O’s Odyssey, Episode 0: Prologue

I suddenly and immediately awoke from a bright flash of red light.

The moon shone in through the window by my side. I was in bed, in my room, sleeping with my naked nineteen-year-old body tucked under my cozy and warm blankets. It was the middle of the night.

I do wake up at night often, that was no big surprise to me. But where did the light come from? I knelt up to look out the window, but there were no police cars passing by. Lots of snow covered everything, but this was residual snow from the day before; right now the sky was fully clear, not a single star obstructed by a cloud. Just a normal winter night. In the tiny town where I lived, no big things ever happened.

“Must’ve been just me,” I thought as I lay back down in my bed and closed my eyes again.

For a moment everything was peaceful. But a few seconds later, my mind started drifting and imagining things as it was falling asleep once more… and in that moment, once again, a sudden red explosion sparked before my eyes.

What was this? I needed to investigate. I got out of my bed. I was alone in the room and it was dark, so I didn’t bother putting any clothes on. I noticed I was still hard, probably from that awesome wet dream I had earlier this night. But I ignored it for now. I was more curious about the red lights. Last time it seemed like it appeared when my mind started drifting. So I sat down on my bed and opened my eyes, on the lookout for the source of the light. I imagined the first thing that came to my mind—but before that spark of thought could turn into the image of that beautiful naked boy from my wet dream, kneeling down before me and taking me in…

I jumped in a spasm and my fantasy was dispelled as the light flashed again. Now I caught it red-handed. It was… emanating from the drawer in my end table!? How could that be? The only things in that drawer were my diary and that weird necklace I found in the basement yesterday…

I opened the drawer, my mind hungry for answers. My eyes opened wide with curiosity as I indeed saw the huge red gem adorning the necklace shining with red light, and moreover, pulsating with a deep mysterious hum.

“Well, I sure as heck didn’t expect THIS turn of events when I found this thing yesterday,” I thought to myself.

I took it in my hands and put it on top of my end table. Then I pulled out the dusty notebook lying beneath it, quickly wiped off the dust with my hand, and lost my thoughts in it for a little while.

‘Milly’s Diary’, said the title, written in the white stripe of a pink-blue-white sticker glued onto the front cover.

I’ve kept this diary for over 3 years now. I had all the parts arranged beautifully in a nice chronological order in another drawer, while the current volume was always tucked away safely in my end table. I’d poured out so many core memories into the pages of those notebooks that there was no way I could part ways with them now; they were part of who I was, they helped me figure out I was trans and I could love anyone irrespective of their gender.

I put it away for now, on the bed. My hands reached back towards the necklace with its huge red glowing gem. What was all this about? I could swear that just yesterday it seemed like a completely normal necklace.

I would stand up and turn on the light, but thankfully the rods in my eyes were very accustomed to the dark. I could easily discern the tiniest details on the necklace in complete darkness, as long as they were not about color. All I could see was that the gem was red; everything else, as far as my eyes right now were concerned, was black and white.

Maybe—that thought was very weird, but to my brain, forced out of sleep so brutally in the middle of the night, still having half-dream-like thoughts, anything seemed plausible—maybe that gem was trying to communicate something to me?

I turned the necklace around and looked at the back, and then I saw it. “There was a whole back side to this necklace that I never even thought of looking at yesterday?!” I thought to myself. The back of the metallic frame that the gem was set into… it had something engraved into it.