"Iggy! Hey Iggy! Where are ya man? Come on! Hellooo?" A very impatient Alfred F. Jones whined from the front door of the Briton's house as he repeatedly rang the doorbell and pounded on the door simultaneously. "Arthuur! Come on! You said you'd be here right now! Let me iiin! It's cold and it's wet and all icky and stuff!" True to his complaints, it was currently pouring down an uncomfortable mix of rain, sleet, and hail, and a cold wind cut through even the thick leather of the personification of America's bomber jacket, freezing him to the bone.

Pouting, eager to get in out of the awful weather- seriously, he didn't know how the Brit could stand weather like this all the time- he tried the doorknob and found it pleasantly open.

"I'm coming in!" he announced loudly to the seemingly empty house. Quickly shutting the door behind him and deciding to shuck his sodden coat- right onto the floor of the foyer. He was dripping all over and shivering profusely, and made his way to where he knew Arthur's living room was, using one hand to swipe sodden bangs from his face. America was pleasantly surprised to find a warm fire crackling in the hearth and he promptly approached it to warm himself.

He rubbed his hands and held them up to the fire, periodically scooting a little bit closer or turning this way or that to warm and dry each and every part of him. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty, with no sign of Arthur anywhere, and nothing to entertain Alfred but the crackling of the fire. With a pout that didn't befit a nation of his size and age, he stood, hands crossed over his chest, glancing around the room. "Artiiie, come on," he whined, though it was obvious the said nation wasn't around to hear him complain.

Alfred's eyes fell on a bookshelf hiding against one side of the room. That would do, he decided. He'd read a book while he waited. Walking up to the bookshelf, his feet squishing wetly in the carpet, he pulled an interesting looking book from the shelf. A quick leaf through it showed him that there were no pictures and, bored already, he shoved the book haphazardly back onto the shelf. He looked through another, then another, then another and none piqued his interest.

Finally he came to one on the top shelf, way on one edge. It was a dusty old tome of a book bound with ancient-looking leather and weird symbols on the front. He grinned as he flipped it open. It looked promising.

However, a glance inside showed pages full of diagrams and symbols, pentagrams and odd rune-things that he couldn't read at all. "Come on Artie, what kinda stuff is this? Don't you have any good books?" A page slipped, and he found himself looking at a page with a clock-looking diagram, and words with letters that he actually recognized.

Squinting his eyes to read the fancy, faded script on the time-yellowed pages, he spoke them out loud to himself. The words sounded odd to him, and hard to pronounce, nothing like any language he'd ever encountered before. As he finished reading, he suddenly felt something flowing through him, like a wave, pulling out his energy and leaving nothing but exhaustion behind, which was quickly drowned by this strange, exhilarating, startling, yet refreshing feeling, like being drenched in ice-cold water. Black washed over his vision, but he still felt fully conscious, like his eyes were open. He reached out into it, and found that the air resisted his movement, as if he were standing in Jell-o.

He frowned. What was going on? Then the air seemed to thicken further, until it wasn't Jell-o he was standing in, but pure, rock-hard concrete. And he couldn't breathe. He couldn't move, frozen in space- no, it wasn't like concrete, it was like ice, freezing him to the core, so cold it was burning. He wanted to scream it was too cold, it hurt so bad, but his voice was as frozen as his body.

It felt like an eternity had passed, like he had gone through centuries of the awful freeze, when the whole world shattered, and he fell away from awareness.

A/N: YO! Yeah, this suddenly came to mind when I found this epic video on Youtube… 'Don't mess with the British Empire.'. You should totally look it up. It's awesome. Anyhows…

Yeah, this is just a prologue, not terribly happy with it but meh…

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