Author's Note: This is a short little intro chapter. What I think would happen if a person were really sucked into the game. Enjoy.

Disclaimer: I don't own Final Fantasy XIII nor any of its characters. I do own one character who has yet to be named.

She was literally awakened to a battlefield. Explosions coupled with gunfire rang through her ears. Her mind tried desperately to come up with a solution or an excuse as to why this was happening.

It's just in my head.

It's the TV. I must've left it on.

It's my brother. He's playing video games again.

All of those excuses died when she opened her eyes. What she saw couldn't be imagined in even her wildest nightmares. Soldiers dressed in odd uniforms that seemed amphibious in appearance marched off to do battle with their enemies. The visors that covered their eyes bulged out, reminding her of a frog's throat as it croaked, and the uniforms almost seemed to glow green, but that may have been a trick of the light. The things that scared her the most were the automatic weapons they carried. They could make her heart gallop in her chest.

She was only sure of one thing. She wasn't home anymore.

She brought herself to her feet, only to realize that she was on a metal platform raised a terrible distance above the ground.

"Wh-What?!" she stuttered to herself in disbelief. Everything was so much more different than she had ever seen in her life. Everyone around her was scattering and screaming. Gunfire rattled her teeth and she held her ears closed to keep the noise from boring a hole through her brain.

Her knees buckled under the stress, and they thudded against the cold surface of the walkway. She tried to repeat to herself that this was some kind of dream. Nothing like this existed in real life! This couldn't be happening!

She peeled open her eyes to survey her hopefully normal surroundings, but, to her horror, everything was the same as before. The rapid succession of shots from both sides and the battle cries had only multiplied.

"We've got another here!"

Her head whipped around to find one of those soldiers aiming his weapon at her. Her blood began to carry lead instead of oxygen, and her vocal chords were infused with liquid nitrogen. Her eyes widened in complete and utter shock.

The bullets he fired made everything reality. It brought her mind into its most primal state of fight or flight. And she didn't want to die before she graduated high school.

She rolled to the side to avoid the first barrage of bullets, but one grazed her shoulder. The pain sliced through her like a knife as the fabric of her hooded jacket was smeared with crimson fluid. She would have rolled further had there not been a fatal drop to the ground on her next turn.

"You are infected by Pulse. You must surrender or be executed," the soldier's mechanized voice informed from behind his mask.

She raised her hands behind her head and turned away from the man.

"I surrender!"

It was the only thing she could've even thought of doing. It was a perfectly natural thing to do. Every animal in the wild knows when to let the predator have his way. But she didn't know that this man liked a still target.

A metallic click was somehow amplified in her head. It rose above the cacophony of violence and war with a piercing knowledge attached to it. She was going to be shot. Execution style.

Before she could begin to cry, a large smack of something solid could be heard crashing into flesh. The cracks of visors and muttered obscenities accompanied the sound.

"You think it's so easy to pick on girls, huh? Try handling someone your size," the man's smirk was evident in his voice as he continued, "I'm not even armed. Just the way you guys like it, right?"

More cursing, cracking, and crushing followed, but she didn't dare look up. She instead picked up her feet which had been mysteriously welded to the metal only seconds before. She sprinted as far away as she could from this place that didn't make any sense. She didn't know where she was going, but she knew that she wanted to get the hell out of there!

Her feet pounded against the metal in time with her rapid heartbeat.

Clank, Clank, Clank!

Ba-bump, Ba-bump, Ba-Bump!

She rushed away from the confusion and chaos until she found a small hiding place behind two steel girders. She hid herself, trying to conform her body into an unnaturally straight position.

None of the fighting was stopping. Nothing was even slowing down, and she had this overwhelming urge to vomit on her shoes. But she couldn't do that. It would give away her hiding place.

More earth shattering explosions roared through the air, and she could've sworn she heard someone cry out to his mother, but she clasped her hands against her ears to shut it out.

"Where am I? How did I get here? What's going on!?"

No answers came, and she knew the prickling sensation near the corners of her eyes were hot tears ready to burst free. She didn't care. She didn't even wipe them away when they slid forth from their barriers, leaving a trail down the side of her dirty and smudged face.

The pain in her shoulder came alive, rupturing vitality, almost as if she had searing tentacles licking the wound, and she gripped it with as much fierceness as she could muster. She needed to stop the bleeding, but she didn't have the equipment with her.

A tremor ripped its way through the metal at her feet, and she fell to her knees. She shook with the walkway, and could only scream in sheer terror as it began to tilt lower.

"I'm going to die."

How many times had that thought lashed through her mind in the five minutes she had been conscious? Too many to count.

Gravity grabbed ahold of her torso, but she resisted, clasping onto the metal girder that had been her safe haven a few moments before. Her breathing was erratic, and it felt as if her heart was going to leap from the confines of her chest. She had never liked heights, and she was now dangling over about a mile of nothing but air.

She heard several screams. They rode through the air, forcing her to observe their creators.

People.

Hundreds of people, if not more, were falling. They were all going to die. Their bones would crunch and snap with the force of the impact. They knew it. She knew it. But that didn't make it any more believable.

It was happening right in front of her eyes, and she thought she would rather be blind. She couldn't look away as the women, children, civilians, and soldiers alike fell to their inevitable dooms. She could only hope they didn't suffer.

Her grip on the girder was weakening, and the metal might have been slanting a little further down. She could either try to hang on and fall with the girder, or let go and just fall anyway. She didn't have time to figure out which was the more appealing as another explosion shattered her concentration, causing her to begin her descent into unknowable darkness.

It had been her sixteenth birthday just three days before she dropped.