by Simon Archer
“Actually, yes!” I said, surprised myself at the coincidence of finding the perfect guy to start this on the first try, “Thank God. With all of these different people from around the world here, I’m just glad someone knows English. Now, can I--?”
“Certainly, you mean German?” Tobias snickered, “I admit, you have a distinctly American accent, but we are both speaking High German. May I ask you your name?”
“Um, Jeremiah Thorne,” I said, still processing what he just said, “do you think I’m speaking German to you right now? As in, the words coming from my mouth sound German, and not English?”
“What else would it be?” Tobias stared at me. “You are a very strange person, Mr. Thorne. Were you taken from your home in your sleep? I must assume so, with your nightly garments and unkempt hair. Curious that the first person who would help me on my journey to be a hero would look like a street beggar.”
As he spoke, I probably confirmed my strangeness by intensely glaring at his mouth, matching the shapes of his lips with the sounds and finding that they were not matching up. It was like he was speaking underneath a documentary overdub, but with a voice actor that matched him exactly.
“Would you mind following me over here and indulging me for a moment?” I asked him as I went over to the next person I could. “I need to test something.”
“Do you know what is going on here?” The German followed behind me at my behest. “Your behavior is erratic, and your pajamas still make me think you are in a state of delusion, but you’re the only one who can understand me here. You do not have the same voice as the one who was in my living room, but that could easily be voice modulation. Ever since I was taken from my home by that voice, I haven’t been able to make sense of this.”
“Well, hold on to your ass,” I said, approaching the next random person. “I have more questions for you, and then I might be able to answer some questions.” I turned to the woman with curly black hair, a cute blouse, dark skin, and addressed her. “Is your name Serena Regio?”
“How vulgar,” the prudish German sneered quietly. “Perhaps you truly are American.”
“Why, yes!” the black woman said with an Italian accent straight out of Venice. “How do you know my name?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute,” I deflected the question. “What language do you hear coming out of my mouth right now?”
“… Italian?” Serena pulled her head back a bit. “What’s going on? What else would you be speaking with? Are you claiming you’re not speaking Italian? Who are you, anyway?” Her hand motions spoke about as much as she did.
“One moment, please. Tobias,” I now addressed the German, “what does it sound like she’s speaking?”
“She’s speaking Italian,” Tobias said flatly, “There’s no ‘sound like’ about it with those hands flying in the air, but I don’t know Italian if that’s what you’re wondering about. What is going on? What are you playing at?”
“In a minute, just indulge me for a bit more,” I continued my investigation, “Did I ever start speaking Italian at any point while talking with Serena?”
“No, but she spoke some Italian at you.” Tobias crossed his arms. “Are you going to tell me what’s happening here? Why all of this nonsense?”
“One last thing, I promise,” I said, turning to Serena. “Ma’am, I haven’t stopped speaking Italian this whole time, right? That’s what you’re still hearing? And this man is still speaking German to me even as we’re conversing?”
“Yes to all of that,” she said with her hands. “What’s happening? And you still haven’t told me your name!”
“Alright, I’ve figured some things out!” I exclaimed. “Both of you can--”
“Oh, thank heavens!” a Kenyan voice shouted from behind me, followed by another man of obvious Kenyan heritage. “I’m sorry about the outburst. I just thought I might be lost in this forest of people forever. My name is--”
“Ashura Mwangi, I can see that.” I beat him to the punch by saying his name before him. “You can also understand me, right?”
“Yes, of course!” He enthusiastically shook my hand that I didn’t exactly offer up. “It is a pleasure to meet someone who I can talk to. If I may be so bold, I did not expect them to be a white man in their pajamas. How is it that you know my name, if I may ask? Do you know about what is happening, or who that voice in my mother’s house was?”
“Hey, no problem, and I was just getting to some of that,” I informed him. “Serena, to answer your questions, I am Jeremiah Thorne, and I’m fairly certain that I have somehow developed the ability to understand and be understood by everyone around me. You, this German man Tobias Schoder here, and this Kenyan man Ashura Mwangi over here, all speak different languages but can understand me perfectly.”
It seemed that more and more people were catching onto that fact as well, turning around from their attempts at conversation to look at me as they slowly surrounded me. Creeped me the fuck out, but it more than proved my point.
“How is that possible?” Tobias remained skeptical, though his critical eye was wavering at the mass of circumstance. “You are only speaking one language now, and it has not changed this entire time. You mean that everyone can understand your words, even if they’re still in German?”
“My words are actually in English, Mr. Schoder, not German,” I corrected him, “and yes, that’s correct. It appears that no matter what I speak, people understand me in their native tongue, and I can understand them in mine. I’ve gained a universal translator.”
I was going to sound redundant a lot to myself and whoever asked, but now, I was acting like the one universal translator for a UN meeting in this scenario. I had to provide context for everything I said so everyone could be on the same page. That was going to be especially important with the growing crowd of people now realizing that I was somehow speaking their specific language to this crowd.
Earth Jeremiah’s worst nightmare might have looked something like this. But heroic Neo Ceissein Jeremiah was not going to be so daunted by social interaction. He’d have had to inspire soldiers in times of war, or talk down nefarious villains from destroying villages, and give speeches in big assemblies because the people would… would be counting… on his inspiring… never-wavering… courage… and constant… socializing… Fuck me.
Ho, boy. Earth Jeremiah needed some serious ironing out into Neo Ceissein Jeremiah real quick if we were getting anywhere fast.
“That’s amazing!” Serena shouted. “But it still doesn’t quite explain how you know our names before you speak to us.”
“My ‘name-finding’ power is a bit complicated,” I said as the crowd thickened and quieted around me, “And I actually have some questions about that for all of you. To quickly explain, the short answer to me knowing each of your names--”
“What’s my name, Mr. Magic Man?” an older Ukrainian lady shouted from the back, my translating power carrying over her sarcasm very well.
“Are you the one who did this to us?” another man shouted from somewhere in the crowd.
“When can we go home?” a third voice piped in.
And, just like that, the voices were all riled up again, creating a smog of voices that ground at my spinal cord and drove nails through my temples. Who thought that this was the smart thing to do, huh? Which one of them was thinking, ‘Wowie wow wow, you know what’s going to help this crowd of shouting people understand me? Adding to the shouting! Yippee! That’s the solution!’?
That was a trick question. None of them were thinking in the first place. They were only panicking. Neo Ceissein Jeremiah was going to have to take a back seat while Earth Jeremiah summoned all the shits I’d stopped giving about the wellbeing of others if I wanted to nip this shit in the bud.
“EVERYONE, QUIET!” I said with much more authority than I remember being able to project out before. Either way, it got everyone to shut up immediately. Time to get really specific and really obvious. No room for ambiguity.
“Thank you. Yes, I can speak all of your languages at once, and yes, I can learn your names just by looking at you. I’m about to tell all of you here every last thing that I know about this situation of being transported to another world right now during this speech. You will not ask me any questions during my explanation or after my explanation is done. After I finish, every last piece of my knowledge about what’s happened to us will be exhausted, so I will not have any answers for you beyond what I explained. No, I will not let you ask clarifying questions, either. After I’m done explaining, for those of you who are willing, I will have a question based upon what I asked. Nod your heads like this,” I demonstrated what I meant with my own head, “if you understand everything I’ve just said, without speaking. No talking is crucial.”
Most of them nodded their heads without speaking, just as they were ordered. There were a few headshakes to confirm that they distinctly didn’t understand what I was saying, but I didn’t care about that. I was going to do the bare minimum of my civic duty as the guy who could talk to other people in the multicultural fair in the magic land, and then I was hiding in a corner. There were a few faces showing severe distaste in me treating everyone like children, and I was also more than happy with that outcome.
“Excellent!” I continued on to my explanation, “I know all of your names because they are showing up for me above each of your heads like floating name tags. I don’t know how I got that power. I don’t know many details about what is happening to all of us. I only know what you all were probably told before you came here, that the people who brought us here are all part of the same organization called the Order of the Golden Feather. They’re a cult that worships the Aurum Phoenix, and they’re trying to save their world from another bad cult that wants to destroy a new world never before seen by humans called Neo Ceissein. This is a different world from ours that has literal magic, like the ability to transport people from one world to another. I don’t know what other things that magic can do.”
I raised my hands to stave off the inevitable questions. “No, I do not know the name of the bad cult, or even who’s in it or what they look like or what they even want besides destruction. I also don’t know why I can talk with so many people all in different languages and can only suspect literal magic that I had no hand in making happen, so do not ask about that either. That is absolutely everything that I know, down to the last iota of information. So, my question is this--”
“How are we supposed to get home?” a voice shouted from the crowd. Oh, sure, yeah, of course, how could I have forgotten that little bit in my ‘absolutely everything I know’ speech? Silly me! Humans. I’d developed a prejudice towards them, it seemed. Yes, that included me. Sometimes, especially me. I was a terrible human being.
And that one panicked voice was all it took to throw the whole mob into a frenzy of voices again, all clamoring at me for answers. Their groping hands were on me like a thousand tentacles of desperate savagery, scared people doing stupid things in large groups, and I happened to be on the shit end of the stick. The noise and the touching froze my blood with anxious dread as I pushed away from them with all my might.
Fucking animals. I knew I shouldn’t have tried to socialize. I knew it. Nothing good ever comes from moving outside your societal comfort zone.
By the slimmest of fateful chances, the three who I’d spoken to first were still on the side of the confrontation that wanted me alive, or at least were rationally minded enough that they knew that this was less than unhelpful. Tobias and Ashura were putting up their arms to keep the crowd off of me, while Serena took the opportunity that they bought us to weave me through the other half of the crowd and out among the white space again. Damn, they worked fast. Maybe not all humans sucked so bad.
I turned to the crowd to address the unhelpful people before they tore Tobias and Ashura apart. This had to end now. Without any magic powers of our own and no conceivable way out of here at the moment, we were stuck working together until we were given a way out of here.
“SIT! DOWN!” I shouted again, projecting my command from parts of my diaphragm that I’d never accessed before in my life.
Like obedient dogs, they were on their butts like their legs had nearly given out on them, collapsing onto the floor and staring right at me in anticipation of the next thing I was going to say. I couldn’t believe that these were the people I had to work with in my heroic career if there ever was going to be one at this point. We all had a long way to go.
“That’s better,” I spoke again, “Here’s the bottom line until we find out what the hell is actually going on: We work together, or we die alone. If we’re killing anyone, it can’t be each other. Not yet, anyway. Back to my question: do any of you see anything like a floating name above other people’s heads? Any words or numbers, specifically on some kind of floating screen above people as you look at them? Please raise your hand like this,” I demonstrated what I meant with my own hand, “if you want to answer me.”
One person near the back, a Polynesian man with a tribal face tattoo in a suit, raised his hand. I pointed at him to prompt his answer.
“I haven’t seen anything like that,” the big guy answered.
“Does anyone see anything like that?” I said slowly. “Nod your head if that’s true, shake your head if that’s false.”
Universally, the crowd was shaking their heads. So it was just me. Great. Why? Was it because I wandered away from the crowd? The hell was that about? Or was it because I touched that arcane spy eyeball? Something like that had to be why I was singled out like this.
“Does anyone have anything else weird happening to them like what’s happening to me?” I asked another question, “Something weird, magical, or unexplainable that you couldn’t do before you came here? It can literally be anything.”
They all looked at each other, at their own hands, or just around themselves at others. Some of them experimented with some hand movements, or some pressed fingers to their heads, a few low moans here and there, and other random activities that might have yielded a magic power. Sure, it looked stupid, but I couldn’t have given them crap for it this time. What the hell were they supposed to do without anyone here to tell us anything? Humans were stupid and selfish, but whoever had trapped us here were morons.
Or they were secretly evil and sadistic, and this was some cosmic Saw torture game for them. That would have been a serious dick move, in the kindest of words. We were just going to hope that theory was false, too. All bets were on an ‘actual fantasy world full of wonder and mystery.’ Fingers crossed.
“Nothing?” I returned my attention to the situation, “nothing at all? Not even an extra-bendy finger or something?”
“Do our name tags say anything else?” Tobias asked, against my explicit instructions not to ask any questions. “You seem to have the only information that we can use.”
“My name displays don’t have anything useful yet,” I lied, not wanting to open the can of worms of ‘we’re living inside of a system that works like a video game, so I hope you brought your calculators and scratch paper because it’s math time!’ quite just yet, “I’ll let you know if anything develops. Right now--”
“NOW IS THE HOUR OF YOUR DESTINY!” said the scary voice in the sky that had just been haunting my apartment and was now forcing my heart into my throat.
About goddamn time someone showed up.
4
“DO NOT BE ALARMED!” the voice spoke with no sympathetic sense for its own voice, “YOU ARE IN NO DANGER HERE!” Jesus, why not just shoot us yourselves and spare us the jinxes and the annoying voice from heaven? “IT IS MORE THAN UNDERSTANDABLE IF YOU ALL HAVE MANY QUESTIONS FOR US, AND WE ASSURE YOU THAT THEY WILL ALL BE ANSWERED IN TIME. FOR NOW, YOU MUST TRUST THAT WE ARE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN TO ENSURE BOTH OUR SURVIVAL AND YOUR OWN!”
Yeah, I wasn’t feeling very assured by anything this guy was laying down. It’d have been nice for us to see a face, at least, so we weren’t talking to
the infinite void of nothing. Or some kind of display to look at. Or really anything at all. And what took them so damn long, anyway?
Oh, look at that, speak of the devil. Appearing before us in a flash of golden light, like a ray from heaven infinitely above us mixed with a teleporter beam from a sci-fi show, came a heavily armored man. Like someone might have expected to come out from on high, this mega- knight was tall enough to break a world record back home and with hair blonder than a labrador’s shiniest coat. If I had imagined every leading male actor from my mom’s old hallmark movies and threw their individual features into a randomizer, that face and hair would have been what came out the other end. And his teeth were whiter than snow. Painfully, unsettlingly white. All of his teeth were clearly defined and glistened like fresh winter powder. Seriously, he looked straight out of a commercial for dental floss or something. Anyone who’d seen someone’s face be so unerringly symmetrical and handsome as to go right back to being a bit hideous would have had an idea of what I saw right now.
What would have made the biggest difference between him and any pretty face on the TV or gilded nightmare, besides the rest of him in the massive tin can from Albion, was his really, really pointy ears. They grew out past his head and luscious locks and more than another half-length away to thin points above him, like spears or feathers slapped onto the sides of his scalp, but apricot-colored and bendy as his head twisted from side to side.
The armor itself was about as gaudy as anyone could have possibly made it, with gold trim thicker than my head lining the white plates of the armor and oversized proportions throughout it. My head could have fit inside one of the finger caps on the gauntlets like a helmet, for crying out loud. And his head looked absolutely tiny in comparison to his own suit. There had to be some sort of magical mecha component to it like he was piloting a machine. I’d have sooner eaten my pajamas than believe he was proportioned in any way that resembled what the armor would fit onto. If he did, he’d have looked like a damn mutant. On the other hand, magical world, untold possibilities, crazy circumstances, all that could have warranted me ditching some old presumptions. Still, though, ew.