The Balloon from Nowhere

When you were a child, you were found in the remains of a crashed, runaway hot air balloon. Your origins unknown, you were taken in by a kind, elderly couple.

Over a decade later, a strange woman brandishing a sword lands a hot air balloon in the middle of town square and starts questioning everyone in sight as to whether or not they’d seen the balloon her child came through in not ten minutes prior.

She’s arrested, but not before someone tells her that the only chaos with a hot air balloon the town has seen, aside from present company, is her, and that was over a decade ago.

You can’t help a nagging curiosity you have about the woman as she seems oddly familiar to you, but you go to sleep anyway hoping to get more information in the morning.

Only a few hours have passed before you’re woken up by the strange woman who had somehow escaped from jail and broken into your room. She claims to be your long-lost mother, the creator of one of the first time-space jumping prototypes. She says you got trapped in one of the balloons headed for the prototype portal she’d created, and after failing to stop your balloon before you went through the portal, she rushed to follow after you in her own balloon. However, something must have glitched because five minutes turned into more than ten years.

She wants you to come home with her to a universe that you only faintly remember in your dreams.