Phantom Shift-Introduction

Sitting in a dark room, a woman approaches from “The Group”. They have an offer for you. A simple job for one of The Activity’s best agents. A simple task for a man of your talents. Retrieve Doctor Cardoso’s journal and a copy of the Empire's world-dominating devices, and relieve the United States from their dominance.

Slide into the cave of wonders that is Raul’s new reality. Step into a world where the boundary between realities blur, where the smallest choices can ripple into something extraordinary. Can Raul use his spycraft to stay ahead of his pursuers? Follow as he weaves through the labyrinth of secrets to find the elusive Tupac. And, perhaps, happiness once again.

Prepare as Raul's new partner, Mariam, guides him through this odyssey with her titanic intellect and curiosity. Watch as Mariam conjures the forces of astrophysics and cryptography to help Raul unlock the secrets of the Doctor’s journal. Can they decipher the treasure trove of secrets to unlocking the Kleptonium Temporal Field Modulator, or will agents of the Empire find them first?

Chapter 1. Petrópolis

Chapter 2. The Redux

Chapter 3. Blastema

Chapter 4. Sublimation

Chapter 5. Limits of Our Vision

More to come…|

What inspired this work:

This work was originally inspired by the “Little Black Book” challenge on Vocal from January 2021. I will admit this challenge felt quite hard at first, because during college I had become so accustomed to writing academic papers, that I felt a little like I had lost the ability to write fiction. In all honesty, I think the opening of the challenge description fits what I did most of the time I spent trying to come up with some way of entering the challenge. It’s often easier to imagine the “possibilities that come along with a $20,000 prize,” than it is to sit down and write out the work that will get you the $20,000 prize.

The funniest part of this journey is that my challenge entry was not very good. Well, rather, it was a good idea executed poorly. I say this because if I’m being honest, I barely followed the prompt. Whether that was intentional or just the excitement at the possibility of winning $20,000, who knows.

I say that I barely followed the prompt, because as it states, we had to “create a fiction story about someone who unexpectedly comes into $20,000. Whether it involves a mysterious inheritance, a lotto win, or random circumstance, the details are entirely up to you—the only requirement is that at some point in your narrative, whether it’s a major plot point or a minor detail, your story must include a small black notebook.” While I did manage to wedge both elements into my story, I did it so haphazardly that it is no wonder I didn’t win. I probably did not make it past the first cut. Why? Because if I’m being objective, I probably wouldn’t have selected my entry to go further than it had. But that wasn’t a problem later.

The feeling of disappointment is always present after we pour our hearts into a project, especially one that we write for a specific challenge. However, after several months of watching and waiting for what I believed was a literary masterpiece to take off on its own on Vocal, I started joining several Vocal groups on Facebook. This is where I met other Vocal authors. One of the most inspirational of these was Tom Bradbury. A man that was one of the most wonderful people you could ever meet, and one of the best authors to grace Vocal. It was looking at what he and others wrote that I learned that Vocal was more than quick money and challenges. It is a place to develop as a writer, and share your creativity with the world. This completely changed my outlook on Vocal.

While the next thing I did publish was also a challenge entry( a nice distraction from recently being unemployed again), I started using Vocal for much more. First, I pulled out some old poems and published those. Seeing the success from those, and publishing one more challenge entry before my biggest break encouraged me to try new things. And that was the watershed moment. It was writing an article about a popular Star Wars character’s creation that took me to the heights of having my first Top Story. And since then I have used Vocal as my platform of choice to develop my writing. And with that, I am happy that I just finished the fifth chapter in a series that I plan to one day publish as a book.

Thank you for reading my work. If you enjoyed this story, there’s more below. Please hit the like and subscribe button, you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @AtomicHistorian, and if you want to help me create more content, please consider leaving a tip or become a pledged subscriber.

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