A Foreigner’s Tale, Book 1
A Mortal Kombat Fan Fiction
Rated T for violence, language, suggestive themes and potentially disturbing imagery
Chapter 1: The Journey Begins

I had no idea how long it was before I had a thought or feeling I could remember. It could have been a moment or an hour or a day… or several.

But when I could feel again, there was steady warmth on the right side of my body. I felt safe, secure. I’d forgotten what happened at home. I just felt content. And a bit like I was floating…

I decided that I rather liked the warm sensation, and so I tried to move to curl into it. I don’t know how successful I was, for the heat soon left me entirely, and I was still.

Only for a moment longer.

I thought I could see a soft light, like a fire – a much smaller fire. I was also fairly certain that someone was speaking near me. I could only make out one word:

“Nethership.”

I knew very well what that was. The Nethership was a boat, with a bow shaped like a dragon’s head, that would transport fighters of Earthrealm to a Mortal Kombat tournament. But… why did I hear this word above all others, and what the heck did it have to do with my situation… whatever it was?

The soft light glowed again, more brightly this time. I blinked and squinted, trying to adjust my eyes to the fire-light.

Once I was focused, I did indeed see a fire – but mounted in the confines of a torch. There was a small building to either side of me, and the night sky was once again dotted with stars.

I felt a bit odd trying to breathe. I didn’t exactly struggle, but it felt like something was around my throat. And when I felt my neck to see what it was, lo and behold, there was a strip of cloth wrapped around it. It felt smooth, silky, and it was slightly frayed at its edges, as if it were cut out of something. It was almost ribbon-like …How did that get there?

Where the crap was I, anyway?

I sat up, and the image of docks and a darkened bay presented itself. I stretched my arms, but when I brought them back down, I was surprised twice over:

First, there was a scroll in my right hand.

Second, that same hand had become white and tiger-striped. This… was far too familiar.

What the hell happened to me?

I dared to look down at myself. It was a very simple outfit, but also very new to me – a white sort of tank top, nearly trademark camouflage pants, classic black and white sneakers…

I stared at my hands, one open white palm facing me and the other still gripping the scroll. I stood… slowly, and when I was upright, my vision was at a higher point than before I’d slept. I also heard a little noise; something dragged across the ground to my left.

…Holy… shit. Am I… taller? And what was… I looked to the source of the noise, and I saw a sheath resting on my left hip. In a small burst of eagerness, I gripped the hilt and pulled. Steel scraped against the sheath’s end, and I examined the weapon.

The metal of the blade seemed to emit a slight silver-white glow when I held the sword. I found it slightly heavier than I’d expected; after all, I’d never held a sword in my human life. I sincerely thought it was an illusion at the time, but I felt power flow between the weapon and the arm that held it.

This was my sword… Lunavalora, it was named. I never thought I’d actually have it – I never even got around to working it into my stories!

I felt something sticking out of my back. Was that my… my tail? When I turned to look, it seemed pretty unmistakable. White tail, black stripes and tip…

My left hand shot to my head, and I dragged a lock of hair into my vision. Blonde. Blonde and straight. The sharpest contrast ever to my dark and curly head – well… well, that’s what it had been, anyway.

I felt my face. A small nose… a slight coat of fur… thin and rounded ears, resting atop my head…

I had become a beloved character of mine. It was absolutely obvious. I had written her as an expression of my desires to have adventures and protect worlds alongside heroes I admired… and our transformations were eerily similar… Not in regards to the house fire, but in regards to waking up in a foreign world to find ourselves changed.

Her name was Gamecube Silvermoon… and now that name, that body and that persona were mine, for the moment.

However, when I actually had the realization, my mind did not state it as ‘Gamecube,’ but as ‘Gancena.’ A dear friend of mine, known to most of the rest of the world as RoyalFanatic, had given the name ‘Gancena’ as an Angelic translation for ‘Gamecube.’ She’d been writing fan fiction regarding angels and demons.

Shortly before my tragedy, I’d often mentally referred to Gamecube as Gancena. I saw the difference immediately. It seemed to just roll off my tongue, and, frankly, there would be no need for disclaimers on my own character’s name. I’d never gotten around to thinking about the surname, Silvermoon.

So my alias from then on would be ‘Gancena’ and only ‘Gancena.’

I then regarded the unopened scroll. I didn’t know what it was, but… I had to open it. I took a wooden end in each hand and tugged at a bow-knotted string holding it closed. At last, the parchment was free… and I was a bit frustrated. It was in a Far Eastern language. Likely Japanese or Chinese, I deduced. I wasn’t sure. It really wouldn’t have mattered either way; I only knew a few Japanese characters, but even then I knew no words. I was completely illiterate to this scroll.

“Well, dang. This is great,” I muttered. At that moment, my eyes widened. They beheld… an oh-so familiar design.

On the bottom left-hand corner was a red circle, imprinted with a dragon. If I didn’t recognize that, then something had to have been desperately wrong with me.

“The symbol for Mortal Kombat!” I exclaimed. I looked over at the bay again. “But… seriously! Where am I?” When I finished my questioning, I rolled up the scroll again and kept it in my right hand.

I then stepped out of the alleyway determinedly. There was nothing interesting to my left, but to my right… oh, by the Elder Gods, this seemed familiar.

People were gathered around a harbor. Nearby, there was a masked man working iron. This sure did seem familiar…

I began to walk, slowly, closer to the crowd. However, I was slightly unnerved, not only by the possible prospects, but by my very appearance. If I really was in the universe of Mortal Kombat, in Earthrealm, or perhaps even in any other of its realms, then no soul would have seen anything like me. What would they think of me? Would they be afraid? Would they… attempt to drive me off?

But, hey. I had to roll the dice sometime. Besides, I was nothing like what they would have to face in the tournament…

After all, I’d easily say that four arms are far scarier than almost any animalistic appearance. Especially when the latter isn’t all that aggressive. I think…

So I kept moving.  I glanced at the blacksmith and watched the sparks of his work dive to the ground as I walked by, and then I looked to the crowd again.

As expected, I did hear several gasps as I began to weave my way in, and I did catch a few people staring. I sincerely tried to ignore them, but nevertheless, I felt flustered as I tried to seek out anyone or anything that would reaffirm my suspicions – that I was really somewhere within the realms of Mortal Kombat.

“Nethership.”

My heart jumped when I remembered that word. Only in the world of MK… It helped, but… I needed something big. Something that would not make me doubt a thing.  A perfect confirmation. The actual appearance of a kombatant or object would be excellent, I thought.

I stopped for a minute in a relatively clear space, listening to the chatter around me. I could hear a couple words here and there about me, mostly friends or companions beckoning each other to look at me, but what really caught my attention was another conversation about another unusual sight.

“…wearing almost all purple from head to toe, right over there. She looks like she’s not from this planet.”

For the first time since arriving, my ears pricked. It was definitely a familiarity, but not quite the kind I was looking for…

Nevertheless, I looked forward, roughly in the direction of the commenter’s gaze…

Oh, boy. No way.

I definitely saw who they were talking about.

My surprised eyes beheld a young lady several notches taller than me, with short purple hair that fanned out below her ears, eyes to match, a sleeveless dark purple shirt beneath a grand golden breastplate, a long purple battle skirt that went beyond her feet – looking back, how she didn’t trip in that thing was beyond me, but I considered the knee-high slit on the left side of the garment as a possibility –brown grieves plated with metal on the sole and up to the heel, a gold chain belt wrapped around her hips, and a red ribbon tied around her neck. The light blue hilt of the weapon I knew as Razerglaze peeked out of a purple sheath on her left hip. Her wrist-length white-gloved hands gripped a scroll similar to mine. My heart leaped. The man who pointed her out was right; she was not of this world… but she was definitely someone I knew.

Cecilia Lilith Aurion, niece to Kratos Aurion and cousin to Lloyd Irving, ally to Colette Brunel on the Regeneration Journey, was RoyalFanatic’s most prominent character, a former angel of Cruxis on the realm of Symphonia. Several months before I turned sixteen, I remembered, RF was away from deviantART, our main means of communication, for an unusually long time. When she did finally return, she acted… oddly, to say the least, as if she were learning to use the website all over again. And she would refer to Symphonia way more often than before... for a time, anyway. And for that time, she really acted more like Cecilia than like RoyalFanatic.

Given that, I wondered… was this Cecilia… or RF herself?

I approached swiftly, maybe more swiftly than I’d ever walked up to anyone, until we were just a few yards apart. I wanted to speak. I wanted to say something so badly… I felt choked up for just another moment before I let out a sound:

“Ce-Cece!”

Instantly, Cecilia looked up and turned her head to me. “Gamecube!” she greeted, grinning.  I winced a bit internally at the call of my obsolete name, but who was I to do so? She didn’t know about my intended renaming. Nevertheless, I closed the distance between us.

“Cece, what are you doing here?” I questioned.

“Well, Lloyd delivered a message from Origin,” my friend explained, “saying that there was a realm where a friend of mine would be. Of course, I wanted to go, so he sent me here with the power of the Eternal Sword.”

I knew more about the places and events in Symphonia, but my total knowledge of it still couldn’t compare to that of… say, pre-calculus, since that was the math I was taking at the time of the fire. But at least I understood full well who Lloyd Irving and Origin were, and what the Eternal Sword was.

“How did you get that scroll?” I asked.

Cecilia stared at the parchment. “Um… I’m not sure. But I had it ever since I got here.”

“And when was that, exactly?”

“You probably won’t believe this, but… I’ve only been here for a few minutes.”

“Really? So have I!”

“How about you? What are you up to?” inquired the angel.

“Well, I…” I paused. This would be odd… and definitely not what Cecilia would expect from me. “…I was at home, and… the place caught fire.”

She gasped.

“No, no! Don’t worry! I got away, but… well… I had to fall out a window to do it.”

“And the others? Were they okay?”

All right, here it goes… “I’m very certain that Mom, Dad and my brother all got out way before I did. I told Dad to move outside. He probably did, but only because he couldn’t get to me beforehand.”

As part of me expected, Cecilia’s expression tilted into confusion. “But… weren’t you at Smash Mansion?”

“I’ve never been to Smash Mansion, as much as I would have liked to go a few years ago,” I replied, placing my right hand over my heart, “but Gamecube has.”

Her brow furrowed a bit more, but her eyes soon widened in realization. After a moment’s pause, she whispered my human name, to be sure that it was me.

And I knew exactly who I was talking to.

“RF… It really is you! …Oh, my God!” I squealed and jumped, catching her tightly in not just a hug, but a glomp. I heard her laugh. “Oh, I don’t believe it! We’ve been talking about meeting for so long and now we’re here and… and…” I let her go, panting excitedly, to look her in the eye. “I can’t begin to say how happy I am to see you!”

Our glee was stopped for a moment with a splash farther down the harbor. I looked to the direction of the noise, but I only saw an Asian man walking by from the sound’s general direction, pocketing… something. I couldn’t see it. …I was rather surprised that he didn’t look at us.

Wait… what? That seemed familiar, too…

“Gamecube?” Cecilia asked. “You okay?”

I looked to the angel once more. “Yeah. I just thought I saw that before. Oh, and…” Another pause. “…It’s pretty apparent now that I made the decision after you got to Symphonia, but… I’m not going to call myself ‘Gamecube.’ Just call me ‘Gancena.’”

“Ah, okay. So...Gancena. Looks like you took the angelic name after all. Hah! I can't say I'm not honored! So...dare I ask what's going on here?”

I scratched the back of my head. “Ah, well… if my notions are correct, then we might be—“ My answer was interrupted by various “Whoa!”s and other surprised cries. I turned.

To my surprise, there was a huge plume of fog – I could have sworn it wasn’t there before – and from it emerged… an ancient-looking boat. …With a dragon-headed bow!

My eyes flew wide open. “The Nethership!” I gasped.

“The what?” Cecilia asked. I whipped around. I’d nearly forgotten how little she knew of Mortal Kombat – the gist of a few fighters’ backstories and a much later part of the storyline, at least – and I knew that ‘Nethership’ certainly wasn’t in her vocabulary… until now!

“The Nethership, Cecilia! It’s the Nethership! This boat would take Earthrealm fighters to the island where the Mortal Kombat tournament takes place!” I spun to gaze upon the vessel. “I… I can’t believe this! My notions are correct! We are in Earthrealm!”

All the contenders stared as the old ship docked and lowered a boarding ramp. Instantly, the bewildered people lifted their bags and began to file in. It was a silent embarking.

Cecilia and I stared for several long moments, letting the crowd pass us by, but then something new caught my eye.

On the ramp, I could make out a man dressed in a black stealth suit with a blue over mantle. My breath caught. Unmistakable… Sub-Zero…

I saw something in my peripheral vision, and when I turned to look, a red eye stared from the darkness of a tiny building. The sparks from the blacksmith’s work illuminated its owner’s face for a moment – short brown hair, beard and moustache. The man’s vest hung open. Kano…

I jerked my focus back to Cecilia. “We have to board this ship, whether for one reason or another.” One being for Earthrealm and the other being… my own desire, apparently, I quietly added.

“Hm,” she grunted, nodding. “I had a feeling.”

“Good,” I responded, taking a step, “I bet you won’t have any trouble out here.”

“So, we’re going to this island?” the angel asked when we reached the ramp.

I was quiet until we’d both made our way to the top and led us further into the interior. When I turned back to Cecilia, I peered over her shoulder for a heartbeat and saw Kano taking the final steps onto the boat.

Then I looked at her, smiled, and nodded firmly. “Yes. We are.”

Mortal Kombat begins…