tedium's travels through the zulhaeliyn universe, introduction.

what a strange and remarkable place this is...it is merely the beginning, and yet i have already seen so much. they told me i had been chosen to complete this task...chosen by whom? who would choose ME to do such a thing? regardless, i have accepted, and now i am eternally bound to this endlessly interesting world.1

...I must apologize. I doubt that you have any idea what I am saying, and honestly, I do not know who will be reading this. Perhaps I am speaking to no one at all. but for those who stumble upon these records, allow me to do a bit of explaining about this whole...ordeal. my name is tedium. i am a human, like you. i come from earth, like you. i had a family, a neighborhood, memories, friends, everything that a normal person on earth would have. but they were taken away from me...or, rather, I away from them.2

One morning I awoke to something so peculiar, so extraordinary, that no one would have ever been able to explain it if they had seen it, except that I was the only one who was able to. I rose from my bed and peered out from my room window, gazing at the blackened sky. It raged and chopped like a violent aerial ocean, clouds shapechanging before my very eyes, giving way to something nearly as bright as the sun, but much larger, and much closer. I went outside and stared at this bright white light, appearing to be a ball of an irridescent aura that could not be explained by any scientist or any philosopher. But as my eyes slowly became totally fixated on this floating energy, i felt my mind slip away from me, my consciousness robbed, the control of my body loosened and taken. I felt my body elevate past the trees, past the tallest of buildings, and into this dark and foreboding sky that made no sound, yet visually it screamed and reached out to me in a way that I could not resist. I was taken away that day, away from the reality I had grown accustomed to, away from anything and everything with which I was familiar, away from life and existence and understanding and the flow of thought itself.3

As I floated closer and closer into this enveloping white mass, my thoughts and memories faded more and more, until I had completely blacked out and surrendered my body to the aura above. My eyes opened and witnessed complete destruction. I realized that the white light had consumed me and I was inside of it, and through its cold and somehow solid gaseous mass that held me in place, what I saw appeared to ripple and distort as the white energy moved and pulsated. My city was obliterated as if it had been swallowed by the most destructive of cyclones, buildings cracking in half and swirling around in an invisible circle, along with people, trees, automobiles, and anything else that had been there. Mere seconds later I felt the white mass of energy ascend through the atmosphere of the earth, until I was looking at my home planet from the vastness of space. I was suspended within its grasp, forced to watch my world, watch it change. The clouds moved and changed shape on its surface more rapidly than naturally possible, and all at once a bright yellow light burst through the center of the planet, a light so blinding that I screamed and was rendered unconscious.4

When I next awoke, I was somewhere entirely different. I had been placed on a rather large piece of what appeared to be earth soil, an enormous "space-island" that had a mountain range, a forest and an atmosphere all its own. All around me was the infinity of the universe, but it was a universe that somehow felt and looked much different than my own. I noticed a faint blue tint to the emptiness that had been black in the universe i was accustomed to, and I also noticed that there were waterfalls cascading vertically, appearing from nothingness and descending into more nothing. I was in the zulhaeliyn universe, one of two parallel universes that existed 99 billion years before our universe came to be, during what is known as the Prima Aeon.  But of course, I had no way of knowing that yet. I can't explain to you how I gathered all this knowledge, nor do I expect you to believe what you are reading to be truth. You may percieve it the way you like. But you will know more. And the more you come to know, the more you will realize how all of this is indeed very real...or was. I believe that is enough for now.5