POV: David Miller

…

My head…

“Ghhggh…Where am I?” I muttered to myself as I woke up again. Not outside anymore, obviously, because I was conscious when I was brought in, but the room wasn’t what I expected.

What little I had seen of the outside part of the building looked like that white stone sculptors used. Marble, I think, and the rock had black and gold accents. Very regal.

The interior was the exact opposite, assuming we were in the same building. The floor was some kind of dark wood with deep gouges and scratches on the surface, and the walls seemed to be made of normal stone. From the ceiling hung a few lights, like budget chandeliers, and there was what looked like a bar area which…well, it matched what you would expect of a dive bar. The only things that stood out were a near pristine booth off to the right and a large wooden door next to that.

Reflexively, I sat up, surprising myself with the lack of pain, substituted by the sound of a bowl of Rice Krispies through eight bullhorns and two amps. It was loud, if you didn’t realize that already, but the crackling noise wasn’t too annoying in my eyes…ears, I guess. I was used to it.

I looked down at where I had lain, noticing that it was pretty much just a bunch of tables moved together, and just walked around, trying to get a feel for my surroundings when the big door slammed open, and I flinched.

Three people came out from wherever that door led: the two that brought me here and one relatively normal guy. He had reddish-brown hair, stood at around my height, maybe 5’ 11”, and wore a dark blue suit jacket over a white button down and black pants.

I had no idea what they were saying. I could still maybe write down their speech, but I couldn’t tell you what it meant even if I was held at gunpoint.

The one that looked like a normal human spoke first. “Wp, pslli eof! Wfs yic asll jia, if oe dpsfs eiks lojqsfojq srrsude rfik dps pswlojq?”

My confusion must have been apparent, because he frowned a few moments later and spoke a word, light bathing the room.

“There! Can you understand me now?”

I nodded, mentally screaming as I finally began to process my current situation. “Yeah, I can…Where, uh, where are we, what is this place, and…” I stopped speaking for a moment to do that weird, hand wavy motion when you’re trying to gesture to a thing. “Who are y’all?”

The big guy was the first to speak. “I’m Graman.” The elf next. “Aran.” And then the human. “I’m Hale Rannan, owner and master of the Titanheart branch of the Adventurers Guild. I believe that should have answered your questions sufficiently enough, right?”

…

“No.”

The big one, Graman, laughed deeply when I said that and the guildmaster’s face contorted in confusion and surprise. “Are you not familiar with the cities? The different branches of the…where is your party?”

“My what?”

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“Your party, the adventurers you travel with. These two found you in the forest, which means the others are all dead, or they left you behind, unless you work as a solo adventurer?”

“I don’t have one. I appeared in the sky, crashed into a dragon, and broke several of my bones on the way down.”

A long silence…

“You fell. From the sky?”

I nodded. “Back to my question, where are we? What is the world called? What was the thing you just did to make me understand you?”

The elf rolled his neck. “The town of Titanheart, the world’s called Qit’e Tikwoj, and he cast a translation spell.”

…

My eye twitched as I fully processed that. “I’m in a magic land… I’m in a fucking magic land,” I muttered to myself.

If this is the afterlife, I hate it. Wait, I just got confirmation that this is a separate world so it’s not the afterlife. Would I be able to go home still or am I stuck here?

A lot of thoughts shot through my head, but the main one was “Why?” Why didn’t I just die? In all of the stories I had read, it was usually the influence of God or a god, but I just appeared, over and over. No option to reincarnate or move on, just the living equivalent of a save state soft lock.

I was agnostic…yeah, that has nothing to do with this. “What are you going to do now?”

“We didn’t think that far ahead,” Aran admitted. “Our highest expectations were to find a barely touched corpse at best, but we found you.”

…

“I could let him stay with me. Th’ house is big enough anyways.” The orc looked between all of us and smiled. “Right then. You’re coming with me,” he said before picking me up and throwing me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

I would normally be surprised, but by now I was so tired that I just could not care less, honestly.

This is my life now. Just being hauled around by an orc when I go places.

The town was nice at least. Loud, but that wasn’t too far off from what Houston was like in public places. It wasn’t the bad kind of noise either, it was just people living their lives. I took in all sorts of smells that were close to dishes I remembered, I saw a lady hammering a piece of metal into a sword, and a bunch of kids swarmed Graman’s legs to ask him things that I ignored.

About a minute after that, I heard a door open and was placed down on a soft couch of sorts, the cushion as big as a full size mattress.

“Welcome to my home,” he rumbled as I looked around the space. It looked…not old, but aged. The kind of place that was well worn and well loved, like an old jacket you didn’t want to get rid of.

“Why’d you bring me here?”

The orc shrugged as he sat down in front of me. “One, it gets lonely here when it’s just me. Two, I healed you, and I have no idea how well that worked so I’m going to monitor you for about a week.”

…

“Hm. Alright.”

“You aren’t upset?”

I turned to the orc, who stood in a kitchen that looked like it was made for pubescent Goliath. “You could easily kill me if you wanted to, and so much has happened to me recently that I’m just …done.”

“You sound less concerned than you should be about me being able to kill you.”

I sighed. “It’s a long story. What…what do I do now?”

He shrugged. “I only carried you here so you could see what the house looks like. Wander around if you want, just make sure you come back.”

I quickly shot up from the couch, feeling my knee almost dislocate as I stumbled out of the building and looked around at the area. The…streets? Paths? Whatever. It was packed with people, doing anything from running around to building a stall of sorts. There was a particularly large group walking to the right of me, and I saw the market down there.

Of course I decided to walk that way. I need to acquaint myself with the foods they have here in… I can’t remember the name of this world. Oh well.

The first stall I stopped at had fairly familiar foods, like tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, onions, and a lot of other things it would take too long to list, but something caught my eye: a semi-golden dragonfruit thing, but not as leafy. The skin still had that texture, but it was…less so, if that makes any sense. When you looked down, below the middle, it transitioned from a metallic sheen to a somewhat waxy orange, like an old penny.

The lady at the stall noticed me looking at the fruit and grinned at me like she was getting ready to sell me the worst used car in existence. “Ah, I see my goods have caught your eye. This,” she said, holding the fruit like Simba, “is called a dragonbud. Wonderful for cooking, and I have samples.”

She held out a plate with small cubes of bright yellow fruit that looked like a mix of pineapple and watermelon. I took a sample, and then the smell hit.

I have tried a durian exactly once in my life, and the taste was good. The smell? It was like rotten eggs, shit, and honey. This fruit smelled worse somehow, tacking on dead rats in an unwashed sock, but I took a piece and chewed it as fast as possible. The taste made it absolutely worth it.

It was sweet, but not overly so, and it had a very vague but pleasant flavor. Like you asked someone to make a fruit flavor. Not a fruit flavor, fruit flavor. The taste of fruit. The texture was soft and creamy, like custard, and I could clearly see the potential it held for a dish if you could look past the awful…AWFUL smell.

“You going to buy it? I can save some from the next batch if you can’t afford it yet.”

I nodded. “Yes please.” I wandered off after that, checking for things I recognized or stuff I thought had potential. I never even noticed the guy following me.