Josuke, Tuner of the Void (Chapter 1)
The hum of the station’s servers was the symphony of Josuke’s life. Data flowed, systems operated within predictable parameters, and the vast, indifferent void outside his viewport remained safely external to his reality. His job in deep-space analytics wasn’t glamorous, but it was ordered, and order was Josuke’s comfort zone.
His current task was classifying an incoming object – a derelict vessel picked up on long-range sensors. No transponder, no identifiable markings, ancient energy signatures unlike anything in the galactic registries. Anomalous. Intrigued despite himself, Josuke focused the station’s spectral analyzer on the derelict’s estimated core.
The energy signature wasn’t just unknown; it was active. Fluctuating wildly, raw and powerful, it felt like a raw nerve in spacetime, sending discordant pulses through his console that bypassed standard filters. Josuke leaned closer, compelled by the sheer strangeness of the data. It was chaos, but it possessed a terrifying, intricate structure he yearned to understand.
As he attempted to lock the analyzer onto the core signature, the energy spiked. The lights in Josuke’s small analytical station flickered erratically, his console shrieked, and the contained environment of his booth felt like it was being stretched and compressed simultaneously. Outside his viewport, the derelict pulsed with an impossible, blinding white light that seemed to warp the very fabric of space around it.
The light expanded, tearing through the viewport, filling the booth with an intense, overwhelming radiance. Josuke felt a violent wrench, a sickening sensation of being pulled apart at a fundamental level. The familiar hum of the station died, the force of gravity vanished, and he was suspended in a terrifying, silent void where logic and physics ceased to apply.
Then, he fell.
He hit something solid, jarringly. Gasping, he pushed himself up. The blinding light was gone. He lay on springy, bio-luminescent ground under a sky painted in swirling, ethereal colours he’d never seen before. Towering flora, like giant, crystalline trees, rose around him, emitting soft light. The air was clean, carrying the scent of ozone and unknown life. Distant, melodic calls echoed through the alien forest.
He was alone. His workstation, the station, his whole life – gone. He wore his standard grey analyst jumpsuit, miraculously intact. His datapad, his comm-unit… vanished.
He looked down at his hands. They felt… different. And in his palm, where nothing should have been, was a small, smooth object of iridescent obsidian, etched with glowing, shifting patterns. It pulsed with a faint, steady light, radiating a warmth that felt both alien and strangely comforting.
As he stared at it, bewildered, a sudden torrent of information flooded his mind, not in language, but as pure, intuitive understanding. The object… it was an Anchor, tethered to a vast, powerful energy source. The place… a planet designated Designation Gamma-Prime-Seven, located in the far reaches of Sector 9. The flora… its energy flow was tied to the planet’s core resonance. The object in his hand… it had brought him here. And it had infused him with a unique ability – Resonance. He could sense energy, understand its flow, perceive the underlying structure of reality, not through data, but through innate feeling. The signature from the derelict… it was inside him. Tied to the Anchor.
A snap of a twig nearby tore him from his stunned realization. His senses, amplified by the Resonance, pinpointed the sound with startling clarity. Something was moving through the alien vegetation, something large and deliberate. His ‘Resonance’ didn’t give him combat skills or survival knowledge. It just told him, with absolute certainty, that he was in immediate danger.
He pressed himself against the wide trunk of a crystalline tree, clutching the glowing Anchor stone. He was Josuke, data analyst. His comfort zone was light-years away. The first inhabitant of this new, terrifying world was approaching, and he had to figure out how to use this inexplicable Resonance just to survive the next few minutes.
