Shattered Desires
A Sonic the Hedgehog Fanfiction
Obligatory Disclaimer: All characters except for where noted otherwise copyright Sega.
Prologue
I don't remember very much about the first six years of my life. The only memories I have of that era of my life are fragments, a few still shots in my head of a time I can't remember much of. The first snapshot is when I was about four or five years old. (I can't remember which) My parents were archaeologists and traveled the world for a living. Today, I barely even remember my parents at all. I feel sad about this sometimes. All I really know about them are their faces in my head, and an old photo album with a few pictures to remember them by. I'm in a few of them. I never got to know my parents because they were killed in a freak accident on the outskirts of Shamar during an archaeological dig. They were doing an excavation of some ancient ruins when there was a horrible accident which caused a cave in. Both were crushed to death. With no legal guardian, I was sent off to an orphanage in a small town several hours away from Empire City.
Growing up in the orphanage wasn't too bad, I got along well enough with the other kids and had a few semi-close friends. There wasn't a whole lot to do at the orphanage, the TVs only got a few channels and there was a rec room with a pool table, and some other stuff including a few video games. We also had computers in our rooms, but there was no internet and not much to do on those, and I was really never much of a gamer anyways, so the only other alternative was reading. When they taught us to read in school (and I taught myself outside of classes) the result was that for the next few years I turned into a total bookworm.
I found solace in the many worlds and stories which I escaped in, and after several years had gone by, I had visited well over several hundred of them. My favorite books by far were romance, particularly the type of stories about 'damsels in distress' who were saved by a heroic character. To this end, I started becoming fascinated with the superhero genre, and ended up with a fairly decent comic book/graphic novel collection. It wasn't so much the super abilities and the clash of good versus evil in the books that attracted me the most, I was drawn most to the series' in which the hero had a girlfriend.
It was my biggest fantasy to have a hero of my own, someone brave and bold, a defender of the world, and I would be the girl in his life, the one he would risk life and limb to protect, the one he cared about above all else. The Lois Lane to Superman, if you will.
This obsession was so strong that I got a pen and some paper and began writing stories of my own, some original, a lot of stories based off the characters from the stories that particularly interested me.
I had a whole large collection of these writings that I kept in a box stashed under my bed. They were not terribly well written by professional standards, but what the heck, I was only nine years old, and they were my personal fantasies. I didn't care how good or bad they were, and I knew I could improve with practice as long as I kept writing.
It was at that time I knew that I probably wanted to be a writer when I grew up. At age 10, this was further spurned on when our orphanage got internet access, and I discovered to my great surprise and joy that there were entire communities on the internet dedicated to the exact same thing I was doing. I excitedly dug all my old stories out from under my bed, selected the ones I thought were the best, and posted them on a website called .
I found the internet far more convenient than using a bunch of paper and having to store it somewhere in my room, where I was beginning to run out of space.
Also, the website had a system for posting reviews and critiques of stories, which I found extremely useful as I met people who helped me out and taught me how to get better, which I steadily did. I joined some online communities and made a number of friends through various message boards.
I think, looking back upon it now, that the reason I was so obsessed with my stories was that, while I had a lot of friends and a very friendly staff at the orphanage that cared about me, I never really had anyone in my life who truly cared about me as the person I was deep inside.
Let me elaborate: my parents were dead. My friends were the other kids at the orphanage and people I knew online, but they weren't truly close. I kinda lived two different lives, one in the physical and a separate life online. I never really talked about the other in one section, and kept a lot to myself. Truly, I felt alone. I had no one to whom I was the center of their world. To the orphanage staff, I was just one kid out of many. To my fellow kids, I was not much more special than any one of them. To my friends online, I was a screenname that was developing steadily into a more proficient writer. But there was really no one who truly saw the real me inside, someone special with which I could share every aspect of my life in.
Also, no one ever adopted me. I saw a lot of friends come and go over the years and most eventually got new homes, but no one ever wanted me. I guess deep down inside I started wondering, after several years, if there was something wrong with me. Why didn't anyone ever want me?
Writing about my fantasies was a great catharsis. I think that was why I wanted a boyfriend so bad, because I felt that I could finally achieve wholeness and get what I was longing for. The superhero fetish in particular stemmed from the desire to have a protector, someone who would I would be the center of attention. I wanted it so bad, that it permeated my every thought day in and day out. My fantasies were not just limited to the pen and paper (or word processor), but my fantasies would often entertain themselves throughout the day and lying awake for hours at night.
Sometimes I would even cry, thinking that I might never get to know what I so longed to have.
