How many stories about people being transported to another world have I read?
A few dozen?
A few hundred?
I’m not exactly sure.
What I am sure about is that I never expected to become one of them.
To be fair, I doubt anyone seriously expects to suddenly wake up in another world.
Yet somehow, that’s exactly what happened to me.
I didn’t drift through an endless void among billions of other souls.
I didn’t go to Heaven or Hell, and I never met some god who handed me a convenient explanation for what was happening.
I simply woke up one morning with a strange feeling.
On one hand, I was lying in a completely unfamiliar room, with absolutely no idea how I’d gotten there.
On the other, everything somehow felt exactly the way it was supposed to.
Memories from two completely different lives had been thrown together into one enormous mess, and trying to make sense of it was a nightmare.
My thoughts were tangled as well.
My brain seemed unable to decide which language it was supposed to use.
Russian and English words bounced around inside my skull, accompanied by a splitting headache.
I have no idea how long it took me to get the contents of my poor head into something resembling order.
The headache didn’t go away, but at least my thoughts and memories gradually settled down.
Two different lives.
Two different people.
A Russian university student and an American high school student.
Now, somehow, we shared the same body.
Trying to figure out exactly how it had happened was pointless.
Whatever higher powers might have been responsible, assuming there were any, apparently hadn’t felt the need to introduce themselves or explain what they wanted from me.
I shook my head and pushed those thoughts aside.
I could spend an eternity speculating about gods, demons, or even Cthulhu deciding to dump me here, but none of it would get me anywhere.
Maybe, in a few hours, I’d wake up in my own bed and remember this as nothing more than an incredibly realistic dream.
And if that didn’t happen, wasting time pondering questions I might never find answers to wouldn’t accomplish anything either.
Problems had to be dealt with as they came.
Right now, the only problem I could actually do something about was my headache, which showed no intention of going away.
I needed to find the medicine cabinet first.
Then I could worry about what to do with the rest of my life.
The moment I thought about the medicine cabinet, it suddenly appeared right in front of me.
And no, nobody brought it to me, nor did it magically fly across the room.
I flew to it.
Or, more accurately, I teleported.
One moment I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling.
The next, I was standing in the bathroom where the medicine cabinet was kept.
The sudden change caught me so completely off guard that I clumsily dropped onto my backside, landing directly on the cold tile floor.
I just sat there for a moment, blinking stupidly as I tried to fit everything that had happened that morning into my head.
Eventually, I got back on my feet, swallowed the damn painkiller, and washed it down with tap water.
Then I decided to test that strange movement again.
I concentrated on the bedroom.
It worked.
Kitchen.
Living room.
Bathroom.
Bedroom again.
I moved around the house as if I’d been doing it my entire life.
Thankfully, I was alone.
After another jump, I appeared in the kitchen and collapsed into a chair, completely exhausted.
There had simply been too many things to process.
A new world.
Superpowers.
Still, for Samuel White, the original owner of this body, superpowers weren’t particularly extraordinary.
He had never possessed any himself, but the general public had known about mutants with supernatural abilities since the 1980s.
And recently, heroes and villains with superhuman abilities, or technology that could more or less rival those abilities, had begun appearing on the streets of New York and other major cities.
As I went through Sam’s memories, I finally realized where I’d ended up.
Marvel.
It was almost embarrassing that it had taken me so long to figure it out, but I blamed the shock.
There was plenty of evidence.
Mutants.
The history textbooks had photographs of a beautiful blonde woman everyone knew as Captain America.
And only someone both deaf and blind could have failed to hear about Stark Industries.
As for Samuel White himself, he was a fairly typical guy for this world.
Although that was very different from what I was used to seeing in men.
In this world, men were considered the weaker sex.
More importantly, there were far fewer of them than women.
According to the latest estimates, the ratio was somewhere around one man for every five women.
Naturally, that meant the men here enjoyed a ridiculous number of privileges.
Polygamy was not only legal, it was actively encouraged.
Families even received a fairly generous allowance for having a boy.
And then there were the women.
Or, more accurately, the way women treated men.
A genuine marriage cult had taken root throughout much of the world.
Women were taught to protect men, provide for them, and take care of them in every possible way.
Competition for men was brutal.
According to statistics, most men preferred having three or four wives.
As a result, roughly one in every five women ended up single.
And the men themselves had become spoiled rotten.
Pampered from birth and accustomed to getting the very best without lifting a finger, most of them were difficult to call men at all.
Some of them barely qualified as functioning human beings.
Then there was the local movement supposedly fighting for gender equality, something similar to the feminists from my old world.
There wasn’t a hint of equality in their demands.
Having grown drunk on their privileges, they were simply trying to squeeze even more benefits out of society for their own sex.
Sam, however, wasn’t particularly bad.
He was spoiled too, certainly, but at least he had some limits.
He attended school once a month at best.
He simply didn’t see the point.
Why bother?
Find a few wealthy wives, and his life would be set.
Aside from that, he behaved reasonably well.
He didn’t throw his weight around over every little thing, he was fairly polite, especially for a teenager, and he never treated his own mother like a servant or a walking wallet.
By local standards, he was practically a saint.
The White family consisted of only Sam and his mother.
There was no father.
Amanda White had used a sperm bank.
There were also several aunts, grandparents, and other relatives on his mother’s side, but they rarely appeared.
Their financial situation was fairly comfortable.
They lived in a decent two-story house in Queens.
In my previous life, a place like this would have been nothing more than a dream.
Amanda held a respectable position at a decent company and earned enough to support both herself and her son.
I sighed and got up from the chair.
I’d landed in a pretty comfortable situation, but I didn’t like the life Sam had planned for himself.
I didn’t want to become a freeloader.
Starting tomorrow, I needed to go back to school.
Fortunately, I’d always been a good student, so the curriculum shouldn’t give me much trouble.
That meant I might even have enough time to repair the damage Sam had done to his grades.
For now, though, I should check the internet.
If I really was in Marvel, I needed to figure out where I was on the timeline.
It would be rather unfortunate if the Chitauri suddenly dropped out of the sky tomorrow.
Browsing the internet calmed me down a little.
There was no news about Captain America.
Nothing was happening in Mexico either, which meant Thor was probably still in Asgard.
But Antonia Stark was scheduled to travel to Afghanistan later that week to demonstrate some new weapons to the military.
The exact nature of the weapons hadn’t been announced, but I could make an educated guess.
The Jericho missiles.
Which meant things were about to get started.
I still wasn’t sure what I should do about any of this.
And I wasn’t talking specifically about Stark’s upcoming kidnapping.
I meant everything.
Should I become a superhero and try to influence the events that were coming?
On one hand, my powers weren’t particularly impressive.
One well-placed bullet would be enough to end both my superhero career and my life.
On the other hand, my ability was perfect for an assassin.
Sometimes, a dagger could accomplish far more than a sword.
If I had the opportunity to help stop Thanos, or at the very least convince Stark not to create Ultron, then perhaps the risk would be worth it.
I was going to live in this world now.
I didn’t exactly want to watch it go to hell.
I closed the browser and stood up from the desk.
Questions like that couldn’t be answered on the spur of the moment.
I didn’t even know the limits of my own abilities yet.
I needed to clear my head first.
Fortunately, I had something to do.
For all his laziness, Sam took his responsibilities around the house seriously, at least the ones he considered a man’s duties.
The house was always clean.
The laundry was done.
His clothes were washed.
And whenever his mother came home from work, there was always a hot meal waiting for her.
It was still too early to start dinner, but there was nothing stopping me from cleaning and doing the laundry.
Routine work was actually a good way to distract myself from overthinking things.
And right now, that was exactly what I needed.
“Son, are you all right?”
The cleaning took quite a while.
Cleaning a two-story house by yourself wasn’t exactly easy.
I was still at it around lunchtime, but I had no appetite, so I ended up diving back into my thoughts.
I browsed the internet again, trying to gather more information, but I didn’t get much out of it.
I learned that some heroes and villains were already active in the city.
Some were familiar.
Others I’d never even heard of.
I had never been able to claim that I possessed expert knowledge of the Marvel universe.
By evening, it was time for dinner, which I hadn’t forgotten to prepare.
Amanda came home from work, and we sat down at the table.
Only a blind person could have failed to notice how dazed I looked.
For a loving mother, it was even more obvious.
Calling another woman’s mother “Mom” felt strange.
But I didn’t want to upset her.
Her son was everything to her, and since I’d taken his place, I could at least try to play that role properly.
It would be rather suspicious if I suddenly started calling her Amanda, or, God forbid, Mrs. White.
The poor woman would probably have a heart attack.
“Everything’s fine,” I replied, considering what answer would reassure her.
“I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”
“Like what?”
There was genuine interest in Amanda’s eyes, along with a hint of concern.
“Well, it’s our final year of school. We’ve only got about half a year left. I’ve been thinking about what to do with my life afterward. Maybe I should start taking school seriously and try to get into college.”
I wasn’t lying.
Despite all my doubts, I’d already made up my mind that I was going to get a proper education.
I wasn’t going to become one of the typical men of this world.
“Of course, Sammy. That’s wonderful.”
Her eyes practically lit up with excitement.
She leaned forward and took my hand.
“You can absolutely do it!”
I should mention that she hadn’t been particularly happy with her son’s reclusive lifestyle.
Of course, she understood that, in a way, Sam had a point.
Being born male practically guaranteed him a comfortable life.
Still, she wanted him to strive for something more.
Unfortunately, she had never been able to bring herself to force him to do anything.
She simply loved him too much to be firm with him.
“You think so?”
I raised an eyebrow skeptically.
It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in myself.
I was more curious about why she believed in me.
Sam had never demonstrated any particular talent for studying.
“Absolutely! You’re a very intelligent boy. If you actually try, I’m sure you’ll do well. And I’ll help you. If you need a tutor, we can hire one. We also have enough money to pay for college!”
All I could do was smile.
Well, did a loving mother really need a reason to believe in her child?
Still, it felt strange knowing that all this love and concern, which she practically radiated, had originally been meant for someone else.
Or had it?
I had all of Samuel White’s memories.
I couldn’t even say for certain whether I’d truly entered his body, or whether Sam himself had somehow remembered a past life in a dream.
Damn it.
There was no point thinking about it.
It was just another question without an answer.
“Thanks, but I don’t think I need a tutor yet. I’ll try on my own first, and we’ll see how it goes.”
I stood up from the table and gathered the empty plates.
“Anyway, I’ll wash the dishes and probably go to bed early. I’ve got school tomorrow.”
Still, I doubted I’d be able to sleep.
Today had been an incredible shock.
But I was here now, and there was nothing I could do about that.
In the end, maybe things wouldn’t be so bad after all.