“Should we wake him up?”

The voice was almost a growl, so deep that Arthur could feel it vibrating his bones like an organic subwoofer. He couldn’t see the source of it yet.

The comfort of the bed had given way to the sensation of laying face-down on something hard and cold, and Arthur kept his eyes firmly shut as he tried to assess what kind of situation he had found himself in. Just a moment ago, he had been there with the smiling old man.

“I don’t know. Have you ever seen this variation before?”

The new voice was significantly higher, but almost anything would have been. Still male. But probably younger?

“No. If he’s a demon, he’s not like any I’ve seen. And if he’s not a demon…”

“Then what is he? I was thinking the same thing,” the second voice said, in agreement. “Do you want to wake him?”

“Not without knowing anything about how he’d react, no.”

“So we wait, Karbo?”

There was a pause before Karbo’s bass boomed out again.

“We wait.”

Now, Arthur found, he was in a bit of a pickle. He heard the two settle in, apparently anticipating a long delay before he woke up by himself.

If he had actually been asleep, he might have appreciated the gesture. Since he was awake, the combination of the courtesy of the voices and his own deception meant all the time in the world to experience the unique discomfort of a hard, apparently stone surface grinding into his face.

He settled on a time limit. If they didn’t leave in the next five hundred seconds, he decided, he’d get up. Not that they seemed like they were going to leave at all, really. He was aware, on some level, that he was stalling. For the moment, he was fine with it.

“Hey, Karbo.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t think he’s actually asleep.”

Shit.

“Why not?”

“His lips keep twitching. I think he’s… counting?”

“In his sleep?”

“No. Who counts in their sleep? I’m saying he’s awake.”

The two voices suddenly became more muted as they whispered back and forth. Arthur stopped counting, hoping they’d believe it was a fluke.

“Hey. Kid. I get that you are in a weird spot, but my friend and I aren’t going to hurt you, okay? We just have to make sure you are all right.”

Karbo joined in.

“If we wanted to hurt you, couldn’t we have, by now? I swear on the city, no harm will come to you.”

That was, Arthur thought, probably about the best he was going to get. They could be lying, sure, but besides the panic of waking up in an unfamiliar place, he had no reason to think they were planning on hurting him. He was probably just being silly.

Sighing internally, he put his hands underneath him and opened his eyes to see the hard surface he was laying on was actually some kind of flagstone street paved with reddish rock.

With a push off the ground, he slowly rotated to face the pair. The environment was, surprisingly, pretty normal. He was on a side street of some kind, a sort of wide alley with not much going on besides a few refuse piles and the back entrances of some buildings.

The people themselves were a different story altogether. As Arthur twisted his head to an angle where he could see them, he found himself face to face with real, actual monsters. Karbo, or at least the one he assumed was Karbo, was a huge, red devil complete with horns that curved back over his forehead, tracking the shape of his skull all the way to the back of his head.

“You okay?” The devil asked. The voice confirmed it. That was Karbo. All probably 400 pounds of him, a mass of red muscles crammed into a tank-top and simple fabric pants.

Arthur gawked, only to be distracted by the utterly bizarre variant on the monster theme the other voice turned out to come from. The second man was slender and a much more normal size, so in that respect there wasn’t much to be freaked out about. What was weirder was the fact that his skin was bark, his eyes were made out of wood, and that his hair appeared to be intricately carved out of a single tree stump.

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“I don’t think he is. Look at him,” the tree-demon said as he pointed a wood finger forward. “He’s freaking out.”

On some level, Arthur knew that he shouldn’t be panicking over this. He was in a whole new world. Somewhere, his more academic side was telling him that this wasn’t even necessarily the weirdest thing he’d see all day. He knew that his best bet was to take a deep breath, have a calm conversation, and figure out more about where he was and what he was doing.

And yet he was already running away. Fast. Faster than he actually imagined he could have run, courtesy of his brand-new body.

“Wait!” He heard the tree-demon yell. “We want to help you!”

It might as well have been yelling at a startled wild rabbit. Whatever was making Arthur run was much closer to instinct than rational thought. But the running, he found, had been a mistake. Karbo and his friend weren’t the only monsters in sight. What he had thought of as a town was a city, a whole city, chock-full of them.

He almost ran into some kind of rabbit woman holding a basket of produce, then swerved to barely miss some kind of human-shaped cloud that appeared to be out for a stroll. Wherever he turned, there was some kind of new impossibility, something more mind-stretchingly painful to look at.

And then, somehow, Karbo was in front of him, too close to dodge around. He slammed into the demon with all the grace of a rotten peach thrown at a brick wall, and then felt the monster’s huge arms curl around him.

“There, there,” Karbo boomed. “I gotcha. It’s all right. Take a deep breath.”

“Don’t hold him too tight, you oaf.”

“I’m not. Now, you, listen. Calm down. It’s okay.”

Arthur realized, somewhere deep in himself, that it probably was okay, or would be if he could just stop panicking. He had almost a full second to consider that before he passed out.

—

“Looks like you’re waking up. Good,” a woman’s voice said. “Don’t open your eyes, all right? Just lay there. I’m going to tell you some things.”

“Yes,” Arthur said. The permission to keep his eyes closed and the kind, adult competence in the new voice made him feel better than he probably should have felt.

“Since we don’t know why you panicked, I’m going to cover all the reasons I can think of why you might have, and tell you why they aren’t a problem. Is that all right?”

Arthur nodded, weakly.

“First, we suspect you aren’t from around here. If I’m guessing correctly, you’re probably from another world. I want you to know that isn’t unknown to us. It’s not common, exactly, but it’s not something new or something that we get angry about.”

Arthur heard a chair scrape out from the wall and the sounds of a person settling into it as he considered that bit of good news.

“You also don’t look much like us, which I suspect means we don’t look very much like the kinds of people you’re used to. From your reaction, I’m guessing we look a bit monstrous. Is that right?”

Arthur didn’t know how to respond to that one. He could lie or he could let this person know how bizarre the speaking monsters looked to him. He kept quiet instead. After a few moments, the woman continued talking anyway.

“There are all sorts of demons living in this city. A lot of variety, you might say. But I want to reassure you that, however we might look to you, most of us are perfectly decent people. We get along with each other, despite all the differences you’ve already seen. It won’t be much of a stretch to get along with you.”

The person shifted their weight a bit, and Arthur suddenly became aware she was leaning over him. He felt a warm hand settle on his shoulder, as gently and lightly as a feather would have.

“Last, you might be worried that we might hurt you. Or want to. The truth of the matter is we don’t. We actually have a duty here to take care of people who find their way to us. It’s one of the more important duties we have. You’re a guest here, one we intend to help, not harm. Do you understand these things? Everything I’ve said?”

Arthur nodded. He really did, despite the fact that he was still incredibly nervous about it all.

“Good. Open your eyes. Look at me.”

He did. The new voice turned out to belong to a rather small woman, if you could call her that. She had a dove-like head, complete with a beak, and wings that appeared to sprout straight from her back. But beyond that, she appeared reasonably human. She had two arms, two legs, and proportions close to what Arthur was used to.

And over in a corner, looking bashful, were Karbo and his tree-friend.

“Not running? Good. Keep breathing, and don’t feel like you have to talk, yet.” The woman lifted her hand to Arthur’s head, then nodded. “No fever. You look well, despite the day you’ve had. When these two oafs brought you in, you were as limp as a cooked noodle. I was afraid something worse might be wrong with you.”

“I’m… sorry about that,” Arthur said, then looked over at Karbo and the tree. “To all of you. It was sort of a lot to take in once.”

“It’s fine,” the tree said, with Karbo nodding in agreement. “We understand. I’m Eito, by the way.”

“I’m Arthur.” He looked at the bird woman, questioningly.

“Itela. A doctor of sorts. And don’t worry. We are going to get all this sorted out.”

Over the next 20 minutes, Arthur learned a lot. He was, Itela said, in a place called Stannen, a relatively large city of the Demon Continent. It was a city of variety, one that housed commerce, crafting, and that even trained adventurers of a sort.

“It’s a good place, I promise you. Everyone contributes to the health of the city.”

“It does sound nice.” Arthur took a bite out of a small cookie-like wafer the woman had supplied.

“I’m glad you think so. It will be your home, for now. Now, am I right in assuming you don’t have a system class, yet?”

“No. I don’t think so, at least.”

“Ah,” Karbo said. “An initiate. That’s what I thought when I first saw you.”

“I’m sorry?”

“An initiate,” Eito said. “A demon old enough to have a class but doesn’t have one yet, or who is in the first parts of learning how to use one.”

“Oh,” Arthur said. “Class, like a warrior or an archer? That kind of thing?”

“Those and a thousand others,” the bird woman said, standing from her chair. “Anything useful you can think of can be supplemented by a class. Not just combat, but crafting as well. Healing. Cooking. Cleaning. Whatever a person might do.”

Clearing what few dishes she had used to serve the cookies to Arthur, the bird-woman stood.

“But that’s something that can be handled later. For now, we need to figure out where to put you.”

“Put me?”

She gestured at the two male demons, who had settled into chairs around the room once it was clear that Arthur was calming down. “As the people who discovered you, both Karbo and Eito are obligated to take care of you for a time. But as they don’t live in the same home, only one of them can go first. It’s a temporary thing, of course. You’ll likely be housed with quite a few people before you are settled. Who would you like to go with first?”