AN: I have... a pretty big buffer on this. I was writing it as a speed challenge to myself, and did 100K words in 10.5 days. Or, about 30-40 print pages a day for ten days. Please, do note it was a speed writing challenge. Don’t come here for quality, and don’t complain if the quality was lacking; you’ve been warned. It's self indulgent crap; basically it is now a guilty pleasure to write, and certainly a guilty pleasure to read (the quality is just that bad), but it may entertain.
The initial burst of writing took me up to chapter 38 – as I post this I’m mid-way through chapter 55. I plan on posting a chapter daily until I've run out of chapters.
As a note, this mostly uses some very loosely interpreted MTG fluff for the magic mechanics. Protagonist has no knowledge of MTG (or any other setting, at least directly), and thus spell names or effects are not the same.
Obviously, I don’t own GoT, ASoIaF, MTG, SW, or any future crossover. Some canon events are reproduced fairly accurately, but events do tend to diverge a lot as the story continues, and the worlds aren’t perfectly canonical in general. Age wise, I tended to split the difference between GoT and ASoIaF, picking ones I found reasonable for how the characters acted.
Chapter 1: A Whole New World
It had been a week since I last slept, and I was not doing well. I had long passed the point of exhaustion, and yet no matter what I did I couldn’t sleep.
I spent hours every night in meditation; I suspect that without that, I would have gone mad for lack of sleep days prior. As it was, I knew I was bordering on that gaping abyss of insanity; I was, after all, having a hallucination. I knew it was a hallucination because I was still together enough to know that even if all the desks in the lounge were on fire, the fire wouldn’t be green.
I was, in short, totally fucked. I decided then that I’d go to the doctors in the morning, when they were open. Until then, I was going to meditate. I felt like doing so outside, that the nature might give an extra bit of calm and relaxation that I needed so desperately to keep myself together. So I walked down the flights of stairs from my dorm room on the fourth floor, the absence of an elevator an ever (non-)present annoyance, then opened a door into the dorm’s courtyard.
It was a cool October night in Massachusetts, but I was adequately warm with my thick, fleece-lined hoody, scarf, lined jeans and boots. I sat crosslegged on the grass, and began to breathe, subsuming myself under a mixture of self-hypnosis and meditation. I imagined myself sinking deeper, deeper, becoming one with land, one with the trees. I was in an ancient wood, near a spring, and as the water burbled and the leaves rustled I fell deeper, deeper, deeper…
And then I felt it, a flood of power. It was Nature, the force of wild life and instinct, a spiritual connection to the woods and primordial, unfettered animal living. It swept through my body like a tidalwave over a city, washing away all the accumulated stress and exhaustion. I felt alive, awake, clear-headed for the first time in days. It was amazing.
I opened my eyes, and realized I was totally screwed. I wasn’t in my dorm’s courtyard anymore. No, I was in an actual ancient forest. Right in front of me was a tree. It seemed unnatural, with baby-skin smooth bone white bark and blood red leaves. Most alarming was the face that seemed to have grown out of the bark, its red eyes seeming to stare at me fondly.
Being a massive nerd, I had thought about what to do if I suddenly found myself transported through magic, accident or malice to Faerie or some other realm of fantasy. Specifically, attempt to recreate the phenomenon and get back to Earth as soon as possible. Because without narrative plot armor or some other ridiculously overpowered ability, anyone in one of those settings was likely to end up dead. Even if they didn’t, living without the internet, massive libraries of science-fiction and fantasy, without my friends and family and pets… If I didn’t have to lose all of that, I didn’t want to. And the best way not to have to lose my life, whether metaphorically or literally, was to get back home.
So I sat back down, and meditated, focused on my dorm room. The smells, the colors, the sounds and feeling. It didn’t work. Then I tried my mother, unsuccessfully. My family home was, again, a failure. My childhood home, likewise. The dojo and archery range where I practiced weren’t viable. The woods I played in as a child, the stable I rode horses from, schools, Stonehenge where’d I been several times while living in England, none of them worked. But even though I’d been sat there for hours, even though the sun had risen, I wasn’t giving up.
“Who are you, and what are you doing in the Godswood?” demanded a man authoritatively. He had a long face with grey eyes, a neat, short beard and chin-length dark brown hair. Beneath a thick fur cloak his clothes were embroidered, their quality denoting him a man of some importance if I was correct in guessing a medieval-equivalent society from the massive greatsword he carried.
I thought quickly. Judging from my sudden transportation, magic was both real and potentially problematic; I didn’t want to give my real name. “Odysseus Gangari, but you can call me Odds” I answered. My last name in honor of Odin the Wayfarer, my first a promise to one day return home no matter how long the journey. Plus, the shortened form sounded at least somewhat similar to my own name, so I’d react to it. “And as for what I’m doing here, I haven’t the faintest idea.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You haven’t the faintest idea?” he repeated. “Considering I am Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, and it is my castle you have trespassed, my Godswood you are in, I expect a better answer than that.”
Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. “No, I really have no idea. I was meditating in the courtyard of my school, and when I opened my eyes I was here,” I explained, telling the truth as I didn’t have a better explanation.
“Your word on it?” he asked. “And know that the weirwood will know if you lie, and if you do I will execute you.”
“You have my most solemn oath, Lord Stark,” I said. He seemed to wait a moment, for what I don’t know, before he nodded cautiously.
“And do you have any proof of this?” he questioned.
“Beyond the weirwood not eating me or whatever?” I asked rhetorically. He smiled despite himself at that, so I guessed weirwoods didn’t eat people for lying. “Um. Let me think for a second.” And I did. What did I have that was totally foreign to the middle ages? “Well, the stitching on my clothes is done by machine, it should be finer and more even than anything people can manage by hand. Oh! And my wallet, I have my ID and credit cards on me, those are made of plastic, I doubt you have that here. And my phone,” I patted my pockets, no phone, “ah, I left my phone in my room. My shoes, they use rubber. And if you have a mathematician at hand, I can see if there’s anything I know which is more advanced than what you’ve previously discovered?”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“Very well. Throw me your items of plastic, and if they are unknown to me I will escort you to Maester Luwin to discuss mathematics,” the lord ordered. I struggled to get my wallet out of my jeans pocket without standing up and potentially seeming threatening, then tossed it to him. Of course my coordination, never the best at throwing, decided that was the perfect moment to go on the fritz, and the wallet landed several feet away from Lord Stark.
I winced in shamed embarrassment. “I, ah-, sorry?” I stammered. He took a step, bent over and picked it up without looking away from me. Then he flipped the wallet open and with an impressive degree of one handed dexterity managed to pull my driver’s license out with one hand, the other fixed to the hilt of his belt-knife.
After a few moments of inspection, he spoke. “It seems that your plastic, at least, bears out your story so far; I have never seen the like. What plant or animal does it come from?”
“Um, thanks? Plastic doesn’t really come from a plant or animal. Well, I guess the oil comes from the dinosaurs. But that was millions of years ago, so I don’t think it counts the way you’re thinking. Basically, some chemists a long time ago figured out how to use chemicals and heat and pressure and other chemicals to make plastic. I know that explanation isn’t very good, sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be,” he said. “After all, I have paper and glass, but I couldn’t tell you how to make them either.” Damn, that was unexpectedly clever of him. I’d have to be careful not to confuse undeveloped for unintelligent. “Rise, Odds, it seems we will be calling on my Maester this morning.”
A few minutes of walking later, as Lord Stark pointed out different parts of his fortress, we came to a tower. He opened the door, and gestured for me to proceed. We went up a couple flights of stairs, coming to another door. He knocked.
“Please, enter,” an old man’s voice called from inside. When Lord Stark opened the door I saw the owner of the voice, an old man in robes with a metal choker around his neck made from multiple links of different metals. Did they have slavery here?
“Maester Luwin, I hope we are not interrupting,” Lord Stark said politely. I was American, but I knew that when your liege lord came over he wasn’t interrupting even if you were mid-coitus.
“Not at all, my lord, not at all,” Maester Luwin replied. Damn, it would be ironic as hell if they called their slaves Maester. But no way in hell was I going to broach the subject of slavery just yet. No good would come of picking fights.
“This is Oddyseus Gangari, an unexpected visitor to Winterfell. He claims to be something of a mathematician, and wanted to compare his knowledge with your own,” Lord Stark announced.
“A pleasure to meet you, Maester Luwin,” I said, stretching out my hand without thinking about it, my parents’ conditioning on polite greetings coming to the fore. He grasped it around the wrist with a bit of bemusement; I guessed that manly warrior handshake equivalents were a thing, but most likely shared between warriors rather than with Maesters.
What followed was a pretty comprehensive workup of mathematics. We used chalk on slate boards; I was glad to avoid the wax-tablets that Romans used for impermanent work, but sad that paper was clearly limited and expensive. That said, I doubted I’d have done well with a quill or primitive pen, so perhaps it was for the best.
As for the math, I quickly found that the locals, the Westerosi, used base ten notation with their own equivalent of Arabic numerals.
And it was then that I had this massive moment of cognitive dissonance; I realized I’d been flawlessly speaking in a foreign language, interpreting it as English. Once I figured it out I realized that I could, if I focused, hear the difference. Otherwise though it seemed I’d gained some version of Allspeak, which was pretty awesome. Fairy magical adaptations for the win.
The locals also had working knowledge of algebra and geometry. They knew of Pi and the Golden Ratio. That said, they had little use of graphing equations and none of calculus, so I was able to establish my bonafides. Lord Stark had been following what he could, but we had obviously left him behind at some point.
“My lord, how long will Odds be staying with us?” Maester Luwin asked. The man was clever enough to have figured out that my being there was strange, but interested enough in what I knew to want to keep me around.
“I intend to allow him to stay as my guest for as long as he likes, providing his stay remains agreeable to both him and myself,” Lord Stark replied. “Should I take this to mean you’d appreciate sharing knowledge between you?”
“Yes, my lord. His knowledge… If he were part of the Citadel, he would doubtless have at least two or three links of yellow gold for mathematics. Assuming his knowledge in other fields is of a similar level, the improvement of our knowledge could be immense,” Luwin enthused.
“I was actually studying materials. Metallurgy, you’d probably call it,” I said. Both of their eyes lit up. “Ah, but, unlike mathematics, the gains I can provide there are more limited. Imagine if a smith were dropped off into absolute wilderness; he might know some of the theory behind finding the ores, refining them, and then processing the metal but it’s a very difficult undertaking. My case is worse; there’s a greater distance between what I studied and smithing than there is between smithing and wilderness. I’m used to a level of infrastructure that just isn’t likely to be present.”
Part of my explanation was not wanting to do it. I knew, at least in theory, how to make a blast furnace and Bessemer converter. Between those, that was a good portion of the industrial revolution, though they really needed to be paired with gunpowder-expedited mining to get full impact. But I didn’t want to work on those; I didn’t want to spend all that time breathing in fumes from molten metals that might contain lead and other nastiness. I didn’t want to spend all my time working, rather than figuring out how to use my magic and maybe return home. And until I felt they were honorable and moral enough to deserve it, though Stark was a good ways to showing that, I didn’t want to give them such a massive leg up on their competition.
I also knew how to make black powder, including how to manufacture saltpeter as recommended in LeConte’s manual, but there was no way I was bringing that up until and unless I thought it appropriate. Beyond that, saltpeter production took at least a year of lead time, which was a lot on just my word. I sure as shit wasn’t going to be the one turning over the manure pile, which meant I needed enough credit before I even think of it.
The last popular part of uplift stories I’d read, penicillin, was often achieved far too easily for the authors to be nearly good enough chemists and chemical engineers to actually manage it. Industrial penicillin production is miserably difficult, with yields so low as to make extraction exceptionally difficult, issues maintaining purity which is required for decent shelf-lives, and a high removal rate of penicillin from the body which meant large amounts were needed, or the penicillin needed to be modified for increased residency time. It took years of concentrated effort, a nationwide search for the best penicillin strain, and dedicated teams of chemical engineers to manage to produce enough penicillin to treat more than one or two people at a time within the entire US back in the 1940s. Even knowing the outline of their eventual solutions, I was a good enough chemist and engineer to know I could easily spend my entire life on the effort with nothing to show for it.
So fuck penicillin. I was allergic to that shit anyways.
Honestly, it was a good thing my math was enough to get me residency within Winterfell.