Story introduction exercise. (Multiple story introductions written to multiple songs in a playlist)
An open door. A path untouched. A way unopened.
I aim to traverse them all, the places that are untouched, and my goal is to see the world. I have no possessions or belongings other than my sense of wellbeing and the clothes on my back. I believe that there are places in the world where no one has gone, and I mean to find and see them all.
The rushing wind ruffles a man's clothes as he falls through thin air. The cliff-face rushes past and there is nothing that can break his fall. Farther and farther, faster, and faster, the man plummets towards the crystal strew ground below.
Lines of blue light line the walls shaped like circuits. The ground is plainly black and made of a smooth material. A woman stands on the edge of a chasm with the blue light circuit lines running down the face of the chasm. Sharp geometric shapes make up the environment around here, covered in organized blue lines.
Amidst stone pillars and broken cobblestones stands a man by the sea. He is amongst the ruins of a lost race, perched on a high cliff amidst grass and trees that grew out of the cluster of pillars arranged in a circular pattern. He looks to the sea and the sunset for answers, answers to questions that have no answers. Wind lightly pulls on his jacket, which is light-brown, and zipped up to his chin, and he grips his arms.
"There must be a place where I can learn to understand what I see."
A room filled with beakers and twisting and curving blown glass tubes is lit with a strange green and orange light. There are bubbling test tubes of strangely colored fluids along one wall.
A volcano overlooks a vast plateau of twisted stone and glass. Colorful gasses erupt from cracks in the stone and jutting spires of crystal dot the landscape. Lava pours down the side of the volcano and spread out across the landscape in a wave of heat, destruction, rebirth, and eventually the resurgence of life. Black birds circled the rim of the volcano...
Sleek, angular, metal-flying-devices swoop down over an icy landscape dotted with lava vents and waterfalls and rivers. There is a persistent cloud of steam that glows orange that hangs over the environment. The flying machines separate into shards of metals and fold away from the humans that are within them.
People look up to the stars. They see whatever they want. As with clouds, the stars take the likeness of a great many things from the people's lives. They see a shooting star.
A man hangs from an overhead metal rail and slides down with the aid of a hook-like device attached to it. He flies by futuristic skyscrapers that float thousands of feet above the ground. The structures are lit with thousands of colorful screens displaying advertisements and flying cars that zip by in a blur. The man drops from the rail into a flying car after the driver signals him from a distance. They fly off towards an imposing structure in the center of the city. The buildings began to take on a jagged look, like spikes of rock, shards of glass, or ice farther towards the central structure.
A boy jumps joyfully beside his sister on the back of a large doglike creature. It bounds and leaps through a forest past burbling streams and softly swaying trees of turquoise and purple. Strange exotic plants with bulbous tips float around them and swirl lightly in the breeze as the Dog creature leaps past. The creature bounds and leaps between platforms of floating rock and descends beside a waterfall to the floor of a valley.
Floating stones rush through the upper atmosphere of the planet. The outer layers of rock slough off and the beautiful crystalline interiors are gradually revealed. The crystals descend and inside, graceful beings are revealed. As the crystal breaks away from them, they tumble through the air like dancers and twist and spiral like gymnasts. As they near the ground they slow down and gracefully tumble to a soft landing on their feet.
Mountains fold up from the ground into the shapes of flowers while the lakes and water of the planet spirals upwards and forms angular sheets of ice that tumble past each other in a graceful twirl. The creatures of the planet fly upward, spin, congeal, and morph into a great aquatic creature that possesses the enthusiasm and grace of a dolphin and the power of a whale.
A boy runs along a narrow metal beam and tumbles onto a rooftop. He runs past a crane and jumps from one rooftop onto a narrow cable and slides down towards a massive floating structure. As he nears the structure, he sees some guards walking towards his landing zone. He jumps and flips and lands in a heap near a couple of the guards that are patrolling the platform of the floating structure. He takes them down with a sweep of one leg and jumps and punches another who is running up to him. He rolls between the guard's legs and leaps up the side of a box onto its top and crawls onto an elevated catwalk. He spots and quickly runs up to it. He grabs the jetpack suit and puts it on. The insectile wings extend straight up and out, directly out of two lumps on the back of the suit, and he flies away.
A man lays dead. He is marred not by knife wounds or bullet holes, but the emotional scars of his past. He sits silently on the cold concrete ground, nary moving a muscle nor blinking his eyes. His blank stare gazes towards the heavens and looks at no one thing. Everything is caught in his sightless eyes. The stars, the clouds, skyscrapers. He even sees a dragon flying low beneath the clouds, unable to discern truth from fiction, as he has no thoughts of his own to think. He is pale and cold, and can speak no words. He was most certainly dead. The dragon that was reflected in the man's eyes swept down out of the skies, a lanky teenage boy with black hair astride its back. The teen's face was contorted into an intense look of fear and worry. The boy leapt to the ground to see the dead man for himself. Ryan knelt beside the dead man and looked into his empty eyes for only a moment before he swept the man's eyelids shut with a curt and fluid gesture.
"Another one. I guess they're not taking any new members anymore."
"Then we really need to hurry. That means they've probably found what they've been looking for."
Ryan then looked up at Aden with a knowing look and asked, "Will you help me do it again?"
Aden nodded and reached down to Ryan and put his muzzle to Ryan's brow. He screwed up his snout with a scowl and an icy surge of energy leapt into Ryan. He fell to his hands and knees and gasped as he was overcome with the strange feeling of losing his humanity again. He body rippled and expanded as his limbs bulged and stretched as he transformed into a dragon once gain. Ryan cringed and his pelvis cracked and reformed into his new shape, and his shoulders widened. He grimaced as his facial bones snapped and extended forward into a muzzle and he slumped against the ground.