Lotus stared at the proffered hand with no intention to take it.

The strange rider (if he could indeed be called a ‘rider’—Lotus wasn’t entirely sure the vehicle he’d fallen from was even a motorcycle) spoke with an oddly gravelly voice that contrasted starkly with his clean-shaven and soft-featured face, which still retained some of its baby fat. She also had no clue as to the meaning of the string of heavily accented words that had come out of his mouth. They sounded like they might be English, yet there was nothing in them of the familiar and the immediate for her to latch onto.

The young man, perhaps only a few years older than herself, appeared unusually happy to see her, and his smile felt genuine enough, but there were far too many questions and alarms flying and blaring through Lotus’s mind to spare this stranger any real consideration. Her concern first and foremost was the safety and well-being of Echo and herself. So, she blurted out the question that rang loudest in the moment, “Where the hell are we?”

The stranger’s smile faltered a touch, though his eyes still shone with childlike amazement. “You didn’t hit your head during that turn, did you? Where do you think we are?”

“That’s what I’m asking,” Lotus snapped, still letting the stranger’s hand hang in the air unreciprocated. “As far as I can tell, I was still riding on the Inner Ring Road a moment ago, trying to get away from that overturned truck. Now, I’m in some kind of… forest? A park? Talking to… I mean, I don’t know who or what you are.”

Now the stranger’s smile transitioned fully over to a frown, and he let his hand fall limply to his side. “Like I told you, I’m Iver. Iver Gambit. Wait, you don’t recognize—never mind.” The man calling himself Iver shook his head briefly, as though dispelling an unpleasant thought. “Inner Ring Road? I know this area pretty well, but I don’t recognize a street by that name. Are you… concussed or something? By Sattva, please don’t tell me you’re concussed. Not now, not like this!”

To further compound Lotus’s bewilderment, a look of profound consternation came over this Iver, and he proceeded to grab handfuls of his own sweat-drenched hair as he fixed Lotus with forlorn eyes. The man had clearly decided to rely on Lotus to address some problem of his, without her consent nor even knowledge of what that was. Not only that, but he’d also taken it a step further by responding to her reticence with a full-blown panic attack.

A sudden rush of anger made her react in ways unpredictable even to herself. She cut the Hayabusa’s engine, jumped off, and grabbed the stranger by the shoulders (which were surprisingly accessible; she was used to people being much taller than her). Then she shook him bodily as she shouted, “I’m not concussed, and I don’t care who you are or what your problem is! Just tell us where we are and how we got here, so I can start figuring out how to go home.”

“Okay, okay, calm down!” Iver put up his hands defensively and shook himself out of Lotus’s grip. His own irritation at the way he was manhandled seemed to have snapped him out of his spiralling mood. Then he once again spoke a sequence of words that to Lotus sounded mostly like gibberish, “You’re in Pax Magna National Park, just on the outskirts of Fort Auspice. If you wanna be more specific than that, just behind us is the Progress Pier Lookout, located right along the southernmost bend of the Provenance River. As for how you got here… I mean, your guess is as good as mine. I didn’t think there was anyone else on this path with me, but I heard a loud… explosion or something, and when I turned around, there you were.”

Lotus scowled, caught in two minds between trying to make sense of Iver’s words and calling him out on his bullshit. Fort Auspice? Provenance River? These were not the names of places she engaged with on a daily basis, and they certainly had nothing to do with where she’d been or what she’d been doing mere minutes ago. But just as she opened her mouth to shout some more, Echo cut in.

“I think he might be trying to tell you the truth, Lotus,” he said, his brow furrowed in concentration and eyes pointed to the phone screen he was frantically thumbing. “Got no service here. And GPS stopped working completely. Wherever we are, we’re far from home.”

Then he looked up with an odd sort of frown that suggested he himself didn’t believe what he was about to say, “I think… I think we might’ve been Isekai’d.”

“Ise-what?”

“Isekai. Remember? Those animes I’d been telling you about? Never mind. I think we’ve been, uh… transported. To a parallel universe. Or I dunno, a different world. You could say… we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Lotus now directed her scowl toward her brother. Echo of course didn’t speak with Iver’s impenetrable accent, but he seemed to somehow make even less sense. What had gotten into him? What had gotten into her to be even tolerating this conversation?

“Oh, come on, Lotus, you don’t think it’s even a possibility? I mean look at this place!” Echo threw up his spindly arms. “We were on a freeway in the middle of the night, and the next second we’re surrounded by nature, the sun’s shining, and the birds are singing. What happened to the road? The streetlights and the buildings? What happened to… to the truck and the driver?”

Echo’s voice trailed off as he dropped his arms, and suddenly, he looked like he might be sick. Of course Lotus remembered the fuel tanker, all twisted on its side and spewing black smoke into the night sky. She remembered her brother’s desperation as he tried to get to the driver still trapped inside the cabin. Most of all, she remembered the fire, the towering inferno that had enveloped her and Echo as she tried to get them to safety.

Yet she also remembered a distinct sense of wonderment and exaltation. The fire hadn’t been the only thing. There had also been the wind—and it was the wind that had shown her the way…

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Lotus shoved past a dumbfounded Iver, perhaps a little more roughly than was called for, and sidled up to Echo. Her brother looked a sorry sight, with confusion and guilt chasing each other across the grooves between his troubled eyes. Suddenly and bizarrely, she felt glad that they’d been… Isekai’d, whatever the hell that meant. For at least it meant that Echo was safe for now, safe from the burning truck and the horrors it might represent.

She reached a hand toward his shoulder (a considerably more strenuous task than doing the same to Iver), and tried her best to play the wise older sister, a role she took on with far more regularity than her aptitude for it warranted, “You might be right, Echo. All that stuff’s gone, and this situation is all kinds of fucked up, and I don’t know what any of it means. But at least neither of us are hurt, and that’s the most important thing. Come on, hop back on the bike. We’ll figure this out together.”

Lotus gave him a gentle nudge on the back, and was gratified to see him trudge toward the Hayabusa. Echo still had his head down and shoulders slumped, and god knew what it would take for the two of them to figure out what had happened to them and how to move on from here. But whatever this craziness was, it had happened to the two of them together; Lotus still had her brother safe and sound and within her reach, and that more than anything gave her the anchor she needed within this maelstrom of confusion she’d been swept into.

“Hey. Hey!”

Now it was Iver Gambit’s turn to throw his arms up. He’d gone from being thoroughly confused himself to now gaping at the siblings with indignant incredulity. He said, “I hate to butt in on a touching… whatever this is, but aren’t you guys forgetting something? What about me?”

“What about you?” Lotus muttered without looking up, already kneeling next to the Hayabusa to check for nicks and leaks.

“Yeah, the guy you almost crashed into on your Chakram? I’m in the Fort Auspice Trophy, and I can’t exactly race with a sprained ankle, can I?”

“Speak English or don’t speak at all,” Lotus spat, then immediately regretted the coarseness of her words. It went to show just how much the events of the last few minutes had put her on edge, to say nothing of how annoying she was starting to find this haughty stranger.

“English? I don’t know what that is, and besides, I thought we were communicating just fine in Stormvaster.”

Lotus gave Iver a look, before remembering that she still had her helmet on. Then she turned to Echo, who shrugged in response.

“Isekai,” he offered, as if that explained anything at all.

Lotus turned back to Iver, and tried to keep a lid on her rising impatience with the stranger, “Look, I’m sorry about your ankle. Get well soon, and good luck with your… Chakram Trophy or whatever you said, but quite frankly, I can’t spare the headspace to worry about your problems right now, okay? My brother seems to think we’ve been transported to a parallel universe. So, I’ve got to figure out what I need to do about… that.”

“Oh, don’t think you’re getting off that easy, missy.”

“Missy?” Lotus stood to her full height, which didn’t exactly produce an impressive effect, but it was enough to make Iver flinch and back off a step. She narrowed her eyes through the visor of her helmet, then said, “English or not, I’d choose my words carefully if I were you.”

“Hey, Lotus.” Echo stepped in between them, looking rather sheepish. “Maybe it’s worth hearing this guy out? He doesn’t strike me as a bad person, and he seems to really need our help. Besides, you know, with these Isekai type situations, we definitely could use a local guide that can show us the lay of the land, get us settled in, and all that stuff.”

Now Lotus turned her glare onto Echo. Despite the visor obscuring her expression, her brother winced and averted his gaze, perhaps out of habit more than anything else. Seeing this deflated her anger somewhat, and she bit back on the caustic words already armed upon her tongue.

Seeming to sense an opportunity, Iver Gambit now straightened himself and grabbed Lotus by both shoulders. So taken aback was she by this reversal that she simply gaped and let him speak.

“Lotus. I don’t know where you’ve come from nor where you think you need to go, but I do know this: you’re the best damn Chakram pilot I’ve seen since my own sister, and it only took one corner to convince me. I swear to you, if you come with me, you’ll have a thousand more corners to show the whole of Stormvast the same thing I saw. Fame, glory, money… I can promise you the world.”

“I don’t need the world,” Lotus groused while shrugging off one of Iver’s hands, “and I don’t care about fame or glory. Money… maybe. But the only thing I really care about right now is finding a way to get Echo back to… our planet? He’s got a math test coming up. He’s got debate club, violin practice… The point is, he can’t be dallying around in some parallel universe, understand? If I help you, can you help us, I dunno, cross back to the other side?”

To his credit, Iver paused and considered this for a moment. Then he continued, as earnest as ever, “I’ll be honest. I have almost no clue what you guys are talking about with parallel universes and izakaya or whatever. But believe me or not, I think your best bet to get the answers you need is through Chakram racing. At the very least, it’s the surest way to get the attention of the powers that be that might be privy to the kind of information you’re after. And I can definitely help you with that! Fate has brought us together, Lotus. Be my pilot, and let me be your guide.”

Lotus was lost for words. None of this felt right to her, because none of this made any sense. If it had been terrible misfortune that had Isekai’d her and her brother, perhaps it had also been good fortune that landed them at the sprained ankle of someone who claimed to be willing and able to make it all make sense. She looked toward Echo again, and saw that he’d picked his head up and was now wearing an uncertain smile.

“Okay.” Lotus sighed. “One race. That’s all I’m going to promise. And only because I do feel bad about your ankle. After that though, you better show me solid proof you know what you’re talking about.”

“Done! Yes!” Iver pumped his fist and shouted with startling enthusiasm. Immediately, he started fidgeting and looking about, seemingly unable to make up his mind about what to do next. “Okay, we better hurry though. The race starts in like an hour. I’m sure you have a ton of questions, but save it for the road, yeah? Hop on your Chakram; we’ll ride and talk.”

“I do have one question,” Lotus called out as she mounted the Hayabusa and beckoned for Echo to follow suit. “Just what the hell is this Chakram you keep mentioning?”