Prometheus: Harbinger of Conflagration (Shatterpoint part 1)

Chapter 1

 My heartbeat pounds through my head as my bare feet race along the cobbled streets. With every step I take, pain shoots through my body from all the injuries I've endured the past few days. It's hard to breathe as the thick smoke of burning wood and flesh fills my lungs.

'My name's Alex Mercke. It's 1666. I'm from Gideon, U.S.A, more than three hundred years from now. London is burning,' I think to myself, 'and it's all my fault.'

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It started out like a weird fever dream. I woke up Sunday morning with a splitting headache in some back alley, and I didn't know where I was. I didn't recognize any of the buildings and they seemed to be mostly made of wood. I stepped out of the alley and saw nothing around but wooden buildings looming over the streets. I looked around for clues as to where (or who) I was, and the cacophony of cockney accents gave me my answer.

"London...?" I said to myself, trailing off.

The lack of a cockney accent in my voice alerted me to the fact that I was not British. I wandered around for a while and found a newspaper of sorts. I found a thing called the 'London Gazette,' saying the year was 1666, the month of September. The cacophony of voices finally got to the headache, so I ducked back into the alley and decided to try and sleep. Hopefully the headache or London itself would be gone when I woke up.

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I woke up when nightfall came, my body starting to cramp from hunger. Unfortunately, I was still in London, and the headache had developed into a fever. Creeping out of the alley, I began strolling the quieting streets trying to find some food or drink that either wasn't rotten or contaminated so that I wouldn't starve to death or burn up. I eventually wound up on a street called Pudding Lane, in front of a store called 'Farriner's Bake Shoppe'. At that point the fever inside me was raging and I felt like I was going to explode. After trying the door and finding it locked, I broke a window and snuck inside.

After gorging my face on some day-old pies and other baked goods, I started to get up, but was tackled to the ground by a burly man who began to assault me- who I assumed to be Mr. Farriner himself, who must have woke up when I broke inside.

"Mr. Farriner, please, wai-", I started to try and talk my way out of it, but Mr. Farriner swung at me before I could finish.

"This is mah store, and ye dare come in here to steal mah food?!" he cried, "Ah make this with mah son in order to provide for mah family, not for some foreign knave such as ye to come in an' eat it all!"

I dodged blows back and forth and tried to put up my hands in self-defense. He swung again and struck my face, knocked me down. As I hit the floor, the fever broke. Not broke as in went away, mind you, but broke as in broke out of me. Searing hot flames exploded from my body as though they were escaping back to Hell, and the interior of the shoppe caught fire almost as quickly.

"Bloody hell!" cried Farriner as he stumbled away from me, "yer spawn of the Devil himself! Begone from my shoppe at once!"

Not looking for a reason to stick around I fled, stumbling out of the window. Looking back, I saw Farriner rushing up the stairs as the flames roared and caught on nearly every surface. The flames continued to wreath my hands, so I decided to try and shake them off. To my horror, the fire engulfing my hands did not only not go out, but large bursts of flame flew from them into buildings as I ran by.

Deciding not to look at the destruction I was causing, I put my head down and sprinted even faster. That proved to be an unfortunate mistake as I ran straight first into a pushcart and blacked out as my head hit the cobblestones.