//------------------------------// // Chapter 4: Journey, Part 1 // Story: Chronicles of an Unknown World - The Awakening // by Blue Blaze {COMET} //------------------------------// -CHAPTER 4: JOURNEY- {*First-Person View, Main Character*} Have you ever wished for adventure? What a stupid question to ask, of course you have! I would be very surprised if you haven’t before. I know that I wish for adventure. In fact, I dream of it! If I could just get one glimpse of a radiant overgrown jungle, parachuting my way down into the thick foliage, then I think that my life would be complete. Heck, the adventure I want doesn’t even have to take place in the jungle, it could take place anywhere! The frozen tundra, the depths of the ocean, the intense heat of a volcano; it doesn’t matter. What does matter is whether or not I will actually get my wish granted. Aw, who am I kidding? Reality does not allow dreams to come true that easily! It’s not every day that one gets to ride a horse through the Wild West, or take a submarine down to the crevices of the Earth! No, in fact, it never happens unless you’re either crazy or you specialize in some kind of field that give you permission to do that kind of stuff! So if you don’t have that kind of privileges or if you’re not even OLD enough to partake in any adventures, then you’re just plain out of luck, just like I am! I sit here on an early Monday morning, waiting for the school bell to ring so I can begin my miserably normal day! I’ve been repeating the same process over and over for the past 8 years: wake up, go to school, study, get praised unnecessarily for my work, go home, do homework, go to bed and wake up the next morning just to do it all over again! It’s blasphemy I tell you, BLASPHEMY! Why can’t they just let us teens go and do our own thing? We don’t need to know how to calculate the side lengths of a triangle to survive in the outside world! No! We need to learn how to get jobs and follow our dreams! But will school let us do that? No! Will I ever get to follow MY dreams anytime soon? NO! For the next five years of my life I’m going to have to repeat the same process almost every day, except each additional year getting harder and harder! It’s just so unfair! I sighed out loud, slamming my forehead into my desk. For the past month or so I have been doing this and my teacher and my fellow classmates have stopped fretting about the well being of my skull. I groaned inside my head, knowing that making notices that everyone can hear will not help my predicament. I grasp my blue Five-Star binder and drag it towards my head. At this point I’m just waiting for my day to start. There’s nothing interesting for me to do in the meantime. All my friends are in other classes, I’m done all my homework so I can’t work on it while I’m waiting and they don’t allow IPods in class! What a load of bull. Raising my head just enough to take a look around, I observe what has been my homeroom for the past eight months: white walls with a white floor with brown desks and a shiny backboard so the teacher’s annoying squeaking marker can scribble her chicken scratch for all to see. Nothing in this room is worth mentioning except for the fake motivational posters that are plaster against one side of the wall, adorning messages such as ‘learning builds character’ and ‘class is in session, turn your brain on’. After reading them for the um-teenth time, their value of creating some variety in the class wears off. At this point in time almost everyone has arrived and taken their seats except for those few that either skip homeroom or skip school all together. My peers are either chatting, reading, stressfully doing some last minute homework or are creating some kind of trouble. Since I sit at the back of my class, I more or less get a clear view of everyone else. I can see the four girls in the right front of the class chatting away at some thing or another. At the other corner I could see a group of boys that were mischievously switching spots without the teacher noticing so they could talk to each other in class. Everyone else was doing something in between the lines of acting foolishly and acting responsibly. I sighed again. I see no point in going to school at all. Well, maybe I’m stretching my feelings for education a little bit, but still! I learn more by watching TV and hanging around the internet that by sitting in a desk all day while listening to some grumpy scrawny adult at the front of the class mentor to everyone how to make a good poem (and I hate poems!) or how to add two and two together or how the reproductive system works (thanks science class! Now I know more about penises than I have ever wanted!). Of course, I could just not go, but my parents are expecting me to cope with the crap and just do it like they had to when they were teenagers. Also graduating high school will look good on my resume, but that’s a totally different perspective. A loud obnoxious beeping sound rings over the PA system. Finally, the day has begun! Now I can stop waiting for something to actually happen! “Good morning River Bell High School!” the office secretary chirped over the poor microphone quality of the PA system. “Today is Wednesday, June first, s day two. Please rise for your national anthem.” There were disruptive screeching sounds all over the room, signaling that people had scrapped their chairs across the floor to stand up. Some people I noted were late to stand up. Whatever, it’s not like it matters that much. “Um… Griff? Aren’t you going to stand?” one of my peers to the left of me poked me in the shoulder. I think his name was Jake. I think. But anyways, I thought I have already stood up! I guess not, seeing as my line of sight just connected to a bunch of butts. Normally I subconsciously stand up, but this time I guess not. Well, maybe this time I actually have to make a conscious effort on something. I willed myself to get up. I told my legs, “Get going and stand up!” I asked my back to straighten and I tried to open my eyes more to look less sleepy. It didn’t happen. Wait, what? Let me try again… Legs stand up, back don’t slouch, eyes awaken and get the frick up… Nope, nothing. My point of view hadn’t changed from my desktop. Why? Why couldn’t I stand up? Now that I thought about it, my limbs adorned a numb sensation to them. I really couldn’t feel the surface of the desk with my hands, nor could I move my hands anyways. My arms wouldn’t respond, my neck wouldn’t respond, nothing on my body worked when I told it to! It was like my muscles had just gone up and dies all of the sudden! I couldn’t even move my eyes! What the heck was going on here? I just lost all feeling and control of everything in my body? What the heck? WHAT THE HECK? Ok, hit the panic button brain, ‘cause shit just hit the fan! Can I talk? Can I communicate still so I can get assistance? Nope, my mouth wouldn’t move! My shoulder was suddenly moving a bit. I could hear Jake say something, but apparently my ears were failing as well. It was like he was talking from underwater or something!... Or maybe it was just my brain shutting down all capabilities, including speech recognition. I completely lost any sense of balance and couldn’t figure out where gravity was pulling me. Of course I knew that it was pulling me downwards, but without any feeling from my nerves it was difficult to tell exactly which direction it was pulling me. I felt as if my mind had completely disconnected from the rest of my body! My vision was suddenly changing. It was slowing moving downwards at an angle. Oh no. Oh no no no no! Was I sliding off my seat? My vision continued down. Yes, I am sliding off my seat! Holy Jesus, I still can’t move my limbs! Someone, anyone, help me! I heard voices off in the distance, but like I said, it was difficult hearing anything. I could see a few heads turning around to see what was going on behind them. Finally, my point of view dropped rapidly as my body collapsed off of the seat of my desk. Crack. I heard a crack, then bounced a small amount before settling on the ground. Oh my god. What that my skull? Did my skull just crack? Did it break? Oh god, I hope not. What the heck is going on here? WHAT’S HAPPENING??? The edges of my sight were slowly turning dark. Oh great, now I’m blacking out. I could see kids jumping out of their standing spots to rush over to my location. I could also just barely make out the face of Jack trying to say something to me. Key word being ‘I think’, because his blurry lips were moving but no sound was coming out. There was definitely a sense of urgency in the classroom. Now, I could barely make out the outlines of other teens running and causing a commotion over my sudden fainting. Although maybe I wasn’t fainting. I wouldn’t know, seeing as I have never fainted once before in my life. Maybe I was dying. Was I dying? Is this what dying feels like? Slowly losing smell, hearing and feeling while you black out? Speaking of blacking out, there was only a sliver of clear vision left in my, well, vision. Everything else was covered with a black, murky area. Oh crap crap crap crap! Stop blacking out, Griffin, stop blacking out! You need to get out of this stupor and back into action! No no no no, go back! Go back so that you can fix this and get back to normal! Why is this happening? WHY IS THIS HAPPENING??? Darkness overtook me.