I couldn’t say for sure how long it took me to fully come to my senses. I was sitting on a bench with reins resting gently in my hands. The temperature of the gentle breeze was nice. The bench rocked a bit.
Bird song and the buzz of insects played the back ground to the sounds of heavy wooden frames shifting centers of gravity over uneven terrain. Oddly enough the hug animal in front of me didn’t seem to make much nose at all.
In front of me, slightly lower than my elevated position, was the green-gray back of an animal I didn’t recognize and beyond it the back of a giant box, I would later figure out was a wagon. It appeared to be covered in rope nets that held everything from wooden barrels to animals with only their feet and faces reviled.
Some of those looked like chickens, and some like small dinosaurs. Particularly that one from Jurassic Park with the rounded head that smashes into things. Except the size of a bigger dog, and bundled up in a net hammock and hung from the back of a wagon.
A woman sat beside me on the wide bench. Far enough we were not touching. She had a light blue dress on and an overly large hat, like something old-time southern ladies would wear to church. The toes of her boots were polished to a shine, and the book on her lap had script in a language I’d never seen that oddly looked like I could understand it if I just got closer.
She more light blue glove, then thin cloth kind, that rose to her elbows. There was a gap of flash and then the shoulders of her dress.
There was a small embroidered flower, on her collar and small metal earrings in her earlobe and the side and top of her ear.
I eventually looked down at my own feet. Boots again though they were anything but shiny and the laces were odd. They weren’t really laces at at. The boot had the split down the front but there were no eyelets. Just small raised wooden patricians. The laces were wrapped all the way around the boot, the wooden partitions keeping the laces in place.
Looking down I noticed my shadow was oddly shaped. I reached up every so slowly and touched a hat I hadn’t know I was wearing.
Except I reached up with my right hand. Was I right handed? My hands had two thumbs and eight fingers. Three bones per finger.
My fingers were longer, and my thumb thicker than they had been. Or were they?
The more I looked at my hand the more I was convinced it was my hand, even thought I knew it wasn’t.
Tongue. I ran it over my lips and teeth as I felt my face.
Eyebrows, eyes, nose, two nostrils, a bit of facial hair scruff.
Collared shirt of some sort. Button keeping the cloth tight around my neck. Tailored shirt perhaps?
Long sleeved leather jacket with shirt cuffs showing. The showed evidence of stains and wear.
Leather vest with little loops sized to hold pencils. Then ran down each side of my chest. Pants with a belt, even though the bottom of the vest attached to two buttons on the pant waist.
Vest and combination suspenders? Yup. I could feel at my lower back were something attached to my pants and ran up-
The woman was looking at me. Or had been. She glanced over, but was now back to pretending to read.
The second belt was much wider and thicker. It had loops on either side of a belt buckle big enough to get me into a country music festival. The resolver on my right hip seemed to indicate I was right handed, as there was a canteen on my left hip.
When I found that I realized I was so thirsty.
I couldn’t figure out the lid at first. But there was a bit of stuff metal wire that created a sort of compression fitting to force a plug down into the mouth of a metal canteen.
I drank the water like a man lost in a desert.
Looking back, I missed the planetary rings that encircled the planet because of a combination of factors. First I had a wide brimmed hat of my own. Very much a cowboy style thing. Second when I tipped my head back to drink I closed my eyes and focused on the pure pleasure of water when you were thirsty.
I found myself looking at the thing pulling the cart. It looked like Mr. Happy the iguana in the glass tank in the waiting room of my shrink.
The back was wide and arched in the middle so I couldn’t see the head. The legs were big things. It seemed to move side to side a lot more than it needed to as it walked forward.
Someone rode past me on a very horse like creature that wasn’t a horse. Or could have been a horse and bull mix.
Hat, reins, saddle, tall mammal horse thing that was just enough different from being a horse to make me freak out more than the wagon I was on being pulled by a lizard.
I went to scratch my head- with my right hand, and found the hat.
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I started to take it off but it seemed stuck to the front of my head. I lifted it from the back and the woman next to me spoke.
“Put that on,” she said in a whisper.
I lifted my left hand to run it along my head and found short cut hair.
“Please,” she said glancing at men and then around, as if I had dropped my pants in church.
I tried to put the hat on in what I thought was a normal way. Hold it by the front bit, hook the back over your head and pull the front on and down.
Except that didn’t work out too well. Why? It felt like I had a half golf ball’s worth of bone under my scalp, just above my temples.
Touching those seemed to make the woman uncomfortable and I had the disturbing thought that they might be the equivalent of testicles or something.
I put the hat on the front first then pulled the back down. The raised welts or whatever they were sort of locked the hat in place.
I was scratching the back of my neck, again with my right hand, when I tipped my head back and finally saw the rings.
I stood up at some point as I stared. As I tried to get off the wagon I discovered the lip on the floor that would catch your foot if you appeared in his universe without ever having climbed up to the bench and therefor didn’t know about it.
I tripped, but caught myself.
The iron bands around my chest that didn’t let me breathe seemed very human like.
I don’t know what the woman said or where I was going. It wasn’t like I could get away from the fucking rings encircling the planet I was on.
But I had to move, so I moved.
The thing was a giant lizard thing with a huge flat head and lazy eyes that didn’t seem to care that I gawked at it.
That just sped my legs forward.
The wagon in front bounced over the road and the hanging things shifted and swayed.
I was almost running and only gaining on the long line of wagons I could see in front of the one beside me.
“Mr. Kine?” a man said and it took me too long to look up to see a man with one of of those thin pencil mustaches that didn’t look good on anyone.
“Are you feeling well Mr. Kine?” he asked.
“I don’t-” I began and then it sort of hit me. I wasn’t speaking English. I knew that, but at the same time I knew what I was saying.
It was true. I was in another universe.
My eyes began to drift up toward the rings and I sort of over tipped and stumbled backward falling on my ass.
“Mr. Kine!” the man shouted. Then shouted more and there was a bell that was rung, and then more ringing.
I just stared at the rings.
“Let’s get you some water,” the man said reaching at my side and opening the empty canteen.
“Ah. Do you have water sir, he seems to be out and I’ve only got the barrels. Thank you. Drink this now. Slowly. Slowly.
“Excuse me,” a woman said.
She knelt beside me and took my hand in her gloved hands. It was the woman from the wagon.
“Mr. Kine. Are you well.”
“No,” I said shaking my head.
“Mrs. Kine let’s give him some air,” someone else said with a bit of authority.
There were a lot of questions and I wasn’t answering them well enough for the man with the big bushy mustache.
“Right,” he said to a man on one of the massive horses. This one had two horns on it’s head, the horse not the man.
“Water and feed the onyas. Small pit fire for tea, and break out one of the bottles of the hard cider for the customers. I want Hicks and Victor to ride out for big game, and put the rest on wood, we are running low.”
The man knelt by me and leaned down.
“Mr. Kine, you rest up now. Do you need any medicine? Mrs. Kine has your bag.”
The woman was holding a wooden crate with a handle.
When the man with the huge mustache stood up he clapped his hands and called out for space.
“Give him room now folks. We will be breaking for a bit. I’ll have a fire for tea set up-” he kept talking as he moved away. Like a star his gravity pulled the spectators along leaving only Mrs. Kine.
Mrs. Kine and the pencil mustached man from the wagon in front of me.
“I’m not sure what is needed,” she was saying, “but I’ve got your case here.”
It opened like a tackle box displaying perhaps a hundred tiny vials of liquids and several small wooden containers.
She opened one of the larger wooden containers. It looked like a tiny wooden jewelry box. Inside was a greenish powder.
“Shall I get some hot water Mrs. Kine?”
She turned, seemingly noticing the thin nervous man for the first time.
“Yes. Thank you. And a mug if you will, I’ve forgotten his.”
The man rushed off.
She asked me questions and I read the labels, but they said things like, Silver Lear, or Toad’s Wart.
“I don’t know what this is,” I said.
She looked worried and then forced a smile.
“It is your medicine case,” she said calmly.
“I’m a- healer?” I meant to say doctor, but the word sort of caught and twisted into healer.
“No,” she said slowly, “You are an alchemist and a-” she cut off as the man rushed back with a wooden mug.
“Here it is Mrs. Kine.”
“Thank you,” she said as she took it, “Please give us space.”
“Oh. Of course,” he said, though he seemed disappointed.
“Do get better Mr. Kine,” he said.
I did not get better and the dying was both painful and slow, and the whole time I was doing it, Mrs. Kine was blaming herself. She had put a pinch of some sort of powdered bark into the mug and two measures of some sort of flower’s leaf that was always put in tea.
“These are the only two I know will not harm you,” she said as she gave me the mug.
I screamed into the darkness still shaking from pain that was no longer there. It took time to realize I’d died. So much for a second chance at life. It had been filled with a few hours of confusion, a wife I didn’t know, a brief gun fight, a long right bound and tied in the back of a wagon, and then days of pain with brief glimpses of lucidity that revealed others being raped or tortured.
I floated in darkness that wasn’t dark at all. Every part of me was lit, there just wasn’t anything else.
Anywhere.
You know that feeling you get when you realize that two hundred years after you eventually die no one is going to remember you. Or when you really start to understand galactic time scales and that even even universes will die, and then the there will be billions and billions of years of darkness and cold as the heat of the universe spreads out over the vast infinities.
Or that time when you were younger and you confessed to your first love and she laughed at you.
That’s the tiny, insignificant feeling I was avoiding as I floated in the darkness. Or was I floating. I wasn’t standing on anything, and yet it felt like there was gravity.
“Humanity has not taken well to their new realities,” the voice said. It was the voice of the simulation.
“The rules of reality are different and it has been argued that since you are all being inserted into the simulation without information about it you be given time to acclimate. I have agreed. Had the owner of your body not died of poison in his canteen he would have survived until reaching his new home in Nightfyre. You may take that time to acclimate.
I was back on the bench of the wagon where this had all started. Where I’d come into being after the earth was destroyed.