A young man in his early teens sits in the den of his family's house watching television in a recliner chair. Bored, he lets out a great yawn as he flips meaninglessly through channels. “They go on a week-long vacation and leave me here, a twelve-year-old. Their only excuse, because somebody needs to watch the dogs. If they just hired someone to watch the house and the dogs, they could have taken me along with them on vacation. Where did they go again, some kind of married couple's cruise? Bah! That's no excuse to leave a child to fend for himself alone in his own house. It's as if since my dad married my step-mom and moved here, he lost all sense of what was in front of him.” the young man thinks to himself.

He lets out a sigh and begins speaking to himself. “She could have at least installed a door for the dogs to the porch, then I wouldn't have to sit down here for the whole freakin' week! At least then I could stay in my bedroom like any normal person.” the young man shakes his head disapprovingly twice before getting up from the green recliner he was sitting on and going to the bathroom, which is to the left of the kitchen, where in which to get to he has to go to his left from the den.

He grabs the edge of the sink with one hand and turns on the faucet with his other. He cups a handful of cold water and takes his glasses off with his free hand. He splashes the water repeatedly across his bored face, attempting to wake himself out of his state of boredom. He places his glasses back on his face and stares intently into the bathroom mirror at the young boy staring back at him. He has brown hair and blue eyes. He smiles at himself and rubs a finger across the pair of newly-placed braces on his teeth and sighs. “Can't wait to get these things off, they hurt like hell every time they tighten 'em.” the young man thinks to himself. He shakes his head and leaves the bathroom, speaking to himself on the way out. “Raphael, what have you gotten yourself into with these braces. Well, whatever, better go grab something to eat.”

Raphael walks a few feet out of the downstairs bathroom and makes a U-turn around the microwave cabinet and the snack cabinet and into the kitchen. The kitchen is a dead-end room that is filled with cabinets and counter tops on each side that are made out of stern oak wood. The refrigerator is located at the very end and to the right. The stove is in the same direction as the refrigerator, but is a few feet to the side, with a counter top separating the two. The sink is on the left side, with multiple other utensils and containers scattered around the vast amount of space that is left on the counter top.

Raphael scowls at himself for not having anything to do while walking to the refrigerator. He pulls out some leftover lasagna from the refrigerator and slams the door shut behind him. He walks over to the left-most kitchen counter and places the lasagna down while picking up a kitchen knife. He slices off a large, satisfying portion of the lasagna and places it on a porcelain plate. He lifts up the plate and walks over to the microwave that is in between the bathroom and the kitchen. He throws the plate with the lasagna in and slams the door shut, punching in the usual minute thirty into the microwave's timer before pressing start. He looks at the microwave's spinning screen for a moment before then spinning around and walking back into the den area of his house.

Raphael sits back down on the green recliner he was sitting on before and begins to mumble to himself. “I mean seriously, what were they thinking. They left a twelve year old boy alone at home by himself with no one to look over him for a full week. I suppose I should be enjoying this, but there's nothing to do when there's nobody around.” Raphael grabs the TV remote and begins flipping through the channels again. “The fact that I moved here two years ago doesn't help either. Two years is definitely not long enough to make any good long term friends,” Raphael puts his right elbow on the recliner's arm and places his balled fist to his temple to support his head. He lets out a sigh and speaks again. “wish it was though....”

Raphael falls silent for the next few moments before hearing the microwave beep from the kitchen, identifying that his lasagna is finished heating. Raphael gets up from his chair and looks in the kitchen's direction and is about to walk to the microwave when he is suddenly hit with an overwhelming urge to go outside. He looks over at the sliding glass door that shows the way to his backyard, then back at his food and back again to the door. “Ahh, why not. I was just going to eat for enjoyment anyway.” he thinks. Raphael shrugs his shoulders and lets out a 'why not' grunt. He walks over to the sliding door and pulls on a pair of white tennis shoes, not even untying the knot. He thinks for a second about turning off the den TV, but then decides that he would only be outside for a few moments, just to get some fresh air. He grabs a hold of the sliding glass door's handle and pulls it to the side, exits the house, and shuts the door behind him.

Raphael sighs as he walks out into the mid-afternoon summer sun. “June 24th 2023. School just let out. Going to be a sixth-grader next year and get transferred to a new school. Middle school. Dad said that middle school is going to be extra tough. He even said something about me having to wake up earlier too, and the classes being harder. Well, I guess I better just enjoy my summer while it's here.” he thinks to himself. Raphael walks forward into the center of his backyard and looks around. His eyes are still adjusting to the light of the high-risen star in the sky. He shields his eyes with his hand and looks up at the misty-blue sky above him.

The sky is bright and blue like the sky off of his brand-new cartridge of his new favorite game series 'The Chronicles of the Sky-King Sword'. Raphael's mind slowly starts to wander back to the first time he had placed the game into his brand-new Timegamer just a few days ago. Chronicles of the Sky-King Sword was the first RPG that he had ever played, and he has been obsessed with it ever since. Raphael lets out a happy sigh as he shuts his eyes and remembers the beautifully-made animated cut-scenes that blessed his eyes only a few day's prior.

Suddenly, Raphael's peace is broken. While he is holding his eyelid's shut and remembering the past, a light, worried voice creeps into his head. He can't make out anything of what the voice is saying, he barely even notices it over top of his loving thoughts of what he thinks is the best video game of all time. But the voice is not what breaks his peace.

What breaks his peace is a piercing demonic screech that suddenly tears through his mind, completely cutting off the other voice's pleading cry for help. His eye's flash open in an instant and his hand's clench onto his ears, trying to drown out the horrid cries that are echoing in his mind. He sinks down to the ground as the deathly roar persists, his mentality becoming numb from the grueling shriek that is pulsating through his skull. His head shrinks down in between his legs and he tightens his eye's shut further in pain, muttering under his breath for someone to make it stop.

Then, as suddenly as it had started... it ends. He lets out a noise of confusion and open's his eyes in astonishment at the sudden end of his suffering. He slowly lifts his head up from between his legs and looks around his yard in absolute misunderstanding, trying to find a possible reason in visual form for what he had just heard.

He shakes his head and looks down low, letting out a worried sigh, thinking that he must be going crazy. He shifts one of his leg's out in front of him and places his foot firmly onto the ground. He then puts his hand on his knee and boosts himself back up to his feet with a grunt. He looks around his yard again another time, but finds nothing that provides any evidence of what had just happened to him.

“What in the world was that!? Who was that!? It didn't even sound human! I should tell my parents about this when they get back home and go see my doctor.” Raphael thinks while he looks around the yard. He rubs his fingers over his eyes as he attempts to push the memory of the scream out of his head, but it is of no use, the scream still echoes in his mind like an enigma.

Then a sudden thought runs through his head. Maybe what made him hear that scream isn't in his backyard, perhaps it is above him. He lifts his head and looks up into the sky, using his hand to shade his eyes from the glare of the sun.

It takes him a few moments to notice it, but there is a star in the mid-afternoon sky, and it isn't a dim light either. It is bright and shining. Raphael closes his eyes and shakes his head repeatedly. He looks back into space once more and sees that the light is still in exactly the same place that it was before. As he watches the illumination, he can almost make out an outline of some object around it.

Raphael squints his eyes and looks more closely. This time he sees that the star is actually a space-fairing vessel, and as far as he knows, earth is just starting to get into travel outside of his planet. His heart falls deep as he realizes that this is alien activity. Aliens are coming to earth, but as far as he can tell, there is only one vessel, one light. Is this only a scouting party? Are there more coming? These thoughts run through Raphael's head while he watches the ever-approaching gleam that is descending upon his world.

He freezes in his position in complete fear of the unknown. He watches the light as it gets closer and brighter over the afternoon sun. Within a few seconds, the light has gone from a gleam in the sky to a bright sun that is drawing ever nearer to his planet. What is mere minutes seem like hours to Raphael as the ship falls closer and closer to his life.

He stares in complete horror as he notices the light on the spaceship blow out, but now the vessel is close enough that he can see a rough outline of the ship. The vessel is built in the form of an egg-shape with a large oval area underneath that must be exactly half the size of the egg-like area. At the back of the ship is an engine attached to the back of the egg-shaped portion with two wing-like appendages that go up at a curve and then point backwards, going off to the right and left of the engine, but one of these appendages is damaged and blown off. There is also a hole near the engine that is billowing out smoke and fire as the ship nears.

Raphael realizes that the ship must have been damaged by something. Most likely some government weapon must have fired at them as they neared earth's orbit and the alien's must have had no choice but to make an emergency drop into earth's atmosphere. “I hope the government's happy, they probably are about to start a war with an alien civilization by shooting at that ship.” thinks Raphael. As the ship nears closer to Raphael, he freezes even further into the ground. He can hear people around the neighborhood screaming in terror at the sight, no one able to make heads or tails of what they are seeing.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

Then a horrid conclusion strikes Raphael as he watches with fright as the vessel is closing in towards the surface of his planet. The ship is going to land right on top of him....

Raphael lets out a horrid shriek as the realization spreads through him. He sinks to the ground and watches the ship for a few more moments before hunkering his head down between his legs in fear of his imminent death. He shuts his eye's tight and grits his teeth in fear of what is going to happen next. He can hear the ship nearing and the screams of his neighbor's growing louder as the ship draws closer. A great wind and a burning noise echo through Raphael's ears as the ship closes in, and then a great, soul-shattering quake can be felt rocking the entire neighborhood....

After the earthquake ends, Raphael opens his eyes and lets out a grunt of confusion. He thought that he was going to die. There was no way that the vessel could have missed him, but it did. He pushes his head out of his legs and examines his yard, with no ship to be found. He gets up to his feet and examines the area.

He judges from the screaming that he heard from around the neighborhood that he didn't just think this up. It was no hallucination, it really happened. But then again, where did the ship go? Raphael looks ahead of him and runs over to his neighbor's fence and looks over top of the old wooden barrier to see if the ship landed there. He judges that the ship didn't land anywhere in their yard or on top of their house, since neither of those are damaged in the slightest. He shrugs his shoulders. “Guess they didn't crash land there....”

Raphael pushes himself away from the fence and moves over to the other side of his yard and pushes his head up over top of the wood to see what is happening in his other neighbor's yard and across the street. The whole area is in complete commotion over what had just happened. There are people crowding around in the middle of the street and yammering on about alien's attacking and that they should call the government and other things of that nature. Apparently none of them had noticed that the ship was actually damaged and was making an emergency drop into their atmosphere.

“Stupid people, the alien's probably need our help more then they want to hurt us. Didn't they see the smoke and the fire? We should be trying to help them. So stupid!” thinks Raphael. He grits his teeth in anger at his neighbor's for being so idiotic. He knows deep in his heart that the alien's aren't here to hurt or conquer them, they were just traveling by for some reason or another and got shot out of space and onto our planet. If anything, the alien's need more help from the humans then the human's need theirs. Unless his people shot them down themselves, of course.

Raphael backs himself away from the fence and decides to look toward the back of his yard where a forest is situated at. It isn't a very large forest, only about two miles long with a large clearing in the center. Raphael has never been in the forest before, almost nobody has, he only knows that there is a clearing there because he looked up the local area online when he was bored at school one day.

He doesn't see anything in the forest at first, it is way too deep and thick for him to see past the first few layers of trees, but then he looks above the trees and sees that there is thick black smoke coming up from the forest and suspending up in the surrounding sky. The ship must have crash-landed in the forest, and with any luck it fell in the clearing. Raphael looks deep in the forest, considering what he should do next. His mind is filled with conflicting thoughts over his next action. He lets out a deep, heartfelt sigh and solemnly says “What do I do next....” He lowers his head in deep thought over his next move and closes his eyes.

Then he remembers why he had even looked up into the sky in the first place. The scream. The scream that broke in to and shattered his mind moments earlier. If he had to guess, the only reason he heard that demonic screech was because of whatever or whoever is on that ship. He needs to know what was behind that horrid cry, and now that he thinks back, he also needs to know who that other girl was that he heard yelling behind the demon. He decides that he needs answers above all else. He sprints towards the back-fence and climbs over top of the six-foot wooden barrier, which is rather easy for him at the time because of his body length, measuring in at exactly five feet tall.

He lands behind his fence and he feels like he has just entered an entirely new world. For most of the two years since he had moved to his new neighborhood, he had spent it almost completely inside of his house, doing menial choirs and playing with his toys or his video games. Since he has no friends in his neighborhood, he had no reason to go outside, and the fact that he abhorred exercise didn't help that either, he simply didn't find it to be any fun, but shadow fighting he did find fun.

Ever since he moved into his new house, he started to dream about being a hero and being adored by everyone around him, and not a hero that saves people from burning buildings or breaks up fights. He wanted to be a hero that could kill a grizzly bear with his bare hands, that could hold off an entire medieval army single-handed, or could lift up tanks with pure muscle. But no matter what he hopes to be, he could never be the hero that he dreams of, and he knows that is true.

He walks through the forest with a small fear growing in his heart of the new land that he had just entered. The forest that he had just jumped into has been completely untouched since his neighborhood had first been created. The ground is filled with overgrown grass and dead leaves that go up to Raphael's ankles. The entire area is quiet and dark from the overhanging trees that block out all light, save a few pockets that protrude through the tree leaves.

Despite having a small fear that a snake or a wild animal would sneak up and bite him, Raphael moves forward into the dark forest. He walks at first, but then breaks off into a full sprint through the woods, being too full of curiosity of what awaited him at the ship to worry himself about taking his time. From what he can remember of his Google search at school last year, there should be a clearing directly across from his house that the ship, he believes, is at. The terrain flies by him as he rushes to the ship as fast as he can. It doesn't take Raphael long to run out of breath, his unfit body running out of energy and his heart beating too quickly for him to be able to go further at anything less than a fast walk.

The forest is just as thick as he thought it was from the outside, as he can barely see in front of him beyond a large grouping of trees. By the time he starts running again, he is already halfway through the woods. He can barely tell that, however, and can barely make heads or tails of where he is, all he knows is that he has to keep moving forward or he will get completely lost. He continues running in a single direction, moving ever closer to the downed spacecraft that has landed in his neighborhood. As he stops his run and begins to walk with deep breaths through the forest, he starts to notice a siren off in the distance.

“Someone must have called the police and told them that a ship flew down from the sky. After enough calls, they must have decided that it was true and sent some people out to investigate the calls.” he thinks as he listens to the sirens “I need to get to the ship and fast if I want to look over it first.” he says before bracing himself into a running position. He takes a deep breath and then sprints off again with his heart now beating at a deafening pace.

Within a minute of running as fast as he can go, Raphael has finally reached the forest clearing. Luckily enough, the ship had landed exactly in the center of the clearing. The ship itself isn't as large as Raphael had thought it would be, it only fills up half of the clearing. Raphael can barely make out any specifics of the ship from his tired state. He is so out of breath that he can barely stand on his own two feet. He can't take the pressure any longer. He drops down to the dirt with a thud and lowers his head to the ground in complete exhaustion. With heavy breaths, he begins to focus his mind and regain himself. He can hear over his deep breaths the roar of police sirens nearby, the police are at the scene and he is running out of time. He needs to move fast.

He lifts himself up to his feet and examines the ship from his lowered point of view. The ship is exactly the geometrical shape that he had seen from the ground, but more highly detailed then from what he saw from his earlier view.

The ship is fashioned from a sleek, shinning purple material that encompasses the entire ship. At the front part of the egg-shaped portion of the ship is the apparent bridge. There is glass encompassing in a half circle around the front of the ship going horizontally. It is made out of thick reinforced glass that can withstand even the great empty vacuums of space, he believes. The glass is parted in five sections around the windows with strengthened steel and the windows are too tinted for any visibility of the interior to be perceived.

All of the sleek, purple metal is placed in sheets and fused together with thick metal bolts. The back engine is highly damaged by some kind of particle weapon that blasted a clean hole straight through the exterior and interior of the engine, the damage obviously too extensive for the ship to ever fly again and most likely the reason behind the ship's crash-landing.

As Raphael examines the ship, he starts to realize that things aren't adding up. Throughout the entire day, he never heard a single cannon fire or any kind of explosion. If the military had shot this ship out of orbit, then he would have heard something, but he remembers nothing of the sort. No gunfire, no missiles launching, no explosions, nothing.

Not only that, but he could tell by the hole in the ship's engine that it was hit by some kind of particle beam, something that the U.S. Government or military isn't anywhere close to creating or perfecting, especially for space defenses. “No, whoever did this is not from America. They aren't even from this world. Nobody on Earth has the technology to do something like this. This type of damage is stuff from science fiction. This entire situation is straight from the pages of a sci-fi novel!” Raphael stops thinking for a second to focus on the sirens in the background. The sirens have stopped coming closer and he can just barely make out the outline of the red and blue shine of police lights glaring off of the edges of the forest trees. The police are at the scene and they are going to be at the ship shortly. Raphael is faced with a choice that eats at his very soul. Does he leave the ship and let the police do their job, or does he explore the ship nonetheless?

As Raphael ponders over his next action, a sudden warmness fills his soul. This change is so sudden that it makes him gasp in alarm. He has no idea where this sudden change has come from. Suddenly, like as if it is echoing through the forest itself, a beautiful voice resonates through Raphael's mind. The voice speaks clear and calm in his home language, speaking pleadingly into his mind. Raphael closes his eyes in pure bliss as the voice speaks, being completely enveloped in the pureness of the spectral sound.

“We need you, Raphael....” speaks the voice, with Raphael letting comfort flow through him. His eyes shut, now oblivious to the world around him. The voice speaks repeatedly the same line deep within Raphael's mind, letting the word's echo deep into his head. Then suddenly, it drifts away.

Almost as if working in conjunction with the voice, a chunk of the oval part of the ship gives way and crashes to the ground in front of Raphael, landing right where he is at. He opens his eyes right at the exact moment as the piece of purple metal begins to rattle and break, with barely enough time to back away from the landing site and get away from the bone-crushing impact.

He lies on the ground, stunned for but a few seconds before returning himself back to his feet and looking back into the new entrance that had appeared in the vessel. He takes a deep breath and remembers why he had come out here in the first place. He needs answers, and now he needs even more conclusions to an ever-growing list of questions. He lets out a deep sigh and bows his head, only to look up moments later at the five-story ship above him. He decides then, as he hears helicopters coming close in the air above, that he is not going to leave without some answers. Realizing that there is no time left, he runs through the entryway that had been created in the ship and pushes his way into it's interior.