Chapter 1 Arrival

Light peaked between the buildings, warming her face ever so slightly. She stepped towards it, away from the busy market street she'd found herself in. Into an alley and then beyond, open sky greeted her. There was a small patch of grass before a jagged cliff edge was fenced by crooked wooden posts that curved behind the buildings as the edge moved. Behind her the mountain shot further into the sky, while far below a forest bloomed. There was but a thin strip of flat where the market had been built.

Edging the horizon, far below and off in the distance, a large lake shimmered with turquoise water. Above was a sky o fan unfamiliar blue. Lighter, paler, the clouds were harder to distinguish. Shoving her phone into one pocket and the bottle of rum half into the other, her hands gripped the wooden fence as she looked all around her. "My wish came true." Seras breathed. "A birthday wish actually came true. Oh my god, oh my fucking god. This is incredible."

She took a deep breath, and the air that filled her nostrils had a freshness she had rarely felt before. She tightened her grip on the beams as her heart beat faster. A glance back confirmed there was no one around her. Overcoming the nervousness raging inside her, she shouted into the distance "I've been isekaied!"

As she pulled away a sudden yelp escaped her lips. A splinter pieced through the soft skin of her palm. It wasn't long, but it hurt. Bitting her lip she scratched with her nails to get it out. It took a few goes, and blood seeped from where she split open her skin. Undoing the cap, she poured a dash of rum over it. She had to bite her lip to stop herself from crying out. After a few moments the pain subsided and she returned the bottle. "Great start girl. Great bloody start."

With slower steps she returned to the street. About twenty people milled around the stores. Some not even human. There was a mixture of lizard people, most about as tall as an average human and ranging in scale-tones from green to brown. And then there was another race she couldn't work out how to describe. They were each almost two meters tall, with well defined muscles and horns coming from their heads. And then there were the eyes, black where the whites should be, red for the iris.

Just like the mountain, the road was on an angle. Down to the left, up to the right. She went left, setting off, humming.

Her eyes glazed over the locals. Most were dressed in a mixture of rags and robes. Most were brown or grey, often tied by a sash. In a weird way, it made her attire seem almost formal. The thought made her chuckle. She couldn't imagine a single instance from her world were a pink flannel and khaki pants would be considered smart. Her runners were also so different from everybody else, mostly in some variant of boots. The only piece that fit was her hair band tying her dark blonde hair, but its vibrant green made even that out of place.

A growl came from her stomach, interrupting her thoughts. Feeling her lack of breakfast, and the out-of-routine low intensity cardio from the morning walk, she began looking at the stalls, hoping for something to eat. A nice smell came to her. Something fried, with a smell of fresh bread mixed in. Her nose guided her to a stall a little further down. It was run by a lizard-woman, whose smile looked predatory but felt sweet. A man looked at Seras as she stood frozen a few meters from the stall, and after a moment he approached the woman, pulling a coin from his pocket and handing it over.

Patting down her pockets, Seras found her small black leather wallet. She pulled open the zip, extracting a coin from it. The dollar coin looked similar to the one the man handed over. When the lizard woman took the man's coin and he took the wrap, the attention turned to Seras. She held up the coin. Eyes furrowed, the lizard woman took it in a clawed hand, holding it before her. Shaking her head, she handed it back. Then her mouth moved and she said something that rocked Seras.

It was clearly speech, not just an animal sound. The man seemed to recognise whatever it was, but for Seras it made as much sense as whenever her friend spoke Indian. It was no language she knew, and it didn't even sound like any she'd heard so much as once on TV. The man raised an eyebrow at her, and cleared his throat to say something. Seras didn't hear it, her head was swimming.

TV was a good teacher. Not as good as her best school teachers, far better than her worst ones. It taught her how to make a light globe, and how to perform CPR, and so many things she later forgot or never needed. Many of the things TV taught her school retaught later on. One of the things TV taught Seras, was that when someone finds themselves in another world, they can always understand the locals. It shouldn't matter if they were humans or elves or some other race, if they were human-ish, they should speak her language or some magic should be translating. Hell, Doctor Who met with so many races no sane person would count, and never had she seen him lost for language.

Seras didn't pay any attention as she drifted away from the store, even as her stomach protested the more the smell evaporated. Finally the stall was beyond her vision, obscured by the curves in the road. Her pace slowed until she came to a stop. Thinking deeper, she could find an example or two where non-humans had some different language, so it's not unprecedented, just rare. And she considered herself unlucky enough to be in that exception. Running a calculation in her head, Seras looked around her again. The three races she noted seemed to be roughly even, so if the lizard people had their own language, that was only one third of the population she couldn't speak to. If the horned people had their own as well, then maybe that would be two thirds, leaving one whole third of the population within her range, implying zero cross over. All things considered, not too bad.

In high school she had learned, for some reason she couldn't remember in one class she couldn't recall which, that in Canada everything was in both French and English, so maybe this was the same. She should have said something to the store-person, maybe she would have understood and swapped language. But to go back now was san embarrassment she couldn't bear. Instead, she kept walking, finding the next lizard-person run stall she saw. It didn't take long. There were no nice smells coming from this one. It was a jeweller. "Um, hi there. Do you speak English?"

The person let her large mouth open slightly, showing sharp teeth. But the action didn't seem threatening, more like when a person parts their lips in thought. She gave a response in that same language. Seeing from her face that Seras hadn't understood, she looked around for some help. The way she looked at each person surrounding them for a moment before moving on hinted at her familiarity with them, trying to pick who was most likely to speak the language of the girl before her. Rip, guess it's the one third then.

Waving to a group of humans, they approached quickly. The first person was a woman in a large skirt, the other two were young men standing behind her. The store owner gave a hand movement to Seras, as if to say go ahead. "Um, hi there. Do you mind telling me where I am?"

The trio didn't respond. The shared a glance between them, then turned back to Seras. From the phonetic structure, the way their words connected sounds together, she could tell that they spoke the same language as the first person she asked.

As if no longer able to hold herself straight, Seras rocked where she stood. Desperately, she repeated her question in Danish and Chinese.

Shrugging, she turned to the others, then back to the store-person. She said something to her, then something to Seras, and moved away.

Seras stood there, unmoving. She was thinking, her thoughts trapped in a tight circle. Even humans didn't understand me? Will anyone? Can I understand anyone? This isn't right.

She took absent steps away, going further down the road. Asking herself what characters did in shows. The answer was unhelpful. She couldn't think of a single character like this, and she had seen a lot.

Her breathing increased far faster than her walking should incite. Her breaths were becoming more ragged, and soon they were all she could concentrate on. One thought would be maintained, then get lost in her breathing. Over and over.

The stalls disappeared from the road as it began to curve with the mountain into a large u-shaped alcove. The other side was at least fifty meters away, with a drop between them. The next building had a small angle in the wall near the entry, giving a corner in the mud. She didn't pay much attention as she veered towards it, sliding onto the ground. She stayed there for a few minutes, unmoving, barely thinking.

She had been seven years old she first visited her grandparents. It was a long flight to Denmark. Everyone seemed to talk so fast it was hard to understand them. The last time she had gone was just before starting her job, two and a half years earlier. That time, people didn't sound fast. She became fluent, so her mind knew where to insert the spaces. But on that first time, when she had walking into her grandparent's house, she barely knew a word they were saying, and her father knew none of it.

With the sudden switch like a sprinter after the gun, Seras clapped her hands onto her cheeks. They went a little bit red. She got to her feet, determined to find even a single person she could understand. Her father had learned. He tried, and slowly was able to pick up enough to not need to ask for every other sentence. If she could find just one person, then it would be like it was for him. Better even, given how her brain already had three languages crammed in. She reckoned that meant she would be more adaptable to learn a fourth. The annoying part was that all the time she had spent learning may have just been thrown down the drain. Speaking all the languages of Earth would mean nothing if this world had none of them.

Unlike where the stalls lined the road, there weren't as many people milling around here. Every time she did pass somebody, she veered towards them, determined to find somebody to help. "Hi, do you speak English?"

The first time she asked the man said something and walked away. The second time, the group looked to each other and said something again, and she walked away. By the third time the word was becoming more familiar. 'Higus'. She was confident in thinking it either meant some variation of 'sorry', or that they didn't understand. She wanted to let herself believe that learning that much already meant she would be fine in no time, but she knew better.

By the time she got to the end of the large alcove, her question had shortened. Seeing the last person before the road bent back in line with before the first large turn, she approached the older man. "English? No, okay."

Looking back, she couldn't believe how far down she had descended. On the other side, across the fifty meter gap, the road was so much higher up. She could feel the downward slope as she walked, but it didn't feel strong enough to get her that much lower.

Beyond the curve the road opened up. To her right the cliff fell away. At this point of the mountain, this was the top. It was a wide, almost flat space, allowing more streets to branch off. But immediately before her was a cobbled square, the dirt track running beside it. Buildings and shops surrounded it. A fountain took the attention in the centre. Her feet took her towards it before she knew what she was doing.

While walking past, she let her gaze wonder through the windows. The writing on them was foreign. The reasonable part of her knew they would be, but it still surprised her anyway. Then through one window she saw something she didn't expect. Her direction changed towards the shop.

A bell rung as she opened the door. Inside was a single store attendant behind a dirty wooden counter. Along each wall were locked cabinets, a black roller gate shut in front of them. And locked in each cabinet was an array of guns. Some had large rifles. They were wooden, long and thin, something predating the weapons of the world wars. In others were large flintlock pistols. Far from modern, but far more modern than what should be found in a medieval world. There were no swords anywhere in the shop.

As her dazed look scanned the merchandise over and over, the store attendant spoke up. Unanswered, she repeated her question, louder. It snapped Seras to attention. Looking at the woman she gave a slight bow, repeating the word she had heard everyone say to her. Hoping it meant what she thought, Seras walked straight back out, the little bell again ringing.

This is not right. It played in her head, again and again, so much she didn't see the woman intersecting her with a child at her side. They collided. Seras fell back a step, the woman fell backwards, throwing out her hands to break her fall. The shock snapped Seras' attention. Looking around, the top of the woman's hair just entered her vision. Quickly shaking her head to wipe away her daze, she reached out a hand to help her. "Sorry, I wasn't paying attention." The child, a young boy, was standing so close to where she had fallen that a little further off and she would have squashed him.

The woman reached out to take Seras's hand. As she pulled the lady halfway up, Seras felt cold metal grip her palm. The momentum was enough to get to her to her feet, but Seras was left staring at her arm, or rather the prosthetic that replaced it. It was a bronze coloured metal, with pistons moving up and down as she adjusted her elbow and fingers. It had rivets and large rounded caps around it, making it look like outdated factory machinery.

Then a sound came from the way she had came from. It sounded similar to a train horn as it rushed past another train. Over on the cliff side was a large platform, and over that was what looked almost like a crane arm. From the ends of the arms came thick cables, and at the end of one side was what looked almost like a telephone box, but slightly larger. A few people got off, and from the line of people before it, five got on. Then it disappeared again down a cut in the platform. Behind the arm were large cogs and machinery, pistons moving up and down as steam erupted from releases everywhere.

The realisation hit her harder than the language had. That may have posed a functional problem, but what she was seeing defiled the ideology that TV had led her to believe. Because no isekai to her knowledge had been set in a world like this, where machines ran on a clockwork mechanism, and technology existed to this extent, far more akin to the industrial revolution that the middle ages. A steampunk iseaki was something she had never expected to see. The machines hadn't captured her dreams, unless they were the sci-fi gadgets that made life a breeze. She found beauty in the sterile whites and crisp colours of those future worlds, or the cobblestone from those long past. Both had a different sort of purity to them.

As a child, her family had taken her to Kryal Castle. It was almost like a museum of sorts held inside the walls of a castle structure, less than a two hour drive from her childhood home. It gave her a wish to live in such a world. Dreaming of it, she created her own romanticised vision lacking the torture chambers and keeping the modern bathroom. Even as the wish faded from memory some part had remained deep within her, dormant until the first show depicting a boy getting hit by a truck crossed her path. How she had longed for an isekai before she ever heard the word.

People were gathering at the far end of the square, grouping around something that she couldn't see. Some still had the robes she had seen earlier, but more and more people were in tweed suits or Victorian dresses. Her head was spinning, and the crowd took her. As she passed the fountain, she saw that even it was not free of the clockwork aesthetic as gears turned in its base. Sitting on the railing, facing away from the gathering, was a woman who looked about her age, although she had no idea how ages worked for the devil-people. Her hood was up, covering her face, but the distinctive horns and eyes were still clear. What was less clear were the tears running down her eyes.

Pausing for a moment, the woman felt her eyes and looked to Seras. Their eyes met. She had a girlish face, as if her body had grown while her face stayed young. Or maybe that was what this race looked like. Seras didn't know. Swallowing, Seras offered a smile. It wasn't intentional, but the sad, apologetic smile you give when seeing someone in pain, and not knowing what to do. When it happened on the train, she could ask if the person was alright, then move on knowing that they would say there were fine regardless of reality. But here, she didn't even know how to ask those hollow words. So she let herself keep going with the crowd.

There were two scaffolds at the end of the courtyard. The back one had a large devil-man kneeling on it and chained down, while the other held a robed human, standing, reading from a scroll. The crowd was silent. Beside the scaffold was a pylon, a dark coned-shaped device with a bulbous head and rings running around it. The man finished talking, and from beside the pylon another pulled a leaver. The bottom ring lit up, then the next, then the next. Finally the bulb lit neon blue. For a moment, she thought it was beautiful. The only beautiful thing in this world. A bright light in the darkening sky.

From the head the light erupted as a stream of lighting, heading straight for the man chained to the scaffold. He screamed. A second later the lighting stopped. The man pulled the leaver back and the light faded. The man on the podium was a burned husk, and the life that had so recently been inside of him had died.