First Impressions
by Kira Bacal
A first encounter with an alien race goes a little... oddly.As a recent graduate, Ryan Johnson is on the fast track to having a prestigious career and prosperous life. Then Ryan wakes up one spring morning and everything he cherishes becomes jeopardized. He finds himself left with only fragments of the prior night's events and covering his body are numerous strange injuries that he cannot rationally explain. As he learns of the painful experiences that took place the night his memory was deleted, his world is exterminated of all purpose and is instead replaced with abundant chaos. Did his destructive habits finally ruin his family or is someone else hiding in the dark? In search of answers, he begins peeling back the layers that surround his tragic demise. But answers are hard to come by, and the murder that turned his life into a nightmare takes an unexpected turn. His search leads him to the rediscovery of a piece of family history, the tale of an event his own ancestors buried, so that their family could move on from the past by hiding any remembrance of the lost "Gate's Fortune" from the public.Who does a person trust, when he can't even trust himself or his family? While excavating the corrosive details from his wrecked world, he uncovers a hidden relationship that brings him clarity. A relationship that removes the carnage from his mind and breaths life into his heart. But to find any true peace, he himself must not only protect himself and those he loves, but also avenge those he has lost, thus hopefully repudiating his own transgressions within his distraught reality. But, all hidden truth comes with a price. Some of these truths can take a person into a bottomless pit of despair, where things are best left untouched and forgotten. While other times, the only way to survive a life of trauma and pain is to engage the truths that the mind tries to hide. For Ryan, this struggle for regeneration will either lead him into the light or banish him to a bleak life of darkness inside his twisted mind. Because there is but one way to decipher the events surrounding that horrid night, he must dive head first into the raging hurricane within his subconscious, in search of the buried truth.