The Dragon King Chronicles: Mind, Wind, Water

David woke up with a start, the familiar ceiling above him served to shock him out of his dazed state, but not enough to bring about the clarity he needed. For some reason he felt afraid, but who wouldn't be; when the first thing you remember is your step brother sleeping with your mom.

The image was so vivid and haunting that David could not begin to imagine how he would have survived such an ordeal. But then it hit him, he never did survive the ordeal. He killed himself, or at least some other David did. Something seemed to be wrong and very much out of place.

It was confusing juggling two different lifetimes of memories so similar, yet so different that it left him stuck in a loop of comparisons and a droning headache. David could not wrap his head around the entire damn situation. Yesterday he went to sleep in his high class neighborhood on Victoria Island, Lagos Nigeria, west Africa, earth.

Today however he was waking up on Victoria Island, located south east of the black dream sea, a sub island under the jurisdiction of the Iron city, on a planet called Pangea. This was the point where he would panic and ask the universe what was going on, but the intense sense of familiarity he was getting from the room, and the fact that it was not in the best interest of an educated man to panic for no reason. So he panicked, just for a few seconds anyway, everything seemed so familiar yet it was also quite foreign to him.

David knew who he was, who he both was, which of course did not sound right, even to him. Why would he be here, was he dreaming, or was the life he remembered actually the dream. Nothing seemed to make sense, and the droning headache he had seemed to be increasing in intensity with each questions he asked.

David got up from his bed and swept his eyes through his room, everything looked the same except the walls were painted yellow, and there was a bag of guns at the foot of the bed. He ignored the fact that there were instruments of murder sitting right in front of him and made his way to his window.

When he swept his curtains aside a familiar neighborhood greeted his sight, the only and most notable difference was the fact that the duplex opposite his house had a giant living, breathing bat sleeping on its ruble. The Johnsons used to live there, but his new memories told him that only a young bachelor lived there and he was most probably being digested in the stomach of the bat.

The monstrosity was ten to thirteen meters tall, David could not begin to imagine how wide it must be. It took David a second to notice that its piercing blood red eyes were staring right at him. David felt his heart stop as he backtracked in fright, letting the curtain fall back into place. His right hip made contact with his bedside cabinet dislodging a rather strange looking watch from the top of it. David bit back a curse as he massaged his aching hip and shot his scared eyes towards the bag of guns and back to the window.

Waking up in a rather strange world was okay, waking up in the body of a person that's you, but not you is even better. But being stared at by a bat the size of a plane would send even the best of men running.

David was no hero, he knew that better than anyone. Of course he was never shy about getting his fist dirty neither did he run away from a fight. But that thing outside was most probably the booth manager that sold one way tickets to hell or any part of the afterlife that's relevant these days. And now he had an aching hip with no idea what to do next.

David shifted his gaze to the floor bringing it directly to the strange looking watch. Well it was less a watch but more of an arm guard, (what do they call that stuff again) it was large enough to cover his entire forearm if worn. It gleamed an intense silver as the rays of the morning sun softly fell on it.

Common sense says that's a freaky looking bracelet or watch, memory say that's a regulator and gene enhancement device. Unlike earth, the humans of Pangea had this particular trait of being able to constantly absorb the energy that's within nature. Which is to say they are more like plants, but the kind of energy absorbed differs from person to person. Some depend on kinetic energy, others molecular, atomic or even heat. The absorption of this energy usually induces mutations or evolutions in the body of the absorber.

So in the end the lucky ones who absorb energy enough for it to create a change and alter their biological makeup, develop abilities the likes which you would only ever see on the pages of a comic book, or a TV screen.

The regulator plays a part in making sure that everyone has a slow and steady growth, any sudden evolution can cause serious damage to both the person evolving and the people and infrastructure around him. So the regulator serves as flood gate or something. It regulates the amount of energy absorbed, and distribute it evenly around the human body, based on a person's most recent and active lifestyle.

For example if you were someone who used your mind a lot, like scientists or mathematicians, the regulator would place emphasis on improving your mental abilities, if you were more of a physical person, it would improve your physical abilities. Not everyone on Pangea develop powers or abilities. Only a few lucky ones do, and even among them some would have rather preferred to remain normal as some of the mutations can be incredibly bizarre.

The regulator was not a perfect creation, but it was the only option preventing people from exploding from absorbing too much energy, or growing the horns of a cow, the fins of a fish and the nose of a donkey. Without the regulator the evolutions and mutations would be heavily unrestrained and unpredictable.

So it came as no surprise that David hurriedly placed the regulator on his wrist. It felt cold at first as it made contact with his skin, then it rapidly heated up and sent a shock through his entire body. David felt every bone in his body at that moment.

There was such clarity and knowledge about his entire body going through his mind at that moment, that he felt all powerful. He could see every cell, feel every cell. He felt like he only needed a thought to communicate with those cells and tell them what to do. And then this feeling went deeper, he felt the molecules, the atoms every single little bit of creation and matter that made up his entire body. Then as sudden as this feeling came, it went away.

David was gasping for breath, he had never taken drugs before, but if this was what drug addicts felt when ever they sniffed or injected those drugs into their body, then he knew why they would be so addicted to the feeling.

There was such euphoria, such power. He felt like he was in absolute control, and if not for the fact that there was a giant bat across the street from him, he would have spent more time relishing this feeling.

David picked up the bag of guns and almost stumbled due to how heavy it was. He was a little shocked by it, and the fact that he felt weaker than he looked. He shook his head and instead chose to drag the bag of weapons behind him as he opened the door of his bedroom and went out into the hallway.

It was empty and a little dirty. David could see dust on the tiled floor with footprints imprinted on it. David was no tracker, but he knew for a fact that it has been days since anyone had moved through this hall. Their house was a five bedroom duplex, but at the moment the house seemed so empty and quiet. As much as he would rather not do what he was about too, he really had no choice at the moment.

"Mom...mom…."

His voice echoed throughout the entire house with no reply to his calls. David furrowed his eyebrows and made his way to his mother's bedroom. When he got there the entire place was empty and even more of a mess than the hallway. The only thing he saw that drew his attention was the lingerie and lace underwear that belonged to his mother right beside the boxers and jeans he knew his step brother favored.

Whether he was the David from earth or the David from Pangea he was not happy about the fact that his step brother was sleeping with his mother. Pangea was a lot more liberal than earth, but even sleeping with your own mother was going too far, even if she was your step mother. And you also had to consider the fact that she had raised him since he was ten. Ten years of motherhood only led to an illicit relationship behind everybody's back. David was devastated, he really had no idea how to approach this whole situation than with the disgust and horror he was feeling.

Not to mention he had such a pit in his stomach every time he thought about it. His father and elder sister were currently on business in the City of Iron. Of course the entire world had gone to hell so it was hard to imagine if they were alive. But David was glad that they were not here to see this, it was horrible.

He had no idea where his mom and brother were, they could have ran away in the current chaos, or they could be dead. If they were dead that would be a whole lot better for everybody.

David shook his head at the string of negative thoughts that went through his mind. The two incestual couple aside, David had bigger things to worry about.

About six months ago in the City of Wonders, one of the twelve city states that governed the entire surface area of Pangea and much of its surrounding seas, had experienced an accident. At first everyone thought that it was just a reactor in a lab or something that malfunctioned.

That is until birds the size of school buses started falling from the skies and picking rather innocent and unsuspecting people for lunch. When that happened, the lab that had suffered the accident gave a formal explanation. And enhancement drug was being tested along with a new equipment for dispersion. There was a malfunction and the drug was released into the air where due to its unique properties rapidly multiplied and assimilated with the elements in the air, the water and even the very energy that ran through every living thing on Pangea.

That drug caused a series of rapid mutations within every animal or plant it came in contact with. Any organism that's not a human, or living without a regulator experienced a period of extreme evolution. It was immensely painful and more than eighty percent of the infected lost their minds or gained intelligence way beyond what a creature of its caliber was supposed to have.

Humans were relatively safe, the regulator helped a lot. But for those of them that had no access to the regulator, well...lets just say most of them were better of dead. In the six months that had passed, the whole of Pangea had been covered and infected with the drug, even the creatures of the sea were not safe. The twelve city states were safe or somewhat safe as they have been able to resist and manage the situation properly.

But as for any outlying cities or towns that were not within the massive walls of the twelve city states, well they have all become food for the evolved animals.

Only a few survivors are left, and they are all slowly making their way to the closest city state to them. It was the only option for survival, at this point in time without proper information and knowledge about the degree of evolution and how affected the entire planet and its ecosystem was, it was pure suicide to try and survive outside the protection of any of the twelve city states.

There was a danger of the city states being crowded, but before all this happened they were each already housing a minimum of two billion people, there should be no problem adding a few more millions to that number.

In the past week, Victoria island has been in danger of being over run by evolved animals, most of them aquatic, the bat was just an enigma. It must have evolved from one of the caves around the coast.

But there was even more danger than just the animals. With each passing day, the water level was rising rapidly, soon enough Victoria island would be completely submerged under the sea.

David still had a lot of questions unanswered, but those questions would remain unanswered if he lost his life to monsters or God forbid drowned here. It was at that moment David understood why there was a bag of guns at the foot of his bed when he woke up. He was preparing to leave, most probably to the city of Iron to meet up with his father since it was the closest city state to the coast, apart from the city of Flowers. It was in the process of making his preparations that he found out about his step brother and his mother's affair. And then he woke up, he was David, but weirdly enough, two different versions of himself.

David thought it was stupid, why the hell would he take his life because his mother was banging his step brother. It hurt a lot thinking about it, but David would never kill himself over such a thing. But the more he thought about it, the more he was confused. Apart from the fact that he was not sure if he, inherited a memory of someone else from another world, or he was someone from another world who ended up in the body of someone else in another world and inherited his memories.

Thinking about his reasons for killing himself just came up blank, however everything else just seemed clear. Except the David of earth was seventeen, and this David was nineteen. Apart from that everything in their memory seems almost the same.

They went to the same school, they had the same friends with the same name, fell in love with the same teacher, except she taught English on earth but taught History on Pangea. They both had the same girlfriend and she still cheated on their best friend which mind you was actually the same person.

It was like they were both a mirror of each others life, with a few cracks in the perfect surface. David was quite scared now, not to mention that the droning headache he was feeling seemed to be increasing in intensity. The whole thing seemed wrong. It was like all those stuff he saw happening in Hollywood movies. Speaking of Hollywood it also existed on Pangea, but it was a military school for super heroes, or people who developed abilities. But that school was far to the west in the city of Angels.

David shook his pounding head as he rapidly began to make numerous connections and comparisons to the things on earth, and the things on Pangea. It was so confusing and his head hurt as a reminder. All of a sudden the regulator on his wrist beeped. It flickered a bit, before it's smooth silver surface lit up and projected a hologram in front of him.

LOW LEVEL PSIONIC SURGE DETECTED.

ANALYZING HOST...

NAME: DAVID JOHNSON IYE

AGE: NINETEEN

PHYSIQUE : LEVEL 0(0.78)

AGILITY : LEVEL 0(0.58)

MENTAL: LEVEL 1(1.34)

PSIONIC COLUMN: LEVEL 0

PSIONIC ABILITY : TELEPATHY: LEVEL 0, MOLECULAR RESTRUCTURE: LEVEL 0

ENERGY LEVEL RISING

MOST PROBABLE NATURAL ABILITY FOR IMPROVEMENT: MENTAL AND PHYSIQUE.

YES/NO.

David suspected that choosing yes meant that he had chose to focus on improving the state of his body and the power of his mind. He would have paid a closer attention to what was in front of him, but the head ache he was feeling was increasing almost to the point of being completely unbearable. He was weaker and slower than an average human being if the result of his analysis was supposed to be believed. But right now he didn't care, he just wanted the pain in his head to stop so he moved his fingers to the hologram and pressed yes.

Immediately he lost control of his body and fell straight to the ground. Amidst the dust and dirt that littered the floor David felt his body go through a myriad of different feelings. He felt hot, cold, wet, cool, hard, soft, itchy and restless. Each of these feelings bombarded him at the same time and his body was too locked up to feel it. There was a lot of pain, the droning ache in his head had subsided, but he did not care since there was another source of pain within his very own body.

All of a sudden he could hear whispers, he could feel thoughts and instinct, need and hunger, so much hunger. He could feel the fear, the euphoria he felt as his fangs ripped into flesh. He could smell someone in that dusty empty house. He could smell himself from the nose of an evolved rat. He could feel the need, the hunger, the instinct that drove him.

He broke into a run, he wanted nothing more than to just take a bite of that brown skin, he doubted it tasted really good due to the small amount of flesh on that bony frame. But he had to make do, the bigger animals had cleared most of this neighborhood of any human or any creature small enough to be a meal. All that was left was this boy, this tasty brown looking boy.

Just as he was about to pounce on that tasty morsel he felt himself suspended in the air, he could see the air swirls as even dust, old wrappers of biscuits and empty juice boxes floated in the air, he saw a peculiar looking black lace panty float past his face and he wondered who owned that and why it was flying too.

Then he started shaking, he felt Intense vibrations in the air, all of a sudden every thing around him started shredding and turning to pieces of itself, the wrappers, the juice box, the sexy looking lace underwear, he felt his skin tearing and grinding. He let out a shriek of intense pain and then everything went black.

David opened his eyes, and watched the trail of destruction around him, in a radius of two and half meters; everything around him had been turned to dust, even the walls and floor beneath him had been grinded to pieces. He felt blood dripping from his nose and eyes, every part of his body ached fiercely. He looked down and noticed he was floating over a two and half meter hole directly overlooking the dining table their family used to eat on.

He tried to sit upright in panic and immediately what ever it was that was holding him up disappeared and he fell four meters down crashing onto the black colored dining set and breaking the table that he has remembered since he was four to pieces. But at that moment David could not have known he broke that table In such a way you would think someone with super strength drove his fist through it, because David had passed out.