CHAPTER 1: The Strange Ring

After a very long and boring day of school, Dan was excited to go on the hiking trip with his best friend Tyler. He ran to his locker in an enthusiastic pace. He grabbed his books and jacket, and walked out of school to the bus. It was still very nice out, and a perfect temperature for the hiking trip. Dan almost forgot to call Tyler like he promised. He dialed Tyler's number and waited for him to pick up.

"Tyler?" Dan questioned, as he talked into his cell phone.

"Yeah, I'm coming. Wait at the school entrance for me please?" Tyler asked, in a hurried tone.

"Yeah hurry up though." Dan hung up his phone and placed it in his pocket carefully.

Tyler walked out of school two minutes later out of breath. Dan looked at him and shook his head and snickered to himself. "C'mon let's get going! We're gonna miss the bus!" Dan exclaimed as he made a hand gesture to Tyler saying follow me. Tyler ran up to Dan as they walked in a fast pace to the bus and got on.

When they got off the bus, they walked over to Tyler's house to get some supplies for the hiking trip. Dan and Tyler were neighbors, so it wasn't hard to go to each others' houses. They lived in a slightly rich suburban neighborhood, that was near the forest that they were going to walk through.

"I think we'll just need some snacks, right?" Tyler said, as he was looking through his pantry of foods of all sorts.

"Yeah, I don't think we'll be that long." Dan replied.

About an hour after they packed and did their homework and chores, they started to head near the woods not too far from their houses. Tyler and Dan did not see their parents often, because they worked a lot during the day and their job was very time consuming. It made it worse that they were both an only-child too, and they found it lucky to be friends with each other. They finally reached the woods, where they looked up at the tall trees and looked through the forest and saw how deep it went. It was fall. The leaves were beginning to change and starting to cover the cold dirt floor of the forest. They walked through as they looked around in awe. They admired the scenery of the woods and the creatures that lived inside. It seemed like the deeper and deeper they explored, the more beautiful it became.

"Wow, I can't believe that we lived here for so long, and never even bothered to find this place." Dan said as he gazed upon the beautiful fall forest.

"No kidding." Tyler responded as he did the same.

They reached a little creek deep into the forest that showed a tiny waterfall and a lot of moss covered rocks. The water was clear, and the sun reflecting off it gave a nice touch to the view of the creek. They crossed the water on a conveniently fallen log and onto the other side of the water stream. There were some huge rocks that caught their sight and decided to climb them to see what was over them. They both climbed to the top and over the rocks was a large earthly pit. They climbed over the other side of the rocks to take a look around. It seemed like an ordinary part of the woods until they saw a seemingly deep hole in the ground.

"Woah look at that!" Tyler shouted, running over to the hole and looking down into the darkness.

"Yeah, must have been a huge groundhog." Dan said sarcastically. Tyler laughed as he looked at Dan and smiled softly.

"Wanna see what's down there?" Tyler glared at Dan as if he had two heads.

"Are you serious? There's probably beavers and groundhogs like you said!"

"No there isn't. C'mon man, it's just a hole.." Tyler looked at Dan for a minute silently and eventually agreed to explore the dark hole.

(Just to build up the suspense of this part of the chapter, I thought I'd link you to a youtube video of a soundtrack from the National Treasure movie that fits perfectly with this. Trust me it makes it 10 times epic-ER! XD .com/watch?v=O5l_fUD9S9o&feature=related. I'll tell you when to play it in parenthesis.)

As they climbed down the dark cold hole, they reached the bottom and saw that it went downward into a cave-like chasm. "Dude this is nuts, I can't believe no one has found this before!" Dan said.

"Yeah, because they didn't want to see all the hibernating animals probably.." Tyler sarcastically replied.

It was starting to get hard to see, so Dan and Tyler brought out a flashlight that Tyler conveniently packed in his bag of supplies. (Now!) It was getting colder and darker as they submerged into the deep underground cave. They eventually approached the bottom of the chasm. Dan waved his flashlight around the bottom and saw that it was big. Tyler finds a source of flammable substance that could be used to light up the bottom of the chasm. Tyler pulls out some matches and throws it into the substance and catches fire. The fire starts to illuminate the room, as the fire follows the substance down a large flight of old stairs made of stone. The cave lit up and Dan and Tyler looked in amazement, a huge room that resembled a large temple. "HOLY SH-!" Dan and Tyler said simultaneously as they looked around the huge temple-like chamber. The temple seemed to be made out of a metallic type of stone. It showed off a bronze-like color as the fire's brightness touched the walls of the chamber. They walked down the stairs and approached the middle of the chamber and saw a huge circular stone. The stone had odd-looking symbols on it, which confused Dan and Tyler.

"Have you seen anything like these before?" Dan asked, as he scanned the metallic stone. Tyler shook his head, and replied with a no.

Dan noticed a sequence of panels that could be pressed as if they were buttons on the stone. He wondered to himself, if he pressed the panel what would happen? Would they be trapped in the temple? Would it lead them to somewhere else? Dan pressed one of the panels and it glowed a yellow-greenish color, and then the odd-looking lines engraved in the stone started to glow the same color. Tyler and Dan hear something that sounded like a rumble. Right infront of them, a part of the metallic wall opened up into another room. They ran to the entrance to the next room in the chamber. The walls started to glow the same yellow-greenish color as the metallic stone was.

"Woah, this is unbelievable! We could be rich if we showed this to historians, do you realize that?" Tyler shouted in excitement.

"Your right! I didn't even think of that! Wait, what's that?" Dan pointed to a huge metallic ring.

The ring was on a huge platform made of the same bronze-like metal, and being supported on the wall. Dan and Tyler walked over to the strange ring and climbed the stairs onto the top of the platform. They get closer to the ring and the same strange symbols were engraved into it, just like the stone. Right next to the metallic ring, they found a machine that resembled some sort of vehicle. They jumped into it and saw an orb-like device with the same odd symbols, and a ruby gem with a gold trim around it. Dan, curious of what the gem was, pushed it and it activated the orb device. It started to open up and metallic spheres started to orbit around it and made Tyler and Dan wonder.

"Wonder what this is, must be some type of ra-" Tyler was interrupted as the orb closed, and the Ring started to glow. Dan and Tyler looked at eachother in confusion, but were starting to get used to everything glowing. The ring then started to lift off the ground and spin slowly in place. It then started to glowed a dark purple color in the middle, and filled up the opening in the middle of the strange ring.

Well, isn't this starting to get good? I hope you liked the first chapter so far, I'm pretty sure most of us know what's going to happen next! Please review, it would make me really happy! Thanks!(: