Time for covert operations. It was a Friday and a short day for me. I got off at a little before noon and arrived home approximately a half-an-hour after that. Luckily, today was cool and windy so I didn't reek of sweat on the trek home. I ought to rethink my rather ingenious idea of wearing dark shirts to school. Though I hadn't much choice else wise and much preferred the pleasant navy to the irritating white and yellow that comprised my other options. Walking in the desert back and forth in the hot sun with nearly black shirts surely wasn't the best way to belay heatstroke but then again I've been doing just that for years now and have yet to encounter any life threatening situations.
I burst into my house and took a minute to worship the air conditioning. Oh glorious apparatus that permitted us to live in the desert as we do! Continuing on, I flung my bag on the floor and headed to the kitchen for refreshment with the pesky dog on my tail piously requesting affection. I acquired my glass of icy lemonade and returned back to my room- my sanctuary.
Here it was. I snickered as I pulled it out of the case. Another of the games I liked in the collection and it was already a favorite. My sister wasn't home yet and wasn't due to arrive for a few hours yet, so I finally had time to play the cherished game alone. I could play without being forced second player and my dear sister controlling the main character. In fact I was home alone for about four hours. It was time to play Tales of Vesperia. I grabbed my faithful white controller, lovingly dubbed Picante, and put my sister's black controller on the file cabinet. I pressed down the almighty green button in the center and heard the always entertaining swhooom of the Xbox being activated. The actual console had a name as well, I once suggested it to my sister by way of calling shotgun. The title stuck and the white machine was duly named Shotgun.
Messing around with the settings a bit, I logged on my profile and then clicked on the image for the game on the menu. It loaded fine and I listened cheerfully to the opening. The lyrics didn't make a lick of sense but I'd damn my shirt if they weren't catchy. I mean, at least it had lyrics, rather unlike the openings Tales of the Abyss and Tales of Symphonia did in their translated forms. The instrumentals were nice, but the original versions were better.
I clicked past the start menu and begun a new game. I was too busy quenching my thirst to notice for the television at the moment, I placed the glass down on my desk and whirled the chair to face the television once more. I was surprised when I saw a black screen with the Vesperia logo star plastered upon it sans any wording propositioned over it.
...Loading.
What in all seven hells could it be loading? The game had already done so.
...Please reinsert disc.
I stared, confounded at the screen and, like any rational person would do, obeyed the text like a mindless zombie. I opened the disc tray and, before closing it again, polished the bottom surface on the disc with one of my scattered pieces of clean laundry. It closed with an almost ominous whirr of console mechanics and suddenly it all went dark.
"What the flaming fudge?!" I shouted as the room around me lost all tangibility around me. I floated in what seemed like an endless void when a rush of tingling sensation took me. I was ripped from all sides yet intact, felt all over and yet untouched. A whirring vortex of feelings in discord- in an instant it was overwhelming and yet never more than a brush of sensation. Images spiraled on for fathoms and then puddle-deep. My mind went black and I dropped into nothing.
~*~*~
I woke with an odd stiffness in my neck that somehow reminded me of a broken slinky. Did I sleep on the wrong side of the bed? I blinked open my eyes and had to shield them from the sudden effuse of light. I pushed myself upright my hands and felt the chilling touch of cold stone like tiles after a cold night. I knew I was not were I had left myself. I didn't remember where I did and instantly my mind went into a centrifuge of conspiracy theories and odd thoughts.
What if I was kidnapped and taken for ransom? But then they wouldn't leave me in a cave. What if I was going to be the sacrifice at some weird mountain ritual and they thought I would be unconscious and left me unguarded? Though this didn't have the feel of any place I'd been before so I'd had to have been unconscious for a while to be anywhere I didn't recognize.
The walls were an eerily smooth marble-gray, quite obviously by weathering and erosion. Outside was a vista of unparalleled beauty, not really though. It was more rocks. Except rougher and not smoothed by the odd winded properties of the cave. If I peeked up a bit I could see beyond the cliff and view the startlingly green hillocks and the small blots of creatures moving about in the distance. What was the oddest thing was the lack of human noise, civilization of sorts. I could hear no murmur of activity, not even a car wooshing by or its alarm echoing in the street. The color of the stone and the environment didn't match what I knew as the peaks that made a valley out of my home near the desert I lived in.
I finally activated my legs and stood up, careful of my footing on the unevenly smooth floor of the cave. I looked down I could see where I steppe- wait a minute. These aren't my legs. My legs are not here? I paused again to further examine this weird happening. My legs are definitely not this tan. These are sun-kissed. My legs were as pale as, well, Jack Skellington. It had embarrassed me to admit this since I usually prided myself on having a nice Mexican tan. I do, but on my arms. Speaking, or rather thinking of arms... I looked over these limbs as well, and found that they were not my own either. I lacked the usual dots scattered across my skin and I could've sworn that I didn't have that fresh paper cut or those oddly girly fingers encased in tough leather gloves. Taking a moment to take a better inventory, this whole body wasn't mine. Rail-thin yet curvaceous and, unfairly, bigger boobs. Well mine were fine, but these are nice... got distracted there. I observed my clothing, which is in muted fall tones with some dashes of red and I'm donned in garments I would never have found myself wearing. My new shirt was worse as it displayed this body's pleasant cleavage, at it least covered my gut. I definitely wasn't in my own body which had left me to wonder.
Whose body was this?
This led me down one of my rumbling trails of thought which had somehow ended in Nicole Kidman, and that didn't really relate to the situation at all- unless I'd turned into some sort of emotionless alien life form that takes over others bodies. I was fairly sure I would've known if that had been the case, but then I was not sure of much right then, so who was to say? For the time being I had better figure out where in all seven hells I was.
I finally emerged from the gorge in the rock's surface and got a gust blown directly into my face. I moved my hair out of my way and felt something damp. I had pulled back my finger to see red, but a dried chocolate-red meaning I had been bleeding. I could've told the color of that anywhere, especially after having taken a course on forensic science- and not just for the television series. I was an addict to crime and murder mystery novels. Either way I had felt around and discovered two things. First, the wound on my head had already scabbed over, and the second; I had a hat. This discovery had distracted me much more than the first. I had a hat, and not just any hat, I soon discovered as I had taken it off my head. A cool pumpkin orange newsboy cap, accentuated with a little belt. I had loved this hat and I then named it. Pondering a bit, I poked at the hat and spoke aloud.
"I'll call you Mitochondria!" I spewed the first thing that came to mind- not a good naming solution but it worked anyways and was how I had named a number of objects in the past. Seeing a blood splotch on my lovely new Mitochondria, I remembered. Yes, I was bleeding. I was also a stupid git to forget that. The problem had been that I obtained nothing to wipe it with, unless I had wanted to go topless or endanger myself to wounds on the rocks further with no protection, assuming this body had gotten hurt that way in the first place.
I paid attention to my real mission then, I found a pathway that had looked a bit.. used, which sparked my hope for meeting other people to help figure out this dilemma. The body I was in was oddly easy to get used to. I didn't have to even try, really. You'd think I would have to get used to the longer legs and height but it wasn't as difficult as it might have been. I followed the path, and was led to a ledge with what had looked like were hand and foot holds. I paused, sure that I would have been unable to get down but, there had been no other way. I promptly gave up and begun to descend. My grip on the stones had come easily, along with how I was able to swing from one foothold to another and it had made me wonder. How much untapped potential did I not know of in this body?
I reached the ground and crawled through another space. I stepped out and my breath was taken from my lungs. I'm in ruins with statues and broken buildings of ancient porcelain white. Easily I could pick out where buildings once stood and have a glimpse of what this place used to be. The pathways were granite and few buildings still stood up to the erosion of time but it still was an epic place. Everything here had a purpose though they it seemed they did take time for aesthetics in brilliant but now faded blue designs and statues of what could be a long-lost goddess. I picked my way through the city ravaged by disrepair and I get faint glimpses of recognition, but I couldn't have been here before. Archaeologists wouldn't have let a civilian anywhere near their finds unless behind several lasers and a glass or plexiglass case. Too soon, I exited the city.
Outside of the area I found two people standing and talking dressed in garments the likes of which I've only seen in Anime conventions. Much like the outfit I was in, unsurprisingly. I'm so happy to finally have found people that I didn't cover the sound of my approach and they turned having heard my footsteps. They were two young girls in white robes that also screamed for my recognition. Both leaped up at seeing me and look worried.
"Geez I'm glad we're here! You're covered in blood!" The pale orange haired girl spoke indignantly.
"We came... all the way from Aspio.. Poor Miss Ideen is hurt.." The shy looking one with fiery orange hair commented quietly.
A spark started a wildfire of thought in my mind. The ruins, the clothing, the name Aspio. It couldn't be true was my firm belief until my memories flooded back to me. I had just turned on the game when I was transported here somehow. The truth is revealed and it was not something that I could deny with the clothing more realistic than the best cosplayer could ever had made it back home. The two orange haired twins wore the robes of Aspio researchers and these ruins were the ones near the town in game. It hit me like a ton of bricks and my mouth gaped open.
"Ideen?" I questioned before I can think on it further.
"That's your name, yes." The angrier twin spoke up.
"Well that's dandy, and you are?"
"You how... what.. remember?" She sputtered.
"What she means to say.. pardon, but did you forget us Ms. Ideen?" The quieter one translated.
"I don't remember anything frankly." I lie airly and believable since I actually didn't know these two.
"Thehe blood! Head! Injury!" The angry one spoke up again.
"Yes, sister. That's what must have caused her amnesia. I do apologize for speaking as though you are not present." The quiet one speaks.
An eloquent quiet girl and a temperamental girl who stuttered. How did who I was before come across such an odd pair? They looked exactly alike but for their expressions and colors of their hair. What was it they had called me, Ideen? Well... that's was a stupid name. My thoughts provided me with the drab word choice.
"Anyways since you can't remember, you're Ideen Atwyn a researcher at Aspio. I'm Apple and my sister over there is Pomegranate. Don't call me Apple though, I'll kill you. I go by App or Appi and my sister likes to be called Pome." The pale orange haired one spoke up, having interrupted my train of thought and apparently regaining her ability to form complete sentences. "Anything you do remember, Mistress Ideen?"
I paused for a moment in thought. Was there anything I did remember? These two poor children haphazardly named after fruits seemed almost familiar now and anything else seemed odd apart from the fact that I played this in my world as a game. Though it was knowingly less detailed and all from Yuri's perspective. A sudden thought comes to me unbidden with a strong urge to obey and I did so. I placed my hand near my right ear I extended my other arm and faced away from the girls.
"O' flickering blaze burn. Fireball!" As I chanted the incantation energy flowed from the point on my ear and it spread like roots throughout my body. It was an empowering sensation as I felt energy taken bit by bit like playing a game of tetris and focused through my arm. A simple fireball bursts out in a bullet trajectory from where I had shot it and the tree I faced was now aflame. The girls near me paused a moment and then the quiet one summoned a water spell. I'm too focused on the idea of 'WhatTheHellIJustUsedMagic' to have heard her incantation but I could clearly see the results. I wanted to show my confusion but it wasn't really a good idea with my limited grasp of what went on so I remained stagnant faced as Pome, Appi, and I faced each other once more. Never show your whole hand.
"She can cast." Pome spoke up in her melodically sad voice.
"Yeah, but that's about it. Only a simple spell and she seems to have lost all her grace with magic. She's just using it like some... some uneducated buffoon of a warrior!" Appi spat out harshly.
"Appi..."
"Sorry Pome... it's just hard for me.. Mistress Ideen is just suddenly not the brilliant person she used to be."
"I'm thinking standing here where we can attacked at any moment isn't a good idea. Can we have this discussion elsewhere?" I interrupted, not wanting to have my unknown skills forged in battle. I wanted a grasp of it at least. The twins looked up at me with wide eyes and blinked oddly for a moment. They looked to each other and nodded.
"Well then let's go back to your place in Aspio." Appi spoke up again, leading the way as her sister and I followed.
It hit me again. Aspio. I'm really in Tales of Vesperia aren't I? If I remembered correctly, on the continent of Illycia. I had my doubts about this being real still but they grew increasingly unfounded. My dreams may have been weirdly detailed and story-like but nothing like this. It's was hard thing to accept, but a wish come true. I always wanted to be in other worlds.
But still. Aspio. The reality was more daunting my thoughts.
A/N: I have been writing for a while but sticking to original fiction more than fanfiction. So this is technically my first fic. Ask me about technicalities later.
Unbeta'd by read over by myself again and my lovely sister Rissetto. When I get excited I forget how to use tense it seems.
Comments, flames, and constructive criticism are graciously accepted.