanne's eyes widened. She might have been popular in the criminal underworld, but nobody other than the top members of MEDUSA knew where she was going to be today, or what she looked like, or what she was carrying. That could only mean that they had betrayed her! They had never meant to keep their promise in the first place! Leanne's mind raced. But she was of no use to them locked up in Federal jail. MEDUSA would probably pull some strings and get her out of there, only to basically enslave her for life. Not to mention that her family might as well have been dead already.

A new surge of strength flooded her veins.

No way! she cried mentally. I can't let them die! I don't even know who they are, but... they're still my family!

Closing her eyes, she swooped down and blindly scooped up the fallen knife. Cracks of gunfire threatened to break Leanne's eardrums, and there were more shouts from the street. With a shout, she flung the knife in the direction of the President, who was being swiftly carried away by two Secret Service agents. Just as the hilt of the knife brushed the tip of her fingers, a sharp burst of pain ripped through her chest.

The teen assassin cried out in agony.

The knife went spinning out into the street, bouncing harmlessly off a Stop sign but scaring the hell out of quite a few pedestrians.

Defeat washed over her like an ocean of despair.

Her vision was quickly blackening. Her head hit the street.

As she lost consciousness, her last thought was the cruel knowledge that it was all over.

August 5th, the Merry Martial Arts Dojo just outside of London, England, 1:22 P.M.

Sweat poured down his face. His breaths came heavily as he winced and groaned. The teen's knuckles were red and sore from too much impact, but he didn't stop or even falter. Instead, Abbey Borkenau whaled on the punching bag even harder.

There was the click of his Sensei snapping shut his stopwatch.

Abbey slumped to the blue mat, panting from the exertion.

"Good work out today," Sensei approved. "You got a real sweat going, Abbey-kun. Keep it up and you'll make this year's Olympics for sure. That triple-kick you performed was amazing!"

The teen gulped for air. "T-Thanks."

The two were the only people in the dojo; it didn't officially open to the public until a few hours later. Abbey was a seventeen-year-old, though his short stature and complete innocence made him look around fourteen. His strawberry blonde hair was styled so that it was curly. He was dressed in a simple, white karate gi - - the usual martial artist uniform, almost like a kimono but plain and for men. Around his waist was a black belt with ten golden straps of paper wrapped around one end, signifying that he was a tenth degree Dan... and that was the highest level you could get in karate. (You pronounced it like dawn, not like the name Dan.)

He was currently in training for the next summer Olympics. Thankfully, whoever ran the incredible event had finally decided that karate was a worthy enough sport to add to the list.

Sensei, an old man with white hair, a black gi, and only a seventh degree Dan, sighed and sat down on the mat beside him.

"Why do you try so hard?" he asked, rubbing his head.

Abbey looked at him questioningly. "What do you mean? If I don't train as hard as I could, I'll never make the Olympics."

"I mean, why do you want to get into them so badly?"

"Oh," the teen said. He frowned and stared at the white wall of the dojo. "Well... when I stumbled upon your dojo a few years ago, I never dreamed I could learn as much as I have. But you never gave up on me, even though I was a total failure at this stuff for the first few months."

The old man snorted. "Ha! You couldn't even earn your yellow belt until your fourth month."

Abbey's laugh was like Sensei's wind chimes. "Yeah, I sucked back then! But you believed in me and gave me the confidence to keep training. Thanks to that, I was able to fend off those delinquents who tried to be all weird with me." (The teen had a rather feminine physique, and was often mistaken for a young and adorable girl. Add to that his innocence and even name, Abbey, and it confused just about everybody who met him.) "I wanted to repay you in some way. When I heard that your business was declining and that martial arts had been listed as an Olympic sport this year, I realized that if I could get the gold, or even just the bronze, the popularity of this dojo would skyrocket. Everybody interested in karate would want to come here!"

"You idiot," Sensei sighed, smiling. Abbey chuckled awkwardly and rubbed the side of his head.

After the teen had caught his breath, he blinked and said, "Hey, wait a minute. Didn't you say something last week about a scroll containing instructions for a secret training technique? One guaranteed to make the user stronger?"

"Well... yes," the old man coughed. "It's an ancient Chinese scroll that I found hidden in a cave years ago, and I keep it in a puzzle box in my office. But it's also very dangerous. Besides, I don't know of anybody in recorded history who has attempted to undergo its methods and succeeded."

Abbey tilted his head. "So how does that make it dangerous?"

"A curse is inscribed upon the scroll: Anyone who fails this technique shall never know the light of Earth's Ten Suns again. In Chinese mythology, the world had not one Sun, but ten."

"Weird. So, what, are you gonna show me the scroll?"

The old man's eyes bugged out. "Hell no, Abbey! Are you a baka?"

Sensei was Japanese, and he would sometimes slip into his home tongue when emotional.

Abbey turned on his best puppy dog eyes. "Please? I swear I'll be safe!"

Sensei's eye twitched, and he looked like he was doing his best not to give in. But Abbey was a trap through and through, and his puppy dog eyes were deadlier than an army of three hundred Spartans. The old man's will crumbled and he sighed.

"Oh, all right," the seventh degree black belt muttered, standing up and walking to the back of the room, where a desk sat perpendicular to the wall. "I'll show you the scroll. Well, not the original scroll itself. I translated it into English, except for the bottom few lines. They were written in many languages, so I just copied the English-looking version."

As he rummaged through the desk, opening drawers and pulling out random papers, Abbey grinned widely and couldn't help but giggle a little to himself. If he could learn this mysterious technique, then he would be able to repay his debt to Sensei for sure! He tapped his feet against the blue mat anxiously and wiped sweat off his brow. Finally, the old man he had become good friends with came back, waving an ancient piece of faded parchment with elegantly scripted cursive on it.

Abbey blinked. "Why does it look like it was written in Camelot?" he asked.

Sensei laughed awkwardly. "Well, actually, I just felt like it should be more mysterious than it was."

"Oh."

He handed it to Abbey, who held it in both hands and started reading it excitedly. It said:

Only the greatest Karate Master shall achieve the reward this technique brings. Only those with a Heart moste Pure shall receive this reward.
Choosing the hardest path reaps the most rewards.
The Path ahead is a road filled with both Darkness and Joy.
Say the following sentences aloud:

Luo sym evigi
Flesreh Cigam dnas dogeth ot
Ytefas eht erusnell iwi
Tfig eht tuohtiw llafo

Abbey gaped. "Those lines looked like English to you?"

"Well, they were written perfectly in our alphabet. I figured that they were in some kind of code that I couldn't decipher. Or perhaps they were just simply meant to be read like that."

The teen martial artist wondered how the Ancient Chinese knew the modern English alphabet. Writing it off as Marco Polo's fault, he shrugged and started chanting the four strange lines. As he did so, he felt a tingle in the back of his neck and an almost irresistible urge to scratch it. He was able to ignore it for the most part at first, but as he got closer and closer to the last word, the itchiness and tingly feeling grew. Abbey pouted as he read the paragraph. The itchiness was spreading from the small of his back to his entire being. He desperately wanted to relieve the annoying feeling. He spoke the last word almost as a shout - - "LLAFO!"

The itchiness stopped, although the tingly feeling was still there.

"I'm not really sure how that was supposed to help you become stronger," Sensei deadpanned. "It sounded like a bunch of gibberish."

Abbey nodded, rubbing his head. "And it was just a bunch of words, no instructions other than to read a few lines."

They sat there awkwardly for a few beats, not really sure what to do.

"I don't really know what I was expecting to happen," Sensei said.

Abbey uncrossed his legs and stood up without using his hands. He was rather short and had only had one growth spurt, back when he was in seventh grade. "Well, I guess it's time for me to leave, then," he said, smiling even though the Chinese method clearly hadn't worked at all. He bowed to the old man politely.

The old man bowed back. "Sayonara," he said distractedly.

The almost adorably feminine boy started to walk to the door, still wearing his karate gi. He would change when he got home. But as he neared the door, the itchiness returned, this time more intense than before. The tingly feeling was a lot stronger, too. Abbey frowned and scratched his arm, but it didn't help any. It was almost like every molecule of his body was being vibrated back and forth at incredible speeds.

Had his Sensei watched him leave, he would've noticed that his young student's body was starting to fade. But he was busy examining the scroll, which Abbey had returned to him, to make sure they hadn't missed anything.

And then, quite suddenly, Abbey Borkenau simply wasn't there.

August 5th, Behrensville, Germany, 10:46 P.M.

The night was dark, silent, and peaceful. Nestled in between two medium-sized mountains, the villagers enjoyed some isolation from the rest of the world and kept to themselves, and it was late at night anyway. Nearly everyone in the small town of Behrensville was sleeping, except for one person.

Tyrone Ruth was in his family's barn, milking the cows.

The Ruths lived just outside the main town on a small farm that Mr. Ruth's father had passed down to him. The Ruths had owned the farm for generations past and would own it for generations to come, if Mr. Ruth had anything to say about it. Unfortunately, Tyrone hated farming.

"Why," he grunted, "do I have to be up milking these dumb old cows!? Can't they just hold it in until the morning?"

Scratch that. Tyrone despised farming.

And he was damn tired.

Did we mention he hated farming?

"I - - hate - - farming," Tyrone said, milking the cow harder with each word.

The cow mooed in admonishment.

The boy scowled. "Shut up."

The cow mooed louder, but this time it was more like a WHAT THE HELL!? kinda thing. The other animals in the barn, like horses and chickens, woke up and started freaking out, too. Soon the barn was filled with the various panicked sounds of farm animals. Tyrone scowled and looked up to yell at them all some more, but what he saw out the cow's window made him stop and stare.

A giant meteorite was falling to Earth, blazing worse than a bonfire for dragons.

His eyes nearly popped out of his head. "WHAT THE FUCK!?" he yelled, his jaw dropping to the ground. He definitely hadn't heard anything about a meteorite falling in this area, or in any area, lately! It was burning so brightly, it was almost a mini Sun, lighting up the mountains and village like daylight. Tyrone had to look away. It was hurting his eyes too much to look at it for long.

BOOM!

The impact shook the countryside. The teen lost his balance and fell over, accidentally putting his hand in a pile of cow manure.

"Shit," he mumbled rather ironically.

Tyrone wiped his crappy hand off on his jeans, then wondered what he should do. There was no way people hadn't woken up from that massive impact. It had been an earthquake from space! Someone was going to find that giant hunk of space junk sooner or later, and he'd heard that some meteor chunks could sell for hundreds or even thousands of euros.

Well, first come, first serve.

Tyrone guessed that it had fallen somewhere on the other side of the mountain.

"What was that?" his Dad called groggily from inside the house.

He pulled on his black leather jacket, which he had hung up on a post of the horse's pen, and dashed out of the barn, lying, "Dunno, but it made one of the horses freak and run off towards the mountain! I'm going after it on my bike!"

"Okay, but be careful. There's wolves out there."

"I know, Dad."

Tyrone's bike was still leaning against the side of the small farm house, the way he'd left it earlier this morning. He swung onto it and peddled down the Ruths' dirt driveway. The cool night air rushed by his face. The trip to the other side of the mountain would take a couple of hours, let alone coming back, but sleeping could wait. There was cash just sitting on the ground!

The first trip lasted until midnight. Going up the mountain was the hardest part; biking back down was extremely easy. For most people, it might've seemed like an impossibly daunting task, but for Tyrone, who had been biking around the countryside since a young age, the only daunting thing was that he wouldn't get to sleep until four. In the MORNING.

Finally, he came out of the bike path that went through the forest of the woods on the other side, and what he saw made him brake and just stare for a few seconds.

Less than six hundred meters away was a ginormous crater in the ground, about 30 meters wide and probably five hundred feet deep. All of it was charred to a shiny onyx black, as well as some of the surrounding vegetation and earth. And in the center of the crater lay a large boulder, still glowing red and steaming. The entire area stank like that chicken manure other farmers would sometimes spread (and that was about the worst smelling thing on the planet). Tyrone gagged.

"Well, I'm here now," he said to himself. "Just some smelly stuff isn't going to turn me back!"

He kicked the brake lock into place, swung off the bike, and was about to run over to the crater when something shiny caught his eye. Tyrone paused and looked at the ground by his left foot.

Sitting there was what looked like a purple crystal.

"Sweet!" he cheered, grinning widely and bending down to get a closer look at it. "I wonder how much it's worth? And... why it's purple."

The crystal was catching the moonlight in a way that made it appear to glow in an otherworldly nature. Tyrone blinked. Weird. He hadn't thought there was that much moonlight. He reached out for the crystal and picked it up...

And it glowed even brighter before lifting out of his palm and slamming into his chest.

The next morning, when Mr. Ruth woke up for good, he discovered his son was missing.

The disappearances all happened in different parts of the world, to five teens of different ages and vastly different backgrounds. One was normal but shy. Another was an adopted pop idol who felt isolated from the world. A third was an assassin who hated killing. The fourth was a feminine young man who was a master of karate. The fifth and last was a rebellious boy hoping to earn a little extra cash. None of them knew each other, but they all had one thing in common - - they were displeased with their current life.

Although they were scattered across the globe, the five teens vanished at exactly the same time.

And a world of magic and wonder would receive five powerful new citizens.