Portals & Realms

Chapter 1 - Start Menu

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    The day had started out fine, which was one of the biggest mistakes the universe had ever made. K ran errands, cleaned the apartment up and boxed up more of her things, ready to move into her own house to start her job and her new life, and then she had the rest of the day to herself
    "Y'know what sounds fun? Going to our old highschool and exploring! All of our teachers are still there, and we can finally have enough evidence to now know their deepest darkest secrets. You guys should come explore the school at night with me, I bet there are so many changes now," Addi had said excitedly that day over a group call with the five of them, who had just wanted to all get together for coffee. K had pretended to be sick however, and mostly everyone believed her. It wasn't that she got sick often, but it was allergy season. And she also was not emotionally prepared to hang out with this chaos group yet.
     "No way. We'll get arrested," Pidge blatantly said, not skipping any facts. "I don't need getting arrested on my contract for my job. I'm sure that I'd lose it the second we got cuffs around our wrists."
    Kira sighed over the phone, "I remember that the highschool campus was never well guarded at night, it would be fairly easy to just go in and walk around. If anyone found us, we could just run."
    "I prefer sitting here eating my guacamole thank you very much," K rolled her eyes and ate another chip, putting the phone on speaker. She stood up and stretched her arms, swallowing the crumbs left in her mouth and gritting her teeth as her muscles stretched.
    "Look. We are adults now. When are we ever going to have any fun?" Addi asked, catching K off-guard. That's not something she expected her to ever bring up or say. It wasn't like Addi to speak in such a way, since she had almost always been the one to stay serious in times of development and adulthood. She focused well on her job, and definitely had the money to buy what she wanted while still living well. Why would she want to throw that away?
    Perri put the phone down on her table and grabbed a bag from her couch in her apartment, which was only a few down from Addi's. K actually could afford a decently sized one with plenty of room for guests and herself, and shared it with Anh, who was out right now. Pidge lived in the same building that Perri and Addi were also living in, and Kira and K lived in different ones. K was closer to the school campus, which was also in turn, closer to the medical school close by that Anh was finishing her years at. Kira went to the campus that Perri, Addi and Pidge went to, but in a different dorm complex. K was the only one out of school completely, since she got to skip a year in highschool. Perri cleared her throat, "look. I'm going. If you guys don't want to find all the cool secrets, that's fine."
    K groaned and sat up, eating one last scoop of her homemade guacamole and putting on the lid. "Fine fine fine. If y'all are going I guess I can too. I just have a really uneasy feeling that something bad might happen." She opened the fridge and stuffed back in her food, making a mental note to go out and get more groceries when they got back, and then to prepare all of her furniture for the house she was moving into since she had the money, and she was going to have it open to share with friends if they were in town or needed somewhere to stay.
    Listen nothing bad is going to happen!" Pidge spoke, "this will be the smoothest thing we've ever done, I swear it!"
    And that's when everything bad happened.
Before that suggestion and that day, no one in the group had ever thought that they would be sneaking through the hallways of their school. No one thought that they would be looking for secrets, let alone ones that their teachers and other peers possibly possessed. No one expected what fate had in store for them that one night, where the full moon was haunting them from outside the walls. No one had a clue about what was going to happen that one faithful, or faithless, night.
    Kira angled her flashlight directly onto the wall opposite of them, hand drawn pictures were cluttered all over it. The majority of the images looked as if they were colored in with care and neatly crafted, while others looked rushed and unfinished. They were of all different species of animals, for some looked more like elephants, while others looked like sea turtles and octopuses. She took her flashlight away from the wall and angled it on the floor in front of them.
    "So, what are you hoping to find Addi?" Pidge asked the girl in front of her, who was the only one who didn't currently possess a flashlight. Pidge had her flashlight on the doors they passed, making sure to catch any movements of people that may be approaching from behind, or ahead, of the group.
    "Secrets I guess? Maybe secret files, or something that they don't want us to find. Oh! A dead body would be pretty nifty," Addi shrugged and stopped in front of their old science teachers door. She read the plaque to make sure it was the right place, and grabbed the key to unlock it.
    "If we find a dead body I'm going to throw up."
    "Nah you won't, cause we won't let you see it," Pidge remarked to K, "say Kira, what if we go into the other building and find that one teacher's python? It was a baby when we visited two years ago, I bet it's GIANT now."
    "Now that's a terrible idea! You know I'm jittery around snakes."
    K shrugged and stifled a laugh as Addi continued to fumble with the keychain or various keys to different rooms that she had taken out of the front office, "which I personally don't understand, reptiles and snakes are super nifty creatures."
    "Easy for someone to say who will probably be a dragon later in life if god so wills it," Kira mumbled and got a light punch in the shoulder from Perri. Pidge whispered at them to be quiet and walked by Addi, holding the keys in her hand instead. She mumbled something to her friend, and then looked around with her flashlight.
    K turned away from the group and looked down the hallway and past the culinary room, but something unusual caught her eye. The bathroom door to the girls bathroom seemed to be propped open by a wooden doorstop, a small light coming out. Did someone leave a phone here? Is there now lights in there? I don't remember lights. Then again, it's been years since I've been here. Am I old? Is my memory fading? "Hey guys?"
    "Hm?" Perri answered and looked her way.
    "Why don't we search the bathroom as well?" She suggested and directed her flashlight on the ground near the door. "I don't recall lights being in there. If something suspicious has been left in there and Addi wants to find all that she can, I suggest we split up anyways and you guys search that room and then go out the back to the other building. We can have two search parties."
    Kira shrugged and looked back to Addi and Perri. "Why not? Double the search, double the secrets, double the possibilities." She walked over to K and looked near the bathroom, her eyes squinted slightly.
    Pidge let a quiet laugh out and looked at the two with an amused stare. "Fine then, but don't get kidnapped!" She said as Addi finally got the stupid door unlocked and it swung open without any noise, showing off the dark corridor before them. Addi and Perri walked in first without hesitation, but Pidge stayed still.
    K smiled back at her with a reassuring grin. "Kira and I will be ok, trust me. Go on, and tell us what you find! And if we do get arrested, we can always blame it on Addi."
Pidge did so and walked in, closing the door behind them to cover their tracks and ultimately left the two girls alone. Outside. In the hall. And in the open. K and Kira both then made their way into the bathroom, flicking on the lights as they walked in to be able to see. The odd glowing seemingly... disappeared. "God, do they ever clean this place?" Kira asked with a nervous laugh and looked around.
The same dang puddle in front of one of the girls stalls was still there, as it possibly could have been since they attended the school. The walls were seemingly the only clean part of the bathroom, the white and green tiles had no visible prints of spots on them that seemed completely out of the ordinary. The stall doors were all open and clean, no graffiti visible on any of the stall doors or dividers. There was one thing though that had been bugging every girl that ever went into this restroom, and it was the rickety panel at the back of one of the stalls. It was a metal vent it seemed, but it always shook in a way that some came to think of it as possessed. And now, from the other side of said vent, the weird glowing light was shining through, faintly now.
The two couldn't have asked for a better starting point for their "investigation".
"Mind helping me take off this vent cover thing?" Kira asked K as she went into the stall and began "tearing" at the divider. K laughed and grabbed the back of it, helping her yank it out of its hinges and screws. It struggled to hold on, but it also struggled to break free. With a mighty, and frankly quite loud CRACK, it came undone and crashed onto the floor and at their feet.
The two looked at each other with satisfied grins and then looked at the entrance they had ultimately made. There seemed to be something bright on the other side of the wall, like a hidden room...or shrine of some sorts.
"Ladies first," Kira offered K as the entrance looked before them. She opened her mouth to object, but ultimately knew the depths of that statement, and decided against it.
She hefted herself up and through the narrow space, cat crawling through to the other side of the small tunnel. The two quickly made it to the other side, the vent being as short as can be. To successfully get out of the tunnel, K leaned down to the cold floor on the other side of the vent and slowly scooted her way out in an army crawl. She dropped her feet to the floor below with a thud and stood up, ready to help Kira. He took the help and grabbed K's hands, which were grey with dust, and snaked her way out as well. She did the final maneuver and put Kira on the ground as well.
Before them was a glowing red orb, or was it now blue? The weird mystical ball of light seemed to be in an organized rotation of colors on the wheel and spectrum that they could see. K and Kira took a few steps back, but they weren't backed up against the wall just yet. The space they were in was at least five feet by five feet, the small square like room made the two feel claustrophobic.
K looked at it though in thought for a moment before her eyes widened in realization. She looked at her palm as if the answer was written in permanent pen, but saw nothing. At least, that is what it looked like in Kira's perspective. In reality, there was a small flickering flame, similar to a candle flame.
    "Ah- What the!" K exclaimed, swatting her hand and wincing as she smacked it against the wall, hard. "Get it off!"
    Kira raised his eyebrow and looked at K's hand, "Uh... nothing is there? Did you think there was a bug on there?"
    "You... don't see the fire? The bright yellow fire on my hand?"
    "Um... no. I don't. Does it hurt?"
    "No but-! There is fire on my hand and it's saying something in a deep voice," K nervously shut up as the deep, raspy voice radiated from the flames in her hand. She could barely make out what it was saying, since the pitch changed from low to high. "They will... I have... No... It won't happen... Vesuvia, laughable... wait!" She paused and looked at Kira, who had a skeptical expression. "Vesuvia! This leads there!"
    "And you really trust an invisible talking flame to tell you where this strange glowing ball of light leads?" Kira turned to it and shrugged, "eh, this definitely isn't the weirdest thing I could've expected. I mean, there could've been a dead body, and that wouldn't have been ideal."
    K rolled her eyes and tried to listen to the voices, but the flame blew out, like someone pinched their fingers on a candle flame to extinguish it. I trust you, weird glowing ball of light. "This is going to sound insane, but I say we go to Vesuvia for answers as to what's happening."
    "Mount Vesuvius? Isn't that in Italy? I don't think-"
    "No, not there for clues. Vesuvia... wait a minute.." Vesuvia is a fictional town. That's from a game! Does that mean- oh god I'm definitely not emotionally prepared for this. Are they self aware? What if they aren't! Oh god I don't want to hijack any storylines. "Kira. Vesuvia is a fictional world. That means..."
    "Oh dear lord, we are going to go infiltrate a fictional world. Fantastic," He put his hands on his knees and groaned, but the orb didn't move. Nor disappear.     "K, tell me, what do you know about Ves... Vesuvia was it? How will we get back home?"
    "Well from all my time playing Kingdom Hearts, and by all that time I mean probably a hundred hours for the three main games in total, it probably is a waypoint? I mean, if there is one on our end, there is a possibility for there to be one on their end too. I don't understand how this is even possible!"
    "One thing is for sure, we cannot let anyone else know about this. If word gets out, I think the world will either collapse in one itself with the introduction of waypoints and fictional worlds becoming real, or will not care," Kira pointed a finger at the orb and looked back at her, narrowing his eyes, "I still don't trust the situation. It makes me uncomfortable. What if it's a trap."
    "Hey, we may just be adults with crippling anxiety, but we can fend off whatever comes our way. Even a big scary demon named Lucio if that is how the story goes."
    "Oh great, demonic forces, just what I needed while being in crippling debt."
    "Kira, you are literally this close to paying off your student loans," K sarcastically spat and sighed again, getting goosebumps on her arms, "Look, are we going in or not? This could be the adventure of our lives! And also maybe terrifying, but when will anyone else get to say 'I got to travel to a fictional world and vibe'? No one!"
    Kira smiled and nodded, locking hands with K, stared death in the face and walked forward, a glowing light holding him close and enveloping him into nothingness. K looked around as the light covered her eyes and she heard the voices, this time louder.
    "They have grown so much, yet you wish for them to be harmed?" The low voice said, confused.
    "They are strong, and they will follow my path," The higher pitched voice yelled back.
    Everything went dark.
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And so it begins. What will happen to them?