Cast Out (Book 1 Done; Book 2 In-Progress)

Chapter 1

USER REGISTERED: RAES BASTION.

'How'd it know my name?' I dismissed that thought after wondering for a moment. 'Doesn't matter anyway.'

WELCOME TO AWAKENING

I saw the words appear in my vision, and then dissolve into mist. Everything turned black.

....

I feel something hard against my face and open my eyes. Dirt. I just see a lot of dirt, earth and grass near me.

Everything is shrouded in mist.

I try to see things around me, but the mist is too thick. I can't even see my hand in front of my face, even though I know that it's right there.

'This is it? I can't believe this is the top VR game out there. Not very scenic, but I have to admit that it feels pretty real.'

The mist seeped into my clothes as I walked around, looking for something that was solid. The only thing I could actually feel was the ground under my feet, aside from the cold.

5 minutes later and I was still looking for a way out of this freaking mist!

The clothes I had on were already soaked from the mist that it trapped inside its fibers, my body was shivering, my teeth were clattering, and I think that I might have gotten hypothermia (again) if I hadn't seen blurred shapes in the distance. I probably should have been more cautious, but after wandering around literally being lost in a cloud, I saw something that wasn't mist and I ran towards it.

The ground flew past me as I sprinted towards the shapes in the distance. At first it was easy. I was back in top shape (or at least the best shape I'd ever been in), and sprinting long distances was nothing to me. I took deep breaths in through my nose and slowly exhaled out of my mouth, controlling my breathing so that it would be easier to keep the pace I had. Time flew by, just like the ground I'd covered. The things I'd seen in the distance had gotten somewhat closer, but it wasn't enough to make anyone excited about it. They'd gone from a blurry figure in the distance about the size of an ant, to something about the size of a cat.

My chest was already starting to burn with all the effort that it took to keep going. With nothing else around me that I could see, I knew that I couldn't stop. What was the point in stopping after I'd gotten this far? Sure, I didn't think that I had gotten a lot closer to whatever it was in the distance, but it's not like I had any other choice.

It was either keep running towards that thing in the distance, or stop now and still have to run towards it later on. 'I can't waste time in this game. This is just the first step towards getting back everything I lost.'

In the 6 months before the results of the contest had been announced, I'd thought over what exactly it was that I wanted to do with my life. If you'd have the Raes Bastion from when he was 17, he probably would've just laughed at you for even considering something like that. To him, every moment was supposed to be spontaneous. Even though he had a wife, even though he had a daughter on the way, nothing could've made him sit down and actually plan out the future. Not the long-term future anyway. If it was about what you wanted to do the following week, or the following month, he would've told you a bunch of events that he'd already planned to go, and many things to do. But asking him what he wanted to do with his life? Forget it. You were better off trying to asking a cat to explain to you what cold fusion was.

And the cat probably would've given you an answer faster too.

That Raes Bastion was still a kid. A kid playing a game at being an adult. Even though he had a wife and a baby on the way, he hadn't had that moment of clarity that a person has when they first start to mature.