Learning

The voice that drowned out the din was impossibly powerful. It came from the crowd, but belonged to a single speaker.

"Greetings, oh ancient hero of health and heroism! Welcome back home. We, your people, welcome you back with praise, prayer, and an abundance of offerings! We have spent the last few centuries performing this ritual, yearly, and who'd have thought that it was only when we moved across the vast ocean and were in a new, dangerous, continent that it'd finally work..." Explained the mysterious, masculine voice.

"We are your people! We humbly beseech that you come to our aid and accept your rightful place as our leader!" The masculine voice said. Ironically, pride was filling his voice as he spoke of humility. It seemed that he believed that I have some destiny with them and that a role for me was to be their leader. That... excited me, even as strange, alien, and impossible as this whole scenario felt.

I looked out at the crowd and scanned it for the speaker. I was out of luck until the figure spoke once more.

"Oh mighty hero! Our people refer to me as Juniper, and we are so excited to see you! We understand that you might be... confused, our sacred texts warn us about that, but we kindly ask that you come down and bless us with a few words when you feel ready to do so. We have waited... so long to see you." Said the voice. I was able to visually identify the speaker this time.

He was a strange fellow in a robe as brilliantly scarlet as the toga-like clothing I wore. He stood around two meters tall, so he stood out among the crowd and not just for the armor he wore. The vast majority of people in the crowd were far shorter than either of us. The crowd began to cheer once more as soon as he was done talking. I stood still for a second and allowed my vision to zoom in on the man. This time I consciously tried to visually zoom in and was delighted to find that it worked.

The man was a muscular figure. His robe wasn't a toga-like garment like mine was, but was instead a relatively simple piece of clothing. The only way it wasn't simple was in its color. "Juniper" had two guards flanking him, imposing men who wore metal armor and held swords and spears. They were shorter than either of the two of us but they were also more muscular than "Juniper".

I began to look out over the crowd. This was the first time the true potency of my vision was revealed to me. I spent perhaps half a minute studying the crowd.

I could see every detail of the people down below, not to mention the area around my house. I could see the stitching of their clothing, and study their imperfections. I could count the grains of dirt on the ground they were standing on. I could see individual bits of food stuck between the teeth of the messiest eaters in the massive crowd.

And my vision wasn't my only sense that was working better than ever. I could make out individual voices in the crowd. I could hear individual prayers and parents whispering to their children. I could also smell every single person and animal in the crowd. I could smell the alcohol on their lips, or the scent of their sweat. It was all amazing and also utterly impossible.

When I was done studying the crowd I took a deep breath and entered what I had dubbed my "Politician" state of mind. This was the mental framework I preferred to approach social situations from. It was a state of mind that was focused on positive interactions with others, and back before I was here, wherever "here" even is, I was using it to begin to build a political movement.

I smiled down at "Juniper" and began to wave at the crowd. They began to cheer louder than ever before. The sound was almost deafening. And I... felt something. It was an odd emotion that seemed not to well-up from within me, but from within the crowd itself.

I felt an array of emotions come from the crowd. I felt an immense joy radiate out of many of them, as well as an incredible wave of belief, in me specifically. Some of them felt fear, or even shame, but every single person felt something. It was odd, but the mere act of me beginning to wave seemed to awaken an emotional intensity in them that hadn't been there before.

I waved at them and smiled, making eye contact with a number of individuals. I spread out the eye contact, first staring "Juniper" in the eyes, before turning to gaze at his guards. All of them noticed me and seemed to shrink, not quite trying to hide from my gaze but unsure of what to make of it.

I chuckled and turned my gaze elsewhere. I continued to wave and made eye contact with a few other people. They were largely heartened by this, their smiles growing wider and their cheers louder when they noticed me. I did this for perhaps a full minute before eventually pulling away from the rooftop's edge.

I walked, faster now than before, back to the elevator. I had been asked to come down, and I intended to do so. These were my neighbors after all, and they obviously viewed me as some sort of summoned hero.

Honestly that sounded a lot like a subgenre I occasionally heard patients talking about to their families back home. I believe it was called... "Isekai"? Those stories were people get brought to other worlds and oftentimes they gained some sort of superpower along the way. Judging from the name it was probably some sort of subgenre popular in Asia, maybe Japan or South Korea.

The elevator doors opened as soon as I pressed the button to go back into "my" mansion. I swiftly stepped into the elevator and began to think. I pressed the second button down from where I currently was, the one that led to the third floor.

"So... These people think that I am a hero of 'health and heroism'..." I muttered, astounded by the turn of events. In their eyes I was an immortal being, a reborn entity, or something else, perhaps a creature powered by belief.

"What to do..." I wondered as the elevator proceeded downward.

The elevator slowed to a stop and I heard a soft "dinging" noise. The doors before me opened and I was delighted to see a new part of the place I was apparently going to all home for an unknown amount of time.

The floor before me wasn't unlike the one I woke up on. It was clearly supposed to function primarily as a housing space. The common area I stepped out of the elevator into had a similar setup to the common area on the fourth floor. There were a few little nooks, one of which had a smaller but still massive T.V., a small cooking area perfect for making snacks, and a number of sofas and seats for anyone who wants to sit down and watch some T.V.

There were also a total of five large tables, ones like a student might find in a university library, for studying, each of which had multiple seats and little walls to serve as borders for individuals who wanted to do their own individual research. To me, these looked like research stations. I had seen similar ones in medical schools throughout the United States, but those ones also had computers. Mine did not, which was unsurprising but still disappointing.

The common area connected to a full-sized kitchen that I suspected was probably supposed to be the main housing kitchen for the top floors. This kitchen was tied to a tiny room that was filled with a variety of plants. I recognized many but not all of them. This kitchen was also connected to a beautiful dining room.

Other areas in this common space, which frankly was far more used than the one upstairs where I lived, included a gaming room with a dartboard, a pool table, and a foosball table.

There was a tiny library on this floor that contained books outlining topics related to health, medicine, fitness, farming, survival, and even warfare. It was a truly curious arrangement of books.

I quickly investigated the rooms on this floor only to find a disappointing lack of variety. This floor had a small laundry room than my floor did. It also housed smaller bedrooms, ones that were exactly half as big as the ones on the fourth floor but in exchange for the smaller size there were twice as many bedrooms on this floor. Their bathrooms were also simpler than mine were, and were instead fully stocked bathrooms that lacked saunas.

The only thing this floor had that was a luxury that my floor didn't was really surprising. This floor's patio-area had hot tubs. Each corner of the wrap-around patio had a single large hot tub that was perfect for warming up or for viewing the beach while in the privacy of one's own home. I could picture this place being used quite regularly.

I spent around 10 minutes investigating this floor. When I was done I opened the elevator with a single press of a button marked with a down-arrow. I stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the second floor. As the doors shut in front of me, I continued to think.

"What's weird is that this is... Everything I've ever wanted. These people view me as their leader. Or at least someone who appears to be in a position of authority does." I remarked as the elevator went deeper into the mansion.

"I've spent my life dreaming about becoming an elected official... I became a doctor just so that I could make money while building the connections I need to run for office." I muttered, amazed by the fortuitous turn of events. The elevator door opened and showed me a curious space.

The floor I found myself on, the mansion's second floor, was a gigantic workshop and clinic. This floor had very few doors or borders demarking one area or another. There was a strange glass wall not far from the stairs leading onto this floor and that area had a few surprisingly modern waiting seats and a few small tables. Beyond it, on the side of the glass wall I was on, there was a desk fit for a receptionist. I had a suspicion that what I was seeing was a waiting area!

The few separated areas that existed on this floor were marked by the sort of curtains one would see in a particularly busy part of a hospital, such as an emergency room, or that were used to mark areas for specific patients in rooms with more than one such person.

Inside of these areas was an array of high-tech medical equipment. It was messily assembled, but the equipment here was worth millions, or even billions of dollars.

Upon further exploring this floor I was even more astounded by it. I gave it a thorough walkthrough and found equipment for making medicine, tables built for such purposes, manuals that instructed how to do so quite simply, and boxes containing tens of thousands of assorted bits of medical equipment, from masks to scalpels, to syringes, to other, rarer items.

This floor also housed my professional office. This was the first such space I saw and was in one of the very few wholly closed-off rooms on the entire floor. My office was a large room with a huge desk in its middle, a number of cabinets, a huge closet, and something very surprising: a computer and a printer. The computer sat on the desk, rather fittingly, and was a powerful machine. The sight of it almost distracted me from my greater objective, but I managed to resist the temptation I was faced with and returned to the common area.

There was also a small room that was a closed lab space, a room that served as a generalized office space, and even a room that was filled with comfortable-looking bunk beds. There was also a large area filled with showers and toilets, and I quietly assumed that that area was for patients who needed to go to the restroom. By the time I was done studying this area nearly half an hour had passed.

I stepped into the elevator once more and glanced at the buttons before me. I had now explored all of the upper floors. The remaining floors were the first floor and the basement floors. "Hmm..." I muttered, the sound softly escaping my lips.

"Let's... check out the bottom floor." I said, after internally weighing which floor to visit next. I clicked the button and watched the doors slide closed. I felt the elevator shift, right before it began to descend.

"Now... What should I do here?" I asked myself. There was a grin on my face, which I saw in my reflection in the metal door of the elevator. It was an ambitious and unseemly grin.

"If I stayed I could get everything I ever wanted, but in a premodern society where my intelligence gives me even more of an edge than it would otherwise." I muttered, thinking aloud in the safety and privacy of my elevator.

"Heck... If I stay here and lean into what these people believe, who knows what could happen?" I ask myself. I can still see myself in the elevator's reflection and I see a glimmer of ambition gleaming in my eyes.

"Should I? If I do... This whole situation reminds me of 'The Road to El Dorado'," I muse, as the elevator slows to a stop. All is still for a moment, and then the elevator doors open up. The surprising sight that greets me on the manor's lowest floor is one that causes my eyes to widen and my heart to beat faster.

I am greeted by what is very obviously an underground farm. "U.G.F." suddenly makes a lot of sense.

In front of me, for perhaps a full kilometer, extends a massive tunnel in which countless massive grow lights shine brilliant purple light on tilled dirt, seeds, and in some cases even fully grown crops. Some of the crops even look ready to harvest!

The bottom floor of the mansion is an unusual and wonderful one that has brought a massive smile to my face. I feel my excitement to explore this place grow even bigger. And so does my excitement to converse with "Juniper" and his allies. I spend only a few moments looking at this massive farm, before I press the button to pay the "Clinic" a visit. As the elevator door closes in front of me, I begin to laugh in utter delight. What a truly wonderful mansion I have!