I guess this is a prologue? Ehh, who cares right? Enjoy.

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Prologue

How did this happen?

All of this was supposed to be a nice, 2 week vacation in a small place called Beach City. Try out the restaurants, swim in the ocean, make some friends with whom he would chat online from time to time and most importantly, relax. You know, a normal vacation.

But now that he was strapped to a table while a woman with green skin and weird, triangle shaped hair was pointing some sort of machinery that wouldn't look out of place in a Sci-fi movie at him, and not to mention that they were in a space ship in space, it did make him wonder how things have gotten to this point.

~{ו×}~

It was a perfect first day of summer. The sky was clear with only a few small, passing silver clouds, the birds at the nearby park were singing their songs as if in a strange little chorus, and even the usually busy streets were unusually quiet today. But the best thing of all was the fact that all the finals were finally over. It was as if the whole world was celebrating along with him.

Jadan quietly enjoyed this peace for a few more minutes before he fell onto his bed face first and let out a long sigh, the mental fatigue finally catching up with him.

The whole school year was like a race to him. During that race, he was trying his best without stressing himself too much, but when the finish was in sight, he sprinted with all his might and didn't stop until he finished. And now was supposed to be the time where he can finally stop.

But the problem was, he was really, REALLY sick and tired of the cheap apartment that for the last 3 years, he called home.

Jadan let out another tired sigh and tried to relax. And after trying and failing to fall asleep, he tried to think of something to do.

'Get some coffee?' he thought about the choice but quickly shut it down as he looked at the trash can that was almost overflowing with instant coffee and instant food packets. Food wasn't really an issue right now because he had just finished eating one of the before mentioned instant "meals".

Truthfully, Jadan already knew what he wanted. And it wasn't some craving for more unhealthy food.

It was something he wanted to do for a really long time now.

He wanted to travel.

Jadan remembered one of his friends once telling some stupid story about how he randomly entered a random train and started his adventures of 'whatever goes'.

Of course, he himself wasn't going to do something THAT random, especially because the moral of the story was NOT to do that, but he definitely liked the idea.

Jadan sat up on the side of the bed and took out his laptop from his backpack "Okay, I want to go to..." but what did he want? It needed to be someplace calm in favour of the busy city, but also sunny because it felt like he hasn't been touched by a natural light source in forever "... a beach" he spoke to himself as he typed in the word 'beach' into google.

A few suggestions popped up, like 'Top 10 Beaches'. Then there's apparently a movie called 'The beach' but that's not what he was looking for right now. The third suggestion was much more to his liking, 'Beaches near you'. He wrote down his location and after a few seconds of loading, a list was shown.

Jadan thought he would simply go to the nearest one, but he didn't have the heart to do so after seeing the ridiculous price tag of the local hotel. Who knew there was an apparently famous 5 star hotel nearby?

After the first failure, Jadan expected the whole list to be of similar hi class WIP beaches, but thankfully, the second one on the list was much more to his liking. A small town called Beach City. Great view, looked like a quiet and peaceful community. But no matter how much he searched, there were apparently no hotels nearby.

"Oh come on, there has to be SOMETHING for rent there, right?" Jadan really wanted this to work, so he searched for not only public, but also private places.

And after digging around a bit more revealed that there actually IS something for rent. Some guy is looking for a roommate in a wooden cottage near the ocean. It's really a miracle that no one else has taken it already, especially so because the cost is only the living expenses.

Jadan immediately checked the person's number and called him, and after the second beep "Hello?" a male voice answered 'somewhere around my age, probably also 17'

"Hello, I'm calling about the place renting in Beach City, did I get the right number?"

"Oh yeah, you wanna rent it?"

"Yes, of course!" rather, who wouldn't.

"Cool, come whenever you like" Jadan heard some noise at the other side of the phone "Okay, dude, Buck out!" And with that, the person, apparently named 'Buck', hung up.

"Is- is that all?" Jadan asked into the phone, but the annoying beeping of the phone was an answer enough. No questions? What if Jadan was some sort of creep? What if BUCK was a creep? "Well, I guess he sounds pretty chill, what's the worst that could happen, right?"

~•~

Jadan never really considered himself as an impulsive person, but seeing how he was riding the very last bus to some random city he found on the internet for vacation without any prior planning was probably hinting otherwise.

This 'Beach City' was apparently over 500 miles away, so by the time he was near it, it was already getting dark. The strange thing about the city was that the traffic, even at this hour, was active. Well, it couldn't really be called traffic because the bus he was in was the only vehicle actually going INTO the city.

Still, Jadan was too tired after 5 hours of driving to question this strange occurrence right now, maybe it was some weird holiday celebration that he forgot about. Instead of thinking he tried to distract myself by looking through the window. It was night time so he wasn't expecting anything interesting, but apparently there was some sort of cool light show or fireworks display happening right now in the city. But before he could enjoy it for any longer, the bus stopped near the entrance of the city and he had to get out.

The first thing Jadan noticed after setting foot on the boardwalk were the people, or rather, the lack of them. It was late, but not yet midnight. It was as if everyone just up and deserted this place all at once. It would have been creepy if not for the bright moonlight that illuminated everything to a surprising degree. Then he remembered the cool fireworks he saw in the sky a few moments ago and decided to go in that direction for now.

The walk only lasted a couple of minutes and now he stood at the end of the end of the boardwalk, looking over at what seemed like a giant, green hand floating above the ocean with 2 strange women, one green with a triangle shaped hair and the other huge and orange with long and wild hair. They were arguing about something, but Jadan wasn't nearly close enough to hear so he just looked at them for a bit longer before deciding what to do.

The green one was shouting something at the larger woman with big, exaggerated hand movements. As he looked closer at her, she suddenly turned her head towards him and pointed a finger at him.

A little startled, Jadan checked behind himself to see if something was happening there, but when he confirmed that he was indeed the only one present at the currently deserted city, he turned back to the duo. But when he turned, there was only the green woman left. He was aware that he was tired but he couldn't have hallucinated the big, orange woman, right?

But as he stared at the remaining one, he noticed that the green woman was also staring at him... wait, not exactly AT me, but above?

Jadan looked up and his eyes didn't even have the chance to widen as the massive, orange woman from before came crashing down towards him. Her landing created a small crater in the boardwalk that sent him falling onto the ground.

After the initial shock passed and he looked up, the only thing he saw before darkness overwhelmed him was a huge fist heading his way.

~•~

With a start, Jadan's eyes snapped open and he groaned at the splitting headache that clouded his vision. He was never one of those "cool" kids in school who smoked and drank alcohol, but this was how he imagined having a hangover would feel like.

He tried to sit up, but only to find that he couldn't even move an inch.

He looked at himself and noticed that his hands and feet were tied to some sort of a table. It reminded him of the start of that one game he played recently, the obvious difference between the game and reality being the fact that he has absolutely no hope of ever breaking his cuffs. Having nothing better to do, he started looking around the room.

He was in a spacious looking room that didn't really have any decor or personality to it besides the colour green that dominated the room.

He looked to the side and immediately saw the back of a weird green woman with equally weird hair.

"Umm... hello?" he spoke.

The woman jumped at the unexpected voice and quickly turned around to face the source with a slight scowl on her face, but when she saw him her expression instantly brightened "Oh, you are awake"

"Where are..."

"You must probably be wondering what a superior race such as mine want from someone like you" she interrupted him with a rather questionable statement "Well let me tell you" she continued like nothing was wrong "During my mission of information gathering, I met a 'Steven', who is supposedly the leader of the rebellion group called 'Crystal Gems', also know by the name Rose Quartz. Apparently he is some sort of a hybrid between humans and gems" he didn't really understand the better part of what she was saying, but continued listening anyway "He is, intriguing, to say the least, so I decided to try a little experiment of my own by fusing a human and a gem that was sentenced to be shattered, in order to recreate him"

Jadan didn't know who this 'Steven' is, but he definitely didn't like the sound of experimenting "H-hey, no need to make any rash decisions, okay? Maybe we can talk about this?" he tried, but kind of knew that reasoning with some crazy scientist would probably be useless.

"Do not worry, with my superior intelligence this will definitely be a success" the confidence with which she said that was reassuring, but there was a nagging voice at the back of his head telling him that this was more bravado than anything else "You did this before, right?"

"No, as I mentioned earlier, this is an experiment" she explained like a teacher to an elementary student, one hand behind her back and everything "I already copied your consciousness to this gem right here..." she held up a beautiful, square emerald in front of his face "... and now all that is left to do is to infuse it, hopefully keeping your carbon based body intact as the energy from the gem spreads across it and tries to stabilize. I am sure everything will be fine" she finished with a smile as she handed the emerald to the massive robotic arm that came out of the ceiling.

Hopefully? Sure?! She doesn't know what she's doing! He needed to escape, but these restraints didn't leave any room to move even a bit, so all he could do was watch as the gem was being slowly lowered towards his chest. It reached his chest and phased a couple of inches into the center of his sternum.

It stinged a little bit, but definitely not something excruciating as he had imagined "Hey, it's not that..." he tried to say, but immediately shut up as the stinging sensation was turned up a few hundred notches. The place where the gem was implanted into him was slowly spreading the roots of the constantly increasing pain across his entire body.

He wanted to scream, to shout and beg for the pain to stop, but when he opened his mouth to do so, the pain had already become so great that he simply passed out.

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Why hello there, friend. You not only read the chapter to the end but you're actually reading this bit! I'm so happy to see that!

Would you be so kind as to share your thoughts about this chapter with me? I would be really grateful for that.