Consciousness returned not as a gentle dawn, but as a full-frontal assault on the senses.
The first was smell. A thick, cloying miasma of rotting vegetables, wet hay, and something acrid and sour that could only be human waste fought for dominance in his nostrils. It was a smell with texture, a smell you could almost chew.
The second was touch. He was lying on something cold, damp, and lumpy. A sharp stone dug into his shoulder blade. He tried to shift, and his hand squelched into viscous, chilling mud. A shudder of pure revulsion went through him.
Leo's eyes shot open.
He wasn't in his apartment. He wasn't on the floor next to his overturned cup of noodles. He was in a narrow, claustrophobic alleyway, sandwiched between two towering, grimy stone walls that leaned in as if conspiring against the sliver of grey sky visible above. Moss grew in dark green patches between the stones, slick with moisture.
"Okay, Leo, think," he mumbled, his own voice sounding alien in the oppressive quiet. His head throbbed with a dull, persistent ache, a souvenir from his violent, staticky transit. "Crypto-bros. Had to be. Kidnapped me for my revolutionary insights on… badger-based JPEGs?"
The theory sounded flimsy even to him. This felt less like a professional kidnapping and more like a hobo's welcome party. He struggled to his feet, his limbs feeling heavy and uncooperative. The mud clung to his trousers, staining the cheap polyester a depressing shade of brown. He looked down at himself. His one "power suit," a slim-fit, charcoal grey number he'd bought on clearance, was a complete write-off. It was torn at the elbow, smeared with unidentifiable filth, and smelled like it had been used to mop the floor of a medieval abattoir. The last vestige of his "e-commerce guru" persona was ruined.
He took a tentative step towards the mouth of the alley, a brighter square of light that promised an escape from the stench. As he moved, his dress shoes, never designed for anything more strenuous than walking to a coffee shop, made sucking, peeling noises in the mud.
The low hum of the alley gave way to a cacophony as he reached the edge. He paused, squinting against the sudden light, and peered out.
And his brain simply stopped working.
It wasn't a city he recognized. There were no cars, no skyscrapers, no familiar storefronts. The street was a river of chaotic, vibrant life, flowing over a bed of cobblestones slick with mud and manure. Timber-framed buildings with sagging tile roofs leaned against each other, their upper floors jutting out over the street below. A blacksmith's hammer rang out with a rhythmic clang, clang, clang, sending sparks flying from a glowing piece of metal. Merchants with weathered faces and booming voices stood behind carts piled high with produce he'd never seen before—purple carrots, lumpy yellow gourds, and fist-sized red apples that looked impossibly perfect.
A man walked past leading a creature that was emphatically not a horse. It was a bipedal lizard, six feet tall, with a scaly hide and a harness strapped to its powerful haunches, pulling a cart laden with barrels. Leo's jaw went slack.
Then he saw the knight.
The man wasn't a cosplayer. He wasn't an actor for some Renaissance Faire. The sheer presence of him was overwhelming. He was encased head to toe in articulated steel plate armor that wasn't shiny and new, but dented, scratched, and scuffed from genuine use. A longsword with a heavy pommel hung at his hip, its leather scabbard worn smooth. He moved with a heavy, deliberate gait that made the ground seem to tremble, his expression grim beneath the raised visor of his helmet. People instinctively moved out of his way.
Leo felt a wave of vertigo so intense he had to grip the stone wall of the alley to stay upright. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.
This is a dream. A very, very vivid stress dream brought on by ramen-induced sodium poisoning.
He had to prove it. He had to talk to someone, to have them tell him where the nearest subway station was, to shatter this elaborate illusion with a dose of mundane reality. He spotted his target: a stout woman with arms as thick as baked hams, aggressively arranging a pile of cabbages on her stall. She looked stern, no-nonsense. Perfect.
Taking a deep breath, he stepped out of the alley, trying to project an aura of a man who was merely lost, not one whose entire reality had just been drop-kicked into another dimension. He smoothed his ruined suit jacket, a pointless gesture, and approached her with his most disarming smile.
"Excuse me, miss?" he said, his voice a little shaky. "I seem to be a bit turned around. Could you possibly point me towards the city center? Or maybe just tell me what city this is?"
The woman looked up. Her eyes, small and sharp, scanned him from head to toe. She took in his filthy suit, his pale face, his wild eyes. A look of profound confusion, mixed with suspicion, crossed her features. She then unleashed a torrent of harsh, guttural sounds that sounded like someone gargling gravel.
"Gralloch vek, du zottel?" she snapped, gesturing with a cabbage for emphasis.
Leo stared, his smile frozen on his face. "I'm sorry, I don't… I don't understand."
She grunted, rolling her eyes in a universal expression of annoyance. She then turned her back on him, pointedly rearranging a particularly uncooperative cabbage, dismissing him completely.
Panic began to set in, cold and sharp. His greatest weapon, his silver tongue, was a useless piece of meat in his mouth. He was functionally mute.
He tried again, this time with a passing merchant, a thin man pulling a cart of clucking chickens. "Hey! Hey, man, wait up!" Leo called, jogging to catch up.
The man stopped, looking at Leo with wary curiosity.
"English?" Leo tried, pointing at his own chest. "Americano? Do you speak it?" He tried to think. What other languages did he know? "Uh… ¿Habla español?"
The man just shook his head slowly, his expression shifting from wary to fearful. He muttered something that sounded like a prayer, tightened his grip on his cart, and hurried away, casting glances back at Leo as if he were a lunatic escaped from an asylum.
He was a lunatic. He was a gibbering madman in a world where he couldn't even ask for a drink of water. The sounds of the crowd washed over him, a meaningless, alien babble. The knight's heavy footsteps, the merchant's shouts, the laughter of children chasing a dog—it was all noise, signifying nothing.
He stumbled back into the relative safety of the alley, his back sliding down the damp stone wall until he was sitting in the mud again. He didn't even care. The sensory overload, the fear, the utter helplessness—it was too much. He was alone. More alone than he had ever been in his one-room apartment with zero webinar sales. At least there, he had Wi-Fi. Here, he had nothing. He couldn't Google his way out of this. He couldn't watch a tutorial on "How to Survive a Feudal Fantasy Hellscape."
He dropped his head into his hands, his breath coming in ragged gasps. This was it. This was how he died. Not from a failed business, but from starving to death in a muddy alley because he couldn't speak the language. The irony was so bitter it made him want to laugh, but the sound that came out was a choked sob.
It was then that the pain started.
It wasn't the dull throb from before. This was a sharp, piercing agony that erupted behind his eyes, as if an ice pick had been hammered directly into his skull. He cried out, clutching his head as the world dissolved into a kaleidoscope of blinding white light. The sounds of the street faded, replaced by a singular, deafening tone.
Then, a voice spoke. It wasn't a voice he heard with his ears, but one that echoed directly inside the cavern of his mind. It was flat, monotone, and utterly devoid of emotion, like a text-to-speech program from an ancient operating system.
[Cognitive synchronization initiated…]
[…Error. No pre-existing compatible nexus found.]
[Searching for baseline parameters… Found. Species: Human. Origin: Terra-3, Low-Magic Sector.]
[Granting complimentary introductory package for world integration.]
[Basic Language Comprehension Package - Standard Edition - has been installed.]
[Features: Parsing of common nouns, verbs, and local expletives. Contextual understanding of complex grammar, syntax, and abstract concepts not included.]
[This is a one-time, complimentary service. For advanced packages, please seek a qualified source.]
[Installation complete. Enjoy your stay.]
And just as suddenly as it began, the pain vanished. The blinding light receded, and the sounds of the street rushed back in. Leo was left panting, slumped against the wall, sweat beading on his forehead. His head felt strangely… empty. And clear.
He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. The world looked the same. The alley was still filthy. His suit was still ruined. But something had changed.
He focused on the noise filtering in from the street. Before, it was a meaningless jumble. Now… now he could pick out threads.
A booming voice from the cabbage seller: "Krumkohl feil! Frisch und knackig!" The sound was the same, but now, a translation floated in his mind, simple and direct. Cabbage for sale! Fresh and crisp!
A child squealed nearby, "Fang mich, wenn du kannst!" Catch me, if you can!
The man with the lizard-drawn cart shouted at a pedestrian who wandered into his path: "Aus dem Weg, du Rindvieh!" Out of the way, you oaf!
Leo pushed himself to his feet, his eyes wide. He stumbled back to the mouth of the alley and listened, truly listened, to the symphony of the city. The foreign sounds were still foreign, but now they came with subtitles. Rudimentary subtitles, but subtitles nonetheless. Buy apples! Clear the way! Hot pies! My purse! Thief!
He understood. He could understand them.
The initial wave of relief was so powerful it almost brought him to his knees. It was a lifeline, a paddle in an endless ocean. But it was followed by a second, far colder wave.
Origin: Terra-3, Low-Magic Sector.
Complimentary introductory package.
This is a one-time service.
This wasn't a dream. This wasn't a prank. This was a system. An impersonal, bureaucratic system that had just processed him like a new employee and given him the bare minimum to function. He wasn't a hero. He wasn't the chosen one. He was just a piece of data that had fallen through a crack in reality, and some cosmic IT department had just run a diagnostic and installed a driver.
Leo looked out at the impossible city. He saw the impossible lizard-creature haul its cart around a corner. He saw the impossible knight in his dented, brutally real armor. He felt the cold, real mud seeping into his ruined trousers and the chill of the real, damp stone against his fingertips.
He clutched his head, not from pain this time, but from the sheer, crushing weight of certainty. The last, desperate hope that this was all some elaborate hallucination shattered into a million pieces.
He wasn't in Kansas anymore. In fact, he was pretty sure he wasn't even in the same universe.