Bright Orange

Chapter 01: Strange New World

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My peaceful sleep was disturbed by the sudden feeling of something going very wrong. It was the kind of thing that niggled around at the edges of your dreams, forcing you to wake up and deal with it before you could continue sleeping.

I forcefully brought myself awake, grumbling to myself and stumbled out of bed. I probably forgot to lock the door or something…

I only made it a few steps before slamming my foot into a piece of furniture, sending me sprawling onto the floor and, from the sound of it, crushing something Styrofoam underneath me.

I lay groaning on the ground, now fully awake. My foot was throbbing with pain, my back was soaked in some sort of liquid from what I had landed on, and worst of all, now that I was actually looking around, I realized I didn't know where exactly I was.

Sunlight pooled in the room from a window thick with dust, a line of little plants on the window sill drinking in the rays happily. Everything that I could see was in a state of disorder, with things arranged with no real order in mind, and from what I could see from my position on the ground, whoever lived here absolutely lived off cup ramen.

Which was probably what was soaking into my shirt right now. Gross.

Trying not to make anymore noise, I slowly got up, wincing as the crumpled cups I had landed on groaned underneath my weight. I pulled myself to my feet and looked over at the bed, fully expecting to have to apologize to my latest bed-partner for waking her up after what was clearly a hard night of partying for us both.

But there was no one to apologize to. The bed, which was actually more of a mattress on the ground, was small enough that only one person could sleep on it to. Apparently I had not gotten lucky last night.

.

.

.

Shit, had I broken into someone's house last night?! I had to have gotten really drunk for that to have happened. Again.

While I was busy wondering about whether or not I had just committed a felony, the odd feeling at the back of my mind that had woken me up in the first place continued to demand my attention. I frowned and looked around the room more closely.

It was…strange. Things were arranged in a way that seemed subtly off in a way that couldn't be attributed to merely awful organizing skills and neglected cleaning. Maybe I was in a foreign exchange student's apartment? It would fit with the odd style of decorating and bed on the ground, I supposed.

The feeling didn't go away, but I did my best to shrug it off. I should at least find my phone and call my friends, see if they knew what happened last night. I tried to dig it out of my pocket, but rather than finding my phone, I found myself wearing a different pair of pants than I remembered wearing.

I normally thought of myself as a calm and rational man, despite all the evidence to the contrary. However, when I found myself in an unfamiliar place, after not knowing how I got there, wearing different clothing…I may have started to panic.

Or more accurately, I immediately ran out of the apartment that I was in, barely managing to avoid screaming at the top of my lungs. I managed to avoid kicking any more furniture and wretched open the door, sprinting outside.

That, however, is when I slammed into a wall and fell to the ground once again, dazed.

My mind was awhirl, drunk on panic and seizing every scrap of data possible to figure out what had happened to me. Given how easily I had just exited the apartment, I hadn't been kidnapped, but that just meant that I had done this to myself and somehow not remembered it.

The only theory that made sense to me now was that I had gotten monumentally drunk the previous night, drunk enough to try some sort of drug that left me unable to even recall a loose recollection of last night's events. It would also explain why my running seemed far faster than I recalled it: I was still high, and it was affecting my perception, as well as my odd lack of a hangover.

Despite all that, the faint presence at the back of my mind was now screaming at me, screaming at me to disregard the cool breeze that was far too nice for the weather I was used to, and ignore the absent humming of cars beneath my feet that had been present all my life, it commanded me to simply look at myself.

I once again pulled myself to my feet and looked down at my body.

.

.

.

The ground was a lot closer to my eyes than I had ever recalled it being.

The ground began swimming beneath my feet and panic broke in the face of sheer, unavoidable impossibility. My limbs were short and lacked any of the definition of adolescence. My hands were pink, unmarked by callouses, with nails slightly overgrown in a way I would never have allowed them to grow. This was not my body.

I re-entered the apartment in a haze, doing an accurate impression of a junky that was fascinated with his hands. How was this even possible? Had I undergone some sort of weird abduction/surgery to swap my brain with a child's'?

Stumbling over practically everything in my path, I finally found the bathroom, and shakily looked in the mirror. I don't know what I was hoping for, but it wasn't this.

A soft, round face greeted me, blue eyes staring blankly back at me. His hair was a mop of blonde spikes hidden underneath an odd sleeping cap, and there were three whisker-like dark lines on each cheek.

It was a face that I knew well. And as opposed to increasing my panic, or furthering my confusion, I couldn't stop a smile of blessed relief slide across my face.

"Oh, thank god."

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Hello everyone! Phantom Prince again. So, I was about five chapters into several stories and was getting more and more frustrated, because I wanted to give my characters all of this information that I knew would help them, and was common knowledge for me, but would be completely out of place for the character.

So I thought…why not make that character himself me?

I disregarded that thought, because I had never read a good Self-Insert story. That is until I started reading the Subtle Knife, a Worm/Young Justice crossover SI, as well as The Spider, a SI Spiderman fanfic, and I was inspired to do one myself.

Which brings me to Bright Orange, my latest attempt to actually write a good fanfiction. My SI will have many of the flaws that define who I am, but hopefully his journey will be interesting.