The three people had very few belongings. They stayed in the depths of a cavern, next to an underground stream. Their main source of food was fish, bats and a seemingly endless supply of dry rice. That old man would occasionally leave for a few days and come back carrying several sacks of the convenient grain.

Perhaps normal children would believe the fantastical stories that he told about magically summoning the food out of thin air. However, Azra and Yuri had already read in his journal that he used to be a bandit. Even if he was old now, they thought that he still probably went around stealing food from people.

He would also come back with all sorts of books. Some of them were fictional novels, written by famous authors, while others were meant for teaching children and students. Most of their knowledge came from those textbooks.

They learned that their planet was called Earth. The language they mainly spoke was English, though they did learn many others as well. Unlike normal kids that hated reading and preferred to run around or play games, the two of them were obsessed with knowledge.

It had actually gotten to the point where the old man needed to force them to exercise every day, so that they wouldn’t have problems when they were older. They did yoga, tai chi and he even taught them simple martial arts skills.

Azra loved the books about guns, cars, rockets, jets, planes, clocks, even the science fiction stories about unrealistic robots or androids. While Yuri preferred biology, anatomy, medicine, botany and stories about aliens or magical creatures.

Although the two of them were incredibly fast learners, there were things that they couldn’t truly comprehend. Society, socialization, countries, laws, rules, morality… Even if they read about them in books, they simply didn’t understand the relevance.

Whenever a superhero was in a situation where their loved ones died, Yuri would wonder “Why doesn’t Running Dude remove his mother’s head and take it into the future, where they could easily utilize cryogenic technology to preserve her brain long enough to grow a clone.”

Then Azra would chime in, “It’s pretty dumb overall though… Does the mother even need to die in the first place? Since he can travel through time, couldn’t he go back before her death, then use tech from the future to scan her brain waves? They already revealed that virtual reality exists eventually within the storyline, so it should be even easier than resurrecting her biologically.”

The old man would always retort “All of it is pointless anyway. After she died, Running Dude should have captured her soul and brought it to his warlock friend in the present. Then she could be brought back to life as an undead using a certain ritual, it would be way less dangerous to the timeline if he restored her lifeforce using magical techniques instead.”

All three of them couldn’t seem to grasp the purpose of a ‘plot device’.

Prologue: Grandpa

Prologue 1: Uriel, Azrael and Sariel
Prologue 2: The Divine Chess Set
Prologue 3: The Mysterious Old Man
Prologue 4: Presents
Prologue 5: Books
Prologue 6: The Truth