In This Chapter: The main character is introduced.  Struggling through life on Earth when a mysterious energy gives her the greatest opportunity the universe can offer.  Beginning to tell her tale from the first person as she recalls all her greatest cruelties.

Chapter 1 – Introduction (The Chosen One)

            Let me be the first and only one to congratulate you, the chosen one, well, after yours truly of course, don’t worry, eventually you will meet the ones that came before me, as boring as they might be compared to me.  My time is coming to an end and it’s tradition to leave a little journal for the next Sentinel.  You see, my cycle is finishing its course, and after nearly 100,000 Earth years the decision has finally been made from the universe.  I will be going on to the resting place, some call it paradise, and other legends say heaven, but only we will know what it truly is and you shall see it one day too.  So, I’ll see you in about another 100,000 years, trust me, it goes by really quick when you have galaxies full of planets and intelligent life at your disposal, well… maybe not so intelligent, so many planets full of things tried to fight me, so many others worshipped me, but I’ll get to that later.  You see, the Sentinel before me left her journal, but it was… SO BORING, she was way too nice, giving food and resources to struggling species, carving rivers out for people who were landlocked, shaping the landscapes of entire worlds for the convenience of these little insects so that they could have happier lives.  Ughh… she could have at least crushed a village or two, but no, she won the hearts and minds of billions in her queendom through kindness, believe me, I’ll have a few words for her when I get up there, I wasn’t so nice, but it will ultimately be your decision on what to do with the species of the galaxies that you rule over.  I encourage you to be as curious as possible. 

            By now, as you’re reading this you’ve probably figured out that you can manipulate a number of things like; your appearance, you can materialize objects of your choosing, but you cannot create life, and my personal favorite, your size.  It made visiting planets a hell of a lot more entertaining for me, seeing the looks on their tiny faces as I marched and stomped through their lands, crushing trees and huts full of people under my bare feet, it was always more interesting for me to walk around those less developed planets, these tiny beings living in small villages made of mud, attacking me with rocks and sticks, even after 100,000 years I still laughed every single time I felt a mob of people flatten between the wrinkles of my soles. 

Sometimes I would even make myself their size, of course, still taller than them by at least a head, staring at them face to face as they struggled to understand what was happening in their tiny brains, some of them would bow down out of instinct and I would give a little grin and then I would vanish, sometimes for thousands of years.  I remember one time returning to that same planet, they had statues of me, apparently, they based an entire religion off of me! They sacrificed people for my beauty in the hopes that one day I would return to pick out servants for some type of ritual, but when I returned I just kind of squished them for pleasure… oh well.  You’ll be able to do that stuff too, don’t worry, but I’m getting way ahead of myself.  I’ll start from the beginning. 

            Since I was chosen, I was called a number of things, Goddess, Queen, The Plague, The Apocalypse, The Savior, I could keep going, but I was born as Danielle.  Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, a human name, that’s because I was born on Earth in the Milky Way galaxy.  Don’t worry about that though, it is forbidden to visit the galaxy of the previous Sentinel, I mean, I couldn’t even go to my own solar system after I was chosen, it's just in case there was a cycle where a species wanted to exact revenge on another for the choices their Sentinel made.  Anyway, when I was a kid I was raised in a place called Europe, specifically Poland, I enjoyed studying the history of my planet, especially ancient history like the Greeks and Macedonians, all the wars they fought and beautiful styles of art and clothing that they had, but when I turned 13 there was a terrible second world war, I remember my brother and father going off to fight against their will, but they both died during battle against a menacing and evil enemy, it depressed me for a long time, we had to flee from our home because the bombs from the invasion were getting closer each day, we could hear the rifles fire at night and I saw dead men being carried back to our small town to be buried in mass graves, my mother decided to abandon everything we owned and sail across a submarine infested ocean.  By the time I was 16 I was already fluent in the language of my new home in North America and they helped win the war with my old home country. 

            I had seen so many horrors throughout my life, my mother married another man who beat her, who abused me, but we never thought we had a choice, we had no money, but he did, so we got to have hot meals and a bed to sleep in.  Those in my new school didn’t like foreigners too much either, especially because of my accent, they called me ‘commie’ all the time, I was constantly ridiculed and then when I returned home I was beaten, I had no breaks, it started to change me, to see only the bad in people from my planet, the only solace I had was from reading comics and studying history.  Thinking about it now, it might be one of the reasons I was so cruel to so many billions of people and creatures across the galaxies I ruled over.  Crushing entire cities with just one toe or finger because of a bad memory that I had as a teenager, oh well, I can’t change anything now, maybe that species lives underground out of the fear that I caused them.  That’s something that I will mention later, your actions will decide the paths of so many, their evolution, their beliefs, or maybe even their extinction.  I finally figured out I was chosen when I turned 24, I was at my lowest point, the country was roaring economically, but I was suffering, my mother passed away leaving me as the last person in my bloodline, her horrible husband tried to marry me, but was eventually thrown in jail for murdering someone while drunk.  I couldn’t afford to go to a university, and I was working a horrible job in a sewing factory with other immigrants from all over my home world.

            I was horribly depressed, but then something happened.  I felt it.  I felt the calling like a warm light shining through my body.  It was my birthday, turning 24 in the Earth year 1952, I was all alone in a terrible apartment that had holes in the wall and barely enough running water to fill a cup.  I stood up to look out of the window, there wasn’t a view of my town anymore, everything was a dark blue, the next thing I realized is that I wasn’t standing on anything, I tried to adjust my glasses, but nothing was on my face anymore, my vision was naturally clear for the first time in my life.  I was still alone, and I was surrounded by nothingness, as I’m sure you went through.  It’s kind of weird how you start off, you have no direction, and you don’t really know what to do.  You can feel a certain power coursing through your entire body though, almost as if it’s trying to escape, but it’s warming and comforting so you accept it like a saving grace taking you away from all pain.  Suddenly you’re presented of a view of space, something I could only look up at during the night when things were bad.  Your first day you try to figure it out, but all I did was float around not being able to understand where I was or what I could do to escape the emptiness, but the lights from stars were beautiful and relaxing, almost as if I could feel their warmth right next to me.  I’ve only ever read books on what space would be like, but it’s nothing compared to seeing it within my arm’s reach. 

            The laws of nature didn’t apply to me anymore, I didn’t need air in space and I could fly around at astounding speeds, so there I was, losing track of time as I whipped around a galaxy at my normal size, or so I thought.  I saw a planet in the distance lit up by two red huge stars, the planet was brown and blue with patches of pale green all over the surface, but the closer I got, the smaller the planet became, I felt stupid at first for not realizing what was happening to me.  I wasn’t my normal size, I was much bigger than this planet and there I was face to face, not even sure of my situation, honestly it just looked like an oversized marble that could fit in the palm of my hand.  Curiosity got the best of me, I reached out with my index finger poking the strange ball with the tip of my nail, immediately the brown, blue, and green swirled into an orange burst of magma and fire as the planet ripped apart from the my faintest of touches.   To this day I still don’t know who, or what was on that planet, an intelligent species with cities teeming with lights and people, or maybe just a plethora of animals wandering a bleak forest, who knows, all I remember on that first day is how beautiful that planet look when my finger destroyed it.  Then it happened…  I got the previous Sentinel’s journal.