Chapter One: The Reawakening (Part One)

It was a dark, cold and windy night in the Frog Valley region of Amphibia, particularly in its northeastern borders, where our story is about to unfold in the space of a few minutes.

Although the inhabitants of Frog Valley are accustomed to having nights like these, especially during this time of the year, when all of the mountain ranges are frozen solid (which makes travelling outside and inside of the valley's borders risky and practically impossible), we can say that no one has ever passed through a night this harsh before in their lives. The wind is blowing so strong that it almost seems as if it could rip out the leaves and branches of the trees surrounding the swamp areas of the valley and unroot the plants right out of the ground, and the air is so cold that we can see icicles crystalized all over the place: from the tips of mushroom caps to the wings of insects that didn't expect this kind of weather to come …

This weather is also affecting the town of Swamp Shiro, as well as its closest surrounding areas. For those who don't know anything about this place, Swamp Shiro is one of the main towns of Frog Valley: it's considered to be one of the most populated and wealthiest settlements in all of the region, with the town consisting of a cluster of giant mushrooms all reunited closely with one another, and rooted inside a circumference shaped marsh with about 500 meters in diameter. All of the mushrooms that compose the main structure of the town stand very tall above the marsh, with the smallest ones standing at about 30 meters in height and the biggest ones standing at about 50 meters above the marsh.

Of course, once we're located on top of the giant mushrooms, Swamp Shiro is seen as an architecturally complex and aesthetical eye-pleasing town: all of the town's buildings are also themselves mushrooms of varying shapes, colors and sizes (within reason, naturally), the giant mushrooms that support the whole place are interconnected through bridges and stairs made entirely out of vines, and the town is divided into three main districts, all located in different levels of height relative to the marsh.

The first district, built on top of the mushrooms that are, in average, 30 meters tall is the residential district: as the name implies, this part of the town has this name because it's where the majority of the residents of Swamp Shiro live (particularly the middle class citizens, as well as the poorer citizens). The residential houses aren't much to look at, being average in almost every single aspect of their construction; and, besides them, there aren't any more notorious buildings in the area, except for a crummy saloon, an average bar and a not so popular tea parlor, each located in different corners of the district.

However, the second district, which is located on top of the mushrooms that stand 40 meters above the marsh, is shown to be more interesting than the first one. We're talking about the financial/cultural district: this part of Swamp Shiro houses all of the main shops, businesses and cultural monuments of the town; we can find everything, from tailors to shoemakers, the local market, the community theater, practically all of the town's museums, and even a public fountain and a public park (where children and adult amphibians alike come to enjoy themselves). The fountain is even know for also being a wishing fountain, where many coins are thrown everyday by the town's inhabitants in the hopes of getting their wishes fulfilled.

Finally, we have the third district, located on top of the mushrooms that stand 50 meters above the marsh, known as the high/rich district: this area of Swamp Shiro is called like this because, on one hand, it holds the houses of the richest citizens around town (the houses are mainly luxurious and spacious manors that have enough space to hold at least three families inside each of them, as well as being stunning in appearance); and, on the other hand, this district has all of the buildings where the so called "higher" and "nobler" activities take place for amphibians (the list of the main buildings for the activities in question include the Swamp Shiro University, the town Observatory, the town's massive, stunningly beautiful and diversified Botannical Garden, the town's temple, which houses the pantheon of the gods of Amphibia, and so forth).

Usually, Swamp Shiro has a very active night life for most of its evenings: almost every night we can see the majority of the amphibian inhabitants of the town going out of their homes after dinner to have fun, either on the streets (for example, they throw a community ball every now and then, they organize outings with friends and acquaintances, they throw coins at the public wishing fountain, etcetera.), or on the public buildings (such as watching a play on the theater, socializing at one of the bars or saloons of the town over one of their locally brewed beverages, and even going to the Observatory to observe the night sky with its telescope).

However, the harsh weather conditions for tonight aren't allowing for any night time activities to take place in town. Not a single living soul is seen on the streets and on the town's most popular hanging out places: everyone is safely tucked away inside their homes, and the few amphibians who decided to go outside to hang out at the saloons or the bars are now forced to be stuck inside the building, even going to the point of them begging the owners of the establishments to let them spend the night in and only go back home the following day. Other than these places, only the town's inns are open for business, in case a weary traveler visits and needs to take a rest in Swamp Shiro for the night.

Unfortunately, the weather seems to be getting worse and worse as the night progresses throughout all of Frog Valley, with the environment becoming windier and colder with each passing half hour. It's almost as if Nature itself is predicting the happening of a supernatural or out of the ordinary event that might change the course of Amphibia's history forever …

Coincidentally, in this case, it seems that Nature is indeed not wrong in its predictive eyesight, for something very mysterious and unusual is about to happen in the space of a few minutes, and right under the noses of Swamp Shiro's inhabitants…. Below the town's surface foundations (i.e. below the caps of the giant mushrooms upon which the town is seated), and at the bottom of the mushrooms' stalks and in the heart of the marsh, lied the ruins of an ancient structure that existed entirely unknown to the amphibians living above, since no one in Swamp Shiro ever dared to go down and explore the marsh one bit (mainly because the amphibians became too attached to the comforts provided by their hometown, leading to a mindset of complacency that made the locals lose interest in exploring the outskirts of Swamp Shiro).

The structure in question, although it has the looks of having been abandoned many years ago, is not just any old run-of-the-mill boring and useless ruin. In fact, as strange as it may sound, we're looking at the remains of a highly advanced scientific laboratory: for starters, it's very obvious and apparent that most of the walls of the ancient complex don't exist anymore, and the walls that still remain are not 100 percent intact (in average, only half of the original portion of these walls is still standing, with the rest of the walls having already fallen and crumbled within the muddy waters of the marsh); despite that, the rest of the objects present in the lab are still relatively intact, having suffered only minimal or moderate damage, with them still having the potential to become functional again if anyone ever finds and uses the lab for scientific and research purposes once more.

On that note, most of the objects filling the space of the lab complex are things that are typically found on labs back on planet Earth: we have experimental tables, beakers, test tubes, traditional Bunsen burners (made from reinforced ebony wood), shelves filled with scientific books and guidelines for the scientists to conduct their experiments safely and successfully, microscopes, etcetera. Unsurprisingly, most of the equipment and material of the lab is empty and filled to the brim with cob webs, an evident sign of a lack of usage for a really long time…..

But, although the structure overall is interesting and has many corners to explore, there is one thing in the lab that draws more attention than anything else in it, one thing that is so advanced and rare to find in Amphibia that there are no other places known to have it. We're referring, more specifically, to a massive and enormous supercomputer in the middle-left room of the complex: the high-graded technological prowess of the supercomputer alone is enough to amaze any amphibian that had enough curiosity to step down from the haven of Swamp Shiro and explore the marsh down below; and, what's even more amazing is the fact that there are smaller computer units attached to the sides of the supercomputer (presumably, they were built to create a complete computer network, in order to maintain the correct functioning of the supercomputer and assure that the lab's activities were done according to schedule).

Fortunately for these machines, they aren't "alone", so to speak, in their jobs, because they have newt-shaped robots keeping them company. In reality, though, these robots have one purpose to fulfill in the laboratory: which is to take care of the maintenance of the supercomputer and of its side computers (assuring, in the process, that no viruses or malware attack the networking system), as well as to stay vigilant and monitor all of the possible entry points into the laboratory, in case someone decided to pay a visit to the place.

However, there is still one function that these robots fulfill that we hadn't mentioned before: for, you see, there is still one large piece of machinery inside the lab complex that is directly connected to the supercomputer through long, thick and wide electrical wires that go outside of the computer room. In fact, right now, one of the newt robots is leaving its post at the supercomputer's keyboard to follow the electrical wires: the robot gets out of the computer room, but it will still walk a long way before reaching the room where the end of the wires is located, which is precisely at the room located on the top right corner of the lab complex.

Eventually, the robot arrived at the room where the wires' course ends. Once we're inside the room, we're treated to a very shocking, and at the same time very awe inducing, sight set before our eyes. We're talking about the presence of a very tall, advanced and highly functioning healing tank: the inside of this machine is completely filled with a bright light blue liquid that's flowing from the bottom onto the top of the tank, occasionally producing bubbles every now and then; besides that, there's also a massive electrical generator at the right side of the tank, which is presumed to be its main power source.

However, unlike what it seems at first sight, the healing tank is not empty! In fact, if we look more closely into its inside, we are able to see a mysterious silhouette of an individual that's currently using the tank to heal their own injuries! Unfortunately, though, the silhouette's lines are so blurry and undefined that we can't see clearly who's inside the tank. On the other hand, we can still see that the individual has several cords attached to different parts of their body: particularly, it's pretty much visible that some of the cords are attached to the figure's head, through an headband, to their arms, through wristbands, to their ankles, through legbands, and also to their chest, through multiple electrodes. Last, but not least, the individual seems to also have a respirator mask attached to their mouth and nose, keeping them breathing while they're healing in the liquid of the tank.

Whoever is inside the tank, though, is currently unconscious and perfectly unaware of what is happening to themselves and with their surrounding environment. Except for the fact that, when exploring what's going on in their mind, the subject in question is having some unsettling visions that are disturbing their rest: in particular, the visions that they've been having for the past few days, including the ones that are happening right now, involve the arrival of a human girl in Amphibia; to be more specific, this girl is a 13 year-old teenager that came from the planet Earth, and she can be physically described as having a tall (for her age, that is) and slender body-build, having light brown skin and, most notably, having a big volumed messy brown auburn hair, covered with a bunch of leaves and wooden sticks.

This description fits perfectly well with the profile of Anne Boonchuy, a Thai-American teenage human girl that arrived in Amphibia about a month ago when she and her two best friends, Sasha Waybright and Marcy Wu, stole a mysterious music box from a thrift store, and got magically teleported from Earth to Amphibia as soon as they opened it. For the last few days, the individual inside the healing tank has been visually experiencing, through their visions, Anne's most difficult moments ever since she arrived in Amphibia: not only that, but they have also become emotionally affected by Anne's struggles for survival, to the point that the individual feels the same pain as Anne has been feeling for the past month; the pain encompasses everything, from Anne's difficulties in finding edible and non-poisonous food, as well as finding drinkable water, all the way to her discomfort with and fear of sleeping inside a cave filled with bugs and insects that could either parasite her or eat her in mere seconds ….

Following this course of events, we can already see that these visions are directly linked to the bad weather everyone is experiencing outside, in all of Frog Valley: since, the more these visions keep revisiting the individual's mind, the windier and the colder the weather is getting. Eventually, the bad weather and the visions all culminated in one vital moment: the individual in the healing tank began to see Anne getting out of the cave and the wilderness, and out of the bad position she was previously in, to then meet and make friends with a frog family constituted by three members (an orange and short elderly frog, a young and short pink frog boy and a purple little girl pollywog with a yellow bow dotted with polka dots), who consequently took her in and slowly began to adopt her as a member of their own family. However, the next vision revealed itself to be the most bizarre of them all, because the individual was the one who was now meeting Anne (and even the frog family) in person and forming a friendship bond with her and the family, even though that hasn't happened yet, nor does the individual themselves understand why or how that is supposed to happen with them still stuck inside the tank….

At this moment, the strong and cold wind currents outside of the laboratory reached their peak strength, forming an unstoppable icy storm that not only managed to shake and freeze the foundational mushrooms of Swamp Shiro to their core, but also managed to sneak below them into the marsh, eventually entering and invading the building of the lab complex. The ice cold wind reached the room where the healing tank and the generator are located, triggering at the same time the awakening of the individual inside the tank: they eventually woke up, opened their eyes as widely as they could, took off the respirator mask that was keeping them alive inside the liquid, set themselves free from all the cords that were attached to their body and, at last, broke the glass container that kept both themselves and the healing liquid inside the tank, making all of the liquid flow outside of the tank like a waterfall and flooding the floor of the room. Naturally, the individual followed the flow of the liquid, but fell on the floor afterwards, with its face and stomach turned to the floor.

It seems that this event, however, had one person watching everything from very far away. About 60 kilometers south of Swamp Shiro, in a forest located on the outskirts of the town of Wartwood, and more specifically inside a dark and gloomy cave, Anne Boonchuy saw the whole thing during her sleep, and coincidentally through the same visions that have been plaguing the individual's recovery sleep as of late. When she saw the individual fall to the floor, she woke up feeling distressed: she had cold sweat running down her forehead, she was breathing heavily the whole time and she had her eyes wide open due to the feelings of unease about her vision.

But, as a natural response to all of this, Anne dismissed what she experienced as nothing but a nightmare "Okay, just calm down, Anne. This was all just a bad dream, it wasn't real."

Then, after this monologue, Anne looked at her surroundings and afterwards to herself, and continued her monologue to rationalize her experience once more "And who can blame me for having nightmares? I've had nothing good to eat for weeks, I'm thirsty, I can't sleep well because this hard rock floor is killing my back, and these bugs are creepy and gross me out, I can't stand them!".

After Anne stopped talking to herself, she took a moment to reflect upon her difficult circumstances since she arrived in Amphibia. After a few moments thinking about how miserable she has been feeling on account of living in the wild for so long without the comforts she was used to enjoy back home, she didn't go back to sleep. Instead, Anne got up from the rocky floor of the cave, with a new determination taking over her spirit "You know what? That's it. I'm done living like this! I'm going to get out of this dark cave, and let these creeps eat themselves alive or whatever. I'm going to see if there are any people living around here, and I'll try asking for help on how to get out of this strange place and get back home. And….. I'll try to see if Sasha and Marcy are okay, and take them back home with me.".

The last part of the sentence was filled with concern on Anne's part, since she got separated from her best friends when they were teleported to Amphibia, and hasn't seen them since they opened the music box, so she didn't even know if they were safe or not. But, at least for now, Anne had to put her worries aside and move on with her new plan. So, she finally decided to put her idea in action, putting her backpack on and walking out of the cave, eventually disappearing into the dense trees of Wartwood's forest ….

Meanwhile, inside the lab complex, the individual is now making an effort to get up from the floor of the room with the now broken healing tank. After a few seconds, we are now able to see who it is that was healing inside the tank: we're looking right now at a bright orange male newt (naturally, like most amphibians, he has an underbelly that is of a lighter shade of orange), who is very tall (he's about 183 centimeters tall, about 6 feet tall), is young in his age (he looks to be in his late twenties), has long and straight black hair parted in the middle, whose back covers the whole back of his neck and whose sides reach his shoulders, and deep violet eyes. However, there is one particular characteristic about his physical appearance that immediately strikes the attention of anyone looking at him: he's a newt, but he has no tail! What exactly happened to his tail? No one knows…. About his clothing, it seems that the newt is not wearing too many clothes on his body, and they're not fancy clothes either: in fact, the male newt is wearing a typical medieval male peasant outfit, where he's wearing a simple beige cotton tunic over his chest and torso, strapped tightly around his body with a dark brown leather belt, with only a pair of black tights accompanying the tunic and covering his legs. Otherwise, he doesn't have any shoes put on and, therefore, is walking bare footed. We can conclude the newt's description by remarking that it seems he bears a permanent melancholic facial expression as his normal outlook on life.

After waking up, it's clearly visible that the newt is very confused, perplexed and lost in his current situation: he doesn't seem to know where he is, how he got there, why he was in the tank, nothing…. He's currently looking around at his surroundings, trying to figure out the answers to the questions he has about his predicament, but he is finding nothing, and he sums it perfectly well through his first words "W-Where am I? … What am I doing in here?... How did I get in here? …. Why was I inside that damned thing? …. And, most importantly …. Who am I?!".

(To be continued …)

Greetings to all the Amphibia fans out there. My name is DarkSoul2000, and I'm the author of this fan-fic. As you might have imagined, from now on, my plan is to write a post-chapter section after I finish writing each chapter of this story, with the goal of introducing a kind of author's notes about each chapter and how the narrative is flowing so far. But, for now, I'm not going to write any notes about the introductory chapter: I think I'm only ready to do that after I progress further in the story. What I can do, however, is introduce myself briefly and quickly by telling you a few things about me, and then I'll be telling you more about me, as well as starting to introduce my author notes, as time goes by (by which I mean, as the story progresses). For starters, to be honest, this isn't really the first time that I come to , and this isn't the first story that I am publishing on the site. I created my account on this website 10 years ago, and under a different username, when I was much younger and more inexperienced than what I am now. Originally, I wrote a couple of fan-fic stories for the fictional universes of The Amazing World of Gumball, Pokémon, The Simpsons, Sonic the Hedgehog and even The Powerpuff Girls, as much as I am embarrassed to admit I was, and still am, a fan of the original 1998 series, hahaha. But, for better of for worse, I erased all of those fan-fics a few years ago: that's because, as I grew older, I began to become dissatisfied with the core content of my fan-fics and noticed that they had more flaws than good story-telling qualities overall. Nowadays, I think the main flaws of my stories were related to the fact that I rushed their writing too much: as a consequence of too much rushing, my stories had pretty sloppy and childish plots, the characters weren't developed properly throughout the stories and I couldn't bring myself to make an effort to describe vividly and accurately the environment of the settings of the stories. But, as of now, I feel more confident and at ease to write fan-fic stories once again, because I feel like I've matured more as an author over the past few years, and that's due to more experience acquired over what matters the most in a narrative, in a way that gives it more meaning and purpose than what I did years ago.

For now, that's everything I have to say. I hope you've all enjoyed reading the first chapter of this Amphibia fan-fic, and I am also hoping that I made you more curious to read the next few chapters, in order to find out who exactly the main protagonist is, what's his role in the story, what kind of relationship he might develop with Anne and the Plantars and how the story will unfold from now on. Thank you for your time. See you next chapter!