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Chapter 1: This Ain't Kansas Anymore...

I don't even remember what kind of dream I had... I usually don't remember them that well unless they're vivid and I'm sleeping pretty lightly. For a guy that apparently sleeps like the dead; enough to where I have to practically be punched awake, remembering a dream is a seldom occurrence.

Either way, my sleep was shattered by the shrill alarm I had set on my cell phone. The closest I could describe it to would be a high-pitched bleating mechanical sheep that some no-talent trance 'artist' had decided to run through Auto-Tune six times... the damn sound nearly hurt my ears when it went off, and never failed to rouse me out of my sleep. That was a good thing, as without it my biological clock would finally kick in about ten minutes before I was supposed to be at work.

I groggily lifted my head off my pillow, the dim cast of my bedroom greeting my eyes. For some reason I had painted it a Wedgewood shade of blue right after I moved into the house I was renting... I think it was because I was sick of staring at plain white walls. Either way I sliced it, it kept the glare down in the room I used solely to sleep in these days. After getting the house to myself a few months ago... the product of the uncle that had been my roommate getting married as well as my ex-girlfriend storming out after one last bitter fight... I had branched out and used the rest of the place for, well... my things.

The phone, perched upon a minifridge that I used as a nightstand on my queen-sized bed, continued to sing its ear-offending song. After suppressing the thought of chucking that expensive piece of electronics across the room, I flipped it open and shut off the alarm. As I blinked away the weariness from my eyes, the legend "No Service Avail." was printed across the screen. Odd. I had never had a service outage with this phone. If it wasn't a few minute fluke, I'd use the land line from work and take my lunch break to grill a hapless Verizon customer service rep.

Glancing at the phone's clock, it was half past seven in the morning... an hour and a half before I needed to get my ass into work. "Jesus... looks like it's going to be a marvelous day already." I muttered to myself as I got up and stumbled to the door leading into the bathroom.

My hand knew the drill enough times over the past five years, reaching out to flick the light switch on. I expected the harsh roar of the far too large exhaust fan and clean, bright light... and I got neither. That shook me out of my mind enough to mutter again. "Fuck." Power outage, too? Just great. At least I didn't necessarily have to have the bathroom light on to take a shower, and the light streaming in from the small bathroom window would give me enough to see by. However, the bathroom would get fogged up to hell due to the fan staying off... ah well. My hand went down to the hem of my boxers as the other one simultaneously turned out the shower faucet.... only to also receive nothing but a few random splashes on the plastic shower floor instead of the expected torrent from the showerhead.

That woke me up in an instant. "What the fuck is going on?" I asked myself, looking around as if the answer would have suddenly appeared in front of me. It didn't, obviously. It was like the entire house was dead. Something was wrong. I paid the utility bill, so why was everything cut off? Blackout... combined with running water failure? This didn't make sense. Offering a sigh to the still air, I exited the bathroom to see what I could do.

The layout of my house was strange... although that was common for houses built in the 1920's. The bathroom was set in-between the two bedrooms... with no access to the rest of the house. I could make my way through the house by using the bedrooms... which I normally did. My target was the breaker box in the backyard... that caused me to stop in the second bedroom and grab a pair of jeans that I had set on the dresser there. I pulled on the garment to at least shield the neighbors from the sight of me running around outside in boxers in the middle of the day... then exited the house through the back door.

I stopped dead in my tracks as the cool, still air hit me. This was the precise instant that I knew something was seriously wrong in my personal part of the world. However... all I could manage to maintain was a growing curiosity... and a gnawing pit in my stomach.

My house stood in an old suburb about four miles north of my city's downtown... established neighborhood going downhill, tightly packed houses... that sort of thing. I had a backyard that was comprised mostly of a concrete patio and a fence... beyond which I could see three houses less than forty feet from me in each direction. The duplex off to my left with the barking dogs was gone. So was the cottage directly in front of me; part of the property but occupied with another renter. The two-story house to my right was also missing.

"What the fuck...?" I managed to utter. It had been replaced by wilderness... some sort of cliff face rose maybe the height of my house. I couldn't see much more than that. My hand went to my arm, giving my flesh a vicious pinch. I winced and dropped my hand. Was I still dreaming or something?

I stepped back into the house... emerging into the small room that was my office. It was my sanctum of a sort... my desktop computer, sound system... it was where I wrote the troubles of the world away. But, no amount of typing on the old IBM Model M keyboard that sat on my desk would erase the fear that was slowly building up in the pit of my stomach. I suddenly felt very unprotected.

Looking around the room, I had my choice of weapons. The small collection of firearms I had stashed in the room beckoned to me, placed in a standalone gun safe tucked in a corner. As my hands trembled I dialed in the combination... it took me two attempts until the door was open.

I only kept one pistol out in the open... the one that I expressly used as defense against intruders. My FEG PA-63 fired 9x18mm Makarov... and if a situation warranted my house suddenly being somewhere it wasn't, I thought I needed something more powerful. My hands grabbed my Remington 870 pump-action shotgun from the safe, soon afterwards grabbing a box of #4 buckshot shells from the top shelf. I kept most of my ammunition elsewhere in the office, but this would do for now.

I fumbled with stuffing the twelve-gauge shells into the gun... four of them, racking the pump, then one more. I stuffed the pockets of my jeans with as many shells as I could.... all the while thinking what the hell might be out there? Where the hell am I? What the fuck was I actually doing here?

Now equipped with a fully loaded shotgun, I decided I was well armed and confident enough to investigate. I wound my way through the living room this time, keeping the scattergun at the ready as if I was expecting the likes of Jason Vorhees to jump out of the walls at me. Eventually I reached the door and unlocked it... stepping forth onto my porch.

There was no time for me to react... only the surprised hissing of two... things that had been approaching my front door. My mind tunnel-visioned on them, hastily sizing them up. They were lizard-men... big and bulky ones at that. They stood nearly my height of five-ten, and probably outweighed me by twice my one-eighty. They looked somewhat familiar, but my mind didn't have time to ponder that curious thought. They plodded towards me, only the fact they started to brandish the axes in their scaly hands snapping me out of my shock-frozen state.

It was then that I still noticed I had the shotgun clenched in my white-knuckle grip. I had purchased it from my stepbrother two years ago... hadn't even fired it since then. I was holding it at my hip, but the business end was pointed at one of the lizards. Without even thinking about it, I jerked the trigger. Nothing happened. "Fuck!" I cursed my stupidity, my finger snapping the safety off in a single press. As the lizard-thing just about reached me, I pulled the trigger again.

The Remington belched flame, smoke, and lead in a tremendous roar that made my ears ring. The close confines instantly reminded me of the slight hearing loss I gave myself when I was sixteen, fooling around with my dad's old AK clone in the backwoods of Louisiana. However, for all the noise it had the desired effect.

The lizard-thing was kicked backwards, a hole nearly the size of a quarter blown into its chest. Even though the hole looked small, I knew enough about shotguns to know that the lizard-thing had taken about the same amount of punishment as if I emptied a small caliber revolver into it. Its compatriot stopped in its tracks, looking at the stricken lizard-thing tumbling backwards in slow motion. Time seemed to slow for me as well... my hands racked the pump and threw the shotgun to my shoulder.

The lizard-thing didn't recover from the shotgun blast and its dying buddy in time. All I knew was that it was running at me with an ax, and that was a pretty good indication of its intent. I pulled the trigger again, my ears protesting with pain as the blast once again spiked my ears. This time I felt the recoil, a quick, powerful jolt to my shoulder. The other lizard-thing fell the same way.

It wasn't until I lowered the shotgun that I realized what had happened. My body started shaking at the realization... I had just engaged two armed opponents with a firearm and killed them. I felt... sick. Ten minutes ago I was sleeping soundly in my bed... another average day awaiting me. Now, I had two dead lizard-things on my front porch, a smoking shotgun in my hands, and the beginnings of a pretty bad headache.

I took a deep breath as I finally looked out over the scenery that was beyond my porch... besides the dead lizards. A little piece of it was my front yard... not really much of one. The street crews outside had been wanting to repave the street for some time... that was the reason my car was pulled up in the yard... damned lack of a driveway or garage in which to put it. It was still there, but the street simply... wasn't. Green grass and idyllic scenery replaced it... the place I was in looked like some sort of valley. A familiar valley. Wait a minute...

My eyes snapped down to the lizard-things I had just shot. Their profiles started looking more and more familiar. Instead of seeing them as some fucked-up snarling beast ready to cleave me in half with a giant ax, I looked closer. Their armor cinched it... and my jaw dropped open.

"What the fucking hell is going on with me?!" I shouted to what I now knew were two dead Sharpclaw... the reptilian antagonists to that video game I played several times... the video game I had been using to write stories that were based on the storyline. I felt myself fall to my knees, my hands still clenched onto my shotgun as I watched my view of reality slide away... was I going insane? Had I snapped? Was I dead? Was I really sucked into some sort of video game, a fictional universe?

I started breathing so hard I was nearly hyperventilating... honestly, other than the fact I didn't want to be gutted by another Sharpclaw, I would have welcomed it. There was simply no way in Hell that I was experiencing this... there had to be a logical, rational explanation....

...but I found none. The facts were as clear as day. Somehow my house was in Thorntail Hollow... the hub portion of Starfox Adventures. Actually, it was tucked away not too far where Fox parked his Arwing at. I could even see a small group of Thorntail regarding me... I think they were looking at me curiously. At least I knew they were pretty timid... Hell, they were scared shitless if their damn night lights were snuffed out. Least I didn't have to worry about them charging me. "Fuck, fuck... FUCK!" I shouted, primarily out of frustration. I was confused, angry... isolated. I somehow had to survive in what I up to about thirty seconds ago thought was just a damned video game.

I was quaking in my socks as I stood up and retreated back into my house, slamming the door behind me. I locked it... fat lot of good it'd do against an ax, but at least I'd have the warning of my front door being busted in.

My curiosity overtook me and I took the few steps to my entertainment center. Rifling through it I came across what I was looking for... a Gamecube game case. I examined it, knowing exactly what I was looking at.

The cover art for the game I somehow found myself in stared me right in the face. The iconic Fox McCloud stood in the foreground, an ornate staff extended in his paws. Next to him were Slippy Toad, Peppy Hare, and Prince Tricky... Fox's dinosaur sidekick. Right behind him was Krystal... the enigmatic Cerinian who ended up as Fox's fellow wingman and love interest in the next game.

The Sharpclaw were also depicted as well, but their real-life counterparts were a hell of a lot less... cartoony. They looked like comical, bungling bad guys on the cover art, but they looked pretty menacing face to face. Hell... they nearly killed me, and I was armed with a fucking 12-gauge.

I needed to investigate; to get my bearings. And for that... I needed to prepare.