Prologue
It was a warm June evening somewhere in Japan. Things were pretty peaceful; a gentle breeze was blowing and crickets could be heard chirping faintly in the distance. It was quite a beautiful picture. That was until a loud spurt of insane laughter drowned out this picturesque scene and left small animals scurrying for shelter. Inside a public library we see who caused this disturbance.
"It's here! BWA HA HA HA! I can't belief it's finally here!", yells a young girl with long dark green hair and brown eyes.
"SHHHHH" pretty much everyone else in the library whispers. The girl then proceeds to bow her head, ashamed at her outburst. She had been looking for this one book on early medieval cultures and at last (after being out for about three weeks) it finally came in. She had a socials project due in three days, and if she didn't get at least a B on it her mother would kill her.
The girl admired the book briefly, running the thick and dusty dark red cover over her fingers. She opened the book and looked at the stained yellow pages that smelled old. You can't quite describe it, it's just an old smell. In between the pages, placed somewhere in the middle of a book is a bookmark attached to the book itself. It was made out silk, and was the same colour as the cover. On the bottom of the bookmark was a large stone, probably amber the girl thought. It was round and smooth and about as thick as three quarters placed on top of each other. To the top, bottom, left, and right of the stone were four smaller stones, about one eighteenth the larger one's size. All five stones were an amber colour, and were extremely smooth.
Enough goofing around, the girl said to herself, I gotta start this otherwise I'll never finish it!
While taking notes on early Italy, she glanced at an illustration of a giant statue that was in the courtyard of one of the more influential nobles. Apparently it had stood there since the Roman Empire. The statue depicted a woman with long flowing robes standing and looking up. She had shoulder length hair that curled at the bottom. Right by the woman's bare feet stood a caption, and the girl struggled to read it.
" No….non sssso……..non sono….non sono…non sono re….Non sono reus!(1)" the girl exclaimed loudly, proud at being able to decipher what earlier looked like chicken scratches. No sooner than the words left her mouth than a smouldering white light shot out from where appeared to be nowhere, blinding (she couldn't see the glares the rest of the people in the library had given here for calling out that had changed to wide eyed expressions of fear and shock) and engulfing the girl. If she had been able to see, perhaps she would have noticed that the necklace she wore was also shining a hot, bright white.
When the light finally dissipated, the girl found herself outside across from a campfire with three other individuals surrounding it staring at her and in the lap of a very startled chimera.
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(1) This is a mixture of Latin and Italian. Originally I'd planned to have it all in Latin, but the only online dictionary I could find wasn't helping at all and the only word I could find was reus. So I got frustrated and went to an English-Italian dictionary instead since Italian is the closest thing to Latin and got the non sono. In all it means I'm not a prisoner.