by David Burke
Despite the obvious force of the impact, Jay only felt like he had rolled out of bed after celebrating too hard. He shook his head and got up slowly. First onto his hands and knees, and then he did a scan of himself again to make sure that nothing felt broken. Since that went well, he decided to sit onto his backside rather than pushing his luck by trying to stand up.
This gave him an opportunity to evaluate his surroundings. This was clearly not Chicago. There might have been alleyways that smelled this foul in the Windy City, but if there were, they would have been littered with broken beer bottles, and most likely bums. This space appeared to be mostly litter-free but clearly was used as a urinal and worse by the local residents. That smell, more than anything, convinced him the area couldn’t be empty.
Maybe it just smelled so nasty that even the beggars didn’t want to bed down here. Just his luck to land in a back-alley latrine. Of course, thinking about his luck caused him to realize something. He didn’t feel any pain in his gut or back. Hadn’t he been shot?
His hands immediately went to his stomach and then felt around behind to the small of his back. Whatever shirt he was wearing was made of fine material, but it definitely wasn’t his Nirvana shirt, and it was not soaked in blood. Beneath his shirt was smooth, nothing but rippling abs.
As he felt, he sucked in his breath. He was even more cut than he remembered. Something was definitely not right. He didn’t want to complain, but no bullet wound and a ripped body? Then, he looked at his hands. They were massive and had the calluses of someone accustomed to days filled with hard labor.
It wasn’t that he was opposed to hard work, in fact, quite the contrary. It was more that his hands were worth millions, and he took care to make sure they stayed in pristine condition. He needed them to be responsive and able to feel the slightest difference in the grain of a bat or the leather of a ball. These hands had clearly never seen a manicurist in their entire life.
Apparently, he was still dreaming.
The hair on his arms was a light blond and his forearms were as thick as six by six timbers. It was then that Kyle heard a voice say, “You’re perfectly fine. At least for now. But we need to get you moving. Your arrival has caused quite a stir and it’s important that no one find you yet.”
Normally a very sexy, feminine voice wouldn’t cause Kyle to jump, especially not one as warm and smooth as melted butter, but this voice came out of thin air and startled the crap out of him. To be fair, it was also true that the last woman who had spoken to him had shot him in the back. But it had been his intention to stand up and look around anyway. So, he went with that before demanding to know where the imaginary voice was coming from.
Standing up was simple. Or it was supposed to be. After all, he had been doing it since he was ten months old, nine if you believed his father. Instead of standing though, Kyle found the minimal effort he had ordered of his muscles sent him flying up into the air. His vertical clearance would have been enough to make an NBA scout drool. Actually, more than that, as his feet were off the ground likely well above the height of a rim. Kyle didn’t have much time to focus on that before he was falling. Again.
This time Kyle crashed through the thatched roof of a small house next to the alley he had originally landed in. He didn’t come down with much grace and was fairly ashamed to admit that he flailed about and maybe, just maybe, shrieked a tiny bit. Then again, he played baseball for a living and didn’t have much experience acting the stuntman and falling through roofs with style.
His fall was partially broken by a shoddy wooden table that turned into so much kindling after absorbing the impact of his rather massive body. Three small children and a rather haggard looking thirty-something man had been sitting around it.
They all jumped back, at least as well as they could when Kyle came down on top of their table. For his part, it didn’t really hurt and he was just glad that he hadn’t squished any of them, especially one of the kids. He might never have wanted kids, but that didn’t mean he wanted to see one hurt.
A few feet away, a woman, likely the wife and mother, was stirring something in an iron pot hanging over a fire pit. She was the first to react aggressively. She yelled something at him that he didn’t recognize, and then flung a ladle of hot stew at Kyle.
All he had time to do, was raise his arm up to shield his face. It stung as it hit his arm, but definitely didn’t burn like he had been expecting. Still, he didn’t want to sit there on the receiving end of that type of abuse, but he also wasn’t about to charge at this little slip of a woman. He figured he was the one who had fallen through her roof, after all.
This time, when he tried to stand up it went a bit better, at least relatively speaking. He was only flung backwards ten feet and knocked a hole in the plaster of the back wall, but did manage not to go all the way through it. Even better, he was able to stay on his feet and right himself.
Looking at the little woman though, things weren’t getting any better on that end. She was shrieking again as she shooed her children around behind her and tried to hand the man a six-inch blade. He clearly didn’t want anything to do with it, but eventually took the knife, if reluctantly.
From the way he held it, Kyle assumed that he was more used to cutting bread than enemies, but then again, what did he really know about knife fighting? He almost stumbled forward when he heard that same feminine voice in his head say, “Pretty much everything there is to know about it. It is sorta your thing.”
Once again, he had no idea where the voice was coming from or what it was talking about. He couldn’t even claim to be from the rough side of town. He had grown up in a typical middle class suburban family, in Florida, before baseball had taken him to the big city.
Now Kyle figured he was having the most vivid dream ever, possibly as he bled out after being shot by a woman who felt he had spurned her. The alternative was that he was in some kind of magical world.
As his mind tried to adapt to his current situation, it dawned on him that both the man and woman were trying to talk to him. The woman was yelling, while the man seemed more cautious. But Kyle thought he’d be a monkey’s uncle if he understood what either of them were saying.
He had picked up some Spanish; it was more or less a requirement in baseball now if you wanted to be in on all the jokes. Even learned a little Japanese to chat with a teammate. Turned out that besides baseball, Kyle had quite the knack for languages. Not that he was gonna suddenly make a career change to translator.
Thing about it was though, that whatever they were speaking sounded completely foreign to him. They had a bit of the same accent that the big guy in armor had had, but with him Kyle had been able to understand his words, even if the meaning had been gibberish. Not so with his involuntary hosts.
Eventually he put up his hands with his palms out in what he hoped was a universal sign for, ‘I mean you no harm.’ Then he said out loud, “Sorry about the table, not quite sure what is going on here.” He sounded perfectly normal to himself but neither the man nor woman seemed to understand what he was saying.
The two adults looked at one another, confusion clear as day on their faces. Then the man tried talking to Kyle again. This time he spoke much more slowly and enunciated his words. Like that was gonna make anything better. Kyle couldn’t help but laugh. Somehow people always thought that speaking more slowly in a language you didn’t know was gonna make it easier to understand.
Kyle turned his palms up towards the ceiling and then shrugged his shoulders to imply that he had no clue what they were saying.
It seemed to work, because the two of them started talking back and forth. Kyle might not have been able to understand what they were saying, but the body language was easy enough to pick up. The woman was trying to get her man to take care of him, and he didn’t want to have any part of it.
The voice in his head said, “He is asking you if you are a messenger from the gods and she thinks you are a fiend here to drag off th
eir children for some evil ritual.”
“Are you even real?” Jay thought back to the voice but then added, “No, don’t answer that, I’m not talking to the voice in my head.”
As Kyle tried to calm his racing thoughts, he figured it made sense in a weird, twisted way. These people must be really small. In fact, everything around here must be small. His head brushed the ceiling, and that was with him stooping over. The guy looked sturdy enough, not in the fighter or athlete sorta way, but more like a guy who swung a shovel for a living. With the size of this body that he found himself in, Kyle assumed that he must appear like a giant to them.
That was when he got the brilliant idea to try that thing from every first contact movie he had ever seen. He made an exaggerated gesture and pointed to his chest as he said, “Kyle.” He repeated the process three more times, trying very hard to enunciate clearly.
They finally seemed to get the hang of it.
They both looked at each other before the woman finally repeated the pointing process that he had just performed and said, “Freja.” Then she pointed at the man, who Kyle took to be her husband, and said, “Lucas.”
Kyle repeated the names as he pointed at each of them in turn and they did the same with his name. The tension started to ease in the room, but he realized that this was still a long way from making heads or tails out of what they were saying. This was so gonna be a long night. That caused him to look up through the hole he had made in their roof. He felt bad about it, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that.
Kyle realized, in that moment, that he didn’t have any clue about whether this pace had a day and night cycle like he was used to. That might be a faulty Earth assumption. Or maybe he was just going crazy.
That same sultry voice chose now to make itself known again. “Don’t jump. Don’t look around. I’m inside your head.”
“Great, I really am crazy now,” Kyle said out loud. Of course, neither Lucas nor Freja had any idea what he was saying.
“You aren’t crazy; you are just adapting to reincarnation.” Before he could say anything more the voice said, “Repeat after me.”
Then it rattled off a strange sentence. If Kyle’s ear for languages was serving him well, it was likely the same one these people were speaking, he mused. Wondering what he had to lose, he repeated it.
From the reaction on their faces, Kyle initially assumed he was butchering the phrase. But the longer he looked at them, the more he realized it was fear, not confusion, coming over their faces.
That was really saying something. It appeared that whatever phrase he had repeated, had caused more fear than having a strange man, one who towered over you, fall through your roof. That was confirmed when Lucas tossed the knife down at his feet.
Whatever the voice was telling him seemed to be working, so Kyle followed its instructions and repeated several more phrases. Before he knew it, they were directing him to sit down next to the fire. Moments later, a bowl of the stew was held out to him. Freja’s hands trembled as she held the bowl, but she seemed insistent he accept it. What was more, the kids kept staring at him, now more like he was Santa Claus than the boogieman.
Kyle was tempted to ask the voice what he had said to the poor people. Of course, he remembered reading somewhere that hearing voices wasn’t what made you crazy. It was when you started talking back to them that you earned the title.
Besides, he found that he was really hungry, and the stew was really good. It was pretty simple fare, but sometimes that was for the best anyway. Especially now, when it felt like he hadn’t eaten in years.
The more he ate, the more he felt himself growing tired. Of course, that raised a whole new kind of panic as he glanced at the knife Lucas had been holding, where it still laid on the floor.
The voice in his head sounded off again. “It’s okay. You can fall asleep. They have agreed to honor the old invocation. They would sooner kill themselves than allow harm to come to one such as you. You will be safe sleeping beside their hearth tonight, so to speak.”
Kyle realized that he was gonna have to talk to the voice. It had seemed to respond to his thoughts earlier, so he hoped he could do so silently in his head. At least that way, he wouldn’t end up sounding like a total loon.
“Um, so who are you?” Instead of speaking out loud, Kyle directed the thoughts inside as though he was trying to speak to the voice.
No response.
“And how do I know they aren’t gonna cut my throat as soon as I lay down?”
Miracle of miracles, it worked.
This time, the voice replied, “I am called Ild’engel. For now, you are just gonna have to trust me. I am in your head, after all, so who else are you gonna believe? You need sleep. Better that you accept that now before you collapse later. None of your kind have experienced this yet, but it would be for the best that you just take my word for it.”
Kyle pondered what the voice meant by ‘none of his kind’. He figured if this was a dream, then it didn’t really matter. He was gonna wake up from a dream or, worse, find out that he really had been shot and was dead or in a hospital bed. Or just maybe, some really weird shit went down, and he was now in a weird magical world with a bunch of short people.
Either way, one thing was clear. The voice had the right of it. He had never been this tired. Not after running fifty wind sprints. Not after the worst workout in spring training. None of it compared to this. Kyle was dead beat, down to the bottom of his feet.
So he went with it. Kyle laid his head down next to the fire. One of the little girls shyly brought him a small blanket that she folded up. She gestured for him to use it as a pillow. He thought it cute, but then sleep hit him and everything else went dark.
Chapter 3 - Reincarnation?
When Kyle woke up, he felt strangely refreshed. Sunlight came in from the hole in the house’s thatched roofing. It looked like someone had hung a blanket up to try to cover the hole, but it only worked partially. Rays of light streamed in through the gaps.
That answered the question about if there was a normal day and night cycle here. Kyle wondered if he had just been overreacting. Sure, this seemed to be a wild fantasy world, but maybe there was a simpler explanation. Maybe he was stuck in some remote part of the world.
Of course, there was always the simplest explanation. He may just be dreaming.
He lifted his head, first, and then sat up. Honestly, dream rules aside, Kyle had expected to feel sore, but other than the usual need to stretch out in the morning, he didn’t feel different. Well, that wasn’t quite true. He felt stronger, better than usual.
His attention was taken up by looking around the small one-room house in the light of day. None of the small people were there, neither the children nor the adults. That made him think that they must be early risers and off to work or school or whatever it was that people in this world did.
This world.
Those words, thought in the privacy of his own head, were enough to startle him. If this was a dream, wouldn’t he have woken up already? Dreams didn’t work like that, right? Normally they were one set of events and didn’t cover a long span of time.
“Just finally coming to that conclusion, are we? What a scholar you must be, but then again I don’t suppose that is a requirement for this job description.”
It was that same velvet, feminine voice from the night before. That had definitely been part of the dream though. At least Kyle thought it had been. It called into question whether he was really awake now or not.
He shook his head. Nothing for it but to roll with the punches. If it was a dream, it didn’t matter, and if it wasn’t, then he needed to get all the information that he could. Kyle was just glad that he seemed to be able to communicate with the voice silently rather than having to speak out loud. Otherwise, he just knew he would have looked like some kinda homeless person wandering around mumbling to himself. Although which was worse, having a voice in your head or look
ing like a vagrant, was anyone’s guess.
“So, you said your name is Eleanor?” Kyle asked, cringing. He had never been good at remembering names, not even with the women he had—how should he put it—been intimate with. He decided that the voice being inside his head probably constituted being intimate.
“You make it so hard to respect you. This is a new experience in the history of Verden. No, I said you could call me Ild’engel. If I think you might actually survive this transformation, then I will tell you my name. As it is, you should know that I am no happier than you are about this. Nor do I have any idea what Krig was thinking when he passed his mantle to you.”
Kyle blinked. “Okay, slow down. That was too much to take in all at once. I’m a fast study, but before we unpackage everything you just said, I need some basic information. You know, stuff like who, what, where, when, and why? But for now, I will be content to start with where.”
The voice laughed and, for some reason, Kyle thought he would be happy to go through fire to hear that laugh again. It was laden with so much fun and the promise of things to come. Despite the weird circumstances, this was definitely a girl he wanted to meet.
Ild’engel replied, “You are in the world of Verden. I can’t see much from your memories while you are awake, but was able to get some sense of your world from your dreams. It was very confusing. You seem to be some type of gladiator in your old world, but the competition was baffling to me.”
“Gladiator?” he thought back to the voice. There was no way he could keep from laughing. “I was a pro ball player. The best there ever was. I was the one who made people forget about names like Ruth, Mantle, Jeter, and Trout.”
“Ball? Player? So you didn’t fight?” For the first time, the voice in his head sounded confused.
“Yeah, we played baseball. Yes, we fought to win but it wasn’t like actually we were trying to hurt anyone. I mean, if you don’t count the few times the benches cleared ‘cause some asshole of a pitcher was aiming at our guys.” Kyle chuckled, remembering one such particular incident.