A slender young man with pale skin and deep gray eyes was wandering through the vast halls of the British Museum by his lonesome. He wore a simple yet elegant white shirt with a striped gray vest, a style most commonly worn by the lower classes. The young man had recently turned fifteen years old. However, it was hard to tell, as his thin frame did him no favors and made him look younger than he actually was. Yet the feeble young man's subdued gray eyes seemed to brim with pure, unbridled intellectual curiosity.
The young man hastily walked through the museum with impatient reverie, marveling at the sheer quantity of artwork and significant pieces of history he saw. He hurriedly examined various exhibits and passed by countless relics of bygone civilizations. He scribbled down messy notes and drawings of what he had seen, and he had read about every little thing and minute detail he could find. Yet his little leather-bound journal couldn't even record a quarter of what was in the museum, even if the young man had all the time in the world.
Looking around at the building that housed these artifacts, he grew more and more appreciative of the museum's architecture and the sense of grandeur it inspired. as the halls of the museum seemed to touch the sky itself, and its fine marble walls were a starkly bright white, which gave off the feeling of a blank canvas. In tandem with the Corinthian columns, it bore an ancient sense of aesthetics fitting for a museum of its caliber. Wandering through the seemingly boundless halls, the young man felt drawn towards a more niche area of the ancient Greek section of the museum.
It focused not on that ancient civilization's pieces of sculpture or its instruments of war but rather on the technology found within and around the Aegean at the time. Passing by some mundane sets of utensils and recreations of ancient forges, he caught a glimpse of a strange artifact seemingly from the wrong era.
Sitting on a marble pedestal within a glass box was a strange dial made from severely aged bronze, which bore fine gears interlocking with each other to form some sort of ancient calendar. Upon closer inspection, there were markings in ancient Greek that he couldn't understand. Yet he transcribed it anyway to translate when he returned to his home to study. The window next to the exhibit showed that the sun was setting upon the streets and alleys of London, which still hadn't recovered from the German bombings five years before.
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The 1950s had shown to be a promising decade, perhaps one of peace if those world leaders finally decided to get along, but with two incompatible systems of governance, probably not, he mused. He had spent more time in the museum than planned, but it had been worth it. But while he admired the English cityscape, an unsettling sense of unease swept across his body as he quickly turned towards the ancient clock, which... Ticked? It started moving and moving until it moved so fast that he couldn't even perceive it properly, and as it ticked, it began to give off an eerie green glow, then suddenly and without warning, it stopped.
Frozen in disbelief, Soren didn't move a muscle, and after a minute had passed, he let out a sigh of relief; it must've been his imagination. And it was at that exact moment that a glowing green ball suddenly shot out of the center of the calendar, breaking through the glass and embedding itself in his eye. The shock of what happened briefly stopped the pain, but only for so long as an unbearable pain shot through his body as he stumbled. Clutching his eye, Soren fell writhing on the floor in sheer agony as an excruciating headache had begun to make its way across his mind. He felt as though each and every neuron in his brain was being rearranged while dozens of knives were being plunged into his head. The pain was indescribable, yet before it could subside, the entire clockwork mechanism started ticking once more and then it exploded in a blinding green light, and Soren was tossed halfway across the room. With his clothes in tatters and thoughts muddled from what appeared to be a concussion and countless small cuts littering his body, Soren wasn't in the best shape. As he struggled to keep his consciousness, he raised his head towards what was left of the exhibit, only to see a strange crack in reality.
It was hard to describe, as it was as though a green fissure had torn the very fabric of space around the strange mechanism. His ears were ringing, yet faintly he could hear someone shouting and the sound of footsteps as a man in a black trench coat held Soren by his shoulders and started shouting at him. Not hearing a word, Soren's eyes started to dip as he began to fade out of consciousness. Yet a crystal-clear voice began to sound in Soren's ear.
[ Your arrival has been forseen by ___ ]
[ ___ sends a blessing from across the sands of time]
[ You have gained a blessing ]
[ You are Mundane ]
[ Parts of the blessing are sealed ]
[ You have gained an attribute (Eye of Essence) ]
[ You have been marked by a fracture ]
Before Soren could make out what these strange ethereal voices meant by this he lost consciousness.