A couple of strong hands wrapped around my arms and the feeling of slowly overcoming gravity. As I felt someone helping me up from the ground, the darkness that had covered my field of vision slowly dissipated and I came back to myself with a terrible pain in my heart.
As the voices of the worried people around me gradually became clearer, I thought that I was lucky enough not to die again today.
After I managed to stand up and regain my balance with the help of the two people holding my arms, I realized that the sounds of a tractor engine were everywhere and I looked around to see where I had been brought.
Black, noisy cars that were used in the mid-1900s when cars had just been invented were passing right next to the sidewalk I was on, creating traffic. The first thing that came to my mind was that this was the gang march of a group that wanted to showcase their classic cars. But then I was struck by the people that surrounded me and that I could see on each side of the long street.
The men around were usually wearing jackets over collared t-shirts, while the women wore colorful long dresses. A man holding the arm of a woman in a long pink dress that fell a little below her kneecaps was wearing a shirt with a strap extending to his shoulders, which gave me a very antique feeling. Moreover, there was a disturbing smell of petroleum in the air.
"Sir, are you feeling better?"
"Yes, I'm better now, you can let me go, actually. Thanks for your help."
The old man holding my left arm had already let go of me and stepped back, but the man holding my right arm, wearing military clothes from World War II, was still holding my arm.
At this moment, I heard the puzzled voice of someone in the crowd gathered around me, watching me with interest.
"His way of dressing is really odd. Maybe he came from overseas."
"But this guy speaks good English, doesn't he?"
"Yeah, you're right."
At the words of the two people talking next to me, I looked around and then at myself. Indeed, the black short shorts and black T-shirt I was wearing looked quite different from the clothes of the people dressed in layers around me. More striking were my white sports shoes. And I noticed a few people repeatedly shifting their eyes toward my shoes.
"Sir, if I may, could you come with me to the police station so that I can identify you?"
After one look into the eyes of the soldier who was stubbornly holding my arm, I easily realized that it was not a question.
"Please don't misunderstand me. We are in wartime and we have been ordered to be alert to all abnormalities."
As some ideas were forming in my head about where I was, or rather when I was, I asked the soldier to let me be and followed him to a nearby police station building.
As I watched people in different shades of military attire running up and down the narrow corridors, the soldier must have trusted me because he asked me to sit on one of the seats placed at the edge of the corridor for a while and wait.
I sat down where he showed me, dumbfounded, focusing on the conversations of the people around me, and as I waited, some flying letters began to appear in front of my eyes, as if they were being typed on a keyboard.
As a lover of high fantasy, everything I had experienced so far made me sure that this was a dream of my reincarnation.
Just then the half-written sentence in front of me was suddenly erased and replaced by another sentence.
[ This is not a dream ]
Apparently, I must be a traveler with an intelligent system. That's good, at least it helps me to investigate the details.
Since it is a system that can hear the thoughts in my head, when I tried to call out the system in my head, I got no answer. After a while, the writings were erased again letter by letter, and replaced by new writings.
[ All tasks will be shown to you only once, please follow them carefully ]
I had some idea what this meant, but I wasn't sure, so I didn't do anything after I finished reading and the articles were deleted again.
After waiting for some time for new articles to arrive, it was a bit strange that no new articles were coming, but I stopped caring about it and continued to contact the system. Unfortunately, no matter what I said, there was no response from the system. Within a few minutes, I had already tried all the classic commands to call the system.
Meanwhile, the soldier who had just brought me here came back to where I was sitting and told me to follow him.
What happened next was a complete mess. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get any information from the system about my identity in this world and I had to give completely random answers to the man who asked me the names of my family, where I lived, how old I was, and so on.
It helped a bit that ID cards were not used in the time period I was in, but when he asked me to describe the exact location of my house, my answers gave me away. And before I knew it, I was thrown into the underground jail of the police station as a potential Nazi agent who had sneaked into America.
Before I was thrown in jail, the man who had decided to put me in jail told me that it was just a suspicion and that as long as they investigated me a little bit and made sure that I had no connection to the Nazis, they would release me again.
As I continued to sit in the stinking prison cell with the only assurance I had, which was the man's words, my attention was still completely focused on the system. The system should have a code and I should be able to use the system with this code.
And all of a sudden, the writings started to appear in front of me again. Whoever was writing these writings, the speed at which he was writing them was already getting on my nerves.
[ 1 new mission ]