Author's Note: I assure you, as confusing as it may seem, this story does indeed have a grand master plan. Honest. Reviews are wonderful things!

"Every man dies - Not every man really lives" - William Ross Wallace


To all the world that saw him, John Smith was the embodiment of a simple man.

It wasn't to say that he wasn't a good and honest person, because he was. Exceedingly so, actually. A new addition to the Farringham School for Boys, John was immediately pegged as a rather timid kind of man. For the most part he seemed content in keeping to himself, smiling and conversing with all the staff and the few friends he had made since settling in the town, yet not overly social when he didn't have to be.

He hardly spoke much of his childhood, about the place he lived or the family he grew up with. The most you could get out of him was that he used to live in Nottingham with his mother and father as a child, and really had no siblings to speak of.

He'd come to Farringham on somewhat of a whim, it seemed, after the recent death of his dear mother. They'd been extremely close to the bitter end, him holding her hand as she passed from sickness. His father himself had lost his life in war some time ago, bringing mother and son closer than ever.

The move to Farringham turned out to be a decision he'd made more out of the need to find a new lease on life, as it were, since he was no longer any use staying at his old home. He was at something of an impasse, having had his 35th birthday only recently and needing a change.

You would think that a somewhat shy man such as John was, that women wouldn't necessarily flock to him as they did. But he was already quite a handsome man, tall as he was with chocolate brown hair you could run your fingers through and a grin that could make any heart flutter. The way he was so reserved just seemed to add to his charm.

Though John himself would never begin to admit any of this. More to the point, he was completely oblivious to it. To be honest, he'd never really thought that much of himself in that particular way. Maybe that sounded a little self-deprecating, but it really wasn't based on any sour opinion of himself. He was really quite content keeping out of the public eye, and focusing on more important things.

Well, he says more important things. That probably just depended on what you classified as important. Honestly, though, he'd like to think that his own future held a little higher on the list than teaching young boys to kill. The thought itself ran a small shudder through him. The thought of war always did something to his nerves. He knew that it could be unavoidable, and also that preparing these boys for it was what the school was trying to do. He just couldn't stop himself from thinking that there had to be another way, a better way than glamorizing warfare.

With a shake of his head to clear the thoughts from his mind, John turned from the door where he'd just entered his room, a soft click reverberating as he closed it from behind him. Briskly pulling off his jacket and laying it over a nearby chair, he set himself down and leaned forward slightly, reaching down to the hard floor. Searching more from memory than his own eyes, he quickly gripped a small notebook that had been dropped on his departure, heaving a sigh as he opened it to reveal the first page.

"A Journal of Impossible Things," he read aloud the manuscript title across the page, with his own name written below in the same flawless writing. Most logical people at his age had probably foregone even thinking about the words "future" and "dreams" in the same sentence, but he always liked to think that there could be more to life than that.

He'd started the journal quite some time ago, long before his mother had gotten sick. He'd woken from some nightmare, bolting right up as soon as his eyes shot open, the fleeting remnants of the dream just on his surface memory. As his heart slowed from the latent fear, he remembered more and more of the bits and pieces of his dream. Monstrous creatures mucking about, howling and screaming and chasing. Creatures beyond even his own vivid imagination. Or so he'd thought before then. Without any logical reasoning he could find even to this day, he'd dug through the wooden table that stood beside his bed, riffling through several bits and bobs until he found exactly what he was searching for.

A notebook and a writing instrument.

And he'd drawn. Everything he saw he drew, in precise detail to his memories. It was a talent he'd seemed to have from birth, his mum had often joked with him. He had such a talent for drawing even the most complex of portraits. At one time he'd taken to bringing a pencil and paper everywhere he could, drawing everything from the scenery in both nature and the cities that obstructed it, to the people- to all the ordinary, passersby that surrounded it from each and every corner.

It was a talent that had only gotten finely attuned as he grew older, and for this he'd been more than thankful. After his work was done, he gazed upon what had come from the inner working of his mind, only then aware that he'd scribbled some senseless notes alongside his sketches, as if explaining little details about them. They certainly were not anything he'd seen in real life; in fact, he even noted that most of the senseless words on the pages were things he'd only just added upon waking, making up the creatures until they seemed right. Not that he could ever truly decipher why exactly they weren't really completed until he scratched down this detail and that. It was almost as if he knew something in the back of his mind, but he couldn't ever puzzle it out. John wasn't sure if he would ever wrap his mind around it.

Still, ever since then he'd taken to this journal where he wrote and drew all these impossible things, whether they be from a dream or simply from his waking imagination. It was all in good fun, really. Pretending there was more out there, imagining the size of it. Monsters, creatures from another world, spirits; who or whatever they would be, his dream world was a vivid world in which he could imagine his life was more extraordinary. Something he knew could never really happen.

He was John Smith, nothing special at all. A schoolteacher, at that. Not that this was such a bad job. Really, it was one he did rather like from time to time. But that was only part of it.

He had no family anymore, at least not in the immediate. Distant relatives remained quite like that; distant. He'd never particularly felt the need to reach out himself. He had no wife, no one in which he felt he could settle down with and start a family. Even then he couldn't properly see himself being truly happy, living that kind of life. Though what kind of life he thought could really be out there for him to find, was really beyond him.

He was at another impasse in his life. Only this time he had no idea where he could possibly go from here.

Luckily for John Smith, someone was about to show him.