Coming out of the blackness, into light, was pleasant for a moment. Perry felt like he was waking up on a Saturday morning after a long sleep.

He became aware that he was in a case, and immediately saw that it was opening.

Then something hit it, hard, and he fell to the ground. The drop surprised him, but he had no time to think about it because he heard screams and also realized he was covered in slime. He rolled out onto the dirt.

His hands went to his face but then a furred arm slammed into him. He tried to stand up; it hit him again. He rolled away, or tried to, and again attempted to stand. He looked up.

It was a bear, standing. It flashed teeth, and roared – more like a low squeal – but he realized that wasn’t the screams he’d heard a moment before; those came from behind him.

The bear lunged at him. He managed to get to his feet and back up. The bear stepped forward and swiped. Its claws would have torn his side away but for hands behind that grabbed him around the waist and pulled him backward.

He looked down at them. These hands – paws – were also furry.

“Yaw-yaw!” yelled a voice behind him. Another figure hopped forward then, next to him, and thrust a spear at the bear.

Perry turned toward whoever it was defending him, and saw it was a tall, brown animal that walked on its hind legs. He realized it looked something like a kangaroo, but with cropped ears and smarter eyes.

It was one of several, but the only one that stepped forward. Behind it was another one wearing a bone breastplate, and carrying a staff.

A shaman, he thought. This seemed oddly significant, despite his ignorance of where he was or how he had arrived there.

His eyes blurred as the slime sloughed off his hair.

The bear thing – it was still upright, Perry saw, so it wasn’t exactly a bear – darted toward the white case. It grasped the top half. Some of the kangaroo-thing warriors surged up to grab the other half.

Perry supposed he should feel some ownership of the case, because he had evidently spent a lot of time in there until just now, but he was content to let these creatures fight over it themselves.

The sides tugged the case back and forth. The bear-thing was taller, and apparently stronger, even though at least four of the kangaroo-things had now joined.

Another kangaroo grabbed Perry’s arm and pulled him back. It spoke to him, but he could hear no words; he realized how loud this fracas was with all the creatures shouting and squealing. And there were more of both of them around, he realized, than just the ones fighting over the case. More bear creatures stood behind the one fighting over the case, but they did not join. He seemed to be their champion, and they cheered for him.

The kangaroo nodded its head away from the fight, indicating that they should leave. It seemed sensible.

But then a new group surged up, rushing up to the contested case and knocking it down.

People. There were dozens of them.

They looked different than anyone Perry had seen before (although he couldn’t exactly remember how he knew that, or whom he was comparing them to): their skin was tinged slightly blue, and they were largely expressionless. All Perry noticed about their faces is that the ones now picking up the white case were bulging their eyes at the bear and kangaroo creatures.

One of the people came up and pulled Perry away from the kangaroo, slapping the animal’s hand off his arm. Perry was struck that this person was dressed much the same as the shaman who was now in the tussle by the case: he wore a similar kind of bone-decorated vest.

With Perry in hand, the people retreated back where they came from. All of this had taken place in a sort of large gully, with high walls. It was night, and Perry could see stars and the moon.

The moon.

This answered a question which he hadn’t been aware yet that he was thinking: Was he even on earth? He clearly was; it was the moon, nearly full, with the usual whiter areas and grayer areas.

The people hustled him off. They seemed to have the numbers to win the white case, if they had wanted it, but they abandoned it to their opponents and trotted away from the gully.

None spoke. They wore long, flowing clothes, many of them in simple robes. Only the one who struck him like a shaman wore anything remarkable.

They looked Iron Age, somehow, to Perry. A few carried spears. Many wore sandals which would have looked appropriate on a Roman legionary. There were no lights, no instruments of any kind. No eyeglasses.

Many of them were bald. All were male, as far as Perry could see.

They had a certain smell about them, Perry noticed. Like pine sap. It may have been something in their hair. The night air was fragrant with it as he ran along behind the main group.

The one who had pulled him ran next to him now, his hand still on Perry’s upper arm.

“Who are you?" Perry asked. "What’s going on?”

He didn’t answer.

“Anyone? Who are you?”

Despite their effort to rescue him, he was ignored.

They continued to trot down a dirt road. Now Perry heard some of them talking, but this was only low sounds which he couldn’t make sense of. None of them looked at him as they spoke.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Soon the group came to a sort of fortress of stone. There were no towers or buildings visible within; just the walls.

Most of them turned off to the right as they neared it, taking their leave from him without a single one even looking back. But his escort and one other person steered him to the left. He wondered if they were leading him in through a main entrance to be introduced to someone.

But he was not taken inside at all. The two walked him to a field some distance from the walls, but still in sight of them.

Then he saw the chain.

It was heavy, lying on the ground and attached to a pole that looked to be well-anchored. It had a fetter at the end, and before Perry caught on to what was happening, one of his escorts picked it up and slapped it on his ankle while the other pinned his arms down.

“What are you doing?!”

The two men ignored him, just staring at their work with their heads down. One snapped the fetter shut, and then tested the chain and stake. Then they turned to walk away, back toward the fortress.

“Who are you? What is this? I’m a prisoner? Outside?”

The men did not look back. They dwindled in the darkness and distance as they made their way toward the fortress.

The night was warm, for now, but Perry could feel the air moving and worried it might get cold. He was still naked, although he had lost all the gel except some in his hair, and he was now largely dry.

In addition to the moon, he now realized that the stars looked the same as he remembered, also. He did not know the constellations well, but at least knew the Big Dipper; it was up there, and the North Star was still over it by the usual seven or so lengths of the cup. And Cassiopeia was the usual W. He remembered seeing projections of how these stars would move, over tens of thousands of years, but that had not happened yet, or at any rate they hadn’t moved enough for him to notice.

For the first time since being dumped out of the case, he had a still moment to try to remember where he had come from.

He pictured . . . a living room. He’d lived in a house. He’d had some sort of job.

And a wife. And a daughter. Black-haired, both of them. He had a memory of them in rays of light through the windows in that living room.

Now, back on this new earth, he heard growls.

Actually, squeals. Low squeals, like the one he had heard from the bear creature. But these seemed louder; maybe from larger animals.

He discerned that not far off, surrounding the fortress, there were dark hills. The growls and squeals were coming from them.

He looked back at the fortress; and now, atop its walls, he noticed figures. They appeared to be on patrol. They were looking toward him. He guessed they might have held bows, or crossbows; and they would have been in range of him. And in range of any growling animal that would come to attack him.

“I’m bait,” he thought. “Not just a prisoner. Bait.”

And it was not long before he heard creatures approaching. The patrol up on the fortress walls was watching him carefully, he assumed to be ready for the bears.

His visitors, though, turned out to be the kangaroo group again. The shaman wasn’t there, but the one who had pulled him aside back in the gully was.

Sure enough, the humans on the walls let loose volleys of arrows toward the rescue group. Perry heard them hiss through the air. One clanged off the pole he was chained to. The kangaroos worked fast, and one had a tool that popped open the fetter. Perry realized he hadn’t even tried to open it; he might have been able to do so barehanded. But momentarily he was freed, and they rushed him off. The one who had paired off with him before led him again.

They ran from the fortress and the hills, back to woods where they lived.

*

Over months, which became a year, then two, Perry learned the language and customs of the kangaroo people, whose word for themselves was The Good.

“Why did you rescue me?” he asked, when he was able. “From the case, and then from the people?”

Karante – that was the name of the one who had spoken to him – shrugged. “We thought you were special. A sign, a messenger. A portent. That’s why our shaman was so interested in you. Same for the Orsines; they thought the same.”

“How long had you known I was in that case?”

“As far back as I can remember. Same for our grandmothers.”

“But you don’t think I’m special anymore?”

Karante managed to shrug again without interrupting her scraping of hair off a boar hide. He was doing the same chore with another hide, right next to her.

“Well, I suppose we are all special, Brother Perry.”

So his stock had clearly plummeted, with them, but he was still welcome.

The Good lived in simple log cabins which they could disassemble and move if needed. They gathered wild grass grains that grew around lakes and ponds. They kept chickens for poultry and eggs. They also raised fruit, but in what struck Perry as a lackadaisical manner – they kept an eye on apple trees, and other fruit trees, and grape vines, and blackberries, and they gathered from them all, in season, but they didn’t bother very much with thinning, or weeding, and certainly not grafting. Good enough was good enough.

There were plenty of turkeys around the woods and fields where they lived, and The Good hunted those with bows and arrows. There were many boars, also; The Good used spears for those.

The boars were regular boars. Bears and kangaroos were sentient, and the bears were bipedal; and the apparent humans had turned blue; but boars were still boars, chickens were chickens, crows were crows, turtles were turtles.

For months he went back and forth between guessing that he was either in some alternate reality, or else in the far future. The alternate reality explanation just seemed unbelievable, to him –

I’m surrounded by intelligent, talking kangaroos, but I’m rejecting an explanation because it’s too much of a stretch, he acknowledged to himself –

But for months he had no way of verifying if this was earth in the future. Perhaps the white case – which had been broken in the tussle between the Orsines and The Good, that night, and now sat in the gully in two pieces which no one any longer seemed interested in – was a suspended animation device. Or perhaps it was just some science fiction-type portal between his old reality and this new one. He didn’t know the answer to that for some time. He had returned to visit it, several times, but he couldn’t glean any information from it other than that it had obviously been made by a far more technologically advanced culture. He remembered his first life fairly well, by this time, but didn’t remember any inventions that would either put him in suspended animation nor send him to another dimension.

He saw no ruins anywhere, here with The Good in his second life; no stumps of skyscrapers, no weed-overrun roads. No artifacts he would recognize from his own time. Nothing. The kangaroo people lived a pre-industrial existence and made everything they needed from the natural resources around them, not from mining pre-apocalypse ruins.

*

He probed the memories and folktales of his hosts to see if he could learn any clues to their origin that way, even if they themselves did not realize where their stories had come from. This did not turn up anything. The Good had two origin stories, which blithely contradicted each other but were still retold. In one, they had always been present on earth, having found themselves aware one day in the far past along with rock spirits, water spirits, and so on. In another, they had been sent from beyond the horizon to live among, and tame, the humans and the Orsines.

“I’m turning into an archaeologist impersonating a folklore ethnologist,” he said to himself.

“Do your tales talk about why the humans are the way they are?” he asked Karante.

“We have no creation story for them, no.”

“You’ve never seen a human like me?”

“I’m afraid we have not, Brother Perry. Only the blue."

“Not even – stories of any? Far away?”

She shook her head. “Again I’m sorry, Brother Perry. It must be so hard to be – one of a kind.”