The kingdom was in chaos. Armored guards patrolled the city streets, banging on doors and asking intense questions of the people inside. No one was spared questioning, regardless of class. Nobles, merchants, mages, and peasants alike were asked if they knew anything about the missing Princess.
Outside the towering city walls, more guards and teams of adventurers crawled the countryside, braving the monstrous wildlife to search for any sign of the Princess. Some were in it for the bounty, others for their love of the kingdom, and others just wanted to bring a missing girl home to her father.
Zach was just a small child in an unfamiliar city, but he found himself questioned by a guard all the same. The guard wore polished steel armor under his green tabard, but he carried no weapon. The King insisted that his people should not feel afraid, but instead feel encouraged to cooperate with the investigation.
"Hey there, boy!" the guard called. "I don't recognize you. Do you live near here?"
Zach shook his head. "I'm just visiting," he said. Then he quickly added, "With my family."
The guard loomed tall over Zach. "Have you heard anything about the missing Princess? She's about your age."
When Zach shook his head, the man added, "Maybe you overheard someone saying something suspicious?"
"No I haven't. Sorry, sir."
"No need to apologize," the guard said, finally allowing himself to relax slightly. "Your family sure picked a terrible time to visit New Albion. We're all so worried about the Princess, and everyone is walking on eggshells, afraid to cause any disturbance.." The man shrugged and added, "I'll be the roundabout. The words will make you out and out."
Zach frowned in confusion at the guard's nonsensical words. "What?"
Then the guard switched to a singsong voice, "I'll spend the daaaay your waaaay."
That was when Zach recognized the lyrics to one of his favorite songs, and he started to wake up. He flailed for his CD-player alarm on the desk next to his bed. His grasping fingers hit the off switch, then he rubbed his eyes.
"That dream again," he mumbled into his sparsely decorated bedroom. It held a simple bed with plain blue sheets, a wooden desk covered in books and paper, and a dresser filled with clothes. The room wasn't big enough for much else, but that was to be expected of an affordable room near downtown. The housing market in Colorado had gotten crazy lately and Denver had been hit the hardest.
"A world with magic and monsters and a missing princess…" he mumbled. He also remembered gleaming white stone walls against a clear blue sky, but his memory of the latest dream was fading fast. He'd been dreaming about that place since he was a child, and long ago he had learned to just push the dreams out of mind.
Zach sat up and put his bare feet on the wooden floor. It creaked as he stood and stretched. For a 19-year-old, his body was lean and slim. Or put in a less flattering way, it was scrawny. Zach wasn't into sports or fitness but he wasn't a slob either. He rode his bike over three miles round trip to campus every day and he ate well. He also thought his face was rather handsome, at least when he shaved.
On that note, Zach thought, rubbing his chin, I definitely need to shave today. His dad had sported a beard worthy of a lumberjack, but Zach had no such luck with facial hair. To him it was just an inconvenience that had to be mercilessly removed every day or two.
He pulled on some pajama pants and shuffled out of the bedroom. He was pretty sure that his four male roommates wouldn't be upset if he entered the common space in his underwear, but that didn't mean they'd be happy about it either.
The bathroom door was open, so he went in and closed it behind himself. He looked into the mirror and wide hazel eyes looked back at him from under strong eyebrows. He had short brown hair, currently pressed into an impressive cowlick from sleep. His hair wouldn't lie flat without excessive gel, so he'd long ago given up and wore a spiky look most days.
A shower and a much needed shave later, a decidedly more handsome man emerged from the bathroom. He was also decidedly hungry, and nearly late for class. He picked up the pace and quickly dressed in some blue jeans and a vintage concert t-shirt. Despite what the shirt said, Zach had not actually attended a Yes tour in 1977, decades before he was born. He just wished he had.
He grabbed his backpack and some granola bars to eat on the go, then made for the front door. He stopped in the living room when he saw a piece of paper taped to the door. In huge marker-drawn letters it said, "September rent is due! Make out your check to Matt Horton and leave it on the table."
"Right… rent," Zach mumbled. Matt was the roommate who had volunteered to take point on rent and utilities for the five young men that lived there. Zach turned around and sprinted back to his room. Thankfully he'd already written the rent check in advance. He grabbed it from his desk drawer and dropped it on the kitchen table, then set off for campus.
It was Tuesday September 4th, the day after Labor Day. Due to the holiday, it was the first day of the third week of college class. Zach didn't want to be late to 'ECON 202: Principles of Microeconomics'. His classes after that one were another matter entirely…
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Zach's third class of the day was History of Agriculture. He wasn't interested in the topic, but unfortunately it was a required course.
He took a seat near the back of the lecture hall and set his bag down gently. His laptop was inside and he didn't trust its claims of drop-resistant durability. About 50 other students were in the hall, but the professor had yet to appear. Professor Hadley was notorious for showing up late to class and then acting like it was somehow the students' fault. Given that it was just after lunch, she'd likely still be chewing when she eventually arrived.
"Hey, look who decided to join us today: the rare Zach Pike."
The teasing tone came from the seat to Zach's right and its owner was his friend James. Actually, 'friend' was too strong a word. Even 'acquaintance' felt a little too generous.
"Of course I did," Zach said, heroically fighting to restrain his reaction to the verbal jab. He succeeded, but only by not even turning to look at James. "It's a quiz day, after all."
Zach never missed a quiz or test. Thanks to his excellent memory, quizzes were the most effective way to keep his Core Curriculum grades above the minimum. On non-quiz days, his time was better spent studying something else or just reading for fun in the library.
Another voice came from the seat behind him. "He actually attends every one of our Econ classes." That was Erin, a bookish blonde and fellow Econ major. Zach had shared classes with her last year too. She was always friendly and a solid study partner, at least when she wasn't teasing him.
Zach actually bothered to turn in his seat and look at Erin when he replied, "Yeah, because those are actually interesting. I couldn't care less about Humanities, or History of Agriculture, or these other general classes."
Erin grinned and fluttered her eyelashes behind her glasses, likely trying to get an entertaining reaction out of Zach. With her soft blue eyes and fair features, she was kind of pretty, in a mouse-like sort of way. "Don't let Professor Hadley hear you say that."
"Speak of the devil," James whispered as said professor jogged into the room.
Professor Hadley ran up to the table that sat below the room's amphitheatre-style seating, then loudly set down her bag. She tried to address the class but her mouth was full of what appeared to be a grilled cheese sandwich. She bit off a chunk, set the rest down on the table, and frantically chewed.
Zach wasn't a clean freak by any means, but it still didn't seem sanitary to put a sandwich on that table. Who knew what the previous class had been using it for? Chemistry experiments? Animal dissection? He racked his brain to recall the building schedule, then sighed in relief. Ah, it was just English Lit. She's probably fine.
When she finally swallowed her bite of late lunch, Professor Hadley called out, "If you were paying attention on Friday and didn't forget over the long weekend, you should all know that we're taking a quiz today. The focus is on Mesoamerican agriculture, so I hope you studied the right chapters!" With that, she started handing stacks of printouts to the students in the front row to be passed backwards. The first pile got some free greasy fingerprints, courtesy of Hadley's grilled cheese.
Zach rolled his eyes when the stack of quizzes arrived at his desk. They'd already been picked clean of the clean ones, leaving him a choice between the two grease-marked pages that had been the top and bottom of the stack. He took the worst one and passed the other back to Erin.
"Thanks, honey," Erin whispered as she took the paper, grinning mischievously.
As she had hoped, Zach immediately blushed from ear to ear and started stammering. He always reacted strongly to any sort of surprise, but his reaction to romantic ones were the strongest.
She looked down at her quiz and said, "Calm down, Zach, I'm just kidding."
Zach was quite used to Erin's fake flirting and teasing, but no matter how much he expected it, he never could keep his reactions under control. All his life, he always gave such entertaining reactions that people couldn't help but engage in some light hearted teasing.
Once he'd calmed down, Zach's memory served him well and the quiz was a breeze. But he found himself wishing the book had gone into more detail about the Mesoamerican economy. Since the early Mesoamericans had been growing and distributing crops to an entire civilization, they must have had a pretty impressive trade network. He especially wanted to know more about the currencies their economy ran on, which apparently included cocoa beans. That interesting fact had only been included in the book due to its direct relationship to agriculture.
Zach shrugged and smiled. Now he knew how to spend his next skipped class in the library.
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On Wednesday morning, Zach wasn't awoken by his alarm playing music. Instead, he woke up because he was uncomfortably cold. His butt was particularly chilly. That made some sense to his sleep-fogged brain, since he often slept on his stomach. He must have pulled off his blanket, exposing his boxer-clad butt to the air of his bedroom.
As he came to, he realized there were some major problems with that assumption. First, he wasn't wearing any boxers, or any clothes at all. Second, he didn't have a blanket, or even a bed. He was lying on his stomach in dew-covered grass with his bare ass sticking up into the morning air.
Zach rolled over and sat up, then he took in his surroundings. He was on a slight hill that was covered in wild grass and there was a scenic little pond about 20 yards below. Cattails and tall grass encroached on the water, obscuring the pond's true size.
Lofty cottonwood trees were clustered around the pond and a few more dotted the grass-covered landscape. The plant life and terrain were all very familiar; it looked like just about any rural area in Zach's native Colorado.
First, Zach reacted in typical fashion: overreaction. His eyes went wide, his mouth fell open, and he blinked for several seconds as he pieced everything together.
Well, there are two possibilities, he thought to himself. Either my roommates are tremendous assholes who dropped me in the boonies, or I'm dreaming. Zach was pretty sure his roommates wouldn't do anything that awful, but college kids could get up to some wild stunts, especially if fraternities were involved. His apartment building was far enough from campus to be safe from frat-related nonsense. Usually.
Still gaping, Zach stood up and turned around to get a better view. The picturesque landscape seemed to continue as far as the eye could see in every direction. Tall grass, rolling hills, a couple wooden fence posts in the distance. Then he looked uphill. His jaw dropped even further before he said, "Yep, I'm definitely dreaming."
Perhaps a mile away was an impossibly huge white marble wall. It was easily over 10 stories tall and it seemed to go on for miles in each direction, obscuring a huge portion of the horizon. As he marveled at it, he noticed that it curved away from him in a way that could only mean two things: the wall enclosed a massive circular area, and Zach was on the outside.