The Pentagram

Hi. I'm the Archmage Pentagram. My name pre-displacement was Vincent Asteri. The last name is Greek. I'm six feet exactly, I have light blue eyes, I'm caucasian, male and I think I'll start this all out by regaling you all with the tale of my arrival.

At Comic-con, two days ago relative time...

I was walking into Comic-con, and I was cosplaying. Not as any specific character, but I had dyed my hair black, put silver contact lenses on, and I was wearing a navy blue robe, but under it were normal clothes and above it was leather armor dyed black. On both the leather armor and the robe under it was a silver moon and around it and on the rest of the costume were constellations and other stars. I had a black leather satchel that matched the rest of the costume hidden under my robe to store my money and anything I bought. I already had some bottles and herbs in it, so I called it the components satchel. It even had some food and water.

Anxious and filled with expectations, I pushed open the doors and helped the group behind me get in.

"Woah," I muttered, almost certain that if I was wearing shades I would tip them down. "This place is huge!" I was referring to the massive convention center I was in. "If this place had a few more floors, I might think I was in a huge mall complex if I didn't know that this was Comic-con," I said, a hint of disbelief in my voice at the sheer size of it all.

Let's see what's out here, I thought, excitement coursing through my synapses and flaring neuron's reactions. I saw a huge selection of products, I saw cosplayers, I saw everything I hoped to see. I looked around, hoping to find something within my price range I actually wanted. I saw a stand, the guy running it wearing a Resident Evil Four Merchant costume. I looked at him and meandered over to his stand, looking for something cool. And then I saw something I thought might be the best merchandise in the convention. I saw an astral silver colored pentacle, that might even be made of real silver. It's chain looked the same. I don't know why, I think now that it might have been the magic of the Merchant, but I felt compelled to do anything to get that pentacle.

"How much" - I walked over as fast as I could without seeming to be panicking - "for that pentacle." I finished, letting a little excitement seep into my voice.

"Welcome to my stand. That pentacle goes for a hundred bucks. It's made of real silver, and so is the chain, so it was expensive to make," saying things a little louder than required, but the freakiest part is he actually sounded like the merchant.

I was surprised by that, but I didn't let it show, instead dashing over, throwing down the required money and greedily snatching the pendant, slipping it over my neck.

"Thanks," I ran my finger down the chain and onto the pendant.

"If you give me another ten dollars I'll give you this tome too," the merchant smirked a little, showing a tome that matched the theme of my costume.

"Sure," I said, perhaps too quickly and eagerly. "I'll take it."

I slipped the cash across the front table of the stand and admired the book. Satisfied, I put it in with my components satchel.

I wandered off, not doing much, occasionally buying other things to put in my satchel that looked like magical items. I would buy things to go with the costume, but I didn't find anything to actually wear with it. It was like this for a few days, but something special happened at the end of the convention that would change the course of my destiny, my fate would all be changed by buying that seemingly innocuous pentacle pendant.

I was in the middle of the day, and was getting ready to take a break, when the single most important event in the history of my life occured. My pentacle started glowing, with bolts of arcane-looking energy coming out of it, causing reality itself to tear. A rift between time, space, and whole clusters of universes. It sounded like ten to the power of ten to the power of one hundred pieces of paper being ripped simultaneously. In other words a googolplex of 93.5 square inches of paper being ripped in half. Those very, very few that managed to look into the rent were blinded and any children they met and their descendants while they were children started frowning for the next nine thousand years. The one that actually traveled through it, namely me, was shielded from it by the pentacle. The energies seeping out of it melded my contacts with my eyes, ingrained the dye into my deoxyribonucleicacid, and toughened the leather armor to the point where against a small mundane sword it might actually prevent a death with the guy above me having a post-mortem one-liner, like "I think he got the point." God I hate one-liners But the most important part was the three powers I was given, the ability to use magic, scanner vision, and the ability to level up and put points in things like mana and strength and have a physical improvement based on that.

In the Whitetail Woods, the day after he left in relative time...

I landed in what is christened as the Whitetail Woods with a noise somewhat like a combination of a thunderclap and a sewing machine running at full speed, and if anyone around was awake to see it, then they would see a bolt of lightning in the shape of a stitch sewing reality back together and for the time being trapping him in this universe.

"Ugh," I felt terrible, like I had just been sent around the world at the speed of light without the convenient time slowing effect or anything else to help it not kill me, only alive because something took pity on me and tried to hold me together.

I got up, and took stock of my situation. Supplies? Robes, check. Leather, check. Satchel, check. Pentacle, check. Contact Lenses, nope. Food and water, yep. Herbs, yes. Tome, yes. Doesn't feel like the dye is still in. Normal clothes, check. Surroundings? Thin underbrush and trees, so a wood. The trees look like birch trees. Wind is nearly absent, it seems like a summer day by temperature, but the clouds are strangely static. Verdict? I think I got drunk or am dreaming. Pick a random direction and go that way.

I started trudging north, and kept on going. The air got colder, the wind picked up, the trees slowly turned from birch to weeping willow and pine, and the clouds began moving as they should. Eventually, I came upon a stream still enough for me to see my reflection. I blinked once. I blinked twice. I blinked thrice. I pinched myself. I was very, very, surprised. My eyes were silver and hair was black. But I had no dye in and I had no contacts on. I promptly fainted by the riverbank.