Regalian Thunder

Author's note: Well, let's say that this is not really the first fanfiction I've wrote, but it's the first that:
1) I've written fully in English, since I wrote my others in French.
2) That I post on a public site, the others I've done are more directed towards a private group of mine, so they will never be public.
So that means that if there are some passages that you struggle with at the beginning, I'm sorry, I try to improve myself, so… Yep.
One final thing before I let you with the disclaimer and you can begin the story: This story places itself in the MULTIverse of Sleepysaurus Rex's "Trial By Lightning" (found in the Inheritance Cycle category of fanfiction) and we chat often on Discord, so he gave me all the green lights for this story, even more, he helps me by generously being the beta for my story! So yep, if the beginning of his story looks like the same than for TBL, that's normal. Check for the first review if you want proof that I've his accord. Anyways… Onwards to the story!

Disclaimer: I don't own Fairy Tail, all rights are reserved to Hiro Mashima

Beta read by Sleepysaurus Rex (Hello! :D)

Chapter 1: Death is a new adventure

I admit it, motorcycles are death traps. They're unprotected, frail, and a bump can send you smashing into various creatures that live around the road, like street lamps and fire hydrants. Still, it's not really my fault that a drunk driver chose to ignore a red light.

Anyway, my name is Peter Chandler, but my friends call me Pete. I'm twenty years old, I'm almost six feet tall, have brown hair and I have heterochromia iridum. That means I have eyes of different colours; my left eye is blue while my right one is brown. I absolutely love fantasy, especially if there's dragons, and I am a god at RTS games, especially Supreme Commander. (We only talk about the first one and its extension, Forged Alliance. The others are like the matrix sequels – we don't talk about them).

That's… about it. As to how this clusterfuck started, it was the middle of November in France and I was chatting with my friend Nikita at the engineering school that we both attended. He's an inventor through and through, able to create designs of various machines that could work if he found the time and money to build them. As of now, he doesn't really have either. He's shown me his blueprints for a mech that he would love to build one day, and it should really work! Nikita thinks about everything, every flaw that a system might have, every problem to overcome. One day, he'll eventually build them and it'll be glorious.

So, I was chatting with him about the new Pokémon game. We both decided to boycott it. A game shouldn't be half finished by the time it's launched, especially one that was advertised so widely and had such a massive budget spent on it. Eventually, we noticed the time to go home was almost upon us.

"So… What are you gonna do tonight Nikita?" I asked him.

"Play World of Tanks, tinker on that project that would only cost a hundred euros, and work on the assignment that's due next week, so the usual." He responded nonchalantly. "What about you?"

"I'll have to stay here for my tabletop RPG club, which will take a couple of hours to finish our current mission. Then I'll dodge all the cars on the road, get home, and play a singlegame of Supreme Commander tonight on the Seton's map."

He gave me a pointed look. "Really Pete, only one game? When you last said that, you didn't even show up for school the next day because you were drooling into your pillow from staying up all night!"

"I'm serious!" I said, throwing my arms out to exaggerate my point. "I'll not be back home until, like, eight thirty, and I'll have to eat before that, and you know how long one game of Seton's can take, especially if even one of the players has a crappy PC. Sometimes it turns into a PowerPoint presentation with how many particles there are in the game, and in rare cases, my computer crashes due to particle overflows… and that's not even counting the time of lobby sim. So yeah I'll do one game tonight."

"I'll hold you to that." Nikita smirked. "And I'll be able to say 'I told you so!' when we meet up tomorrow. I'll bet good money that I'll see you with bloodshot eyes, a wicked temper, and you fall asleep midway through the classes about WordPress."

I rolled my eyes at him before saying "Anyway I've gotta go, otherwise my DM will shout at me because I'm late, see ya tomorrow!"

"See ya." Nikita replied, nodding to me in farewell.

I rushed to the room where we had our session of Pathfinder. I was just in time, the DM looked at me with pointed eyes but I just ignored him and started retrieving my character sheets. This session I was playing a Falconer named Regal. For those of you who don't know, a Falconer is a Ranger variant who is focused to his animal companion who must be a bird of prey. We started the session and over the course of a few hours, we finished our mission, which was to retrieve a certain "heart of gold" for a very shady character. A very shady character who paid us very, very well, so we asked him no questions.

A couple hours later, and a session that finished with the glorious decapitation of the boss by my golden eagle Nikki, I said goodbye to the rest of my party and rushed to the exit of the school. Finally free, I swung myself over the saddle of my motorcycle and started the ride home. I didn't try to go fast, I knew the time gain was negligible, and given that my school was in the middle of my home city, trying to go as fast as possible was exceedingly dangerous. I had no desire to have my neck broken, thank you.

As I was slaloming through the other vehicles on the highway just because I could, I took my mind off the road and thought about what I would do tonight. I was going to play a game of Seton's that's for sure. I might have forgotten to explain earlier, but Seton's Clutch is a map for Supreme Commander, probably the most popular one too. This is because it's a team map, a 4v4 to be more precise, though it has been known that it sometimes enter the ranked map pool for 1v1, so it's not exclusive. The meta is almost always the same, with the people at the back rushing the high levels of tech to build Air Superiority Fighters as soon as possible. On the other hand, the players at the beach and rock positions must focus on naval units, while the player in the front's goal is to cover the only way possible for a land invasion.

It's probably the only map where people activate the "Full Share" rule. This means that if the commander of one team (the unit you must kill so that you can win the game) dies, his units are not lost. Unlike usual, they go to the control of one of the players remaining with the highest score (generally the air guy). So that means the enemy has less APM, and so can react less well to your action. But it can sometimes be a double edged sword, if the army goes to the control of a more experienced player, who will use the extra resources to build units with extreme destructive power.

Geeking out aside, I was trying to guess which position I'd be able to grab this time (I'm a demon at the air position, but absolute crap at the frontline), with who (there was players that were known to be very good at Seton's, like AchievedJaguar), and trying to guess how many times we'd have to retry the level.

Because I was focused on the possibilities for my game, I just checked if the light was still green before deciding not to hit the brakes, not seeing the car speeding past his red light on the right. After that, I only remember a sound of tearing metal, the sight of the world spinning and the sensation of cartwheeling through the air before I felt intense pain in the side of my head and my neck before everything went black. For those of you wondering, I was wearing a helmet, but it does jack shit if you hit a lamp pole at 50 km/h.

So yeah, I died! But at least it was a quick and swift death, so swift that I only registered pain for a fraction of a second. And that's the point where you're realising that I'm still talking to you and you just reread the last paragraph. So how am I still alive, you ask? What's the afterlife like? Well to be honest I don't know, because apparently I was a special case too, so I'm pretty sure that if you haven't won the lottery like I did, you'll still get the real deal.

I do remember a bit of my limbo phase, though; some sort of out-of-body experience. I remember people swarming over my corpse, police arriving on the scene and arresting the drunken driver. The image when my parents cried before a police officer was especially heartbreaking for me. I also managed to snatch an image of Nikita being devastated by the news. The ever so stoic and pessimist Nikita was overwhelmed with grief. That image would be burned into my memory forever.

The next image was a bit blurred, but I remember a graveyard. There were numerous people dressed in black surrounding a coffin that my blurred parents were crying onto. It was an image of my funeral, really the best thing to remember when you're trying to stay positive.

That was the last image as the world around me turned to black. As total and utter darkness surrounded me, I wondered if this place was what my consciousness will stay in into? A black, infinite void that would last until I'm completely insane and start hallucinating just to keep activity in my brain until I fade forever? Or perhaps I'd get reincarnated after I go completely mad and I'd start killing people for fun? Or maybe this was some kind of cosmic waiting room before I move on and have some company?

I'm not sure when I got my answer. All sense of time was lost in that place. I'm not sure if I just spent a few minutes in that utter void, or perhaps only a few hours or maybe even weeks…

But my answer to my questions came in the form of the blinking light that suddenly appeared before me. It was dancing around in front of me, as if it was taunting me. After getting over being surprised by this new development, I realized that I still had control of my body. Apparently, I was still whole, not just a head floating in the void.

I pondered for a long time about what to do with this strange light. Eventually, I thought to myself 'oh screw it' and shrugged, not realizing that was the last time I could properly do the action. As I lifted one of my hands to touch the light, I relearned a very important lesson: don't poke things when you aren't sure what they'll do to you. That advice works for animals, big red buttons, and blinking lights too.

Then fire coursed through my veins, burning through my body. It hurt, but it wasn't a torture level of pain, more like what would happen if I broke a bone, but it was still painful. I screamed while my insides and flesh twisted – a scream that distorted to a higher and higher pitch until I blacked out. Again.

Let's play a little game: Anybody have a idea of which creature Peter will transform into? There's 2 clues, both linked to the title. One is obvious, the other is more subtle. And here is a last one: it's not one of the Fairy Tail universe, but from another one. (Won't tell you which, or you'll guess it instantly). The ones to guess correctly will win internet cookies!

Posted the 23/01/20