I woke up standing, catching myself from falling. My throat was parched and I was in some sort of dimly lit room. I took a breath in. The air was thin and dry. The altitude is probably 1-1.5km above sea level. The room was slightly stuffy and smelled of herbs, and there was a demonic circle below me, just so slightly illuminated by four barely glowing crystalline stones. The walls were covered in sheets of paper with circles with schemas, akin to blueprints of electrical circuits.
The floor and the walls were planked with wood, and the ceiling was made of stone, so people here used wood and stone.
My wrist watch showed that it had been about 20 hours since I was caught by the kidnappers. I was thirsty, hungry, and needed a bathroom.
The plan I’d formulated during the long flight seemed simple:
1. Get away from whoever summoned the psychopathic kid.
2. Gather information and act according to it.
3. Before that - stay low profile.
As my vision slowly adjusted to the darkness of the room, I decided to take a walk.
In the room was a sofa covered in velvet, a working desk, a coffee table, half a dozen chairs, and bookshelves all bearing resemblance to the rococo style. On the coffee table were five cups, nice porcelain, also around 18th century aesthetics, but with almost ideal craftsmanship.
The people here were most likely influenced by other otherworlders, or maybe my world was influenced by them, but that was a question for later.
Some of the cups were still partially filled, so I sniffed the contents; it was mint and honey. I never like to drink unknown liquids, but dying from dehydration wasn’t an option either, so I drank the mint tea to quench my terrible thirst, hoping no one would notice.
One problem solved.
I checked the bookshelves. Some books with similar spines had Greek-looking letters and Roman numerals on them. Others had modern numbers. I opened one of the books: Left to right writing, and modified Greek letters with extra symbols added to them inside the words. I could guess how to read out some of them, but there was no point in that. I put the book back exactly like it was.
There was a door leading somewhere outside, a ladder upstairs, and closed window shutters with some strange sheets of paper plastered onto it.
I went to the window first, but I figured out that I would have to remove the strange paper with what I assumed was a magical drawing, so I decided against that.
I went to the door and put my ear to it. Two female voices were chatting about something in a language I didn’t know, and couldn’t make out. It didn’t sound like Greek, but it also wasn’t a tonal language from what I could discern.
Going up the wooden ladders, they were completely silent, which delighted me to no end.
I had very little information on what happened to people after they got moved to other worlds. I regretted not reading past the first page or two of ridiculously sounding books usually featuring demon lords in their names. I doubted that Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” was a good guide on this world though.
One thing I knew was that getting lumped with people with bows that could slay a demon lord or mentally unstable kids like the one I got teleported here with wasn’t something I was interested in.
The room upstairs was a bedroom. Queen-sized bed, another desk, also rococo style as far as I could see from the minimum of light coming from dimly glowing crystal on the ceiling, hanging like a chandelier. Well, that part wasn’t rococo.
Two doors on one side, two windows, closed with shutters.
I sneaked to the doors. It was a dimly lit bathroom, the place I was looking for. It had a copper sink, a copper bathtub, and a porcelain toilet with a wooden seat. It looked vintage. I felt like I jumped from the 18th century to 20th century just by entering the bathroom.
Well, everything worked to my great delight, aside from hot water.
The second problem was solved. I quickly cleaned my suit, it somehow held together without visible damage after I was hit by a truck and thrown like a ragdoll by a human-dragon.
The second room was a wardrobe. It didn’t have enough light to make things out, but some clothes were on the rack. I noted the place as a potential hiding spot in my mind.
I slightly opened the window on the left as seeing a general layout would have been great, but the sounds came in instead. The sounds of distant music, chanting, and celebrations.
I looked outside, it was twilight, the sun just set behind hills in the distance, and the remaining light illuminated the city. The city from this position could be mistaken for any old district of a European city; Red tiled roofs of two to four-storied buildings, some made of orange stone, others from wood and painted over. I was most likely on a hill or a highrise, around thirty meters higher than the city.
The city was surrounded by classic stone walls, maybe ten meters tall, and there was another wall closer to me. I was in a castle.
This complicated things a lot … I can’t make the jump to the wall from this window if I were to try.
A celebration was happening on the view, but before I could go and look through the other window or look if there was a way down I heard a door opening from downstairs. At least two spoke quite loudly. One was drunk for sure, but I heard only one set of footsteps.
People noticing me wasn’t a part of my plan. I closed the window and snuck inside the wardrobe room. The voices were getting closer and closer. I instinctively moved my hand to the gun but stopped myself. Killing people without a reason wasn’t my plan either.
The two talked and I could hear their dialogue. The language sounded strange, it was somewhere between the languages I knew. I could make out two familiar words from their conversation: “Magistro`s” and “Baro`n”..
The sober one addressed the drunk one that way. I jotted them down, as well as what I assumed were words for “but” and “yes”.
Maybe they meant something different, but I needed a few hundred words to be able to communicate on a base level, and I needed that fast.
They talked for another few minutes and it became quiet. I noticed that only one of them made sounds of walking. I took a note of that.
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I waited for an hour, completely still. The neon hands of my watches told me how much time had passed. I planned to stay here for another hour, to be sure that the man in the room was asleep and get out through the window. Having extra clothes would be nice though, so I took out a lighter and looked around the place. Around a six square meters room, with two racks on the sides mostly empty, shelves with hats of all kinds, and on the back was a panel of wood.
My attention was grabbed by the middle section with panels as if the wooden panels were created to focus the attention of the people who enter it.
It looked too much like a secret door in a video game with a quest marker highlighting it.
Why would someone highlight a secret door that way? If that’s the person who lives here, he would know where the secret door is. I got the feeling that this was a decoy. And if there was a decoy, there could be a real one nearby.
I checked the panels - normal panels. They just grabbed attention, I could imagine someone following the person who lived here, the owner would run inside the wardrobe and disappear, and the one entering after him would see the obvious panels and try to open them, neglecting anything else.
I looked for anything out of place, a switch, or something similar. I asked myself where I would put a switch and checked those places. I found a couple of decoy switches leading to nowhere. Then I asked myself if I would want a switch, and the answer was no.
I tried to gently pull the shelves, and the shelves with hats had some movement. There was a latch deeper inside that held it in place. I followed it, and it led to one of the hat stands. A gentle tilt and the latch was off, the shelf with hats opening like a door.
Well, not exactly gently. I lifted it a bit so it wouldn't scratch the floor and make a sound. A very narrow corridor with steep ladders led down. It would be a hassle to squeeze through that. It was as if carved out in the stone of the outer wall, to be completely invisible.
I decided to look outside first and opened the door slightly to peek. A human lad was sleeping in the bed, moving his head from side to side as if seeing a nightmare. I froze so as not to make a sound. His hands moved in the air and golden lines started to glow on his skin as he produced mumbling words.
I closed the door. There was a possessed kid in the room, and I didn't want anything to do with that. On second thought, there was a high chance that it was the person who summoned Aki Kurosagi and me. Still, my intuition told me to stay away.
At least I knew for sure that humans populated this world too, and that was comforting. I went to the hidden door, put everything where it belonged, and closed the latch behind me, leaving only the slight smell of the gas lighter as evidence I was there in the first place.
I moved down and sideways. I could fit in, but not being able to see anything was an issue. A trap door signified the end of the way. I removed the latch and turned on the lighter again. It was dark down there. I couldn't see for more than a meter.
The smell of sewers was quite noticeable. I checked my pockets, looking for coins. I didn't think a hundred yen would be worth much here, so I dropped it. Less than a second later, I heard a clang of metal on stone.
"Maybe around three meters," I concluded. I lowered myself inside, and hanging with one hand, lowered the wooden trap door all the way to my fingers. If I needed to come back, the way should be still open, as I couldn't lock the trapdoor, and it didn't seem like one that would lock itself.
My estimates of the height were correct. I landed on my feet and kept upright after some balancing after landing. It was indeed a sewer system.
The current task seemed simple: Find the furthest exit and get out, act according to the plan after that.
I looked around, and my hundred yen was nowhere to be found, probably having rolled into the water in the middle of the stone tube. When I looked up, the trap door had a glowing rune on its bottom part, light somehow not illuminating the place.
It made no sense for there to be a hidden exit. It made no sense as that's not how light works... usually. Maybe it was some magical light bullshit. That was something I didn't know and was not high in my priorities list.
Finding a hidden passage felt too lucky. It was either pure luck, a difference in training level, or something related to me being a zero. Too many questions, too few answers.
The list of questions grew, and the list of answers didn’t.
I sneaked through the sewers. I found the first few dead ends, with metal bars blocking the ways down as if I was in a 2000s video game, but one of the ways led me further than the others, and metal ladders on the wall led me upstairs.
I realized how sickened by the smell I was when I lifted the stone manhole and took a deep breath of clean air. I looked around. It was night and the streets were almost empty. The moon was lighting the street, so I got out and closed the manhole, straining myself to do it as quietly as possible.
Cobbled streets, mostly clean, houses made of some porous yellowish stone, most likely volcanic tuff, the air around fifteen degrees Celsius. A castle stood in the direction from where I came from. Basalt walls, about twenty feet tall, with massive ballistae on the towers. I could see figures with torches walking on the walls.
If someone would tell me that this was some fantasy world, I'm not sure I would believe them. Everything looked like a Hollywood production set for a Southern European high medieval film. Well, aside from the possessed kid and glowing lamps, everything seemed like a mismatch of styles and technologies from human history.
I walked straight as if someone would see me sneaking would raise more suspicions than otherwise. Well, that's what I assumed. Still, I walked silently.
Stores had stained glass windows and hanging signs. The first few probably belonged to a tailor and a cobbler. The third one had two swords painted on the wooden piece, but unlike the other two, it had letters on it - Greek letters with some other letters inside of it, and "N1" at the beginning.
I heard the sounds of someone running, so I hid behind the corner. A human male rushed in front of me with a big bag in his hand and dove into one of the alleyways. The trail of alcohol smell followed him: a drunken burglar, I assumed.
I saw a group running after, wearing breastplates and holding spears, shouting what most likely meant "Stop right there, criminal scum" or something similar. Interestingly, they had more or less a modern sewage and plumbing system but no firearms.
Running away from people in this situation was objectively stupid. If anything I knew about law enforcement was correct, letting them do their work was the best way for them to forget about you. So I pointed towards the alleyway the burglar jumped in, and when the armed man saw me, they instantly went in that direction without giving me a second look. One of them shouted a word back at me continuing the pursuit, barely tangible due to the running.
I added the words "There" and what most likely was "Thanks" to my self-made dictionary. In ten minutes, I ended up in a small park. I went to its deepest parts where no one could see me. I needed to allow my legs to rest a bit. I grabbed a cigarette; I needed one. Lucky me, I had more than a pack of cigarettes on me. Things were going relatively smoothly.
I was concerned about my clothes and outlook, as I was still wearing the three-piece suit I had put on to infiltrate Tokugawa Elite, but somehow that felt like a lifetime ago. Unlike some old European cities, I saw no clothes on dryers hanging outside windows.
Like a true homeless person, I took a special nap on the bench. A terrible way of sleeping they teach all operatives, keeping them alert while they sleep.
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I woke up at sunrise. Thirty hours in the new world, and I had slept through most of them. I adjusted my watch to 7 AM and walked the streets.
The people looked at me as if I were out of place. Well, I was. I was wearing a very good "Made on Earth" suit, while they wore tunics and simple pants. They were manual laborers for sure. Like on home Earth, the working class woke up earlier than others.
We were definitely of the same race, making my potential future attempts to blend into the crowds at least physically possible. The parts of the city I was in looked beautiful and quite clean to my surprise, I was very much lost, with only the castle and the walls acting as my landmarks, allowing me to figure out relative positioning.
I walked into the town's main street, and horsemen rode by. The one in the front wore a Napoleon-era style red and blue Cuirassier uniform. Behind him were soldiers in green early 20th-century uniforms with breastplates on top, all with cutlasses and swords.
Behind them rode an open carriage. The man in it wore a suit as if straight from the 1940s—a suit very similar to mine.
"What the fuck is that?" I asked myself. There was no artistic or technological consistency in this world.