France - Paris (01:05 PM - January 1rst 2025)
A young man can be seen in front of a bakery, in the city of love. He has short brown hair and brown eyes, he is around 18 years old, 1m80 (5'9) tall and hides a lean build underneath his grey winter coat.
After entering the small bakery, he bought a bottle of water with a ham and cheese sandwich, which he started to eat while roaming the streets of the famous capital of France.
He is Arthur Polaris, a young university student, studying biology and hoping to become a scientist after his years of university. He knows that reasearch, as a job, is not all fun and rainbows, but he is just that passionate about reasearch, about studying the mysteries of life.
He also happens to have another passion : reading. Actually he spends most of his time doing exactly that, both for his education and for fun, reading scientific articles and novels alike. One to understand the world around him and himself, and the other as a way to escape from reality, from all the problems and bothersome situations that exist in this world... all that without taking any risk and more or less for free.
And right now, he is currently in vacation, exploring Paris and everything it has to offer to tourists. One peculiar fact about him is that he has a really poor sense of directions, and a poor memory on top of it. Long story short, he often gets lost, but he doesn't mind at all because, he has been like that all his life and is now an adult, so he has gotten used to it.
And more importantly, for him, it's a good opportunity to find something new. Indeed, he often ends up discovering well hidden places that no tourists visit, places sometimes unknown even to those living around, providing novel experiences in his travels. Especially since he is perfectly capable of forgetting these places and miraculously stumble upon them again, at a latter date... and rediscovering them once again as if it was the first time. Something that he enjoys quite a lot as he is pretty curious and love to find new and interesting things, which becomes pretty easy to do in these conditions.
So he truly doesn't care, as long as there are no risks involved and he has a way to get back home somehow. Something perfectly possible in this time and place, with the convenience of always having money thanks to credit cards, being able to call for help wherever you are, having access to Internet at all time, finding your way anywhere anytime with interactive maps...the joys of the 21st century.
Now the problem is that while he thought about his life like that while eating his (delicious) sandwich... he managed to get lost again, and this time his worst nightmare had come true. No battery left in his phone, lost in a big city, and no one around to ask for direction. NO ONE ? AT NOON, IN PARIS ?!
During the New Year, people generally stay at home with their family and eat in a festive mood trying to ignore the atrocious jokes of this peculiar uncle that they had no choice but to invite... but still, no one in sight ? That's surprising.
So here is our little guy, still trying to find someone or some shop to ask for directions, because, of course he would forget how to go back the bakery where he got his sandwich earlier.
This scene didn't change for a few minutes, until he finally found his saving grace.
A biker.
A flamboyant red bike parked just in front of the Seine, the river Paris is renowned for. A bike with someone on it, playing with their phone. Someone that could *finally* help him.
What he failed to notice however...was the truck that was driving at full speed on the road he was trying to cross to reach the biker.
The famous, the one and only "TRUCK-KUN" as the license plate so helpfully indicated.
When he did finally notice, he did the only thing he could think of while trying to avoid a speeding truck, he ran back to the sidewalk, successfully avoiding the truck ! But accidentally falling in the hole of the sidewalk, as apparently the electric cables under it where being changed and the hole was not covered or encircled with fences. He fell and came in contact with the electric cables...
That day, Arthur Polaris died, electrocuted while trying to avoid a truck, a truly shocking New Year indeed.
And yet this new year would prove to be shocking in more than one way, as it marked the beginning of a magical story.