Here’s what Nathan noticed, now that he had a few moments to orient himself:
He stood in a vast coliseum or arena, with smooth gray walls stretching hundreds of meters high. The voice of an announcer screamed in a language unlike anything he’d ever heard, laying down rolling cadences of passionate gutturals and clicks. A billboard hung in the air as if by magic, brightly festooned with what was almost certainly writing in a character set just as alien to Nathan as the voice’s language. And finally, there was a war going on in every inwards direction from him—and the… people nearby had noticed him.
“War is the wrong word,” he said to himself, well aware that despite the popular narrative, talking to yourself out loud was and remains a quite common means of working through a problem. “This is a melee. There aren’t really any sides, just people alone or in little groups.”
It also, he couldn’t help but notice, did not seem particularly lethal. Exchanges of blows or weapons fire would hammer against glowing shields or dark armor without much effect, and clashes too fast for him to track would end with cybernetic warriors in a swords-locked frieze. Then the war machines or fighters would break off from each other and spin to engage someone else, and the fights would continue.
“Is this thing I got really overpowered?” Nathan looked down at his arm, which now bore a bracer of weightless silver metal that ran from his wrist to the middle of his forearm. “Are you a piece of ancient, primordial technology given to me as a starting gift? Once you feed on the metal flesh of my foes, are you going to consume me in turn?”
The bracer wiggled endearingly, a smiley face appearing in ripples on its surface.
“Well, I guess that’s an answer,” he said with a shrug. He looked up at his surroundings, tilting his head to the side. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you can give me the ability to understand what I’m hearing or seeing?”
The metal flowed up his arm by way of answer, squeezing firmly enough not to tickle but gently enough to not feel constricting. It left the skin of his arm, bare due to his uniform polo shirt, feeling like it had been washed and exfoliated as it traveled, and he blinked in bafflement at his forearm and its newfound lack of a low-grade sunburn from his inattentive failure to apply sunscreen the day before.
It tickled at the back of his neck, prompting a snorting giggle and something not entirely unlike a flinch. It rose away from his head and tapped both sides of his jaw twice, which he—correctly, as it turned out—understood to be a sign not to move, and then it kept flowing past and into his ears.
Nathan was not a man prone to flinching, and he was a habitual wearer of earbuds. Still, it took him some effort to remain still and calm as the metal flowed inside noticeably past the point where an earbud would have rested. It brought with it a soothing coolness which helped in that regard, but most of all he was still feeling sufficiently overwhelmed that he simply stared at the nearest alien as the rest of the metal flowed across his forehead and came to rest in an opaque mesh in front of his eyes.
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The mesh thickened and turned into a solid surface of darkness, and for a moment he was blinded and deafened. The moment passed, though, and the visor which the helpful metal had turned into turned into something halfway between a transparent view of the surroundings and a Heads Up Display.
“—and Gendomyako Surfzeitzn is facing up against Quarternion Evanescence Beleaguers, all three of them!” The words scrolled by on Nathan’s visor, written like an opera’s supertitles across the top of his interface. “Gendo was favored to pass through the scrum and into the lower bracket, and the Qebbies are basically gutter trash, so this might be first kill—”
“—Tamarind Rind, you dumbass, we’ve already had first kill!”
“WHAT? And I wasn’t watching!” The text running across the visor was tagged for Nathan’s comprehension, attributing the words to Tamarind Rind, which may not have been his name but which was certainly how he was recorded in the narratives adjacent to his life. “Who was it, Dodobreath dying again?"
“A total unknown just fell out of a dimensional rift and cannibalized Hexarch Robojam with a morphic hookwire. Ring any bells? We’ve got a newcomer, everyone—give it up for whoever this is!”
“This sure is a lucky day for us all, Tee-Cee—”
“Thermo-Catastrophic Blastwave, Tammy.” The line was tagged TC for a moment, and then the tag erased itself, a piece of contextual analysis which impressed Nathan substantially despite being on the simpler end for what the visor was doing.
“This sure is a lucky day for us all, Boombox. Hey, newcomer, welcome to the Facepunch Tournament, where we hate sports gambling and cryptocurrencies! What’s your handle, and who did you kill to get here? Shout it into the sky in whatever extradimensional nonsense language you speak!”
The answers to those questions would have been easy enough for Nathan to answer—”Monotreme” and “a genocidal mass-murderer, apparently?” respectively—had he been able to spare enough attention. The description of the tournament would also have provoked some questions of Nathan’s own on the subject of revenue flows and sponsorships, and possibly about what kind of dystopian non-Earth universe had cryptocurrencies of all things. Unfortunately, he was rather busy.
He had started up a conversation with two nearby convicted murderers. That was unusual, because most of the people he wound up exchanging pleasantries weren’t in a position to be convicted for their body count—but what was making him deeply uncomfortable wasn’t their felonies.
He had, in the span of a very short exchange, become aware they were flirting with him.
He had also noticed one other, possibly inconsequential thing.
Disaster, he thought to himself, and then he set himself to fleeing.