Hunter kicked his way out of the secret room, partly because there was no handle on the door and that offended him, and partly for the satisfying drama of starting out a mission by kicking something.
Then he doubled over in pain, clutching at his head, because kicking a door when he had the mother of all migraines had been an incredibly stupid thing to do.
Using the wall to steady himself, he looked up and saw that he’d emerged into a posh office. The walls and floor were the same gray stone as the secret room, but here the floor was covered in soft, thick carpets in rich reds and purples, and was lit from the walls and ceiling by cozy yellow magelights. Directly in front of him was a heavy wooden desk, behind which sat an intimidating leather chair in front of a row of windows, through which he could see a few distant lights in the outside darkness. Further across the room was a sitting area with couches and chairs, and behind that was an entire wall covered in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, so tall that a rolling ladder had been permanently affixed to them.
Taking a few more steps into the room, he passed a decorative plinth that was holding some kind of sundial thing. Feeling curious, he picked it up and took a look at it, only to suddenly recall what it cost. It was a number that was so shocking that he nearly dropped it.
“Fuck!” he said, just managing to catch it before it hit the floor. Who the hell decorates their office with seven-figure antiques!? Plonking it back down on its pedestal, pissed off by the fright it’d given him, he took another look around and realized that almost everything else in the room was just as expensive.
“Holy shit, this lady’s rich.”
No, she wasn’t just rich, she was ‘fuck you’ rich, the kind of rich where money itself had largely lost its meaning, and decorating one’s office with millions in antiques wasn’t even worth mentioning.
He’d been poor most of his young life, and while he’d later made a considerable amount of money at the height of his contracting career, he’d never come anywhere close to the level of wealth in this room.
He frowned. If this stuff was all Ianthe’s, and he was the one now in Ianthe’s body…
Didn’t that mean he was now ‘fuck you’ rich?
Feeling lightheaded, he took a few unsteady steps towards her big leather chair and fell down in it. He never stolen a body before—well, at least not so he could live in it—but still, he was pretty sure that finders keepers had to apply here. Especially since, as far as he could tell from the fragmented memories he’d inherited, Ianthe hadn’t told anyone she’d planned to abandon her body.
Effectively speaking, she was dead and nobody knew but him.
So… now what?
Drumming his fingers on the cool leather of the armrest, he considered his options.
Telling people who he was—well, aside from his kid, once he found him—was probably out of the question. If one of his coworkers had walked up to him one day and claimed to be a soul from another world, sent by a spider goddess, he’d have gently lured them into his car and driven them straight to a hospital.
But at the same time, if he started walking around in this body acting like his old self… Someone was bound to notice, right? People’s personalities don’t just radically change overnight outside of stories like A Christmas Carol, and he had a feeling people wouldn’t buy the ‘a bunch of ghosts scared me straight’ defense.
He was gonna have to pretend to be this lady, wasn’t he? Especially if he wanted access to her bank account…
Letting out an unhappy sigh, he slumped down in the chair, massaging his aching head with his fingers.
It wasn’t like he’d never acted before. In his old line of work that skill was pretty much a requirement, especially when it came to approaching high-value targets. However, the vast majority of that had been him pretending to be qualified or friendly or harmless, and usually only for short periods of time. Actually living as another person? That was some method acting shit he did not want to deal with, and if he was being honest with himself he wasn’t sure he could keep that sort of thing up for long.
It might have been different if he and Ianthe were alike, but from what he knew so far she seemed like someone cold, introverted, and unapproachable. Hunter had spent most of his life being the guy everybody was friends with, and the idea of constantly alienating other people on purpose made him feel nervous. In fact, now that he thought about it, there was a good chance he was about to inherit her enemies as well as her money, and when he made the mistake of trying to think of who they might be, a wave of cold rushed through him, and his headache began to worsen again.
He abandoned that line of thought. For now, he needed to focus on the immediate future, which meant first finding a private place to recuperate. He wasn’t sure what was wrong with his body, but judging by the weakness in his limbs and the way he was now shivering and sweating, it probably wasn’t just a bump on the noggin. Ianthe had an apartment pretty close by, and since it was still dark out he could probably get there without being seen. That was good, because if he did run into someone who knew her there was a good chance he’d give himself away.
As though that thought had summoned trouble, a sound came from the office door—a key being slid into a lock, and a metallic clatter as someone attempted to turn the handle.
“Wait—hold on a second!” he shouted at the door. Thankfully, the sounds coming from the doorknob stopped.
Shit! Who the hell was this?
“My Lady?” A woman’s soft voice called out, tinged with confusion and worry. “Are you in there?”
“Oh… fuck me,” he muttered to himself, turning to glare out the windows behind him. The horizon was only just beginning to lighten, it was literally before dawn, so why was someone coming to bother Ianthe at this hour? And on a Saturday!?
“My Lady are… are you alright…?”
He recognized that voice now, and his headache once again intensified as though the memories it called up pressed down on his brain. Gritting his teeth, he tried to resist the impulse to think any more deeply, and mentally shooed the information away.
“Yes—just—give me a moment,” he called out, praying that this made her shut up.
He wasn’t ready! He needed to figure out a way to get rid of this woman before she noticed something was wrong with him!
He stood, wincing against the pain and dizziness, and unconsciously reached up to touch his head wound. It felt sticky, and when he pulled his fingers away, he saw that it was bleeding again. Frowning, he looked back at those tall bookshelves on the far wall, and the ladder sitting there…
Fuck method acting, he had a much better idea!
Heading for the door, he pressed his hands against the cool wood and took a deep breath to steady himself. Then, like ripping off a band-aid, he opened it to reveal the frantic woman on the other side.
She was a short, stocky lady in her mid-forties, every inch of her pale skin covered in light orange freckles. Her coral hair was pulled up into a bun, and her light, yellow-green eyes were wide with shock.
“My Lady?” she asked, obviously horrified by his appearance. “Goddess above, are you alright!?”
“I...,” was all he managed to get out before the sight of her familiar-but-not-familiar face set off the memories he’d been trying to resist—
—When Ianthe was ten years old, Anemone was assigned to her as her lady’s maid. She was a practical young woman with a deep love of children, and insisted on treating Ianthe like a normal child regardless of any evidence to the contrary. Over the next three years she proved herself the only source of kindness, patience, and consistency in Ianthe’s life, and a genuine and mutual fondness developed between the two.
Unfortunately, the duchy they lived in was a dangerous place. Ianthe could protect Anemone from the monsters in the forest and the deadly politics among the servants, but she was forbidden from harming the guests her father brought to their castle. After a few years of close calls, bad luck eventually found Anemone, and the result was an unwanted pregnancy.
Most employers would have thrown Anemone out for her condition, but Ianthe never considered it. A cup of tea was enough to deal with the pregnancy, and as for the guest…
Ianthe couldn’t ‘harm’ them, but what did that mean, anyway? Was ‘harm’ a physical wound, an attack on the body? If someone was hurt, but no one could say what was done or prove that it’d happened, had any ‘harm’ actually taken place?
So she decided to experiment.
A week later, when that guest threw himself from the castle ramparts, his body scratched raw with marks from his own fingernails, his head bald and scabbed from the hair he’d torn out, Ianthe was waiting below at the ravine he fell into.
She’d never touched him.
She didn’t have to.
Loopholes, she discovered, were a wonderful thing.
She’d used them to keep Anemone safe ever since.
When he finally came back to the present, Hunter found himself leaning against Anemone, her hands gripping his shoulders.
“Lady? My Lady, please, wake up!” she said, shaking him.
“Shake me again and I’ll puke,” he threatened, and he absolutely meant it. He felt so dizzy he would have fallen if he hadn’t already been leaning against her.
“I—I’m sorry, you… you fell.” Anemone frowned, and tentatively reached for the gash on his head. He’d dissolved all the old blood earlier, but it had obligingly continued seeping since then, which gave him an alarming appearance. “What happened to your head?”
“I… fell off the ladder, I think?” Hunter said, lying through his teeth.
He might not be able to use ghosts to justify a personality change, but head trauma? That he could work with.
“What? How… how could you…?”
“I don’t know. I think I knocked myself unconscious,” he said, grimacing. “What day is it? Do you know how long I was out?”
“Saturday! We… we last spoke three days ago,” Anemone whispered. “Oh gods, this is all my fault…”
Three days? Huh… he hadn’t realized Ianthe had been missing that long. Considering her injuries, Ianthe was lucky to be alive at all.
Only wait, Ianthe wasn’t alive, he was—shit, he was starting to have trouble keeping track of what was actually going on. That intense flashback had ended, but the more he looked at Anemone the more random things he kept remembering about her and the world he was in, and it was incredibly disorienting.
For example, this woman, her name was Anemone of Electis because among most Cydonians—and oh, great, he’d remembered the name of the country he was in—common people like her rarely had last names. They identified themselves by where they were from, in part because they rarely needed last names and in part because having a last name cost a lot of money. This lady, she’d been a maid, but nowadays she was the head secretary of the university’s upper administration and, more importantly, he was pretty sure Ianthe hadn’t told Anemone she planned to leave her body. But she had told Anemone she’d be doing some sort of complicated spell in her secret room, which meant Anemone was probably here to check on her when she’d lost contact—which also meant that Ianthe probably knew Anemone would be the one to find her body, which Hunter thought was pretty fucked up…
He really wanted to lie down.
“Let me see your eyes! Do you feel dizzy?” Anemone asked. She grabbed Hunter’s face with one hand and summoned a light in her other, leaning in close to take a look.
“Fuck that’s bright! Yes, yes I’m dizzy, just turn off the light!”
That light sent a new lance of pain through his skull, and without thinking he squeezed his eyes shut and struggled to get away from it, only to find that he was too weak to break her hold.
Damn, this woman was really strong! Why couldn’t he have gotten her body instead?
The light went out, and just as he opened his eyes again, a cold hand slapped itself against his forehead.
“You’re burning up, too,” Anemone muttered, her expression fierce. “Lady, I think you need to go to the infirmary.”
“What? No!” he protested. Damn it, he’d only wanted an excuse to go hide in Ianthe’s apartment! “I’ll sleep it off!”
“Absolutely not!”
His rebuttal was interrupted by a swooping sensation as Anemone scooped him off his feet and into her arms. He yelped in surprise, and to his shame found that, now that she’d gotten a hold of him, he couldn’t seem to do anything about it.
“Wait, put me down!”
“No! You have a concussion and a fever and gods only know how long you’ve been laying in there, all alone—”
Anemone started to cry, thick tears pouring down her round cheeks, and since she was carrying him, a few splashed onto him.
“Wait, don’t cry,” he tried to reassure her, alarmed by her tears. “It’s really not that bad!”
“No! I’m taking you whether you like it or not. You can fire me once you feel better,” Anemone insisted, and stomped off down the hall.
“I… I’m not going to fire you for that,” he said, feeling guilty. All he’d wanted to do was sell the severity of his injury, but instead he’d really scared this woman.
Truth be told, medical attention probably wasn’t a bad idea, but if he went to the infirmary and recognized someone? Well, one more of those flashbacks and he was pretty sure he was going to pass out.
However, it didn’t look like he had a choice. This short Amazon was already hauling him away, so he figured it wouldn’t hurt to just close his eyes for a few minutes…
But he must have been worse off than he’d thought, because when he opened them again he was somewhere completely different. Somehow he’d ended up laying on his back. Above him stood Anemone with a new person he recognized, which meant—
—It was past midnight, and the infirmary was deserted except for the two of them. She lay on one of the beds, calm and motionless despite the pain wracking her body. Arch-Healer Chiron was sitting next to her, his fingers gently glowing with golden light as he methodically healed her injuries one by one.
“I’m not going to ask how you keep getting so many internal lesions,” he murmured, able to hold a conversation even while casting a spell, “but whatever it is, you need to stop. One of these days you’re going to bleed out and die before you notice it’s happening.”
She grunted an affirmation. She did not thank him for saving her life again, or tell him that she appreciated his discretion, or tell him that she had no choice in the matter…
In fact, if she ever did tell him the truth behind her injuries, he’d probably try to kill her on the spot. That thought made her smile.
“I’m not going to die that easily.”
“I’ll be sure to inscribe that on your grave,” Chiron replied.
The stern-faced, thickly-built man staring down at Hunter had jade green eyes and smooth dark brown skin. His long hair, pulled into hundreds of twists and tied back with a silver ribbon, seemed to start a dark mulberry at the roots, then brightened to a lighter pink towards the tips.
Hunter, mesmerized by this appearance, distantly wondered if his hair grew naturally like that, and would have kept staring if a hand hadn’t blocked his view.
Anemone, who was still visible from where she stood next to Chiron, was just as striking with her bright coral hair and chartreuse eyes. Everyone was so colorful, and his mind, which was swimming with pain and disorientation, was thus inspired to say aloud…
“Wow, everybody’s so pretty here.”
The hand descending towards his forehead paused.
“You both look like fairies,” Hunter elaborated.
Arch-Healer Chiron frowned, then looked at Anemone and said, “You ought to prepare yourself. Brain damage is a real possibility.”
Anemone cupped a hand over her mouth, sniffled, and turned away.
Hunter opened his mouth to say something comforting, but just as he did a golden light bloomed from the fingertips that touched his forehead, and…
Just like that, the pain in his head melted away. It had been so intense that it wasn’t until it vanished that he realized the rest of his body was hurting, too.
Chiron continued speaking to Anemone, “Still, it’s impressive she’s alive at all—an injury like this, left untreated for days, should have killed her.”
Anemone’s quiet sniffling turned to sobbing, and she covered her face with her hands.
“Doc… I love you, but you’ve got to work on your bedside manner,” Hunter said, his heart fit to burst with newfound fondness towards this beautiful man with magical hands.
“Did you just say…? No, I’ll pretend I didn’t hear it,” Chiron replied, frowning at him, and moved to check a little bracelet that someone had, to Hunter’s relief, put on his right wrist instead of the left. “Listen to me—severe cranial swelling, a fever of 104, not to mention those blasted lesions you’ve developed again… That combination is dangerous for an hour, much less however long you’ve been out. You know, the skull only has so much room, too much swelling and the brain can actually start to seep out the—”
“I’m begging you to stop,” Hunter interrupted, and then lifted his wrist and asked, "Hey, can I please wear this on my ankle instead?"
Even if it was his right wrist, he still didn't like it.
The Arch-healer paused, stared at him for a moment, and then re-located the bracelet to his ankle before continuing, “I don’t see any signs of paralysis, so that’s good, but… It sounds like it might have affected your speech patterns? Do you have any difficulty forming words?”
Hunter opened his mouth to say, ‘No, I always talk like this,’ and then stopped himself. He did not know how to explain that the Cydonian language he had not realized he’d been speaking until now was coming out in a New York/New Jersey accent, but he also didn’t know how to stop it. Instead he said, “Uh… yes?”
“But you understand my questions, that’s a good sign. Still, if your speech is damaged, your writing ability might also be damaged.”
Wrinkling his forehead, Hunter realized that in addition to the language he also knew the Cydonian alphabet, but if he picked up a pen, would he have his own handwriting or Ianthe’s? He wanted to try it out, but the moment he moved as though to get up, the Arch-Healer expressionlessly used his glowing golden hand to push him back down.
“Any irregularities in your vision? Numbness or tingling? Difficulty swallowing? Difficulty hearing? Can you feel it when I do this?”
Then he pinched Hunter’s foot hard with the hand that wasn’t glowing, causing him to yelp.
“Yes! Yes I can feel it!” Hunter said, batting away the hand that tried to pinch his fingers next, “I can feel and move everything, okay!? Other than the uhh—talking thing—I feel normal!”
Well, as normal as he could feel considering his circumstances.
Nodding, Chiron turned his attention back to Anemone.
“Well, she’ll live for now at least. I’d say the most important things to watch out for moving forward are seizures, motor control issues, memory impairment, changes in behavior or temperament... I’m going to go ahead and say we’re already witnessing that last one.” He pulled his hand back, the golden light fading, and concluded to Anemone, “I’ll do some tests to figure out the extent of her issues, but brain damage isn’t really something I can do much to fix.”
“Is… is there really no way to heal that sort of thing…?” Anemone asked, looking up from her hands, her voice shaky and wet.
“No,” Chiron said with a shrug. “I can regrow neurons, but I can’t replicate their old pathways, so whatever’s lost is lost. Some things can be regained through therapy, but it’s impossible to tell at this point.”
Anemone’s face screwed up again, and Hunter reached out to touch her wrist. Surprised, she looked down at him.
“It’s—it’s fine, really, don’t cry… I’ve got all the important stuff still, so…”
He really, really did not want her to start crying again. He was not the kind of person who could handle other people crying.
“It’s not fine!” Anemone insisted, her lower lip quivering, “I shouldn’t have let you send me away—no, I should have come to check on you sooner… Oh, what if I’d come any later?”
Hunter winced.
From the game and from her memories, Ianthe did not seem like a kind person. However, leaving her dead body for this poor woman to find seemed low, even for her. He decided that if he ever ran into Ianthe’s soul he was going to tell her off for doing such a shitty thing to Anemone.
“I don’t blame you, so you shouldn’t blame you,” he insisted. “So stop crying, okay?”
Anemone paused, surprised by what he said. Then, turning to Chiron, she asked, “What are we going to do?”
“Keep her here overnight to make sure she doesn’t die suddenly,” the Arch-Healer suggested, his face and voice calm.
Anemone’s face twisted up again, and Hunter reached out to swipe at the air by Chiron’s arm. “You! Seriously, I’m grateful, but you’re going to make her dehydrated!”
Chiron frowned, then looked at Anemone and suggested, “You should go drink some water. Bring some for her, too—and food, while you’re at it.”
Finally given a concrete way she could help, Anemone straightened up, wiped her face with a handkerchief, and said, “Right away! The canteen should be open by now. I’ll get something for you, too."
Anemone hurried off, leaving Chiron and Hunter alone together. The moment she was gone, Chiron's calm expression darkened and he shot Hunter a furious glare, demanding, “What the hell did you get into this time?”
“Um…”
“You know what? I don’t care. Just figure out how to stay alive, because if you die they’ll make me sit on the search committee to replace you and I don’t have the fucking time, President!”
Search committee?
… Oh no, this body came with a job, didn’t it!?
“I—um—I didn’t mean to—”
“Do you think that just because I work for you, I’m your fucking dog?” Chiron hissed, leaning closer to Hunter until they were nearly nose-to-nose. “Try calling for me again, see if I don’t show up just to watch you die!”
Hunter tried to keep his face neutral as he thought, I knew that bitch had a lot of enemies, I fucking knew it!!!
Now that the pain was gone he seemed to be able to poke at her memories without much trouble, so he quickly reviewed what she knew about Chiron.
Ianthe was the President of Aegis University, which meant Hunter was now the President of Aegis University, which meant that the man he was talking to was actually his employee, a high-ranking one at that. Arch-Healer Chiron was the Dean of the Healing College, and therefore the leader of all staff and faculty who worked at the on-campus college, in the campus infirmary, and at the off-campus teaching hospital in nearby Kastri. He was responsible for a great many things, including overseeing the courses and the professors who taught them, recruiting both students and investors, approving and monitoring research projects, and so on. He was also a minor celebrity in Cydonia, famous both for his incredible skill and his revolutionary research, a man whose genius and talent were considered on par with the Saint’s.
Anemone must have called him on Hunter’s behalf, which meant… It was as if Hunter had gone to a hospital, insisted he’d only be treated by their Nobel Prize-winning executive, and that person had been forced to show up to put a Band-Aid on him.
Shit, no wonder this guy was pissed.
If he’d been Chiron, he’d have quit by now! Chiron was the kind of man who could found his own damn university if he wanted to, so why the heck was he still putting up with Ianthe!?
“I apologize, I’ve inconvenienced you again,” Hunter said, giving Chiron what he hoped was a sincere and apologetic look.
“Oh? Do you think?” the Arch-Healer replied, his full lips flattened into a disapproving line.
“I… really appreciate it,” Hunter began, but judging by Chiron’s expression, the man didn’t give two figs for his gratitude. More than anything, he looked like he wanted to slap him across the face.
Hunter briefly considered offering this option, then discarded it. First, because it was unprofessional, and second, because the Arch-Healer’s sleeves were short and his arms looked really big.
“Er—after you finish the tests, we could discuss… increasing the Healing College’s budget?”
Chiron’s pale green eyes narrowed at the obvious bribery. “Oh? I recall discussing that last year, but I believe you rejected it.”
Hunter found himself wishing that he hadn’t called this man a pretty fairy—or at least, that he couldn’t remember calling this man a pretty fairy.
“I am… um… un-rejecting it,” Hunter said, coughing awkwardly into his hand. Fuck, could he do that? Screw it, if he couldn’t he’d just threaten people until it happened anyway. If Chiron decided today’s incident was the last straw and finally quit, Hunter and the Healing College would be fucked. “I was shortsighted at the time, that’s my mistake.”
Chiron remained silent, his cold expression growing thoughtful.
“I want an emergency expenditure to cover this semester’s staffing shortage, and a permanent budget increase next year.”
“Deal! It’s a deal!” Hunter said quickly. Sure, he wasn’t sure how to actually do that or where that money would be coming from, but at this point he was ready to start personally spending Ianthe’s cash if he had to!
“Well… I suppose brain damage can be an improvement in some people,” Chiron grumbled. He didn’t seem happy, but he didn’t throw his hands in the air and walk out either, so Hunter took that as a win. “Fine. I accept.”
Then he smiled, revealing slightly pointed canine teeth, and said, “Let’s start those tests. I look forward to finding out what you’ve done to yourself.”
The tests themselves didn’t take too long, nor were they physically difficult.
Emotionally, however, they were incredibly uncomfortable. No matter how Hunter behaved, Chiron continued to hate his guts and made no effort to conceal that fact. To make matters worse, throughout the day his fever and migraine kept coming back, which meant over and over he was forced to ask one of the lay-healers on staff for help, only they refused to do anything themselves and would go fetch Chiron, who would then show up and proceed to project loathing from every pore.
By the time the sun set and he was finally left alone, he couldn’t help but feel like this was only the start of running into people who hated Ianthe, and that did not fill him with confidence.
Still, he wasn’t dead, and he probably had Anemone to thank for that. If it hadn’t been for her he would have sneaked off to Ianthe’s apartment and quietly died of brain swelling while thinking he just had a headache, so he decided he needed to figure out a way to repay her.
On the bright side, his plan to sell the head wound thing had ended up working pretty well. While physically everything seemed to function normally, Chiron’s tests had picked up a lot of other problems.
There was his accent, for one. When Chiron tried to get him to speak with an Aeonian accent like Ianthe usually did—Aeonia was apparently the Cydonian state he was in, and the common dialect Cydonians spoke came from it—the result was that he started speaking Cydonian in a variety of American accents instead.
The problem seemed to be that, when Ianthe’s knowledge clashed with his, his habits won by default. For example, he could write in Cydonian, but he could only do it in his handwriting, and apparently his handwriting was so bad that the constantly pissed off healer had shown him a rare moment of sympathy and offered to get him some exercise books so he could re-learn how to write legibly.
Hunter, who knew very well that he wrote the Latin alphabet just as poorly, had politely declined.
That said, he felt like his habits winning was a good thing, because his new brain should still be his brain.
Chiron had also, if unintentionally, helped Hunter test out the scope of Ianthe’s memories. He seemed to have picked up a lot of physical skill and general knowledge from her without a problem, but there was definitely some shit that was missing. He could, for example, easily use magic, and speak and write the language—heck, he even knew a lot about Ianthe’s job and who she worked with—but he hadn’t known who the current Emperor was, nor could he name the entire pantheon of Cydonian gods.
However, he wasn’t too upset by that. All things considered, the ability to communicate, to recognize people and, oh yeah, fucking do magic, was already a huge gift considering he was an absolute stranger here.
It also got him a nifty diagnosis of post-traumatic retrograde amnesia, which he found a little ironic, considering he remembered his life just fine.
Regardless, it would be helpful going forward, on account of him secretly being an old man in an Ianthe suit.
He also figured out that there was a big difference between memories he could access that had been, for a lack of a better term, already downloaded, versus ones that hadn’t.
If it was already in there, he could think about it no problem—but if it wasn’t…
That fever and migraine came roaring right back.
There were a few times where it happened with general knowledge, but the biggest trigger for it seemed to be Ianthe’s personal experience. Thinking of surface-level information about people didn’t do much, but the moment he began to recall an emotional event with them that she’d gone through, the pain would begin.
At some point he’d convinced Anemone to bring him a staff roster, and he’d used it to try to trigger more flashbacks and see if he could learn to resist them. While he couldn’t deny that Ianthe’s memories were useful, every time he remembered one it stopped being her memory and started being his, which was an incredibly creepy feeling. He was worried that, if he kept it up long enough, he’d end up becoming somebody new who was a mix of the two of them, and…
Nope! Absolutely not.
He might not like himself very much, but he still did not want to be somebody else.
It wasn’t something he could talk to Chiron about, but personally he suspected that shoving fifty-two years of his mind into the thirty-six-year-old brain of a random woman had not gone well.
He wondered if the spider goddess took feedback on her work.
Now he lay in the semi-darkness of the empty infirmary, vigorously waving his own hand back and forth past his face.
“Either the FPS here is amazing, or it’s a simulation too real to tell,” he mumbled to himself.
He had, just a little bit, actually hoped this world was a video game because he thought that’d be kind of neat. Alas, so far he’d encountered no helpful UI, no floating numbers when he got healed, or any people who behaved like NPCs.
What a bummer.
As far as he could tell, this place was as real as his last world, it’s just that this one had magic.
And gods apparently! Or at least, some things that called themselves gods, and everyone knew they existed because they relied on them to use magic.
He still couldn’t get over that.
More to the point, if gods were real, why hadn’t his taken him instead?
Sure, he’d never been a particularly devout Jew, and he had more than once in his life flirted with atheism, but he’d still had some expectation for how things should go when he died. Heck, he wouldn’t have even minded as much if some other Earth religion had scooped him up instead. At least then he could have had a good laugh about finally finding out who was right and moved on.
Instead he’d run into an ineffable spider-lady. His experience with Her felt more like an alien abduction than a metaphysical experience.
On that uncomfortable note, he took a deep breath and decided to look outside. This was his first night in this world, and there was a question he was afraid to get the answer to, but he couldn’t avoid it forever…
The night sky beyond the infirmary windows was clear of clouds. Though the hour was late, it was brightly lit by a brilliant field of stars. It was the kind of sky he’d only ever seen far out in the wilderness, where there was no light pollution, and thus seeing the constellations wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that he didn’t recognize any of them. Not a single one.
This planet wasn’t Earth.
He’d already known this was another reality, but somehow the fact that it was also another planet made him feel so lonely that his chest ached.
Everything he had from his old life was gone, even the ground and sky.
He’d been holding back a lot of feelings about his own death, but this realization inspired a level of homesickness he’d never experienced before. Maria and Joseph, Al’s weird little friends, the other parents he’d gotten to know over the years… They were gone, everyone was gone, and there was nothing he could do about it.
His eyes stung, and he curled up into a ball on his side.
How was he supposed to feel about this? As far as he knew everyone else was still alive, living out the rest of their lives…
He just couldn’t reach them anymore.
I miss them.
It felt weird to grieve for the living, but he didn’t know what else to call it.
He hoped that they were okay, that they were happy. He wished he could tell them that he was—well, not okay, but still going—and that he was going to find Al, and make sure Al was okay too, so that they wouldn’t have to worry about them.
But he couldn’t, and he was going to have to live with that.
He decided, instead, to focus on how he’d actually find Al…
And came to the conclusion that he still wasn’t sure how that was supposed to work.
The goddess had said She’d grant his wish, and he’d wished to find and protect Al, so presumably ending up in this body would somehow lead to that.
However, that goddess also seemed to be the one who’d gotten them into this mess, so he decided to take Her promise with a grain of salt.
Ianthe’s memories might not be complete, but between her and what he remembered from the video game, he was pretty sure the goddess in question was called the Dread Lady. She was Cydonia’s Goddess of Rebirth, which made sense, considering how he’d gotten here.
According to Cydonia’s religion She was the head god in charge, and was considered one of the more benevolent gods despite Her rather ominous epithet.
In Rabbit Heart She’d been the primary god behind the protagonists, and the majority of the main plot had involved said protagonists fighting against the antagonists and their evil god on Her behalf.
Except… wasn’t he one of those antagonists now?
Like, a lot of shit about Ianthe might be missing, but he was pretty clear on the fact that not only had he inherited her job at the university, he’d also inherited her membership in a cult. From what he could recall, they were a bunch of wackos called the Order the King Undying, and they worshiped said King Undying by being huge murderous dicks to everybody who didn’t…
Wait a minute.
If the setting of this world was the same as the game, and the characters were the same as the game, did that mean the story was too?
Oh fuck—
He sat up in bed, Ianthe’s annoyingly long hair immediately getting in his face.
Did I see the fuckin’ future?
He vigorously rubbed his own face, as though to wake himself up from a dream.
No. That would be such a huge, crazy coincidence, right? Even if, hypothetically, it was possible to see into the future, wouldn’t there be an infinite amount of possible futures? No, more to the point, even if someone could pick out the most likely ones, how the hell did it all end up being written and illustrated and coded and developed into a game in his old world?
He tried to wrap his head around the idea that so many coincidences could possibly line up on their own and like… Okay, yeah, in the span of infinity, maybe, but…
Didn’t it feel kind of deliberate?
A shiver ran up his spine, and he bit down on his thumb nail, chewing it as he thought.
If the Dread Lady was the one who sent him here, then She’d stuck him in the body of a player from the opposing team. He assumed the Lady must know he didn’t have the energy or motivation to psychologically torture a bunch of twenty-somethings, and that meant She’d never expected him to act like Ianthe, which meant She must have known the ‘futures’ from the game would change the moment he arrived…
“It’s a fucking conspiracy,” he said aloud, holding his head between his hands, and then, “No no no, hold on, don’t jump to conclusions.”
Best case scenario, this world was eerily similar to a video game and that wouldn’t be a problem going forward because that was just a coincidence and it had nothing to do with the game’s plot.
Worst case scenario, he’d just been dropped into the middle of a millennia-long religious war as one of the Big Bad Guys, and…
And he really hadn’t paid enough attention to the game!
“You didn’t tell me there’d be a test on this!” he whisper-hissed at the ceiling, because he wasn’t sure how to contact the Dread Lady, and yelling at the sky had been his preferred way of talking to God back in his old world. “Ma’am, what the fuck!?”
Some stuff had definitely stuck with him—mostly events exciting enough to draw his attention away from Words With Friends, and anything Al pointed out or brought up in conversation. He was pretty sure he remembered most of the main characters, and some general stuff about their overall plot lines, but there’d been so many endings! And way too much dialogue, and like a million side characters! How was he not supposed to zone out through half of that!?
More importantly, how was he supposed to know when the ‘game’ started!? He sort of recalled seeing text about a bunch of boring history in the introduction and some important dates were mentioned but that crap had all been so dull that he’d ignored it completely.
No, hold on, he knew one thing. The story was about that pink-haired girl, so all he had to do was watch out for her, right? As long as she hadn’t shown up, he probably still had time to run away.
Because if the game had shown the future, there was no way in hell he was sticking around for the clusterfuck this country was headed towards. If the Dread Lady wanted Ianthe out of her hair, he was happy to oblige! He’d grab Al, he’d raid Ianthe’s fat bank account, and they’d flee to some other country that was far, far away from this one.
Chiron had already asked him to stay in the infirmary for a few days, but there was no way he could do that now. As long as he wasn’t about to die, fever or no fever he needed to get out there and start searching.
He’d arrived in Ianthe’s body at the tail end of move-in week on campus, which meant tomorrow the last of the students would show up, and the day after that the semester would officially begin.
His biggest problem right now was that he himself looked different in this world, which meant there was a good chance Al also looked different, which meant he needed to play a soul-searching version of Where’s Waldo with the entire staff and student body of this university…
According to Ianthe’s knowledge, that meant looking through around two thousand students, and a few hundred staff and faculty.
Fuck.
Well, it didn’t matter. Thanks to Anemone, Chiron, and the infirmary staff, he’d already crossed a few suspects off his list. What was a few thousand more? He could be patient when he needed to be.
He’d search the whole damn country if he had to.