So look. I'm not gonna sugar coat things in the slightest here. I don't know how I got to where I am. Or how I'm fully aware of things, but let's just cut to the chase.
I died. Seems simple, right? Got caught up in an apartment fire, saved one of my neighbors and got turned into charred nothing. Just a cliche, simple man trying to do something right and getting killed off for it. Whadda expect, huh?
Figured I'd see the pearly gates cause like I wasn't that bad of a human being. I mean I wasn't, ya know? So forgive me for expecting a nice peaceful afterlife. You wanna know what I got instead? Feeling like I was getting crushed and then yoinked around. Finding myself staring up at a giant woman, who was in turn smiling at another exhausted woman.
"Well Mrs. Mercer, it looks like you have a son. Congratulations! Oh here comes the other one!" Yeah you heard that right. I repressed the first part but I got like.. Reborn. I'm an infant. A newborn. How else could I know? I tried to scream but all that came out were baby wails. Not fun. At all.
Now I'm sure you might be thinking. 'Wait, other?' Sure enough, out comes another kid! So here I am, a guy with no idea what's happening, stuck in a body that I had no control over. And if I was gonna be lucid, I might as well try and have fun. So that meant it was time for the name game.
"Oh, another boy! Congratulations! What would you like to name them Mrs. Mercer?" My mother smiled at the two of us. Well, I say my mother, but it wasn't the one I- you know what, this is gonna get confusing, so I'll just call her 'New Mom'. For my sake. In any case, she spoke up.
"Jonathan." She said, looking down at me, and gestured to my little brother. "And Alex. Johnathan and Alex Mercer." You see, here's where I'd start asking questions. Because I knew what the name Alex Mercer was going to imply.
So that meant that, knowing my luck, I was stuck in the universe of Prototype. That sentence alone was going to give me nightmares for years to follow, and honestly? Yeah this is how my story starts. Not with a bang, but with a mere cry, and the hope I could at least salvage something out of this bad luck world.
So, I'm just going to skip over childhood, because there is no way in hell I'm talking about it. Suffice to say despite having to adapt to almost no modern day technology, life was… interesting to say the least. I would get into far more fights than I did in my old life, mainly due to Alex, but also because some kids couldn't keep their mouths shut.
Apparently, somebody managed to find out mom was arrested, and boy was that oh so fun to deal with. This is what would happen: Kid inserts foot into mouth, Alex would punch him, I would help out, and everyone lost.
Despite this happening far more times than I can count, it never really affected us. Oh and then there was Dana. Man, I thought they were exaggerating when it was mentioned that Alex was Dana's only parental figure, but they were not. Thanks to Mom always being drunk, it was up to yours truly to give Dana 'The Talk', (and yes we were both emotionally scarred from that conversation so by all means laugh) threaten any boyfriend she had etc. Well it was a combination of me and Alex but you get the point. As the years went by, I could see that Alex was getting more and more distant, and there was no changing it.
It hurt. Hurt because I had the game to at least separate the characters from me. But here? This was my brother. My flesh and blood. Yeah you don't choose your family, and blah blah sometimes you gotta push em away. But I saw what happened to him already. He had been a good kid. But life kept pushing us down. Kept hurting us. And Alex just wanted to stop hurting.
The only reason we actually were able to bond was because I managed to convince my extremely stubborn siblings to give self defense courses a shot. It was perfect for Alex to channel his rage growing up because believe me, he had a lot of it., and gave Dana an excuse to try and pummel me senseless.
Actually, making an effort this time, I at least got a college degree while Alex went off to Columbia University. From there, it was simple living. I 'conveniently' got an apartment in New York and got a job as a bike courier. Hell, for a while I thought I could live normally, that maybe just my presence alone would change things. Then one day I noticed the year. I prayed. A lot. More than I ever thought I could actually do. I thought it even helped.
Then one day, Dana called me.
It was a pretty peaceful day, and boy was it boring. But boring was good. I had already finished up my rounds at work, so I had the day off. That's when my phone rang. I looked at the number and cursed a bit. Dana. If she was calling that means it was almost time. I quickly answered.
"Mercer speaking." I said in my most professional voice. Which just meant I deepened it and took any emotion I had out of it. I basically used the same kind of voice that Alex had fallen into whenever we used to speak. Dana snorted on the other line.
"Yeah yeah Mr. Professional. Keep this up and you'll start to sound like Alex." She told me. Ouch, I could feel that. I mean sure that was part of the joke, but she didn't have to say it so suddenly!
I put a hand to my chest, gasping dramatically.
"Oh, why must you wound me so sister?" Yeah, this was how almost all of our interactions were. "Seriously though, what's up?" I asked.
She hesitated. Shit, she never hesitated. Not good at all. She finally spoke.
"Have you heard from Alex recently? He hasn't been picking up his phone." I rolled my eyes, scoffing. Alex. He was good as a kid, but sometime when we ended up going our separate ways, he developed a case of Assholey-itis.
The bastard ended up just ignoring me and Dana after a fight we had, for a while he didn't even care about us, and he just recently started talking to Dana again. Me? He hadn't talked to me in about six years, and I never felt like talking to him either. Not after he went off to college. I was perfectly fine ignoring him, but Dana wasn't.
"Dana, you know we haven't talked since that fight. Why? Has something happened?" I asked. I knew, but for appearances sake I played ignorant.
"No- I mean… yes. Look he had me looking up this company he worked for, Gentek, but when I sent him some information, he just… vanished. Look, can you just go check on him? Please?" She said. Shit, I could hear the worry in her voice.
"Ok, ok I'll check up on him. Don't worry, I'll call you back." I said. I was going to regret this. I disconnected the call and made my way to Alex's apartment. While I didn't have a key, I did know a few things. One of those happened to be lockpicking.
Anyway, I went to his apartment, and God was it a mess. Everything was thrown around, pictures shattered, even a few dents in the wall. Let's see, there was a photo of me, Alex and Dana on the floor which I pocketed, and a few hundred dollar bills which I also pocketed, and there was Alex's laptop on the desk in front of me.
It… it wasn't the same one from the game. I think. Fuck. The game. You know how easy it is to forget details when you don't have a good visual reference? That's what I'm starting to feel right now. That scared me for a moment, but I had to move past that. I had to do something. Maybe I could… ah fuck. Fuck it's already time isn't it? Alex was going to die. I mean sure, he's a piece of shit. But he's still my brother. Which… anyone could say but still.
Laptop or not, I figured I could make an effort to get something else going. Thankfully I had a USB on me. These things weren't exactly rare, and I never knew when I'd need one. Using that, I just did my best to copy as many files that I could manage. Nothing about Blacklight showed up. No surprise. But there was something else. Off to the side, I could only stare in horror, seeing a map I hadn't noticed beforehand.
The words 'PENN STATION' were circled in red.
I couldn't run out of the door fast enough.
AN: Soooo this is yet another story that I'm rebranding. I swear this is going to be the last one, and from here on out I'm going to do my best to keep the updates to these new stories.
To those of you new here, welcome! You can call me the Chronicler. I wrote the original draft of this fic in 2017, when I was still in high school and very much in an edgy phase where I didn't know how to write a damn thing.
So I'm back here, rewriting this fic and trying to do a far better plot than the original, with less of the shock factor that my younger self had gotten through. It's a work in progress, but I do hope that people are still reading Protoype fics in this modern day. I can't promise a complete work of art, but it's hopefully better than my original story had worked out. I'm here to answer any questions you all might have, and yes I'm trying to move things along just to get the story rolling.
I do have to give a footnotes here, because Jon here is not a self insert. I cannot stress that enough.
Trust me there is a perfectly logical plan for why he is the way he is, and why he's so casual about things. If you wanna know more about what he really is, I would say to check my profile.
For the TLDR... I'll just quote the the original maker of the Outsider concept, Dis Lexic. Thanks for giving me permission all those years ago buddy. I still owe you one.
An Outsider is the term used for a soul from one world who died and was reborn into another they know as fiction. Their presence acts as a magnet and draws other 'worlds' together. They tend to be quite powerful as they follow different rules than the other occupants of the world, as well as have connections to more than one story within the world they live in.
In this case? Jon, the poor bastard, was dropped into the world of Prototype with no warning. I'm hoping to do it justice here, but at the end of the day I'm doing what I can with what I got.
Sorry for the long author's note, I honestly copy and pasted part of it from another first chapter because I figured it would make things easier to explain. So please, read, review and enjoy for the future! I'm looking forward to hearing what people have to say.
