"You're not Rùndi!"

Who's Rùndi?, some part of Maso responded instinctively.

The rest of him was in complete disarray.

A torrent of sounds had to be parsed, half of them unrecognized and discarded, the rest nonsensical - haphazard clanging of machinery, unmuffled cries of children, different voices shouting over one another. One seemed to be yelling about cooked fruit, while another extolled the virtues of some kind of footwear, and as Maso's brain caught up with his senses, he processed more, slowly segmenting the flood of information into more manageable parts.

Maso could feel his body again, but there was something off about it. Multiple things, the more he focused on it.

He had eyes again, but no information display appeared. He could feel his legs, but no connection to the large data stores that were implanted in them. In fact, outside of the neural blocker whose diagnostics he could still vaguely sense, none of his augments had returned.

The lack of information was something he'd grown used to in the void. He'd hated it, but he hadn't even been sure he still existed. Now it surged back into being a major irritant: his training was yelling at him to resync with his data stores, to turn on active location scanning, to reconnect with his muscle stabilizers - and he couldn't.

That wasn't all. Moments before, when he'd been... ejected from the void, he'd had the vague feeling of being taller, somehow stretched. That sensation was doubled now, even though he hadn't looked at his limbs. It didn't feel wrong, not quite. Just different.

Maso cut off that train of thought, reorienting himself. All of this was important information, but solving those problems could wait for later.

He filed the information away. Or attempted to, at least: without access to his main memory augments, he'd have to rely on more fallible human memory, like he had in the void. Even while he'd been in the void, he'd started to notice that he was forgetting information he'd read earlier, which he found somewhat concerning.

Finally, Maso opened his eyes.

And then immediately closed them.

He was outside, and lacking a filtration system.

His vision would deteriorate in less than three minutes.

There would be serious long-term health effects within ten.

He'd completely run out of oxygen in twenty-three-

This isn't the Origin.

The frantic thoughts stopped, and for a moment he relaxed, still ignoring the sounds and smells and odd poking sensation at his thigh.

"Hello? I saw you move," the voice beside him said, sounding mildly annoyed. "If that's you, Rùndi, I hope you know dad is going to be very upset."

Mildly annoyed, but unhurried. Now that Maso's mind was slowly making it towards the 'less important' observations, he'd noticed that it was warm, but not painfully so. A comfortable heat was hitting the front of his body, and he could feel the warmth spreading across his face, almost as pleasant a feeling as the sauna he'd used once.

The furniture he was resting on was also nice, gently supporting his back with-

"If you don't say something, I will roll you off the roof."

Maso opened his eyes.

Now that he could get a good look at the sky, he realized it was far more interesting than he'd thought. On the Origin, the sky was always overcast, filled with thick and overlapping clouds that blocked most of the local star, leaving its light filtered and scarce. Here, the clouds were thin and diffuse, scattered across the sky like smears of paint. The sky itself was a brilliant blue, and Maso blinked, taking it in.

Perhaps more importantly, there was a woman standing beside him, hands on her hips. She looked to be in her twenties, maybe, but Maso had never been a good guess of age; the stern expression on her face reminded him of his mother, many years ago.

She's hardly wearing any clothes, Maso realized. She had a shirt on, but it didn't even come past her elbows; her pants barely reached her knees.

It was a different planet, he knew, and the air was much cleaner - but the sight was still bizarre.

The woman's frown deepened. "Okay, is there anyone in there? I'm going to need a good explanation for how you've respawned on my balcony. This is private property..."

"I'm Maso," he said. Possibly not the best opener, but in fairness, he was still reeling from the amount of new information.

"So you can talk. That's very nice," she said, voice flat. "Well, Maso. Again. I'm going to need a good explanation for why you're here, now."

Maso immediately regretted not thinking harder about this while he was in the void. If there were some kind of people on this planet, he couldn't tell them that he'd come from the Origin. Their appearances and supposedly long history made it likely that he'd somehow found settlers from a previous epoch, but he couldn't know for sure. The rarity of such an encounter was abysmal already, and the networked intelligences back on the Origin should have prevented even that small of a possibility from occurring.

And if this was a fully alien planet, he couldn't know how its citizens would react to hearing about the Origin and its widespread interstellar expeditions.

Well. Admittedly, even if they were humans of a previous epoch, he couldn't know if they'd be friendly. Although they were a frequent study of scientists hoping to piece together long-lost innovations, the civilizations that had previously inhabited the Origin were mostly an enigma. Why they'd done what they'd done to the planet was fun to guess at, but mostly pointless; why they'd tried to leave was obvious; whether or not they'd succeeded was a complete mystery. Or had been, at least.

Going deeper than that was an anthropological effort that most considered a waste of time. It was possible that the networked intelligences could solve these problems, but any scientist to recommend that would have been laughed out of their hearing.

In other words: Maso needed to piece together some reason he'd "respawned" here, despite not having the slightest clue where he was or what "respawn" even meant.

As Maso was struggling to come up with an explanation that wasn't completely nonsensical, taking into consideration what he'd learned in the void, something appeared in his vision.

His instinct was to ignore it. It looked similar to the information display provided by his vision augments, and he'd long become accustomed to simply not seeing the diagnostics overlaid on his retinas when he didn't need to.

After a moment, though, some part of his subconscious recalled that he didn't have vision augments anymore.

His eyes refocused, and he skimmed the text that had appeared in front of him.

Stolen story; please report.

> =====

>

> New Quest!

>

> "Lie Through Your Teeth"

>

> Find a good excuse for how you've ended up here. Bonus points for figuring out where "here" is!

>

> Rewards: Information, very unlikely to be tortured.

>

> Penalties for Failure: The System would be very disappointed in you.

>

> =====

"What?" he said.

"I said, I need an explanation for why you're here, now," the woman repeated, unmoving.

She was tall, Maso realized. Even peering down at him, half-slouched and craning her neck, she was surely taller than anyone he'd known on the Origin.

A more focused part of Maso recognized that her left hand was resting on the hilt of an extremely long and sharp knife.

Had that been there before?

He reread the text, anyways.

Very unlikely to be tortured.

"Well," Maso said.

He needed a good reason. A solid explanation. Something that would prevent him being "rolled off the roof", or in a worst-case scenario, meeting an unfortunate end with the woman's knife. (Well, the former might have been a worst-case scenario depending on the height of the roof, but that wasn't a particularly important distinction.)

On the Origin, he might've been confident enough in his training to take the fight, but right now - without his augments, without any weapons, and against a knife-wielder with absurd reach - it would have been insanity.

He needed some perfect, well-thought-out explanation that would satisfy this completely unknown individual from a foreign planet, culture, society.

"I have absolutely no idea," he said, finally.

For some reason, the woman seemed to deflate at this answer. Not upset, but- disappointed? Maso couldn't guess at the reason why.

"Interesting," she said, her tone making it seem like the opposite. "Well. Do you know anyone named Rùndiam?"

Was that a trick question? Was he supposed to answer yes? Would this woman lose interest and just kill him if he answered 'no'?

The floating text had disappeared - had it been his imagination, or an error in his neural augment? He vividly remembered that phrase, though: Very unlikely to be tortured. He couldn't afford to make a mistake here.

"The name... rings a bell," Maso said, carefully trying to sound like he was in deep thought. He was, so that wasn't difficult.

The woman raised a single eyebrow. A very noticeable action, given the contrast of her dark gray hair against pale skin.

"Really, now? It's not a common name. Give me a bit more to go on."

Lacking his data stores had given Maso an idea. He wasn't sure if it was a good idea, but it was better than nothing.

"I don't remember," Maso said. "I can't... I can't remember much, from before I died, I think."

The woman chuckled. "Fascinating. And here we have it. Yet another fantastic reason not to throw yourself into danger like a Thadh-damned moron."

Maso didn't understand, but he said nothing.

"Tell me everything you do remember, then." Her expression was less bored, now, but Maso wasn't sure if it was because she'd bought his 'explanation', or if she was about to stab him to death. Facial expressions had never been a particularly developed skill of his.

"And sit up, already. This looks ridiculous."

Maso did so. In the process, he realized three things.

Firstly, his instincts had been right. He was taller. It was awkward to swing his legs over the edge of the furniture he'd been lying on - a couch of some sort, it seemed. The woman took a half step back as his feet nearly missed her, and they hit the ground much earlier than he'd been expecting.

Secondly, he was also almost naked. His lower body was half-covered by similar pants to the woman's, patterned white fabric barely reaching the top of his knees. Glancing down at his shirt, he found that it was similarly short, the sleeves longer than the woman's, but not by much. He hadn't thought about clothing before, so he supposed this was better than actually being naked, but still - it was uncomfortable.

And finally. The first realization hadn't been quite accurate. It wasn't that he was taller, although he certainly was.

Rather, this body wasn't his at all. He couldn't see his face or head, but beyond the size of his legs, they were completely hairless, the skin a fraction darker, and oddly muscled. His arms were similar - Maso had been fit, but this body was bizarrely well-toned. And the fingers on his hands were just weird, longer and slender in a way that was very uncommon on the Origin.

Disturbed, Maso tried to ignore the sensation of wrongness that surged through him. Something to deal with later, after he understood more of his situation. He launched into what he hoped was a passable recollection of what he'd experienced on landing on the planet:

"I only remember the way I died," he said. "I was in a forest, I think. There was a creature - a beast, way bigger than me. It had massive wings, and it could breathe fire, and-"

The woman broke out in laughter, stepping back towards the edge of the roof.

Maso stopped, staring.

That was when he noticed she wasn't actually human.

In fairness, he'd been distracted, and it really was a small difference. Obvious, but small: her ears were far too long. They stuck out through her braided whitish hair, pointed tips directed at a forty-five degree angle away from her head. They almost looked like the decades-old biological augments that some still had on the Origin, from before all features could be replicated with just a better chip.

He recognized the trait from some of the texts he'd read in the void. An elf, was what they'd been called. Forest-dwellers, known for their heretical beliefs, bizarre 'magic', and general avoidance of any kind of education or higher culture.

Maso involuntarily glanced at her knife, blade longer than his real body's forearm, and immediately decided to not say any of that.

She finally finished laughing after a minute, her expression morphing into a sardonic grin. "That's a good story. Short and sweet, I like it."

"Should I finish?" Maso said.

"No, no," the woman said. "No, no. Let me do something."

Maso watched, dumbfounded, as the woman suddenly began chanting. The stream of syllables that came out of her mouth were absolutely nonsensical, but perfectly aligned in their pitch and rhythm. A few seconds later, she stopped, and closed her eyes.

She was only two steps away from him. Maso could move that distance with minimal noise, strike her left side to make it harder for her to reach for her weapon, and use the momentum to shove her off the roof. He tried to evaluate the odds of success: he didn't know how strong she was, but now that he had a better idea of the size of his own body, he thought he might actually be taller than her.

But the crux of the issue, and the reason he couldn't risk it, was exactly that: this wasn't the body he was used to. He wasn't sure if he'd be able to walk, let alone make a coordinated attack on someone.

It was better to see where this went, regardless. It stood to reason that the longer he had to get acclimated to this body, the more likely he'd be able to win a fight, if it came to that. And he really did need more information about where he was. He just had to hope she'd bought his story, ridiculous as it was.

Well, this was a different planet. Perhaps his story wasn't that ridiculous here - how was he to know?

After a moment, she opened her eyes again. Maso hadn't moved.

"All right. I understand why you're here, now. And how you died." Her smile widened. "A blessing from the Thadh."

What - or who - a Thadh was, Maso had no idea. But again, he said nothing. He liked his skin unperforated.

The woman shrugged, smile somewhat faded. "All right. Well, Maso. Come downstairs with me. I'll get you something to eat. I'm sure I can fill you in." At the last sentence, her grin returned.

She didn't wait for him to stand up, walking around the couch towards the other side of the roof. Maso hastened to follow. He'd expected it to be hard to control this body - surely he'd be unstable until he got used to the difference in height. But it was simple after all, and he didn't so much as stumble as he made his way to the roof's edge.

As he did so, his eyes scanned the area around him, taking in new information.

This building's roof was situated within a small sea of other buildings, each one about the same height. There were rows of streets in between, half of them wide and filled with people - elves, Maso realized - the other half skinny and containing rickety wooden staircases behind each building. Many of the buildings were completely open on one or more sides, the sunlight illuminating first-floor rooms with hoards of items and food and individuals milling around, and second-floor dwellings, mostly empty.

The streets themselves seemed to be almost alive, dirty and covered with small green biomass, trampled by hordes of people walking through them.

Elves.

A thought struck Maso, and as he made it to the top of the wooden staircase behind the building, he felt at one ear with his hand.

Long and pointed. This was certainly not his body.

Maso filed that information away. He'd done that a lot today, and he had a bad feeling that he'd be doing it a lot more, soon. Again, he missed the comforting knowledge that any important information would be fully saved by his augment network.

He followed the woman down the stairs, taking each step carefully, still deep in thought.

There was something else that had been bothering him. He'd checked, and his data stores were definitely still offline; that made sense, of course, especially if he was in an entirely different body now.

But the data stores were required for his neural augment's universal translation capabilities. It simply wouldn't be able to operate otherwise, such processes requiring far more data than could be stored in the brain implant.

And he'd been talking to a foreign woman on an alien planet for quite a while... and outside a slight difference in accent, they'd been able to communicate perfectly.

Maso wasn't sure what that meant, but taking into account his different body, the floating text instructing him on what to do, and finding a bizarrely human species an absurd distance from the Origin, it was this that disturbed him the most.