Chapter One
The beginning. Where things start. Nothing too out of the ordinary, except for increasing chaos, and the patters and order within the chaos. A crack starts in a windshield, just one small crack. The crack grows, spreading in different directions, creating a spider web of weakness in the glass. Continually increasing until the size and the scale of the crack cause the windshield to shatter.
There is a planet called earth. It is not a very impressive planet. Not very large, and it only claims one moon. Quite some long while ago, this planet was just unorganized dust drifting about in space. But then the dust began to organize. Slowly at first, and taking many, many years, this earth started to form and to take shape. The earth held no life as we know it during that time, most probably. It was a molten mass of stardust, which had collected together, for the benefit of all involved parties.
As time proceeded, this rock began to cool, and water began to collect on the surface. Seas covered large areas of the globe, allowing the combinations of elements to begin an organizational process that would eventually become a very miniscule creature, a mere cell. Over time, this small creature multiplied and adapted to different environments. Over the ages, it began to lose the form and resemblance of its ancestors. Several of these cells somehow organized into larger groups, for their mutual benefit and interest.
Then there was abundant life, constantly at war with itself. Yet the existence of this life would not vanish from the globe entirely in the course of the fighting, at least not yet. Where one organization of creatures would be wiped out, another would flourish in the place of the fallen.
Presently, there also exist a few people on earth. Not many of these people are of any importance, and some are completely worthless. One person has the name of Sid. Another has the name of Jen. Yet another is called Carl.
They are the best of strangers. They even live far away from each other. Until a beginning. They all happen to coincidentally encounter each other while waiting at an airport to change flights. They each arrived on separate planes, and would leave on separate flights to different destinations. At least that had been their intent. A terrible storm had blown in, and all of the planes were grounded indefinitely, leaving all four of them, plus numerous other unimportant people, trapped at the airport. The airport staff is desperately trying to keep everyone happy, and they are hurriedly distributing peanuts and pretzels to keep the unable passengers from rioting.
Sid, Jen, and Carl have little in common with each other. Sid is a musician, or so he tells everyone. Jen is a pharmacist, who sells drugs. Carl is an inventor of sorts. The one thing they did have in common was their affinity towards airplane peanuts. Unfortunately, quite recently and unknown to them, they all had become terribly allergic to them at some recent point in the near past. Their consumption of mass quantities of said peanuts cause allergic reactions in all of them, causing their throats to swell, and effectively begin the process of asphyxiation. They are all rushed to the hospital, where they are treated. The doctors perform their black magic, inject them with substances, remove substances, give them stomach pumps, and place them in the same ward, next to each other in approximately adjacent beds. However, they are unconscious for quite some time, due to the near death experience they all just had survived.