The market from yesterday was gone, and so I tried once again to return to the place where I had originally come from.

Again, there was no door, and again, I couldn’t read anything that was written anywhere.

Again, no one seemed to believe me when I told them where I was from.

Some people were kind enough to point me in the direction of where another market was being held, but this really wasn’t all that helpful given the fact that no one was willing to accept my money.

By evening, I had to come to a sobering realization: If someone was going to come rescue me, they would’ve come by now, or I would’ve heard of some more weird people wearing weird clothes like me from other people I’d spoken with.

Either that or I would’ve seen them myself. And if a way back was going to miraculously appear, I likely would’ve found it by now.

The fact that I hadn’t seen anyone dressed in strange clothing that looked like it was from Earth meant that there likely was no easy way to go from here to there and vice-versa.

Which meant that for whatever reason, it looked like I was stuck here for the time being; all on my own.

My growling stomach urged me to find something to fill it. I started wandering around, no longer asking about a way home, but instead asking if anyone wanted to buy my shoes.

Of everything I had on me, I thought of those as the only things that I could give up that might have some value to them that I could do without. Sure, there was also my phone, but its battery had already run out, so the most I could advertise it as was a glorified mirror, and I wanted to hang onto it in case it happened to be helpful at some point.

Forty minutes later, I walked along the street, barefoot, but with a pouch of coins in my hand. It wasn’t so odd to walk around barefoot here, most of the lizardmen and even some of the humans walked around barefoot, so I wasn’t too out of place… unless you noticed my facial features or everything else I was wearing.

I counted twelve denarii in my hands- they were silver coins slightly bigger than a quarter, and they were designed so that they could easily be broken up into ten pieces in case you needed to buy something a fraction of one. They had the image of a lizardman wearing a laurel crown on one side and an axolotl on the other, as well as some text that I, of course, could not read.

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I saw a lot of stalls selling smoked fish so I assumed it was probably something very popular here, and after seeing a human buy one of them I was mostly reassured that it wouldn’t poison me.

I don’t think I would’ve eaten something like this out of choice, but it was cheap enough that I could make the money I had last about a week if I only ate this.

I still had some hope, no matter how infinitesimally small, that I would be found so long as I stayed in the area.

I didn’t dare waste any coins on accommodation unless I absolutely had to; like in the case if it was raining- I wanted to make my money last as long as possible for the worst-case scenario that help was not coming anytime soon.

I slept on someone’s porch that night, though I made it a point to wake up before anyone would notice and left before I could get another face full of cold water.

Now that I was no longer starving, my thoughts kept going back to my family.

It was day three of me being in this place, and if there wasn’t some sort of strange time dilation going on, they would definitely have been worrying about me. My parents certainly would have - Cheddar though, he would’ve just thought it was another day that I hadn’t visited him.

The guilt of leaving him behind, even if I didn’t really have any other option, washed over me when my darker thoughts overwhelmed me. I had had him since I was fifteen and we had been inseparable since, and he could not understand why we couldn’t be together every day, but was always so happy to see me when I was able to come back home.

When my thoughts were at their darkest, I couldn’t help but think that if I died in this world and didn’t return, Cheddar would have no idea what had happened to me. He would not understand why I never came to visit him again.

He’d just stay there at home, for years on end until he passed away, eagerly anticipating my return - something that would never happen.

My parents would be distraught, wondering where I had gone without leaving a trace.

No- I told myself.

I had to try to remain positive, even if I was in perhaps the most hopeless situation I could’ve imagined myself in. As a thought experiment I had sometimes wondered what I would do if I were stranded on a remote island - but this was worse than that. Still, help might be on the way, and even if it wasn’t, surely there was a way back to Earth?

There had to be, if I could travel from the Earth to here, there must have been a way to do the opposite.

In the meantime, I tried to find a job because my money wasn’t going to last forever, but the thing was that everyone I asked who I told that I was looking for work wanted someone who could read - and I couldn’t, at least, not the writing of this world. I would’ve been fine with something just involving manual labor, even if I probably wouldn’t have lasted long in that kind of a job, but I couldn’t find anything like that. At least, not long term.