Terry was not pleased to discover that even though the stars and dislocation were fading, the pain was not. He was certain, just goddamn certain, that the imprint of some automotive logo was now permanently engraved into his back. As if that insult and injury weren't enough, his head felt like it wanted to explode. There was all this… stuff in there now that didn’t make one damn bit of sense. Places he’d never been, but knew by heart. Things he’d never done. Things that science told him no one could do, but were somehow still possible. People he’d never met but that his brain was insisting were his family and friends. The only saving grace was that he was sprawled out on something reliably solid. He rolled onto his stomach and pressed the side of his face against the cool flat surface. It didn’t help at all with the pain, but at least it felt real, unlike half the shit in his head right now. Small victories, he told himself. Small victories. You’re still alive. That was when it occurred to him that maybe he was not, in fact, alive and that this was the afterlife. Probably Hell, knowing my luck, he thought.

That was when he finally started to process the noises that were drifting into his ears. Hushed whispers surrounded him. He just ignored them and rolled his face so the other side could lie on the cool surface beneath him for a while. It only stood to reason that he should soak up whatever tiny comforts he could just in case he had caught the express to the lake of fire or whatever. The hushed whispering steadily grew into more normal talking. Speech started drifting over him, which just the whole situation feel surreal again. He both did and didn’t understand what was being said, like part of his brain was hearing gibberish, while the other part was cheerfully providing a real-time translation.

“…think it worked?”

“Is that the one who…”

“Why is he just lying…”

Unable to stand this bifurcated listening experience, Terry cracked an eye open. It didn’t really help.

“Why does hell look like a Chinese period drama?” he muttered to himself.

Everyone wore ornate robes. The men all had some kind of strange topknots. The mountain of information in his head that did not belong to him informed him it was called a touji. And everyone was ridiculously good-looking. Like models and actors attractive. If he wasn’t in so much damn pain, Terry would have thought this was all just some bizarre dream. Then, that term he’d remembered right before everything went all out of focus and wobbly, floated back to the top of his consciousness. Truck-kun. Yeah, it ran people over, but there was more to it. It… No way, thought Terry. There’s just no way. Did that stupid delivery truck on a trail in a freaking park send me to some other world? He tried to deny the possibility immediately, but the evidence was stacking up against his denial fast and furious. All this needs now is for them to tell me that I’ve been called here to save the world, he thought with grim amusement. That’s me, alright. The hero of heroes.

Terry decided that the best thing to do was go to sleep. He’d just go to sleep and wake up in some nice, antiseptic hospital with a morphine drip and a body cast. What a thing to hope for, he thought. He never got the chance, though. Someone came over and started to gently shake him. That made the pain in his head increase by orders of magnitude. He clutched at his head with his hands and wished that something would made that pain disappear. Then, he heard someone speak.

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“Oh, of course.”

There was a surge of something that felt like electricity in the air to Terry, followed by a sweet cool sensation that washed through his entire body. The pain vanished and something in the same zip code as sanity returned. He realized that he’d been screaming in agony, except the agony was gone now. So, he stopped screaming. The release from all that pain made Terry feel almost euphoric. He pushed himself up to a sitting position and had to stay there for a minute until his head stopped swimming. He remembered reading something about the body releasing some kind of chemicals to help pain. He must have been getting a massive dose of those at that moment. As that euphoria ebbed, he looked around again. Nope, he was still in some Chinese period drama filled with a cast of people straight from the “You’ll Never Have a Chance with Me” agency. Even the young man who had crouched down nearby looked like someone straight out of a K-pop band, or whatever the Chinese equivalent was, who’d also just happened to get an extra smack or three from the pretty stick. All in all, it left Terry, who might have barely had a chance at getting into the Super Average Guy calendar, feeling pretty damn inadequate. Which just seemed hugely unfair after getting hit by Truck-kun.

Once it was clear that he was rational, though, things got weird all over again. Everyone in the room bowed to him. That strange other-knowledge that some bastard had rammed into his psyche told him that those bows were far lower than they should have been, which gave him a cold, sick feeling.

“We greet the hero. The one who was summoned to save us all.”

Terry forced himself to stand up. He looked around at the bowing people. He could see hope and faith burning in their eyes. It was goddamn creepy, and only made creepier by his cold, certain knowledge that he was not cut out for the hero gig. If they’d summoned him for the fetching tacos gig, or the fix our website gig, or the salvage the garbage database our crappy former employee made gig, he was their guy. As for the hero gig, he was the guy who posted the job requirements. So, he turned his attention to the highly important task of finding a door while he asked a question to stall.

“What have I been summoned to save you from?” he asked.

“There is a great army of evil. Even now, our forces battle to keep it at bay,” said K-pop guy.

“I see,” said Terry slowly, as though he was actually giving that crazy-ass nonsense some serious consideration. “Hard pass.”

Then, he bolted for the door he estimated was the most likely to lead outside. He didn’t know if he’d just caught them all off guard, or maybe they didn’t dare to interfere with “the hero,” or maybe they just hadn’t parsed the meaning of hard pass, but he burst out into the sunlight. He saw gates at what seemed like an unreasonable distance and kept running. At least he hadn’t lost all of his fitness in that awful, trans-whatever shift that had happened. He ran as fast and hard as he could. The armed men at the gate looked at him curiously as he approached them, but they didn’t make a move to interfere. One of them even politely opened the gate for him. Well, thought Terry, at least that guy is okay. He risked a look back and saw no one was chasing him, so he took a chance and slowed to a stop at the gate. He worried it might bring catastrophe, but there was one question he needed answered above all others.

“Which direction is the war?” he asked.

The guards traded uncertain looks, but the polite, gate-opening guard pointed and said, “To the north.”

“Great. Thanks!” said Terry and then shot out of the gate.

He started to look around, decided he didn’t care, and just started running in a generally southward direction. If war, violence, and death were to the north, he needed to get as far from that as possible.