章 1: Awake, Where The Hell Am I?

- ORIS, OUTSKIRTS -

Darrel suddenly jerked awake and then squirmed on the ground as the feeling of pain jolted through his abdomen like an alien parasite, he carelessly clutched his chest and shoulders as he tried to endure the pain.

This went on for a few minutes before the excruciating feeling began to subside, he did not know how long it had been since it started, but he felt relieved when it was over.

"Gah! What the hell was that?" He exclaimed as he examined his upper body, the feeling was so surreal that he immediately sat up to examine his chest.

"Oooh fuuuuudge!"

Seeing that his abdomen was still intact Darrel screamed several more exotic curse words towards the sky before pausing to calm himself from the horrible experience, and as he smiled with glee he started to notice the peculiar surroundings.

Darrel tried to get up to his feet abruptly, but the pain had made him wearily so he laggard until he was standing up straight, and as he looked at the area around him his expression shifted from barely sane, to a more twisted and confused face when his gaze finally glued itself to the looming peak that nearly blotted out the light of the sun from across the land beneath it.

The last thing that Darrel recalled was taking a nap on his couch at home, he had not expected anything odd to occur as he quietly slept off his daily fatigue.

Now in what felt like moments later, Darrel had found himself sleeping right beneath this very tall mountain. When Darrel looked around he noticed a huge crater, and he was standing in its center as though he had fallen out of the sky like a meteorite from space.

"I don't know what the heck happened here, but I know there is something off about this place."

Darrel murmured to himself and at the same time, he felt a strange feeling in his gut telling him to leave the area.

"It can't be..."

Darrel eyed the crater as he scaled the pile of dirt around it, but to keep himself from any more 'phenomena' Darrel decided to listen to his gut and leave the area. Darrel knew he had to look for assistance, but with no sign of civilization in sight, he had no way of knowing which way to go.

"Did I just fall from the sky?"

While standing atop a berm next to the crater, Darrel looked across the landscape and all he could see were dusty plains, rugged hills, and an extremely tall mountain that seemed to ascend beyond the clouds overshadowing the land beneath it.

Walking was his only option, he could not risk exhausting himself by running like a madman in the heat. Darrel eyed his clothes and noted how they had suffered some damage from his supposed fall from the sky, and wondered if his crash site may have harbored some supplies.

"Or something close to useful..."

Darrel walked back to the crater and stood at the edge as he examined its entirety, the first thing that he noticed was an array of strange symbols that had been carved around the crater's edge.

"I have never seen a chisel do that."

Darrel noted that the indents were tracked with cinders as though the symbol's inscriptions had been charred into the ground using heat, but the accuracy of the writing meant this was no ordinary tool that made the symbols.

"Magic perhaps...?"

Darrel wondered as he took a closer look, he also noticed that the symbols had an odd similarity to those he saw in some books and a few role-playing video games.

"Games yes, but where else have I seen these before?"

Strangely enough, Darrel recalled what these 'Video Games' were, but he could not put his finger on which 'Games' he had seen the symbols in. When he thought hard about it, he began to hear sparkling noises in his ears as though electric cables were constantly colliding.

"These symbols do look like…" Darrel thought even harder until the words were dragged out of his mind. "Magic sigils!"

He sputtered after digging hard, this was exactly what had been gnawing at his mind. Darrel recalled how in most role-playing games he had played, symbols of power were the cause of that virtual world's disasters and the basis of magic-based combat.

Even characters that were not magic-oriented could use magic sigils for other purposes, be it healing, protection, at times teleportation.

This was quite the revelation on his part, as he reached out to push the dirt covering up a part of the symbols. Darrel suddenly heard the sparks in his ears again, but this time it felt like a circuit had been connected and no repercussions ensued.

Darrel felt like a piece of himself had been restored to his being and this happened immediately after he touched the magic sigil. He even noticed fragments of memories he had been unable to recall earlier all coming back to him like a stream.

"Wait a minute..."

Darrel started to fiddle about with the clues he had recently come across together with the fragments of his memories.

"How can magic sigils appear in the real world when they were originally from video games?"

The word initially felt odd to him, and it took Darrel a moment as the word tumbled around in his head before he rephrased his conclusion.

"The real world… No. My original world had historical evidence of magic. Texts and symbols have been dug up over the centuries, and even in the modern times I was living in, many people have witnessed magic happening in plain sight."

Darrel pictured all the strange events and recorded experiences that he had heard and read about in articles.

"So magic could not have originally been from video games, the virtual worlds merely made it easy for the magic to occur. So in actual reality, this place can not be a game of any sort..." Darrel grinned forcefully. "The real question outta be. Where the hell am I?"