Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was still raining as Tokio left the cyber-cafe, he only had to take a small step outside before he was suddenly drenched. Tokio hated global warming. Still, he wasn't going to let a bit of rain mess with him. He'd spent most of the day in the cyber-cafe, and the sky was turning even darker now with the clouds still unflinchingly poised overhead.

His whole day had been slow, so he felt like keeping up with it's pace by walking to the trafic lights to cross back to his appartment building. His laptop was still in its protective bag, but Tokio knew that he had to get out of the rain soon, or the water would eventually seep into it, and he didn't want it to be damaged, as he'd only just got it.

As he waited for the light to change, he wiped the raindrops out of his eyes, trying to make out the "Walk" from the "Don't walk" sign across from him. It sure was taking a long time for the light to change. He looked across the street, and noticed that the opposite sign was finally flashing, it wouldn't be long now.

Above him, the light from the digital world began its decent, like a bolt of lightning from the sky. The traffic light changed, and within the step that Tokio took away from the sidewalk, instead of him stepping onto wet pavement, his foot landed on the streets of the primary village.

Tokio's first clue that he wasn't in Japan anymore was that the sun was blinding him, and it was no longer raining. He had a instant reaction to sheild his eyes. After doing so, Tokio was hit with his second clue, and that was the sudden husstle and bustle of what he could only describe as being monsters. He'd played enough videogames to only be able to classify them as such.

"What the...?!" he exclaimed as he stared at the his strange new surroundings.

Was he going crazy, or was this just some sort of weird version of the afterlife? He'd seen a weird beam of light envelop him, lightning perhaps? Well, if he was dead, and these monsters were really demonic spirits, then there was only one way to test that theory. Tokio reached his hand to the side of his face and gave it a good whack.

It hurt. Alot. He wasn't dead. However, the question of his sanity now played in his mind as he wondered why the heck he had hit himself so hard.

He was about to take a step forward in this new world, when he suddenly looked down and found a strange beeping device at his feet. The beeping sounded real, and it even felt and looked real. That was three out of his five senses, and he wasn't about to taste or smell it. The world was now real enough for him, and it was way cool. When his parents moved, they wanted to get a fresh start, and now there was a whole new world for him to live in. Was he worried? Not really. He figured that if there was a way to get here, there had to be some way back. Tokio beamed, as he peered at his newly found device, and he began to walk forward in this new world that he'd discovered.

The device showed a strange picture of an egg, as it beeped. Something told him that it'd probably be in his best intrest to first, figure out what that meant.

Spelke scowled irrately. Oh, he'd been good at the trailfinding all right, an absolute star. In fact, he was such a star that he even had a glowing aura about him...an aura of dust! As a small and nerdy middle-schooler, Spelke did not often need to account for social errors, and had thus absolutely failed to consider jealousy. He knew that his cabin-mates already disliked him with a passion and liked nothing better than to tease him. Why should today have been any different? So what if he was the only one who could make head or tails of the instructions (having been the only one in his squad to have taken advanced math)? They had just run off to break trail and get lost on their own, leaving Spelke sitting in the middle of his very own miniature dust-devil with the map, a makeshift compass (the pencil and pointy thing kind), and a rock with a dot on it that was supposed to point north.

Spelke's eyes snapped open when his puzzle clock began to emit an irritatingly loud and high pitched noise. Military Camp had been an absolute horror, and Spelke largely considered it to be a wasted two weeks of his life. Great! and now he was even having nightmares about it. Well, they weren't 'nightmares' per say, because they weren't particularly scary, but it was still a waste of REM time when he could be dreaming about puzzles and maths and the huge black and white expanse of squares that usually appeared behind his closed eyelids. Yawning, he snatched the puzzle clock off his table, pressed the snooze button to stop the alarm, and began to solve it.

Today was Saturday, which was the household cleaning day. By the time he was finally allowed out the door, Spelke reeked of windex and had already rescued three of his beloved game pieces from the vacum. He was also late. Very late. So late, that if he didn't catch the 391 Bus that was already waiting at the corner he was going to miss the game and lose by forfeit!

Spelke never caught that bus. One moment he was racing along the sidewalk as fast as his spindly legs could carry him and the next he was tripping over a small rock and crashing headfirst into the forest floor. "Aww explitive!" he muttered to himself. Now he was hallucinating about his horrible experiance at camp too. He got up and strode purposefully up to a tree. Spelke stared hard at the cracked surface of the bark, willing it to turn into a lightpost or some other recognizable object. When that didn't work, he backed up to try staring at it from a different angle and tripped over a root, landing right on top of some funny electronic gadget with a blinking blob on the screen. Ah hah! Some sort of handheld children's game! Here was proof that he was hallucinating, and was in reality still at the bus stop! He might make it to his match after all.

Spelke pocketed the digivice and wandered a bit more, keeping an eye out for large moving objects and hoping that he wasn't about to step right off the curb and into the street. Well, if he stuck near the trees (and they had to be lamposts, right?), he was sure to be on the sidewalk, but it also meant that he was probably about to run smack into a building. Well, maybe that wasn't such a bad idea. The jolt might clear his head a bit. Spelke marched purposefully up to a tree and smacked his forhead against it. Nothing changed. Scowling, he hit harder and recoiled clutching at his forhead. "Oww!" he whined, rubbing away the bits of loose bark from what was sure to be a red mark by now. Okay, that hadn't worked at all. Unwilling to try it again, Spelke settled on the next best solution. He was probably already late, so all that was left to do was wait until it went away. Thus resigned, he settled himself against the base of a tree and pulled out the digivice he found earlier, examining it carefully and prodding at the buttons.