The sky over the loading dock split white, and the whole warehouse rattled right after.
"Oh, that one was close." Ray stopped at the open bay door with a box of air fryers against his chest, rain spraying his sneakers.
It was past eleven on the second half of a double shift. His back hurt in places he hadn't known were places, and there were still two trucks to unload. But as long as the storm kept going, he could live with all of it; thunder was the one show he never got tired of, and nobody charged a subscription for it.
Another bolt forked over the parking lot, close enough to light up every puddle. He grinned at it like it had done that for him personally.
'Standing in the doorway, wind in my hair, lightning in the background. This is peak aura farming.' A sheet of wet cardboard blew past his head and stuck to the side of the truck.
"Stuart!" The shout came from the far end of the dock. "Am I paying you to watch the weather?"
"Technically, you're paying me either way." Ray turned around with his best customer-service smile.
His supervisor was a man shaped like the pallets he loved so much, and he had never once smiled back. He pointed his clipboard at the truck, then at Ray, then at the truck again, which covered the whole conversation.
"Going, going." Ray hauled the box to the conveyor. 'Bro really said no joy on company time.'
The truck was full of air fryers, two hundred boxes of them, all headed for a store that would have them at forty percent off by Friday. Ray scanned, lifted, turned and dropped each one on the belt, and let his body run the loop while his head stayed out in the rain.
He had taken the double because someone called out, and time-and-a-half was time-and-a-half. That was life at eighteen with rent due; he said yes to every hour they offered and figured out sleep later. Four months in this place, and the most exciting thing so far was a forklift backing into the vending machine.
Speaking of which.
The break room had one vending machine, and it had hated him since his first day. Ray fed it two dollars and three quarters, then pressed B4 very, very carefully. The honey bun slid forward, tilted, and stopped against the glass.
"No. No, come on." He put both hands on the machine. "We talked about this."
There was a sign taped to the side about not shaking it, signed by management with three exclamation marks. So he did the mature thing and bought a bag of chips from the row above to knock the honey bun down. It worked, which meant his dinner had just cost him four dollars and fifty cents.
"For that money I could've had an actual burrito, you rigged piece of shit." He dropped into a plastic chair and ate the honey bun first, out of spite.
The chips went into his work locker for tomorrow's shift. Four fifty was two dinners' worth of money, and he was going to get two dinners out of it.
His phone was at 40% with no new messages, so he opened the feed. The first thing it gave him was an edit of Zenitsu from Demon Slayer. The blond kid crouched low with a hand on his sword, the screen went yellow, and he was on the other side of the frame before the bass dropped.
Ray had seen that clip maybe forty times. He let it loop again anyway.
'Guy cries for twenty episodes, falls asleep, and then does that. Honestly, goals.' Anything with lightning in it got a like from him on principle, and this one had earned a save back in high school.
The lights flickered as thunder rolled over the roof again. He tilted his head back to listen, a crumb of glaze still stuck to his lip.
"Break's over, Stuart!"
"It's been six minutes!"
"Then eat faster!"
Ray shoved the phone in his pocket and licked the glaze off his lip on the way out. Two trucks left, and the storm was still going; it could've been worse.
...
The last truck closed its doors a little after one. Ray clocked out, rode the night bus with his forehead against the window, and it was almost two when he made it home.
Home was a studio above a laundromat, up a staircase that smelled like dryer sheets and somebody's wet dog. The fridge held a bottle of hot sauce and one egg he didn't trust anymore. Ray dropped his work vest by the door, kicked it shut, and checked his phone out of habit.
One notification. A pizza chain wanted him to know he had 20% off until Sunday.
There was nobody else it could've been. He had filled in a lot of forms this year, for the job, the lease and the bank, and he'd left the emergency contact line blank on every one of them. Eighteen years of other people's houses did that to a guy.
'On the bright side, I never have to text anyone that I got home safe. Saves battery.' He tossed the phone on the mattress and followed it face first.
He was still fully dressed. The ring on his necklace dug into his collarbone, the bracelets were pressed into his wrist, and his sneakers hung off the end of the bed, still damp from the dock. He should take them off. He would, in a minute.
Outside, the storm was still going. The window lit up white, and the glass hummed with the thunder.
"Good one." He mumbled it into the pillow.
The next one came from further away, and the one after that he only half heard. The sneakers stayed on.
...
The next thing he knew, the thunder was gone and something was tickling his nose.
Ray swatted at it, got a handful of grass, and opened his eyes to a sky so blue it looked edited. He lay there for a while, blinking at it. Grass under his back, sun on his face, and a distinct lack of ceiling.
"...Huh." He sat up.
The field went on in every direction, green and rolling, all the way to the horizon. The clouds were fat and round like someone had drawn them. He was wearing exactly what he'd fallen asleep in, down to the damp sneakers.
'Okay. Options.' He pulled his knees up and went through them like a reasonable adult.
A prank? That required friends, and friends committed enough to carry six feet two of dead weight out into the countryside. He crossed it off.
A dream? He pinched his arm, and it hurt. An ant was also climbing over his knuckle, and he could feel each of its legs. His dreams were never that detailed.
A kidnapping? He patted his sides and found both kidneys where he'd left them, as far as he could tell. Besides, who kidnapped a warehouse guy with $212 in his account just to leave him in a nice meadow?
That left the dumb one.
'Isekai rules say a truck hits you first, then a goddess apologizes in a white room. All I got was a nap.' He looked around anyway, then cleared his throat. "Status."
A bird went by overhead.
"Status window. Menu. Inventory." He waved a hand in front of his face. "...Worth a shot."
He tried the phone next. It was down to 23%, since he had fallen asleep without plugging it in, and it had no signal and no Wi-Fi. The map showed a blue dot in a gray square. He dialed 911 on the off chance that emergency calls ran on magic, and the call failed before it rang.
'Even 911 left me on read.' He turned the brightness all the way down and put the phone away, since that battery was now the most valuable thing he owned.
"Alright. Downhill." He had seen a survival video once that said water ran downhill and people lived near water. That was the full extent of his training.
So he walked, and for the first hour he tried shouting, too. "Hello" and "help" went out over the grass and didn't come back, and "I have a pizza coupon" only scared a rabbit out of a bush.
Downhill did have water, to the video's credit. It was a stream about as wide as his arm, so clear he could count the pebbles at the bottom. Ray crouched over it and thought about every parasite documentary he had ever watched. Then he thought about how long it had been since the break room fountain, and drank until his teeth hurt.
"If I get worms, I get worms." He wiped his chin and followed the stream.
The sun climbed, sat on top of him for a few hours, and started down the other side. His navy shirt came off and went around his waist, and the white T-shirt stuck to his back. His heels were starting to blister; he had bought those sneakers for standing at a conveyor.
The longer he walked, the more the place bothered him, and it took a while to figure out why. The colors were too much. The grass was the green of a phone screen at full saturation, the flowers looked freshly painted, and the air didn't smell like exhaust or anything else he could name.
Then he found the car.
It was sunk into the hillside up to its doors, rusted so thin he could see daylight through the hood. A tree had grown up through the floor and out the windshield, and its trunk was thicker than his chest.
"Hello?" He knocked on the roof, which was stupid, and a flake of rust the size of his hand came off.
A car meant a road, and a road meant people; that was the good news. The bad news was the tree. How long did a tree need to do that to a car? 'How long does a tree take to do that? Ten years? Fifty?' He didn't like either number.
'Could be an art thing. Rich people do that.' He wiped the rust on his pants and kept going, a little faster than before.
By the time the sun started dropping, he was lightheaded, and the hunger had settled into a steady ache under his ribs. The honey bun was a lifetime ago. He thought about the bag of chips sitting in his locker at work, safe and sealed, and felt genuine grief.
"I saved you for later." He told the horizon. "Worst decision of my life."
Grieving wasn't going to feed him, though, and the light was going. He needed to see where he was before it got dark, and the tallest thing around was a hill off to his left. So he climbed it.
It took what was left of his legs. Twice he had to stop with his hands on his knees, and he made a promise to cut back on vending machine dinners that he had no plans to keep. But if there was a town, a road or a gas station anywhere out here, he would see it from the top.
'If there's a Walmart on the other side of this, I'm going to cry, and I'm fine with that.'
He got there as the sky went orange.
There was no town. Green hills rolled out on every side, dotted with patches of forest, and a river caught the last of the light on its way to somewhere he couldn't see.
And in the middle of all that summer grass stood a range of ice mountains.
Ray stared. The peaks were blue-white and sharp, with snow blowing off them in the wind, and the grass ran right up to their feet without a patch of frost in between. It looked like someone had cut them out of another continent and set them down here.
"That's not how mountains work." He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand and looked again. Still there.
The strangest part was the itch at the back of his head. He had seen those mountains before. On a screen, years ago, with a bowl of cereal in his lap; the memory had the soft edges of something watched half asleep on a Saturday morning.
The tallest peak had a dent near the top, almost like a face.
"Why do I know you?" Ray asked the mountains.