Chapter one: The Dream

Nothing could have prepared me for what would follow something as simple as a dream.

This dream was strange. I had full control of my body, and was in a small metal room with no windows. The only irregularity was a small desk, with an old PC sitting on top of it. I raised an eyebrow. The machine looked like something from the 1990's, complete with the huge protrusion on the back and an off-white coloration. The computer was powered, although I could not see a cord. No matter. This is a dream, I rationalized. As I gazed at the screen, a small window popped up from the solid blue background. It was a Yes/No questionnaire, with about five questions on it. I sat down on the chair that just seemed to appear as I pondered the first question.

Question 1: Are you human?

Well DUH! I thought to myself as I checked the answer box for Yes. The next question was even stranger.

Question 2: Do you believe in alternate realities, parallel timelines, and the like?

Again, I checked Yes, not really seeing where this was going.

Question 3: Do you believe in monsters?

What the heck? I had a quick mental debate, before deciding that monsters were being reffered to in the mythological way. Therefore, I clicked the option for No.

Question 4: Are you sure?

I checked No once more, seeing as I had no idea as to the purposes of this test.

Question 5: Do you believe that light will prevail against shadow?

Now this is a very easy question, I thought with a slight degree of smugness. Light banished shadows, but without light shadow could not exist. With a slight grin set on my face, I unknowingly sealed my fate and checked Yes.

Immediately, everything went black. And I don't mean that the dream ended, or was cut off. I was still dreaming, just I couldn't see anything. But there was something I could feel… and that was a malevolence surrounding me, invading me and causing me to understand the true meaning of Fear. This presence, while it had no face, was scary enough to put a serial killer to shame. A laugh emanated from all around me, and my heart seized up. I had heard that laugh before, ten years ago in a movie. But before I could finish my train of thought, a blast of shadow, or an anti-flash as some would say, blasted my consciousness and I fell down, down, down…

With a yelp, I shot upright in my bed, hands clutching my chest as I gasped for air. A cold breeze from my open window drifted across my sweat-coated skin, and in a natural reaction I shivered slightly. That dream had felt so real, I was sure that I had actually answered that questionnaire. I frowned as I set my brain to the task of remembering the final scene of my strange dream. I remembered a slightly distorted laugh, a blast of something, then darkness.

Deciding not to let such things trouble me, I glanced over at the blocky alarm clock on the blue nightstand beside my bed, and noticed two things. One, I had woken up five minutes early, which was even more unusual than having a dream for me. Second, a golden piece of plastic seemed to glare up at me from beside the clock. I scrunched my eyebrows together, knowing that I hadn't left Lhikan's Great Hau on my bed. I glanced over to where it was supposed to be, which was on Lhikan's face on my shelf, and saw that it was still there. Perplexed, I looked back at the nightstand, and the mask was gone! I spent a minute trying to puzzle out what happened, before putting it off as a slight hallucination and got up to take a shower.

After the shower was over, I quickly dressed in blue jeans and a black shirt before walking off to my final week of 9th grade. The school was luckily only about five minutes away, and as usual I met up with one of my friends, John. I spotted him on the corner of the last block until school, waiting for the walk symbol to light up.

"Hey John!" I called out to my longtime friend.

"Kyle! What's up man?" (Hmm. I appear to have forgotten to mention my name previously)

"Nothing much. Maybe the sky," I said slightly sarcastically.

He groaned good-naturedly. "Of course. I should have known you would say something like that. On Friday you said something about aliens."

"Because aliens are excellent."

"I don't see how this has to do with how you are doing."

"It has nothing to do with that. But I am doing fine."

We bantered back and forth for a few more minutes until the walk signal (finally) turned green. We quickly made our way across the street and managed to slip in through the door the second the bell rang. The teacher, Mr. Bronch, gave us a glare before launching into his lecture about how amazing history was. With a sigh, I resigned myself to a long and boring day. How wrong I was.

Lunchtime. The halfway point between the boredom of school and the slightly less boring home. For me, it actually is the end of the day. After, I have band class and no sixth, so I was golden. All that remained was to socialize.

My friends and I had managed to claim a table right next to the lunch stage, which usually had something interesting going on. Today it was music.

Yes, I said friends. Plural. I am as surprised as you are. Until 7th grade, I had been only known for being the human dictionary and bookworm. However, that was the year I finally found my second friend, the first being John. His name is Jake.

As far as people go, Jake is somewhere in the top 1% in the world. He is honest, kind, loyal, and utterly selfless. Add an excellent mind and he is one of a kind. We actually met when I was being bullied for the test answers for the next period. Usually when this happened, I just overloaded their minds with what they thought they wanted to know, while giving away nothing that was on the test. They always blamed me for their incorrect answers. The nerve of some people!

Point is, Jake was pretty well respected (rightly so) and he simply talked them into ceasing their attempts at extorting information from me. It worked, and we later became friends.

Next was Frank. I liked to describe him as a shorter version of me, but with more sarcasm. He is very intelligent and analytical. We first met when we had a huge shouting match during the debate portion of our History class. We became friends immediately after.

Andrew was an oddity. He is a quiet and reserved person, but always can cheer others up with a few words. We just kind of became friends after sitting next to each other in Video Production last year.

Finally, there was Max. We met through a mutual sport; volleyball, and he is one of my best friends. He is very strategic and has created a hyper-complex strategy game, which he published and actually made some money on.

Lunch passed in the usual fashion. We talked about various things, some of the topics being the difference between various Pokemon, the government shutdown, among other things.

Finally, it was time to go home. Since everyone luckily had no 6th period, everyone came over to my house, where the big summer plans were announced.

"We're going on a cruise!" My mom exclaimed with obvious enthusiasm. "And all of you are invited!"

Of course, there were the usual "Are you sure?"'s and "Is it too expensive?"'s. However, these problems were figured out pretty quickly.

"We got a two for one cruise deal from those Disneyland tickets! You guys are going for free!" There were the general "OMG!"s and general exclamations of joy, before someone asked the main question.

"Where are we going?"

"Well… ummm…" Mom started stumbling.

"Where?" I asked with a growing sense of unease.

"The… Bermuda Triangle."

I heard a few stifled laughs from my friends around the room. We all knew that my mom was superstitious, but to be afraid of going on a cruise to the Triangle? It was nothing to freak out over. "When do we leave?"

"Two weeks. Now, all of you run along and check with your parents; the cruise is two weeks, plus the plane ride, so make sure you all pack accordingly. Now scoot!"

Everyone rushed to their various houses in delight, and I later learned that by an extremely lucky break everyone could go!

The last week of school passed in a blur; a party here, fake math test there, shaving cream wars between classrooms… basically a normal last week of school. I had no more weird dreams, and nothing particularly unusual happened (unless finding a lot of once thought to be lost Bionicle masks counts) until the day came to leave for the cruise. One long and boring flight, customs, and a boarding ceremony later and we were on the open ocean, headed for the Bermuda Triangle.

Metru Nui, Ga-Metru experimental research lab…

The workers were panicking. Rightly so, for their most amazing scientific breakthrough and most important assignment from Turaga Dume was burning through the floor. Their project had first been to create artificial energized protodermis, an endeavor in which they succeeded due to finally having proper funding for the project. The second project, the one currently burning its way out of the lab, had been to create solid, but not frozen energized protodermis. They had again succeeded, but upon solidifying said substance had taken on new properties, one of them being a small temporal anomaly centered on the sphere… and corrosiveness to anything in the near vicinity.

With a dismayed cry, one of the workers watched helplessly as the ball finished burning through the floor, and landed with a large splash in the Silver Sea, where it floated out towards the great barrier. Turaga Dume would not like this one bit.