It’s getting louder as I get closer to the crowd and I begin getting more and more nervous. I’m not good with crowds to begin with and I know this is going to be much worse. Alas, it’s only when I begin to see the edges of the crowd and I begin to start hearing the conversations going on between everyone that I realise, I’ve overlooked a major miscalculation.

Unexpectedly, a memory pops into my head. It’s from when a girl at Uni had told me about how her student exchange started off when she went to China for 6 months. She couldn’t talk to anyone about anything. She didn’t know how to ask for directions, how to get money or even how to ask for help. She told me how on the first day she was on the verge of breaking down into tears in the middle of a street when the sun was going down. If it hadn’t been for a friendly, helpful German man who had happened to pass by at that exact moment things could have gotten much worse very fast.

And there’s no friendly, helpful German man here at all. No. The only one in this entire world who I can talk to is back in that evil fucking tower.

Shit! As if I didn’t have enough fucking problems!

Ok. Ok. Ok… looks like the first priority on the to-do list is going to be learning the lingo around here, but let’s put that aside for the moment and just tackle this crowd first.

I’ve tentatively slipped into the crowd now and I’m making my way through the edges of it as I observe the people and the surroundings. Firstly, the people.

Despite the trepidation I felt about seeing people in all the colours of the rainbow that Bluey led me to be anxious about, everyone looks relatively similar to how I would expect a group of people back home to mix altogether, with a few notable exceptions.

Number one, everyone’s quite short. Well, in comparison to my 6 foot tall body, but everyone seems to be at least a head shorter than me, but that doesn’t take me long to rationalise. Back home, one of the major reasons for stunted growth is malnutrition, which I have never had the misfortune of suffering from. But here, in this medieval society, it would be expected that there would be some pitfalls in the standard of living.

Number two, the extensive range of hair and eye colour. Sure, just like back at home everyone's complexion ranges from dark to fair, but it seems that here peoples hair and eyes are a bit more colourful. Besides the common brown, black, blonde and occasional redhead there's every colour of the rainbow in between. There’s Blue, green, pink, purple, white and everything else you would find on a microsoft word colour wheel.

It feels like I’ve walked into an outdoor magical fantasy cosplay event and it's taking me a second to get my bearings and get accustomed to it all.

The good news with all of this is that besides my height; my blonde hair, green eyes and everything else about me seems to slip into the crowd nicely. So if I stoop down a bit I should blend in easily enough.

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Looking around it seems like today is some kind of celebration. There’s food stalls open on the roadsides and the shops, buildings and even the people are decorated in colourful banners and ribbons and everyone seems to be having a good time. Alhough a bit plain it seems the wizards clothes are blending in easily enough.

I wander through the crowd some more and I suddenly realise that I’m unconsciously searching for something, and it takes me no time to figure out what it is.

I’m looking for something familiar. Something I recognise. But besides the general sense of normal human interaction, everything is foreign. Nothing’s comfortable. The way everything looks, everything sounds and smells, it’s all just off.

I’m feeling what that girl in Uni had been talking about. I feel the tears starting to well in my eyes as it all starts to be too much again. I dash off to the shadows in a less busy side street before I start bawling out my eyes in the middle of everyone.

I try to stop the tears but it doesn’t work. The best I can do is to be as quiet as possible and try to avoid people seeing me. Sometimes all you can do is cry, and sometimes that’s the thing that you need the most. To let out all that built up emotion.

“Dfhj uyg”

Huh?

I look up to see a child standing in front of me. He only looks about three years old and he is the most unusual child I’ve ever seen. It’s not his clothes or his face; it's his eyes. The right one is bright pink and the left one is a dull orange. It’s so confronting that my crying stops as I just take him in. He looks back at me and the kid, though unusual, is actually pretty cute. He’s holding what looks like a toffee apple in each of his little hands and he’s standing proudly in front of me on both of his little legs.

He looks down at his two sweets and I can see some sort of struggle in his eyes before finally, he offers the one in his left hand out to me. I look back at him but he is insistent. So I take his toffee apple and when I do, a really satisfied look comes over his little face.

I laugh.

And I keep on laughing though it quickly falls apart before I’m back to crying again. But the reason’s different this time.

I don’t know how long it’s been since I last laughed, let alone received such an act of honest compassion, but I’m just so touched that the tears won’t stop falling again.

Seeing this, the little boy’s face drops into confusion before he starts to get distressed that the apple’s not working as he thought it would. But I wave my hands and wipe my tears away and manage to make a smile for the boy. Thankfully, that seems enough and he’s back to smiling confidently again.

A call comes out from the crowd and the boy and I turn our heads to see a woman walking over quickly, ushering the little boy to come over to her rather urgently. The boy lights up and waddles over to her as fast as he can. She picks him up fast and turns back into the crowd quickly with no pause. But the little boy is poking over her shoulder and he waves at me with the toffee apple in his hand that he still has. I wave back with mine before he and his mother disappear into the crowd.

Yeah, I should probably move away from here right now.

A mother just caught her little son sharing candy with a strange dirty man in a dark side street away from the crowds. If there’s some sort of police around here she may be going to grab them and that’s the last thing I need right now. Trying to explain my innocence in a language no one here understands.

I get up and move back into the crowd while drying my eyes. Yeah, things are pretty terrible right now, but at least so far the people aren’t innately horrible. Children are still adorable and make the world brighter, so there’s got to be some hope for me on the horizon somewhere.

I look down at my toffee apple before I take a bite out of it as I make my way through the crowds again. I’m still trying to make sense of everything, I’m still confused, but now, I’m resolved to figure it all out.

It’s sweet.