Goodie—cold, terrified and in pain—lay in the corner of the small, padded cell, shivering—the months-old scars covering his body still burning with memory and trauma. He would not have been so bad if he could just stop thinking, stop recalling all that had been done to him.

Every sound, every bump, scratch and knock that echoed from within and out of the room sent him back into a bout of terror as instincts meant to keep him safe from and prepared for big things with bigger teeth and sharp claws instead was forever twisted against him by the tender care and harsh caress of a fellow human.

His instincts were meant for the fight or flight of savagery, not civilisation’s warped cruelties, and as it tried to react to something its biological programming could never hope to understand, he was sent back into himself, back into a mire of memory and trauma as all that had ever happened to him shrouded thought and reason with fear and despair.

He did not know for how long he had stayed there. It felt like forever. And it felt like no time at all.

They had first kept him some place nice after they had found him, the people that had brought him here. Another padded cell, one where a nice man would come every day and try to talk to him. But, as Goodie had always known, it would not last—and to prove him right, he had then been dragged kicking and screaming from that cell and moved here, where no one came to talk to him—where no one even acknowledged him beyond ensuring he did not starve to death or tried to harm himself again.

So, he sat there shivering, the acrid stench of urine and worse in the air the only element of relief, the disgust invoked by it allowing some small and blessed distraction from his wretched mind.

And then he froze.

Footsteps.

It happened every day. Footsteps would come stomping down that hall, and then someone would be dragged kicking and screaming back out, never to return.

Every day they would come; and every day they would drag someone else away.

And every day he would freeze up as his mind grew still, wondering if today would be the day they finally came for him.

Goodie sat there, listening; sat there shivering as those footsteps approached, hoping against hope that they would pass him by as they had done so many times before—and also hoping that they would not, that they would finally just get it all over with.

He could not remember much of what happened next, but Goodie did know that he screamed when he had heard those footsteps stop in front of his cell, began gibbering like some delusional madman when the door to his cell opened.

Two men; big and strong, both wearing padded clothing and thick leather gloves.

They stormed in, wrestling with him as he kicked, bit and screamed bloody hell at them as they dragged him out. Then…then he begged.

As they carried him down a long hallway, and then another, and then another, he begged, pleaded, promised them anything if they would just take him back, anything to just leave him alone. Both paid him no mind as they took him to a small room where they then tied him down to the floor, secured his limbs with metal cuffs and chains.

And it was there he lay for some time, whimpering and begging still, even long after the two men had left. Only for Goodie to once again begin pleading once more as several figures then entered. Women, maybe, but they wore heavy cloth that covered their bodies entirely. Dark blue or purple—the dark of the room making the exact nature unclear.

They too ignored him.

Herbs and incense were burned, and some mantra spoken as they enacted some strange ritual, though his memory was even hazier here, the smoke created having affecting his senses then, clouding his mind with a haze that saw him…not calm, but become more passive, more subdued, his pleas reduced to nonsensical mumblings that soon disappeared entirely as his voice intermixed with whatever words the figures kept uttering, their monotonous mantra unending.

Goodie eventually stopped when he heard tapping against the floor.

The scritching and scratching of many tiny claws as animals moved across it. Too big to be rats, he remembered thinking. Too big for cats, even.

Too big and too heavy.

Then he heard the sniffing and growling.

Dogs. A pack of dogs had come in from who knew where, tentatively moving around the room as they continued to sniff and pant. Slowly, though, they came closer, and then closer, always circling, always sniffing. None of the figures paid them any notice, and he too ignored them even as some suppressed part of his mind screamed out in fear.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

They moved in closer, to then start sniffing at him; always just out of sight, always just in the corner of his vision no matter which way he turned.

And then they were on him, biting and tearing, his flesh peeled away from the bone as they began to gorge themselves upon his form.

And he was happy.

As much as it hurt, as much as it tortured him to be ripped apart in such a slow and cruel manner, each strip of flesh ripped from him brought a sense of intense relief, a bliss he had never before known as his life ebbed away.

…it was over.

His suffering—his pain—all that his short life had put him through…it was all, finally, over.

~~~

Goodie slowly woke from his night’s slumber, rubbing his eyes as he did.

It was still raining outside, the droplets not so much tapping against the various windows of the room as they were washing over them in a gentle curtain of water.

He lay there for some time as he tried to remain smothered in the remnant feelings of his dream. Some would call it a nightmare, but most were not like him.

No; not a dream, a memory.

That had all happened, though his recollection of it was far from absolute.

Two, no, three months ago, now.

The dogs—or wolf, as Frank and Donny had insisted, had taken everything away from him. His memories were not lost. Goodie still remembered every wretched part of his life, to some extent—maybe even better now than before, but there was no connection to it now; as if it was all something he once saw in a movie or something.

A memory of his, but one that felt as if it had happened to someone else.

He was not…happy—not by a long shot—but he was not unhappy, either; if that made any sense. His mind, for the first time in his life, was at peace. Which was more than he could ever have hoped for before coming to this world, the torture of what happened to him here only just proving itself worse than what had happened to him back home.

For a while, he lay there, warm and blissfully thoughtless, skating the knife’s edge of waking fully and returning to even more blissful slumber once more.

Most would have considered having something so personal forcefully stripped from them a cruelty of the highest order, but the day that wolf took away from him the fear and the despair that had accompanied him his entire, short life, was the day he had been reborn anew, the day after the first day of his real life.

Admittedly, that new life was to start out on the street, as those people, having finished with whatever they had done, had then unceremoniously shoved him out the door without so much as a “Have a nice day” as they then presumably moved onto the next freak in line. But that was fine.

Eventually, Goodie somehow worked up the energy to lift himself up, an effort made all the more challenging for the contrast between the warmth of his bed and the cold of all that was not beddy-comfort. But eventually, he got up and dressed himself, momentarily moving into the bathroom to attempt to clean his body first.

Peaceful mind aside, this world lacked for many of the modern conveniences present within his previous Earth. Toothpaste was instead some god-awful powder, his clothing stiff, ill-fitting and about as stretchable as those metal cuffs they had used on him, and as for the electricity? Well, he often found it easier to just warm a kettle and then pour its contents into the basin, where he could then birdbath, than to actually use the combination of shower and bathtub that had come with the place.

He was still in the same building that housed their office, Frank having set him up in one of the apartments on the top floor. It was decent in size, with two bedrooms, a main room, and a small kitchen area with a bathroom next to it. And it was at the corner of the floor, too, so most of the two outer walls had windows; though the one side did open out directly onto the building next door. Still though, plenty of natural light.

And it all was…not nineteen-twenty…ish, or even fortyish. To best describe this Earth, Goodie would have to say the city was like the eighteen-hundreds had been told about the far future and had then tried to cosplay as it, the technology mid industrial revolution for the most part, but also not, with—as he had already stated—a strong resemblance to the nineteen-twenties and forties in other areas. At least, that was his impression of the place, Goodie only knowing as much about those two eras as the media of his world had conveyed to him, which probably not the best source for an education. But it was what it was.

They had some of the themes, though often by different names, but there was also just too much different from what he knew for him to ever confuse this world with his original one.

The presence of magic being the most obvious difference.

Magic and monsters and…humans.

The people were the one thing that was still the same.

…which was a pity.

But the magic? It had allowed him to survive for a time, Goodie having gone after the various bounties listed in the various police stations around the city. He did not bring any of them in, mind you. Even if he could, he would not risk himself so. Money was money, but his life was his life.

No, he used his magic to find whoever the police wanted to be found, then told the cops where to find them. And he got paid for that service. Sometimes.

Then Frank found him, the greedy private det…freelancer seeing within him the opportunity for more.

So, here he was; third partner of Cohen, Sullivan and Goodwill.

For breakfast, Goodie grabbed a couple of cookies from a jar in the main room. He had no refrigerator to store anything more wholesome, nor would he ever. Not here. They had the technology, but not the resources for mass-production. Humanity was not the dominant lifeform in this world.

It was not some fantastic place with dragons flying about or some other isekai cliché. No, the things he spoke of were the things that went bump in the night, things that hid in the dark in wait of the lone straggler or wayward child. Or so Frank had attempted to explain to him. Good was hardly the most outgoing of people originally, and his partners were keeping him busy with so much that he barely had time to focus on his own goals, as few as those were, so the world was, by-and-large, still a mystery to him.

But, as a result of the lack of dominance that they held here, humanity was both less-in-number and more contained—mostly restrained to the coastal regions of this new world—and even then, mostly to the north, the southern half of the continent near certain death for any who ventured down there. Lack of access, and lack of established trade routes, meant that resources were scarce here, yes, but that lack of people also meant that said resources were also, contradictorily, more plentiful and far, far cheaper. Sort of.

Economics was a complicated mess no matter where you went, apparently.

Where his world had built a cage of steel and cement, these people still relied heavily on wood to build everything, metal of any sort far too valuable to waste on civilians. Electricity too, to an extent. He did not know how they were creating it here, the knowledge of such things a government secret…as was gunpowder, for some reason—a fact he still found laughable, though Goodie was nowhere near stupid enough to go about saying so out loud. Nor would he go about telling people what little he knew on the matter, Frank and Donny’s reaction more than enough reason to not do so.

But electricity here was a dodgy affair, frequent blackouts occurring near weekly, so keeping a fridge would have been pointless, he felt, the edibility of the food within far from guaranteed. More than that, the few he had seen in operation looked primitive as hell, the things near freezing over as soon as he looked at them, or not being cold at all, the products offered by some con-artist seeking to fob off faulty goods.

Finishing up and then grabbing his keys, Goodie opened the front door to his apartment and exited, almost forgetting to lockup as he did. That mistake was not as risky as it would have been back on Earth, his Earth. People were still people here, but they were also a little bit more civil, a little bit more honest. Here, you could leave your door open, wide open, and be assured that the worst that could happen was that someone would enter his apartment only to check that something had not happened to him.

The door of the apartment across from his opened as he began to walk away, forcing him to stop and turn back, Donny exiting as he did.

The man did not see him immediately, too busy with locking up, but as he turned, Donny stopped, almost in fright as he finally noticed Goodie watching him.

Pretending to be unfazed, Donny said, “kid?”

“Adult?”

“You know, that’s not as derogatory as you think it is?”

“So,” Goodie then asked, “You admit you’re talking down to me?”

“Privilege of being an adult, kid,” Donny quipped as he walked past, ruffling Goodies hair as he did.

Yeah…Goodie was not happy, not by a long shot, but…he was satisfied.