Charging interest in another world

“My head is dizzy, and everything is so dark. What just happened? Was that Auzyia I saw in my last moments?”

I try to open my eyes, it’s an exotic and uncomfortable feeling, something I have never felt before in my entire life, I can assure you. My vision tries to adapt, but it is as if I’m blind.

Wait a moment, am I blind?

I start itching my eyes to see something, but nothing. Hyperventilating, I question myself: what now?

A voice echoes. Far away, almost as if on the other side of a sports camp.

Now thinking about it, I cannot hear it either!

Ok, now’s not the time to panic. Try not to.

I start panicking.

God, what is happening?

“Varenkai?” I listen to a strange, feminine voice.

“What?” I ask, the word made no sense to me at all.

As I answered, everything began turning back to normal.

I mean, if you could say this situation is normal at all.

***

I open my eyes again, and it is still dark, but a lot less than before.

Now that I can feel it again, it’s freezing! What happened to that oven-like tropical forest we were feeling just minutes ago?

I look up and take a big, scary jump behind. This thing in front of me is not human, no, it is not! It has a size and build bigger even than Nikita’s! Not just that, but his skin is green, and I can swear I see some teeth coming out of his mouth.

Wait, is that an orc?

IS THAT AN ORC?

“Telysûn,” that same feminine voice strikes back again. I look in its direction, understanding nothing it’s trying to say.

I see a humanoid body, but at the time, the skin was not green, but blue as winter’s ice. Her eyes are captivating, charming even, as if I were looking at the night’s sky itself. Her clothes are all too alien to normal people. It feels almost like I’m meeting a cosplayer. She wears long robes with bright adornments, a pouch at her waist with a leather belt. Or at least it looks like leather.

“UHH!” This time, I look and it’s a familiar voice and face. Nikita is at my side, prone, also looking at the same absurdity.

“ERICK!” he screams at me.

For a second between our panic attack, a headache like nothing I've felt before starts. I put my hand over my forehead, trying to contain a strong feeling that was coming from inside of me to throw up whatever was inside my body right now.

It starts pulsing, as if the blood from my entire body was being dragged and compressed inside my head, and flowing through my brain. I tried shouting, but again, nothing was coming out of my mouth.

Oh my god, I think I’m going to faint. This is too heavy, am I having a stroke?

Suddenly, the pressure starts halting, little by little. I breathe heavily as if my lungs were being pressed, as my head was. The reality is that I couldn’t even breathe properly, and I felt this unholy pain.

“They don’t look okay at all. Did you cast it right?” says a strong voice, the orc.

“Of course! I wouldn’t cast wrong magic or something inappropriate in the stones of the heroes!” the woman answered angrily.

I look at them, are they talking in English? Well, that is one problem solved…

“Nikita! Are you ok?” I called my friend, who felt the same head pressure as I did.

“Yeah… Yeah… I think so. You?” he looks me in the eyes as if we just survived an airplane crash.

“I… I think so. But where are we?” I looked around, understanding that we were just inside an open and large stone structure.

For a second, I forgot the fact that two alien-like beings were talking to each other and looking at us. When that snaps out again, I push Nikita’s shoulder and we both crawl behind, facing our backs at a stone wall.

We both exchanged glances with these two creatures. The air tenses up, nobody says anything for a while, until the orc calmly starts.

“Did he just speak in Novrii?”

“Yeah, I think so,” the woman answers.

She is more visible this time. Except for the fact that her skin is blue, she also has pointy ears. Is she an elf?

Looking at the orc, he was different. Not only does he speak in a calm tone, but he is wearing clothes typical of medieval era nobles. His hair has long dreadlocks and is well-treated, and he carries only a small sword, similar to a Gladius. Half of his torso was exposed, showing a somewhat skinny musculature for your typical orc story.

They both look younger, almost the same age as we, maybe the orc could be even younger.

Wait a moment, I recognize those too…

“Humans, are you feeling better? Can we introduce ourselves already?” she says.

I interject.

“Are you Melirya and Jopliv?”

They looked at each other, and they couldn’t suppress their surprise.

“Y-Yes, we are,” she smiled.

“How do you know, sir hero?” she questioned.

Wait, what? Sir hero?

Okay, I’m not stupid, we were over the hero summoning stone before all that strange phenomenon happened, I’m pretty sure we were summoned, but HOW and WHY?

By the way, something is wrong. When you summon someone, you exchange for another hero. And the hero that is asking needs to be the hero of another world first. But nobody came out of the stone we stepped on when we were with Sandra.

Ignoring her question, I made another one. My face was that of a thinking man.

“Right, before that, who did you send to our world?”

They look at each other again, but this time, I can see that the elf girl is making a funny face.

“Well… Nobody,” she answered, looking down.

What? This makes no sense. What about the exchange?

My face looked confused for a moment. Nikita looked at me, surprised too. He seemed to understand our situation, little by little.

“You see, Mr Hero… The legends say this abandoned crypt had stones that could call heroes without offering ourselves to the pact. Seems like ages ago, a powerful mage passed the pact being the hero of another world to create this reserve stone for a time of necessity.”

Okay, now that’s new for me. Did one of those two write this crap?

“They say he was powerful enough to create fireballs the size of the celestial peaks!” she continued.

“You mean, like meteors?”

“Exactly! In the legends, they say he went to your world to fight against giant beasts like monsters. It says that he decided the best approach was to destroy them all with a heavy meteor he created, protecting only the few of your species that were alive.”

Is she talking about the dinosaur era?

What the hell? What about the stories about a period after they all died, when our planet became a burning hell? I put my hand to my forehead, but this time, I’m only confused.

Wait a moment…

So are they charging interest on our world?