Fateful Confession

Fateful Confession (運命の告白, unmei no kokuhaku) is episode 1 of the anime series The Vision of Escaflowne.

Plot
Hitomi Kanzaki participates in a running session for her team, half-way through her run she encounters one of many visions she will have. She keeps running and a boy appears in front of her, with no way of stopping she continues on and runs right through him, and collapses to the ground.

Hitomi finds herself in blinding light and when the light faded away she is faced with five Zaibach  Guymelef and everything around her is burning. This then moves to her overhearing a conversation between the boy she ran through and Balgus, his swordmaster, where the boy is going off to slay a dragon which is later depicted. The scene then shifts once again to two Guymelefs Escaflowne and the other Guymelef is unknown). The ground then breaks away under Hitomi and as she calls for help, an angel sweeps down to save her from the endless pit.

Hitomi then wakes up with Amano by her bedside where they have a conversation on her performance as a runner, Amano then notices her pendant that she wears around her neck and we find that the necklace was given to her by her Grandmother. Using the necklace they start counting the seconds (since one swing of the pendant equals one second). Amano jumps to her bedside and is about to say something to her when they are interrupted by Hitomi's friend Yukari Uchida, who brings her duffle bag.

Hitomi returns home and decides to use her tarot cards and finds out that Amano will be leaving the country for professional track and field, however the reading may very well relate to what is about to come to pass. Hitomi runs to meet Amano before he goes and challenges him that if she runs 100 meters in 13 swings of her pendant that he will give her her very first kiss. He takes up the challenge.

Hitomi starts the race with Amano swinging the pendant and her friend Yukari watching on, on the eighth second a flash of light blinds the stadium and in front of Hitomi the boy in her vision appears, she keeps running and Van Fanel stops her from running into him and flings her away. Both of Hitomi's friends run to aid her, Amano asks the boy who he is and finds out his name is Van, he tells them all a Land Dragon of his world is coming, they all step out of the way and the stadium is engulfed with light once again and a Dragon appears from the blackness of a portal. Van battles with the dragon with no avail, it then runs after Hitomi and her friends who have run away at Van's request. Van follows after it and faces once more; Hitomi encounters another vision in which Van gets killed by the Dragon. Realizing this she warns Van of this and he jumps out of the way, in the process getting his amour cut in half. He runs up the Dragon and cuts open it stomach. He then retrieves a jewel called an energist from the Dragon. The energist then starts glowing and both Hitomi and Van are levitated up into the sky.

Both Hitomi and Van find themselves on a strange planet, which has the earth and its moon in the sky, which is called Gaea. They find themselves surrounded by strange beings.

Characters

 * Hitomi Kanzaki
 * Susumu Amano
 * Yukari Uchida
 * Balgus (vision)
 * Van Fanel

Trivia

 * A pendulum needs to be over a meter long to swing an entire arc in one second.
 * Director Kazuki Akane coined the foreign Gaean words Van says by mixing Portuguese word pronunciations. [Al]guém qual é diabo [Avu]ge-n ku(a)ru e ji(i)a-b roughly translates to "What are you, devils?" During this episode's dialogue recording on 1995 December 6, Van's voice actor Tomokazu Seki said, "That was the most difficult line at today's post-recording."
 * Van's foreign speech was not retained in either of the English dubs. Instead, it was replaced by a regular English phrase (Bandai: "Don't take that tone with me!" / Funimation: "Creatures from the demon world!"), and then clarified through what Yukari says to Hitomi that only Hitomi can understand him. However, in the German and Spanish dubs, Van does say something incomprehensible (though not in another language).