Welcome to my new story, The Future Diary. Some of you may know it as Mirai Nikki. It's one of my new favorite manga.

Now, if you've read Mirai Nikki, then everything will seem crazily similar to you, although I'll do my best to change some of it. I hope you understand that it's a little hard to stray from the original with the complicated plot and storyline.

If you haven't read Mirai Nikki, if you don't want my writing to ruin the manga for you, go read it first. It's not necessary to enjoy this story however.

Almost all the characters have been changed, except for a couple, which in this chapter are Deus and Murmuru.

Remember:

Matthew Williams: Canada

Canada's mom: Joan of Arc (just Joan here, though)

Anyway, enjoy~!

Prologue: The Beginning

Her lips were so hot against his—so wrong, but so right at the same time—and the metal so cold against his back. His overwhelmed mind spun sickeningly. This was all too much! Just an hour ago, everything was completely normal, and now he was going to die!

She was going to kill him!

Even with this knowledge, all he could register was the mind-numbing fear of death and, strangely, how soft her plump lips were against him. Was this how it was going to end? With his first and last kiss, over in a flash.

He couldn't understand any of it!

'I have a dart with me.'

His head pounded with the sudden realization. He remembered the almost insignificant weight in his right hand. His fingers were lightly curled around the small, weighted dart, perfectly poised to stab her—to kill her before she could kill him. He could live, simply by swinging his arm forward while she was distracted.

'That's right. It will be all over if I just stab her with this,' he thought.

So why couldn't he do it?

As if reading his thoughts, she broke away, a smile playing on her lips, swollen from her sudden kiss.

"You didn't stab me," she whispered, her rough, but not unpleasant hands, cupping the sides of his face. "That is the future."

*One Week Earlier*

4/21/20xx (High School Class 2-B)

"This is bad, our reputation is at stake here," one of the boys in the group behind Matthew was whispering. He wasn't paying much attention to them, though, as he busily typed on the cell phone hidden underneath his desk.

"Fine then, let's just ask anyone to fill in!" said the captain of the basketball team. Matthew didn't know his name, but understood what was wrong. The problem was that one of their players was out sick, just before some big game, with no ready stand-in to replace him.

The team captain scanned the room. There lay the second problem. The group had spent too much time discussing the issue, and now most of the class had already filed out of the classroom, eager to leave for home or whatever it was the students did after school ended.

His eyes landed on Matthew Williams, still sitting at his desk. Even as scrawny as the half-French boy was, they just needed someone, anyone, to stand in for their missing player. Even Matthew. "Hey, Matt, are you—?" he began to ask, stepping forward.

On of the others quickly stopped him with a hand on the captain's arm. "Don't!" he hissed warningly.

Matthew pretended not to notice the exchange, his eyes focused down on his cell phone. "Finished my homework," he typed out. Finished, he stood and left, without looking back at the group of boys who had almost invited him to play basketball.

Once Matthew left the classroom, the boy who'd stopped the captain from inviting him heaved a sigh of relief. "It's hard to get along with Matthew. He always has his cell phone with him," he explained.

The captain furrowed his eyebrows, still confused as to what a cell phone had to do with getting along with others. "Really? What game is he playing?" he asked slowly, trying to follow the explanation.

His friend shook his head. "Oh, no, you've got it all wrong. He's writing a diary," he said, emphasizing the word 'diary', as if there was something seriously wrong with the concept of a boy writing one.

The captain still felt confused. He kept a diary himself, so he didn't understand the problem with Matthew keeping one. Unless the quiet boy isolated himself from others for the sake of it.

Actually, the boy thought, he probably heard something about Matthew Williams keeping detached from others. So that was the problem, not the diary itself.

In any case, they needed to find a new player quickly, and the more time he spent on trivial issues, the less likely anyone decent and willing would still be on campus. He hastily pushed the thoughts from his head with a light shake. "Let's go ask Lovina, or Antonio. They're pretty good players."

The others laughed. "A girl, boss?"

"Hey, hey, watch it! She'll kick all of your asses if she hears you dissing her!"

After only 15 minutes since the bell rang, the world seemed drastically emptier of students. That suited Matthew, as he walked home alone, like he usually did, immersing his mind in the things he saw around him that day. He idly scrolled through his latest journal entries; from this morning to just before he left school.

Even if he'd acted as if he hadn't heard those boys talking, he actually had listened to every hushed word. There was a painful ping in his chest that he hadn't been asked to play basketball. It seemed like things like that happened a lot to the invisible Matthew Williams.

Then again, he supposed it was all his fault that he now lived a life isolated from others, like he was simply a bystander—observing the world without actually being a part of it.

Back in elementary school, kids asked him to play with them all the time. But he'd always been too shy, self-conscious about his strange, thick glasses and tangled pale hair that seemed to be unable to decide if it was dirty blond or light brown. Plus the others always pulled at the strange piece of hair that curled away from the rest of his head in an odd kink, making him squeal with the overwhelming, unfamiliar sensations it caused.

So Matthew always declined, and soon enough he stopped receiving invitations to play. The world recognized one who simply did not actively belong in life, and shut him out accordingly. Now a high-schooler, he was, for all intents and purposes, invisible, watching the others through the glass walls that separated him from the rest, his violet-blue eyes always aware of all but himself.

Wrapped in his thoughts, he arrived at the small obstacle he ran into every day to and from school—a small rock in the middle of the sidewalk, separating the path into two converging roads. He stared at it thoughtfully for a few moments.

"I'll take the right today," he said to himself, and continued on his way, without anyone to note the deliberate choice he had just made.

To others, a rock may not seem like much, but to Matthew, the simplest decisions were always the biggest. It intrigued him how little changes—little twists of fate—could affect one's entire future. Not that he'd know if anything he did changed his future anyway, but it was entertaining to think about.

His fascination with the way people changed the course of their future every day led him to begin writing this diary on his cell phone, all from a bystander's view, as suited his position in the world. It didn't change anything, but it still made him feel easy.

A few minutes later, he finally arrived home. "Bonjour, maman!" he called in French as he stepped through the front door.

His mother poked her head out of the kitchen, drying a large mixing bowl, making him wonder if she'd made any sweets that day. She wore a sweet smile on her kind face. She was a pretty blond woman who looked so much different from awkward Matthew that he found it hard to believe that he was related to such a beautiful person.

"Welcome back, Mattie, dear. You're French is getting so good now. You sound just like your father!" she praised affectionately, the slightest bit of a French accent in her voice, pure blue eyes twinkling.

Matthew smiled, a happy blush blooming over his cheeks. "Merci," he told her, going upstairs to his room.

He loved it when his mother praised his French. He loved how happy it made her, and he knew it reminded her of his father, as was obvious whenever she compared him to her ex-husband. Sometimes he wondered if his father would come back to them if he found out how good Matthew's French was becoming, and how prettily it made his mom smile to hear it.

A smile still played across his lips as he entered his room, the shadows already lengthening. One of the walls was covered in dart boards. It was another of the things that made him feel easy—playing darts and improving his aim.

But he wasn't going to play just now.

He sat on the bed as he finished typing out a new entry. "3:40 pm (Home): Made mother smile today. She really loves French, just like she still loves Father," he typed, and snapped his phone shut.

Yes, he loved to be a bystander, even if it meant being isolated from other kids his age. Still, that didn't mean he was friendless. He had two great friends that he saw every day. In fact, he would go see them now.

He wrapped the blanket around him so that it covered his entire body, pulled his knees to his chest. Yes, he still had friends, even if they were only in his imagination.

Matthew closed his eyes, his cheeks light pink from anticipation.

When he next opened them, his bed had moved. Now he was sitting in a huge, circular room, with a roof that resembled a half-completed dome. An amorphous mass of grays and blacks replaced the ceiling. The walls were bare of any trace of his room. Directly in front of him was a giant of sorts, with a head that was nothing but a human skull whose chin was too long and too square. There were sharp protrusions at the back of his head, resembling a crude model of spindly hair. Other than that, the giant resembled a very large man, fifty times larger than Matthew, clothed in all black.

It took the giant a while before he noticed Matthew.

"Oh, look, it's Matthew," he observed, pausing from messing with the complicated-looking controls of some strange machine that was impossibly hanging from the nonexistent ceiling. "Just one moment, I'm currently adjusting the Law of Cause and Effect."

Matthew blinked as he wiggled out of the blanket, infinitely curious when it came to his imaginary friends. "Does that mean something is going to happen?" he asked.

The giant's eyes sparkled mischievously. "You could say that the world will be turning into an exciting place," he replied.

Uh-oh. Matthew felt a nervous sweat beading on his forehead. If his friend was so excited, it was probably nothing good. After all, his friend was a god.

"When you talk about exciting stuff, wouldn't wars be it?" he asked, trying to think of something that would amuse a being of infinite existence.

The god waved him off, almost hitting Matthew with one of his too-long fingers. Matthew ducked just in time to avoid it.

"Please don't say such things, Matthew. This game is pretty interesting," he insisted.

Somehow, those words didn't make Matthew feel any better. He sighed and pulled out his cell phone. His friend, formerly Deus Ex Machina, was the Lord of Time and Space—a god of sorts, if you believed in such things. He wasn't one to take lightly, with his control over (obviously) time and space.

Still nervous, Matthew wrote, "3:45 pm (Home): Got home and met Deus. He's probably up to something again, better be careful."

"Diary, again?"

Matthew looked up from his phone, searching for the source of the question. His eyes landed on Murmuru—her bleach-blond hair as long as she was tall. She was holding an ear of corn, her eyes bright as she happily nibbled at the food.

"Ya sure have many things to write down, don't ya?" she asked. She hopped up onto his bed with a laugh. "Just kidding!" she said before he had a chance to answer, chomping on the corn.

"Hey! Don't eat on my bed!" he scolded. She ignored him. He looked at Deus for help with the god's servant, but Deus was busily messing with the strange machine again. Matthew sighed in resignation.

"Time, place, and incident," Matthew said, counting on his fingers. "I simply write down everything I see."

Murmuru studded eating her cheeks bulging with kernels. She looked up at Matthew as if he was crazy. Before he could ask what was wrong with her, she spit all the kernels at his head with accuracy.

"Hey!" he complained, protecting his head from the assault. If this wasn't just in his imagination, he'd worry about the damp corn sticking in his mop of hair.

"You're an idiot, aren't ya?" she said, pouted.

He rolled his eyes and shrugged. Matthew didn't see anything wrong with what he wrote, and he didn't really care for his imagination berating him for it either.

Suddenly, Murmuru grew serious. She dropped the uneaten corn into her lap, catching and holding Matthew's eyes with a piercing gaze. "So, it doesn't make any difference at all," she observed evenly.

There was no hint of disapproval in her voice. It was just an uncannily accurate statement. Then again, maybe it wasn't so strange, considering she was part of his subconscious. One would expect their own mind to be so insightful.

"That's right, my diary has no purpose. It's just a 'No Difference' diary," he said. Although his smile remained fixed on his face, his eyes grew sad. He barely registered that Deus had stopped working to watch him.

He stared at the last entry, suddenly depressed. Matthew had no dream; no goal. All he had was his diary and imaginary friends. It was a horribly saddening thought, and he closed his eyes to ward off the hot tears threatening to spill over his cheeks.

When Matthew opened them, he was back in his room. Alone. His smile had slid into a long frown. The long shadows engulfing his room, except for a single strip of light from his window, matched his mood perfectly.

"Are you feeling lonely?" It was Deus's voice in the back of his head.

"Not really," he lied, even though he knew it was impossible to consciously lie to your own mind.

"However, if you could change the situation, would you do it?" Deus pressed.

Matthew didn't answer, sinking deeper into his blanket-cocoon. However, Deus seemed to take that as answer enough. Matthew saw something in his peripheral vision, but didn't turn to look at what Deus was handing him.

"Let's see," Deus continued in a pondering tone. "I will entrust the future to you."

"How would you do that?" Matthew asked, curious enough to turn and see what Deus was handing him.

It was his cell phone.

"Isn't that my cell phone?" he asked, mirroring his thoughts as he reached to take it.

The second his fingers closed around the phone, he felt a strange spark somewhere within his chest. He blinked and looked at Deus, slowly pulling the strange gift away. Deus stared back, his face just as stoic as ever when he didn't want to reveal something.

"What are you scheming?" Matthew asked, trying to find some clue in Deus's deep, all-encompassing gaze.

When he found nothing, and Deus did not respond, Matthew looked away, curling into a ball underneath the blanket. "Never mind," he said as Deus sunk back into the shadows. "It's just my imagination anyway."

Translations:

Bonjour: Hello

Maman: mom

Merci: Thank you