My half of an art trade with  noorinstuff!

Noorin encounters a strange coin from space, and finds himself going on quite the adventure.
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Noorin was walking to school like he always did, today seemed to be the same as any. As he gets to school, many of his fellow students are gathered in groups talking as normal, but a few words catch his attention, mentions of NASA and a strange discovery. Noorin decides to listen in to one of the ongoing conversations, and pieces together that NASA discovered a strange object approaching Earth. From what scientists could gather, it was a donut-shaped coin about the size of a football approaching Earth. They have been tracking it for the past few days, and estimate it could enter Earth’s atmosphere, based on its current trajectory, within the next month. Noorin tenses up hearing this, what if it hits Earth and causes a major disaster? Heading to his classes, Noorin worries the whole day. However, by the end of the day most of his worries are replaced by school worries, getting his homework done on time and passing his classes. He heads home and by the time he falls asleep that night, he’s already forgotten about it.

The next few weeks pass without much of another thought of it by Noorin, although a few days prior to its projected impact, it comes up in the news again. Noorin is at home watching TV when a news broadcast interrupts the show and talks about the strange coin. Images of the coin taken from the Hubble Space Telescope appear on the news. They say it could impact in the next 72 hours if no corrective action is taken. The news goes on to talk about an emergency mission by NASA, supported by SpaceX to send a rocket to space and nudge the coin so that it misses Earth, though they are facing delays due to issues with the trajectory. It’s not a simple point-and-shoot, gravity of everything from Earth to the Moon and every other body between here and that coin has to be accounted for, and scientists are just having a hard time calculating an accurate trajectory.

Over the next few days, the news updates get more and more frequent, and everyone begins worrying about the effect this coin will have once it enters the atmosphere and impacts Earth. Finally, 24 hours before projected impact, SpaceX finds an acceptable launch window and fires a rocket into space heading for the coin. The Falcon-9 rocket shoots across deep space towards the coin, slinging its way around the Moon and Mars before finally reaching the coin. The rocket hits its target, right in the middle of one of the faces of the coin, which makes it flip backwards relative to its current path, and the rocket then performs a series of burns to return the rocket home. Unfortunately, all this does is slow the coin down. The countdown to impact is pushed back to 72 hours but models still show it will impact Earth. The cost of sending another rocket is too great, and scientists predict that the speed at which it impacts, especially given how much speed it will lose in the atmosphere, it will not harm the Earth nearly as much. They expect it to make a small crater, and they expect it will land in a spot that will not affect any life.

The next 70 hours pass with much tension from everyone, especially Noorin. As it gets closer, the prediction of where it will land moves around drastically. First it was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, then it was somewhere in Germany, then somewhere in the South China Sea. Noorin keeps up with the news as much as he can, constantly checking his phone for updates. His teachers grow concerned because he spends so much time on his phone but understand due to the circumstances. It comes down to the last 2 hours and the final prediction is made. The coin is expected to impact somewhere in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. Everyone across the country keeps a close eye on the news to see where in Jakarta it will impact, while city authorities plan for an evacuation if necessary. 1 hour left, and the impact spot is narrowed down to a field in a lesser-populated area north-east of Jakarta. Everyone seems relieved that it will land in a field and not harm anyone, and everyone goes about their lives. Now that the imminent threat of danger is gone, Noorin’s curiosity takes over and he starts biking towards the field that it was expected to impact. He races through the city, dodging cars and pedestrians alike, trying to beat the hypothetical clock.

Finally, after 45 minutes of biking, he finally makes it to the field. 15 minutes until impact, and the coin is easily visible with telescopes and most binoculars. Noorin watches the sky, not able to see much of anything yet as he doesn’t have any binoculars of his own. He patiently waits, hoping that he has the right field, nervously double-checking the map and the news reports. 5 minutes remain, and the coin becomes visible to the naked eye. Though it is difficult to see against the bright blue sky. Noorin continues scanning the sky, and finally spots it. A small dot in the sky, silvery-grey in color, and flipping around. It slowly grows larger and larger before flames appear as it enters the thicker part of the atmosphere. Before long, the flames die out and the coin surprisingly appears intact as it continues falling through the atmosphere, flipping as wildly as before. It finally strikes the ground about two hundred feet from Noorin, making a awfully loud noise that sounds like a bomb going off.

Noorin recoils at the sudden sound, and hurries towards the landing zone, hoping to make it there before anyone else. Luckily, despite the media knowing where the coin would impact, most people opted to watch from afar, or from the safety of their own homes. Nobody else was around when the coin struck ground, and as such he’s the first to arrive at the site. A large crater, about 10 feet wide and 7 feet deep, and at the bottom rests the steaming coin, still hot from the atmospheric burn, but it seems to be cooling quickly. Noorin approaches carefully, shielding himself from the heat. He reaches out but quickly reels his hand back from the intense heat. Wanting to cool it quickly, Noorin takes a water bottle from his pack and quickly throws the water at the coin, and it instantly boils with steam billowing from the coin. He decides to just wait it out, hoping nobody else comes by.

An hour passes, and nobody else has come by. Noorin checks the coin again and it doesn’t seem quite as hot, so he gets closer. It still seems to be okay. He slowly reaches out, now merely inches from the coin. It feels warm, but not hot, like a freshly baked dinner roll. Noorin feels compelled to touch it; he feels drawn to it. As if it were calling out to him. He touches the coin and is quickly blinded by a flash of light and knocked back by an invisible force. He lands against the wall of the crater and soon feels a burning sensation throughout his body that quickly subsides to a numbing feeling. Did he burn himself? Maybe poisoned from some alien bacteria? Many thoughts race through his head as strange sensations fill his body.

He feels pressure building in his feet as they grow wider and slightly longer. He finds it harder to separate his toes as they draw together and come to a rounded point. He looks down at his feet confusingly. “Wha-my feet! They’re so sore!” He reaches down to try to take his shoes off, but it becomes difficult as the pressure grows. Before long, the seams of his shoes tear, and his pants soon follow as his legs expand outward. His shoes rip apart in several pieces, revealing white boots with dark blue soles and an odd, light blue square on top. The seams of his pants rip from the bottom up revealing more of the white boots until they finally end just below the knee with a rounded blue lip. Noorin reaches down and feels the boots and is surprised to find that he can feel every touch to the boot, and it feels smooth and warm, as if it were his own skin. Noorin jumps to his feet when he feels this, and nearly stumbles on his new feet and begins to panic. “No, no this can’t be happening, this isn’t real! This must be a dream!” Noorin pokes himself in the lower leg, and the all-too-real feeling confirms that this is not a dream, this is the real deal.

His pants continue to rip, the seams popping apart revealing dark grey, almost black legs. As it passes his knees, he feels his thighs and hips widen, looking thicker and plumper. On his left thigh grows a silver ring with a glowing blue light, then more dark colored pants grow off his legs. From the waist down, he no longer has clothes, but he also doesn’t necessarily feel naked. Noorin reaches down and feels the ring around his thigh and realizes it’s metal. How could metal suddenly appear? Of course, that’s the one question he has out of all of this. Noorin tries to get up and run but as he climbs up the side of the crater, something in his head tells him to stay. He makes it to the top before he stops and the voice in his head grows stronger and stronger, putting a mental block just on the edge of the crater. Noorin falls to the voices demands and climbs back down into the crater, sitting a few feet from the coin.

The dark material reaches his waist, and a brass ring appears, looking like a hula hoop but much smaller. Noorin finds that he cannot move it, no matter how hard he tries to. White cloth appears from underneath the hoop and drapes down. Two pieces of cloth, one on the front and one on the back, drop down. They are only wide enough to cover his legs and long enough to go down to his feet, but not quite touching the ground. The cloth meets at his waist, looking like a partial cloak. With his pants now obliterated, he feels a similar pressure against his shirt. He hurries to try to take it off but finds it more and more difficult with each passing moment as pressure builds. His shirt tears at the lower half, revealing some black cloth, then white, which is spreading upwards rapidly. “No, not my shirt! That was my favorite one!” He whimpers, watching his shirt tear away. As it reaches the top of his chest, he feels weight on his chest as more white cloth appears, but it becomes clear that something is beneath that cloth that wasn’t there before. Two rounded shapes appear in the cloth. Noorin reaches up and feels his chest. It feels much softer than before, and more sensitive. He gently squishes his chest and suddenly realizes what those are. At this point, Noorin realizes, he’s more of a woman than a man and she panics more.

Once again, she gets up and tries to run but faces a similar block upon reaching the edge of the crater. She tries her hardest to fight it but finds it difficult to make any sort of progress. She gives up again and sits back down in front of the coin, watching the changes continue. Her sleeves burst open, revealing more of the dark, fabric-skin material. A gold ring pattern appears just above the elbows before gold bracers become visible. Her hands turn black, then her wrists and lower arms grow thicker and harder. Large cylinders appear between her hands and elbows, with thick golden bands around the center and a white armor plate along the top edge. Her left hand begins to glow blue as a sphere of energy appears over her hand, while her right hand glows orange and a similar sphere of energy appears. “Woah…magic?” She looks at her hands, even more confused, as far as she knew magic didn’t exist, let alone randomly appear in one’s hands.

Her neck thins out and darkens to near-black, same as her arms and legs. The top of her white cloak sprouts lapels on either side of her neck, and her head soon elongates and smooths out. Her hair recedes and skin turns pure white. Ears, nose, eyes, and mouth all begin to blur as they smooth out to a plain white surface and her head stretches both forward and back., almost looking like an egg on its side. Two black rods grow from either side of her head, enhancing her hearing while a white, square backpack grows out from her back, before flames shoot out from the back, causing Noorin to rise a few feet from the ground. The warm feeling stops, and Noorin finds that when she reaches the edge of the crater, she is no longer bound to it. She quickly heads back and touches the coin again and it seems to evaporate into the air. “What the heck? Where did it go?” She flies out of the crater and looks around, not seeing where it went. She then looks herself over, confused as all hell, unsure of what just happened.

“I look so weird now…and my skin feels like fabric, and my head!” She feels her head, as smooth and metallic as it is, and freaks out. “What am I going to do now? Nobody will recognize me like this! I can’t go back home; the government will come and take me away! I-I have to get out!” Noorin starts flying around haphazardly before finding a collection of red orbs floating in the air. Out of sheer curiosity, she follows the orbs until they grow in numbers, and finally collect at an odd structure. It has a large, circular, stone platform with stairs leading up to it on all sides, and two arched spikes coming out of either side of the circle. In the middle, float a number of these red orbs and what appears to be a bowl on a pedestal. Noorin flies towards it and examines the pedestal in the middle. Nothing about it seems special, apart from the fact that this altar-like structure was definitely not here before, and it has these red orbs flying around it. She feels drawn to it like she did the coin, and without thinking twice she touches the altar in the middle. Numerous larger blue orbs fly out of the altar and towards Noorin, seeming to fly into her without a feeling at all. She looks at herself confused as she doesn’t even feel anything, but then her entire body glows blue!

The glowing intensifies quickly and many thoughts race through her head as to what’s going on now before there’s a flash of light which blinds Noorin. When she finally regains her sight, she finds herself in a strange land. The altar is nowhere to be found. She finds herself in the middle of a grassy field with large, half-circle structures in the distance. Given how far away they are, they seem massive, about as large as a skyscraper. She gets to her feet and rises in the air as her jetpack kicks on. She starts flying around the strange land, trying to get her bearings. This looks nothing like Jakarta or anywhere else she’s been. Before she has much time to think, strange creatures appear, seemingly from nowhere. Some of them pop from the ground and appear to be bipedal purple lizards, others come from the air looking like flaming black spheres. Most of them seem to just wander randomly, but the ones closer to Noorin seem to zero in on her and start approaching, quickly. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!” Noorin panics and flies away from them before running into another group of seemingly hostile creatures that are approaching her just as quickly. A low, but loud, bass-heavy sound is heard as a large stone creature forms from seemingly nothing. Tall as a building and with a single, glowing red eye it lumbers towards Noorin from behind. Its red eye glows, and then a red laser blasts from its eye faster than Noorin can even turn around, narrowly missing her.

“Eep!” Noorin exclaims as she’s nearly hit. She raises her hands and realizes that they glow brighter now. She realizes that these must be her only defense in this hostile world. She raises her left hand and stretches it outward towards the large stone creature. Nothing seems to happen. She focuses on the hand and soon it glows brighter and brighter, the sphere growing larger. She opens her palm and a large sphere of energy flies toward the creature before impacting it, with rays of crackling energy surging from it and striking other nearby creatures. “Hoo boy, that worked! I can’t believe I actually did that!” Noorin’s celebration is short-lived as the stone creature gets close to Noorin and raises its large, clunky arm and takes a swipe towards Noorin. She quickly dodges it, and raises her other hand, and then opens the palm sending a glowing red bolt of energy towards it. It strikes the stone creature, knocking it back slightly. The creature glows with flaming embers, and eventually it falls flat on its “face”, soon disappearing.

Noorin quickly turns her attention to the other creatures of the planet, quickly dispatching them as she grows used to her new abilities. Her confidence grows with each kill, and she scours the planet looking for a way back home. Before long, she finds another structure like the first and activates it, but this time a massive creature appears. Noorin works like mad to fight off the creature while also fending off smaller creatures until eventually they all perish like the others. She activates the altar and with another flash, finds herself in a desert. By this time, her hope of finding a way home wanes and something else grows within her. A new passion. She continues fighting off enemy after enemy, before making it to another section of the planet. This continues for hours until she finds herself on the moon of the planet and eventually defeats the largest enemy she’s faced yet. After he’s defeated, she finds a ship and readies it for departure. Before too long, it’s ready and she runs inside and starts it up. And so she left, in love with a new passion: to explore.