JumpchainWriter
Yesterday at 8:10 PM
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#1
Chapter One:
"So what are your plans for the night?" Asks one of the two men, boys really, in a small college dorm room. He glances at his roommate and studies the unfortunately stereotypical-looking nerd.
The boy's roommate is a somewhat larger student who is dressed in clothes that are slightly too tight and do not flatter his already unappealing shape. He has thick glasses that even from a distance are clearly dirty, which hide gentle and vibrant green eyes, and is an unappealing, physically-speaking, figure.
"I don't know man. I'm thinking of going for a walk. I've only been to this campus twice before today and I want to familiarize myself with it before classes begin on Monday." The boy remarks, smiling. To his credit, the boy does have a nice smile, but only in a wholesome, "This person is very happy" sense, rather than in a sense that makes him seem attractive. He radiates a sort of passive happiness just being here, and there is something sincerely heartwarming about that.
His roommate studies him, a look of pity visible in the figure's eyes. Curiously enough this sense of pity does not come with the usual emotional implications of that emotion. Anthony quite likes his roommate, he just feels a pang of pity whenever he thinks about the figure's social life.
Aiden is not a popular sort. He has the energy of a kid who got bullied in high school but viewed college as an escape. Nonetheless he is not unlikeable, he just seems to be easy prey for bullies. There is something soft about him, an aura of timidity that permeates him. It's the sort of air that easily attracts the attention of bullies and makes him impossible for such characters to ignore.
"Well… If you do, I probably won't be here when you get back. I was invited to a party by an upperclassman I went to high school with." Anthony states, and Aiden nods and smiles at his roommate.
"That sounds awesome! I hope you have fun." Aiden remarks, grinning at his roommate. The two then converse for a short while before Aiden gets up, and walks out of the sparsely decorated and newly occupied dorm room. The excitable college freshman steps into a cramped hallway.
Numerous doors around his room are still open, and various other freshmen in the freshman-only dorm are working to move their personal belongings into the cramped dorm rooms they are renting. A muscular man, about two years the senior of the majority of the freshmen in the dorm is busily helping some of the underclassmen. Aiden looks at the man, watches the Resident Advisor hard at work, and feels a bit of pride. He likes the man, and he hopes to be like him someday.
Aiden quickly turns and walks out of the dorm. As soon as he steps outside he feels the cool, but not cold, almost autumn air hit him. The breeze feels good, and the boy decides to enjoy it. He has no plan for this walk, so he simply decides to go in the direction of the breeze, which for now leads him to walk outside of the dorm he is planning to spend the year in. The sun has recently set and the clear night's sky allows nature lovers to look up and spot stars. One star in particular is darting quickly across the night sky.
The dorm Aiden has just exited, Blendinburg Hall, is a small, rectangular building. It has three floors, and only the bottom floor is inhabited by men, with the top two floors being home to a gaggle of first-year women and their slightly older residential advisors. As Aiden strides down the length of the building he walks past various cars and even some of the inhabitants of the cars, the families of underclassmen who have come to help their children go off to college.
Aiden patiently makes his way down its length, and as he does so he looks at the buildings across the street. The buildings are all other dorms, none of which have the same stringent conditions to live in them as Blendinburg Hall. Other students watch the chaos outside of the freshman's dorm, many of whom have amused looks on their faces and some of whom have nostalgic expressions as they reminisce about their own time as freshmen.
When Aiden steps past the dorm he continues to walk down the sidewalk he's on. The sidewalk ends a short distance away from his current location and if he dares to walk deeper he will be setting foot on a trail that leads into a forest that surrounds the back half of the university. The adventurous student, normally a bit wary of the dark, decides tonight is the start of his new life and to exemplify that he should be brave and head into the forest.
As the boy walks towards the forest the star that has been distantly darting across the night's sky begins to zoom in ever closer, to the point that it quickly seems to blink out of existence, no longer visible in the skies above the university. The excited college student enters the forest at the same time that a small, flaming object enters the skies above the university.
The wooded area the boy steps into causes him not to notice when the flaming object streaks into the skies above the woods. Its supernatural nature causes the eyes of others at the university to gloss over it, even as it moves closer and closer to the woods where Aiden is currently working on becoming braver and bolder.
Aiden makes it partway into the woods, deep enough that when he turns around he can't see the university or anything other than the dense growth that surrounds him when the object streaks into and then out of the canopy of the trees. Aiden hears the soft sound the flying object makes as it finally comes close enough to him that he can see it and he audibly gasps. Supernatural glamors and ancient, metaphysical properties that should obscure unnatural, mystical, and eldritch things from the views of humans fail to affect Aiden as he becomes keenly aware of the odd object streaking through the air above the human.
It is a small object, and precisely what it is is unclear to Aiden since it is surrounded by an aura of heat so intense that it's like looking at a rocket reentering the atmosphere. The young man wonders how the object has not caught anything around it on fire even as it streaks closer and closer to him.
The excitable freshman visually tracks it as it sails past him and finally collides with a single tree. The object doesn't streak through the tree, instead it crashes into the tree and then falls to the forest floor, and Aiden moves toward it in the wake of the abrupt conclusion to its orbit.
It takes Aiden a minute to dart off the path that safely allows students and other woodland explorers to navigate the dense growth that surrounds the university. He has to leave the trail to get to the crash site of the object, and to his credit he is brave enough to do so with next to no hesitation, curiosity and adrenaline surging through him as he endeavors to understand what he has just seen.
Aiden is not yet in view to see the "Object" begin to stir when the strange thing begins to come to life. In its current form it is a tiny black cat, one that seems to have been beaten and bloodied sometime ago, and when Aiden darts out of the darkness created by the canopy and into a place where he can see the thing he almost fails to notice it. The cat's eyes, a strange and vibrant shade of blue, are the thing that gave away its location, and as soon as Aiden notices them he darts towards the beast, eager to try and inspect the cat.
The beast considers fending off the human as Aiden explores the woods and draws closer to the strange animal, but when it acts on the violent impulse it feels it is surprised to find that it lacks the strength needed to do so. The cat attempts to hoist a fallen branch into the air and finds the weight of the object too much to telekinetically manipulate which causes the wounded creature to begin to psychologically wrestle with the wounds it has very recently suffered. As it attempts to come to terms with this Aiden gets close enough to the wounded animal that he can reach out and touch it.
His large hands ungracefully dart through the darkness and he lightly strokes the cat's head even as he visually studies the creature. He does his best to make soothing sounds, and eventually, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his cellphone. A second later a beam of light illuminates the patch of woods where the two living beings are interacting. The cat hisses as the beam of light touches its shadowy fur, and Aiden makes a fearful noise when he finally sees the nasty wounds the cat is covered in.
The beast is covered in both scars and fresh wounds, a handful of which bleed a shadowy liquid. The fluid is clearly blood but it's also black and is pooling beneath the fallen animal contaminating the area the animal crashed into. The light is focused on the kitten-sized creature and the creature begins to experience a wave of fear as it feels what little lifeforce it has left beginning to fade.
Aiden wonders what to do and after a few seconds he tries to use his phone to search for the answer but it is too late for him to meaningfully help the poor animal. The creature begins to die in full and as it does Aiden scoops it up and places it in his lap. At this point the creature is too weak to fight back against this, and it silently accepts this attempt at kindness stoically. It weighs almost nothing, and Aiden decides this must be due to the wounds it is covered in. Its death is sudden and fairly painless, and when Aiden blinks he is surprised to feel the weight on his lap, however slight, vanish in the few milliseconds his eyes are shut.
The fallen beast's death is abrupt but its immediate effects are not visible. The energies that coursed through the creature seep into the compatible being the nearest to it, which just so happens to be Aiden. Esoteric energies, primeval abilities, and ancient, primordial instincts don't fade when the cat becomes a thing of the past, they instead form a dark wave that seeps into Aiden while his eyes are shut and when the corpse of the kitten-sized creature ceases to exist.
Unbeknownst to Aiden, he momentarily loses consciousness as his soul is touched and altered by these energies. His body is affected by the eerie and eldritch currents that once coursed through the cat just as powerfully as his soul is, his blood taking on new qualities and his muscles becoming supernaturally powered, even as the otherworldly energies mix and mingle with the various things that make Aiden the unusual character he has become in the eighteen short years he's been alive.
As Aiden fades in and out of consciousness the alien energies within him begin to adjust to the unique qualities he possesses that define him as a person. One minor manifestation of this chaotic and personalized process is the birth of an orb of darkness that forms in and from the strange college student's shadow, separates from it after a few seconds, and then begins to go from a floating orb of concentrated darkness to a strange, featureless silhouette just a touch taller than Aiden himself. It is akin to a mannequin made of shadows, and it turns its head in the direction of Aiden as he continues his evolution.
Deep within Aiden's soul, the transformative process he is undergoing begins to slow. The energies coursing through him begin to settle, and his body, now malleable and empowered in ways he doesn't understand, begins to enter a new sort of passive state.
He begins to open his eyes even as the blood that the supernatural cat bled begins to seep into the floor of the woods. The blood, now esoterically linked to the person who was with the cat when it died, begins to slowly corrupt the woods, transforming the wooded area into something new and something strange: the very first piece of a new monster's dominion.
Aiden's eyes slowly open as both his conscious and unconscious mind fill with new information. As the figure begins to awaken in full he feels a powerful connection form between him and the place he's in, a connection that grants him as much awareness of the area he's in as he now has of himself.
The patch of woods that surrounds the strange creature and extends as far as he could see before his unusual apotheosis has become more than mere woods. Aiden is aware of the changes that have occurred here, and before his very eyes, a trio of eerie gargoyle statues suddenly materialize and surround both him and the strange mannequin-like creature that he senses "looking" at him despite the thing's lack of identifying facial features.
"What the hell?" He asks as he studies his bizarre surroundings, even as he begins to process what he is seeing. Many changes have occurred to the strange student, but physically one of the first changes he is aware of is the fact that he can now see in the dark woods every bit as well as he can when he is on the beach in the middle of the day.
He picks up on every color and every detail of all of the things that surround him, even as things that he can't see that occur within the dominion are revealed to him as well. He knows of animals living atop trees that he isn't looking at, so long as the trees they are in are within the tight confines of the area he esoterically and conceptually now owns; his dominion.
Strange vocabulary and new definitions of familiar words fill the back of Aiden's mind. He is suddenly aware of terms and phrases like "Sanguinarchs" and "Dark Brides", and supernaturally knows new, relevant definitions for words that are familiar to him like "Essence" and "Foci".