· 7 min read
Dumped in another world by a misunderstanding god - part 1
A little something I’ve been working on, which I guess would fall under isekai satire or deconstruction. This is the raw, unedited draft. Let me know what you think.
There’s a moment where I wonder: what the hell did I take?
Then I remember the truck, and the pain, and realise that’s the wrong question to be asking.
The better one is: where the hell am I?
Under me is cold softness; my body sinks into it as I twitch my arms. I open my eyes to whiteness — not brightness, not lightness, just white. I’d wonder if I’d gone blind if it wasn’t for seeing the blur of the tip of my nose at the bottom of my vision.
I push myself up onto my elbows, then up to sitting, cataloguing how easily my body moves, how little anything hurts, and decide I might as well see where this goes.
“Hello?” I call out.
HELLO.
Pain splits through my head. I clap my hands to my ears. It does nothing. The sound is inside me; it does not hit my ears, but bursts into being as thoughts, as memories, as sensations.
It hurts like a motherfucker.
“Fucking ow,” I grumble. “Can you not?”
There is silence for a moment, then:
HELLO?
A new wave of pain crashes against my frontal lobe, but it’s not as bad. I uncurl, lowering my hands, and cautiously glance around.
Everything is still just white. I can maybe spot some vague swirls far above, but that’s it.
“Alright, so. I can’t imagine this is heaven.”
NO. LIMBO.
Oh great.
“Does that mean I’m stuck here?”
NO. WAITING.
“For what?”
CHOICE.
“Whose choice?”
YOURS.
“About what?”
LIFE.
“Geez, thanks, that really helps.”
This time, the voice doesn’t respond.
I look around. Still just white. I wait. Nothing.
“What about life?” I ask. “Like, whether I want to keep living? Because the answer is yes. Sure, life sucks, but at least I’m not dead, y’know?”
Silence.
“Or is this meant to be some philosophical thing? Because I’ll tell you now, I’m awful at philosophy. If you ask me the meaning of life, I’m just going to answer forty-two.”
Silence.
My thoughts are starting to spin.
“Or, what. Do I get a choice where I go or something? Like, hell or heaven or nirvana or whatever the other ones are? The answer is whatever’s easiest, by the way. If I am dead, and I get to pick where to go, I just want somewhere chill and slow. I’ve had enough stress for several lifetimes already. And I’m pretty sure I don’t deserve hell. Parking tickets don’t count, right?”
CHILL? the voice asks.
“Yeah, you know. Slow. Calm. Laid-back. Somewhere I can rest. I’ve got like twenty years of sleep debt to make up for.”
SLEEP.
Of all the words they could have picked on, of course they chose that one. I lean back to look up — if there’s some kind of god here, they’re probably towering over me, right? “I’d love a sleep in,” I say. Even just thinking about it is making me tired. “No more six AM trains. No more rush hour crush. Just a lazy morning, taking my time waking up, nowhere to be and nothing to do. That would be my heaven, I think. At least for now.”
SLEEP, the voice says again.
“Yeah,” I agree, blinking some heaviness out of my eyes. “Sleep’s great. I definitely—” My head jerks up, my eyes open, and I realise they were closed. Just for a second, but still. “Hey, wait—”
SLEEP, the voice says one last time and I realise too late that I had definitely misunderstood something here.
“Wait!” I try to call, but it comes out as a mumble. My body grows heavy — I feel myself list to the side, falling slowly into the soft coldness again. “Wait,” I mumble, as my face presses into the surface and my eyes slip fully shut. “I didn’t mean—”
“—I wan’ed to—”
My tongue feels swollen; the words stumble out of my mouth like sports fans leaving a pub the morning after a historic win. My body feels heavy, each limb too weak to hold out even against gravity. My thoughts are slow, my back hurts, and, above all else, I am really fucking cold.
The first shiver catches me by surprise. The next several have me curling into a ball on the hard surface under me, something like stone digging into my hip.
My teeth chatter, and I can already feel my feet turning to ice.
Where the fuck is this?
Somewhere behind me there is the rustle of material, like a heavy curtain being pushed aside, two footsteps, then a gasp. The footsteps rush away again, and I hear a muffled voice yelling something I don’t understand, gradually softening as it moves away.
A minute later, I hear clanking drawing closer.
I finally open my eyes.
I’m lying on a slab of baby blue crystal, little vines and stars carved all around the edge. It sits on a raised dais made of the same, and beyond that is a room full of pillars and statues and a domed ceiling carved with such detail it puts the Sistine Chapel to shame. All of it made of the same crystal, with mist curling around the floor.
It looks magical. And I mean that both in regards to how beautiful and improbable it is.
It also looks like an altar, like the icy equivalent of something out of a horror movie.
That makes me move.
My body doesn’t want to, every joint a block of ice. But I force my arms to push myself up, and my legs to swing over the side of the altar block. I try to stand, but my legs don’t hold and I go sprawling to the floor instead.
At least I’m not on the altar anymore?
The clanking pauses, still behind me, on the other side of the room, but so close now it’s hurting my ears. There’s a rustle again, and more steps, then a cacophony I don’t recognise, and I turn and pull myself up by the altar so I can see peer over it.
It’s a knight.
Kneeling.
There’s a doorway on that side of the room, covered with a heavy blue drape, which they obviously came through. There’s a path carved into the floor that leads to the altar, like a red carpet except its part of the stone. And there’s a knight, dressed in battered but shining armour, with a deep blue cloak thrown over their shoulder. There’s some kind of insignia picked on it in off-white, but I can’t see the whole thing with the way it folds.
They look more like a robot than a human, I think, looking at the flat faceplate of their helmet. It’s so weird.
“I am glad to see you awake, Hero,” the knight says, their voice echoing strangely within their helmet and the crystal room, “and I apologise for the lacking welcome. The king will be here soon. In the mean time, I am pleased to attend to any and all needs.”
“…What?”
The knight doesn’t respond immediately. I imagine they’re as confused as I am.
Hero?
King?
Again, where the hell am I?
“Are you… alright?” the knight eventually asks, sounding baffled by their own question. “Do you require assistance?”
“No!” The response is automatic. I don’t want anyone closer until I figure out what’s happening.
Then I realise that, from their angle, it probably looks like I’m hiding behind the altar. Which I am, but it’s still not the best first impression. So I pull myself upright, grimacing at the stiffness and weakness of my muscles, then up onto the altar, perching sideways on the edge so I don’t look completely hopeless. That’s when I realise I’m dressed only in a simple cotton robe, the hem falling gently over my feet, and wonder again what on earth happened.
I’m also still absolutely freezing.
I hem and haw for a second, right up until a new bout of shivers decides to shake my spine.
“Actually,” I say, my teeth chattering, “do you have a spare cloak or blanket or something? Tea or soup or anything hot would be nice too.”
The knight startles, looking for a moment like they’ve been hit over the head. Then they become a whir of motion.
In short order I’ve been given their cloak — with much bowing and handed over from as far away as they could reach — and they’ve run off again with promises of tea and stew. I continue to sit there, now swarthed in a ridiculously plush length of lined velvet, and wonder why they didn’t just take me with them.
There’s other thoughts in my mind too, but I bat those away, determined to ignore them for now.