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Capitolo Uno.

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It's kind of embarrassing but it took me seventeen years to realize I'd been reborn in a fictional universe. Some days I kind of wish I'd remained in blissful ignorance.

You'd think you'd be aware of it but in hindsight there are so many fictional worlds you could be reborn in and never know about it. Grimm? Harry Potter? Buffy? You could live an entire normal life and never realize that a TV show or book you'd read in a past life is your current reality today.

But I digress. What you need to know is this: soon after I turned seventeen I started experiencing some seriously weird stuff. Like, really weird. Supernatural kind of weird. Stuff that frankly started to really freak me out.

For example one day I was eating cereal in my modest Midwestern home when my mom started nagging me – again – about getting out more and having a boyfriend. I'd grown to love my mother but she was a woman whose worldview seemed permanently frozen in time in the 1950's. If I didn't have a man and a close group of female friends to spend weekends with then clearly there must have been something wrong me and I was doomed to be an old spinster. She couldn't understand that I was perfectly happy being shy, introverted, and well – a nerd, for lack of a better term.

One second I was eating the milk and cereal just fine before my mother got me especially irritated with her never ending and mildly insulting nagging. The next I put the spoon in my mouth and on reflex spit it out right away. It had tasted utterly vile all of a sudden. On closer inspection I noticed that all the milk in my cereal had curdled. Like, in the span of a second. With no logical explanation.

My mom of course closed her ears and insisted I must have added cottage cheese to my cereal and didn't remember doing so. Yes. That was my mother. After that I think I understandably kept anything strange that happened to myself.

The next thing that happened was also in a moment of anger. I was convinced that my AP History teacher hated me and in my mind that was confirmed when I got a B+ on my final paper when it was clearly at least solid A- material. At the very least. I'd read some of the papers that got A's. That biased jerk totally had it out for me.

I was gripping the metal bar of a railing at school when I read that. I didn't even notice when my fingers made deep indents in the solid metal. When I saw what I had done my second thought was, irrationally, that I didn't want to get in trouble for damaging school property. My first though was obviously a very loudly whispered What the fuck?. I ran after that, eager to leave the scene of the crime. It was only after I was safe from the reprisals of school officials that it really started to sink in how impossible what I had done should have been.

Stuff like that just kept happening no matter how much I wanted to ignore it. I won't lie, it freaked me the hell out. I also had also started to develop a sense of… something. Something different inside of me. Or maybe something I could sense in the world around me? I wasn't sure. But after a while it started to become impossible to ignore.

So I started doing some research like any sane modern day person would. I surfed the internet for days first looking for anything that hinted at some kind of rational explanation… which perhaps predictably turned up exactly zilch that looked even close to promising. It wasn't long before I started getting desperate and started looking into religious and new age explanations. Most of it was wishy-washy new age junk that was pretty much the same kind of stuff you could find anywhere in my last lifetime. Tibetan singing bowls and balancing crystals might be great and stuff but… this was real life. Serious stuff. Stuff that literally felt like life or death somehow and that would probably get me institutionalized for just talking about. So I kept digging and digging and digging hoping (and later praying) for something that might help. That might give me some sort of explanation that I could understand.

Eventually after a thousand message boards and a million dead ends I was directed by one enthusiastic poster to an E-version of the Chicago yellow pages. Apparently there was a guy there who everyone in the community was convinced was the 'real deal'. Eventually I found it and… well I didn't exactly deal with what I found gracefully. As I read the ad my mouth hung open for about five minutes as I read the same lines over and over again, my mind frozen and playing the same words over and over like a broken, skipping gramophone.

Harry Dresden – Wizard

Lost Items Found. Paranormal Investigations.

Consulting. Advice. Reasonable Rates.

No Love Potions, Endless Purses, Parties or

Other Entertainment.

I was positive that, no, the Dresden Files books didn't exist in this world. I knew because that had been my favorite book series of all time and I'd looked. I knew that there was no Jim Butcher here. Still just to make sure one more time I robotically opened up another window on my browser and went to Amazon. And looked. And looked. Nope. No Dresden Files books.

Sooo… that probably meant that no one would know to make a gag like this.

People on the internet seemed convinced that this guy was real.

But… that was nuts. Because if Harry Dresden was real then that meant… fairies were real. And Naaglooshii. And four different flavors of vampires. And eldritch abominations were constantly trying to break into this world to wipe out all life as we know it and the only thing holding them back was a sadistic psychotic queen who apparently wasn't very good at her job because said eldritch abominations kept sneaking into our world like all the time.

And… that was totally insane. So there clearly had to be a more rational explanation for there being a Harry Dresden ad, exactly as I remembered it, posted on the city of Chicago's yellow pages.

Maybe… Maybe someone else from my last life was reborn here and placed that ad as a joke. Yeah. That was much more rational. That made a lot more sense. Had to be it. Reincarnation into an almost completely identical world was much easier to believe than magic and evil fairies and Santa actually existing and secretly being Odin in disguise.

Because that would just be crazy.

Still. I looked at the phone number teasing me on the screen and started to bite my nails, a habit my mother had tried unsuccessfully to completely get me out of for years. It had to be a prank. The world simply didn't work like that. The Dresden explanation that "magic comes from life" and that you could somehow use this force to make a snoopy doll cripple a psychotic super-werewolf (which shouldn't exist in the first place!) using just a bit of blood… or you could use it to open doorways to a dimension that was out of Alice in Wonderland… or Holy Jesus God was actually real here and his Archangels could do magic even come down and talk to you…

That part actually shut down my brain for a minute before deciding to not think about that one for the time being. Especially since I was a Buddhist and had never believed in God in the first place.

Okay. So. Odds were this was all a prank. Somehow. And I was freaking out about nothing. That was the sane and logical explanation. Yet at the same time…

What if what I'm doing is actual magic? I thought as I chewed my nails down to unattractive stumps. It would explain things wouldn't it? Oh boy. Does that mean this will continue to grow until I can't even use technology anymore? Another horrifying thought popped into my head. If I screw up experimenting or get too overzealous am I going to get some humorless stuffy gits in grey cloaks kicking down my door to chop off my head?

Somehow as much as I wanted to I couldn't fully convince myself that I was being silly or that all of it was simply in my head. I pulled out my cell phone and looked at it suspiciously wondering if it was moments away from shorting out. There was nothing to it. I was going to have to call that number. Just so I could confirm things one way or the other. It's no big deal. Not a big deal at all. Just dial the number! I thought to myself as I swallowed nervously.

If this crazy ad was the real deal… then I couldn't afford to remain ignorant. I was salutatorian in my class after all. I'd always been hungry for learning. There was no way I could stand to remain ignorant of something this huge… even without the possibility of my life being in danger if I really could use magic.

I unlocked my phone and dialed the number.