Belated Summoning

When I was younger, I didn’t fit into what you might think of as “normal” society. I was quiet and didn’t have many friends – well, ANY friends, if I’m being honest. Being socially awkward meant that I was a prime target for bullying, so I did what I could to avoid the sorts of confrontations that would lead to bruises, bumps or broken limbs. I kept my head down throughout my school life, slipping into the shadows that protected me but also further isolated me from my classmates.

This withdrawal left me with few options for real interactions, and that led me to seek refuge in stories, both my own and the ones I found in books and movies. From thrillers to romance, from historical tales to fantasy epics, I watched and read it all. I built personas inside my mind based on the characters I loved, and I fell asleep every night imagining myself as them, especially the grand heroes in magical adventures. The excitement of journeys I had never taken became my entire focus.

Before long, I discovered anime, and with it, isekais. Once that concept was planted in my young brain, there was no dislodging it. The thought of being transported from my ordinary, boring, lonely life into a world of mystery excited me like nothing else. When I read the stories to myself, I had no trouble mapping my own features onto the overpowered, magnetically charming protagonists. When I walked home from school, I eyed the trucks trundling along the roads, wondering in passing whether one of them was secretly a gateway to a mystical land. And when I fell into bed at night, I desperately hoped that I would wake up as the protagonist of my own anime, ready to save a whole world and win the love of however many grateful princesses happened to be there.

But it never happened.

I woke up every morning staring at the same unremarkable ceiling from the same unremarkable bed, all as the same unremarkable me.

In spite of my delusions of grandeur and fantastical dreams, I remained grounded in my studies throughout high school. Some part of my brain recognized the need to at least try to make a go of it in the real world; maybe it was some small but strong survival instinct ensuring that I didn’t become a hermit, starving under piles of books and old takeout boxes. There was also the fact that I didn’t have much else going on to distract me, so when I wasn’t building castles in the clouds, I was focusing on my homework. The effort paid off; I managed to be accepted into a reputable university several hours from home. With a little help from my parents, I started my studies, and I even got a part time job to help with expenses. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I truly discovered myself or underwent a metamorphosis in college, but things definitely started changing.

The changes were slow at first: meeting my roommates and neighbors, finding new pursuits in classes, and even getting my first girlfriend (our relationship ended almost as soon as it started though). I stumbled a lot as I navigated this new world of social interactions and expanded my pursuits, but I learned more than I expected to. I tried, taking advantage of the new surroundings to find ways to reinvent myself and be better than I had been. Most of all, I found myself having fun. I liked the experiences I was having, the people I was meeting, even the classes I was taking. I thought less and less about being swept up into a fantasy world and becoming a hero. I still liked the stories, but they no longer dominated my thoughts.

After a couple of years had passed, I couldn’t recognize my old self from within my memories. I had changed physically, of course; I started working out and eating better which led to a “glow-up” as my little sister called it. But the biggest change was mental. I was an adult with well-rounded interests and actual social skills. My relationships with my family grew stronger, and I had a network of friends I loved more than I ever thought I could. Eventually I met a nice girl in my class, we dated for a while, and after we’d graduated together, I proposed. When she said yes, it felt like magic, but the real kind, if that makes sense.

She still had a master’s program ahead of her, though, so our wedding was put off for a few years. Meanwhile I fumbled my way through the working world with my shiny new degree and a renewed interest in the fantastical. I was hoping to eventually make the same stories that captivated me so much when I was young, perhaps to bring some joy to others who were like I had been. I had decided to pursue digital design and animation in hopes of bringing the ideas of others to life, and it wasn’t long before I had a job at a studio working on the sorts of projects I’d once fallen asleep dreaming of. It wasn’t immediately glamorous but my future was looking almost too bright to look forward to.

I distinctly remember the night when I, at 26 years old, was lying in my bed, my soon-to-be wife lying beside me as I fell asleep once again under my unremarkable ceiling, in my unremarkable bed, as the unremarkable me.

Unremarkable but happy.

Then it happened.

Even before I opened my eyes I knew something was wrong. Aside from the pajamas I was wearing, the matching pair I had with my fiancée, there was not a hint of familiarity I could sense. I couldn’t feel the warmth of her next to me anymore. I couldn’t hear the low vibrations of our fan spinning in the corner. I couldn’t even smell the slight fragrance of the flowers we had spent the last two years growing right outside the window, the ones we planted the day I proposed.

It was all wrong.

As my eyes tore open, the amount of information around me was paralyzing. The room I was lying in now was large, yet it was suffocating as there were innumerable designs scrawled across every surface, cryptic scribbles in a language I didn’t recognize. Even without understanding the meanings, I had the overwhelming conviction that it all connected to where I was now struggling to sit up, in an empty circle drawn in chalk in the center of the wooden floor. As my mind raced, light began emanating from around the room with seemingly no point of origin, like the air itself began to glow faintly.

I tried to scramble to my feet, but before I could gain any composure, an entire wall fell away to reveal a deep, gaping darkness. I froze. My eyes adjusted before any other part of me, revealing a robed figure approaching from the dark space.

“This one must be a success, right?” a quiet voice pierced the eerie silence that I had only just become aware of.

I opened my mouth to speak but no sound came out. It was like my vocal cords had seized up. My eyes widened, and I grasped at my throat, helpless to my situation.

“Oh, no!” The voice yelped in response to my panicked expression. “Try to calm down and take a deep breath! Your body has just undergone dimensional migration and is in a state of disarray. It may sound scary but with a cool head and some rest, your systems should fully adapt!”

The figure, smaller than I originally thought, had reached the circle I stood in, and it extended an arm toward me reassuringly. I couldn’t help but back away from the stranger’s touch.

I studied the thing that stood before me as I tried to take measured breaths. Looking for details, features, anything that would indicate who or what this was, I saw nothing but a vague silhouette, a materialized shadow in three dimensions. It was almost difficult to make out the edges of it.

I blinked. As if all the rest of the light in the room was suddenly sucked into the shadow before me, my vision darkened, and I passed out.

Some time later, I woke again, still in a strange place. But this time it was at least comfortable. A dream within a dream? I hoped as I kept my eyes shut tightly and mentally evaluated myself. My heart wouldn’t stop pounding. I took a deep breath and tried to focus on what I could feel, what I could hear, what I could –

“You’re awake!” A familiar voice interrupted my thoughts enthusiastically.

I squinted. All I could see was a pair of shining blue eyes boring into me, inches away from my face.

I jerked up in surprise and felt my forehead smack against the face of the person leaning over me.

“Ow.”

I sat up more slowly. As I rubbed my eyes and my newly bruised head, I saw my victim face down on the bed next to me, quietly groaning from the impact.

Feeling a bit of an advantage for the first time, I drew myself up and looked down on the person beside me, making full use of my larger frame.

“What’s going on? Where am I?” I attempted to inject a note of force in my voice as I spoke, and I was thankful that I mostly succeeded.

“You should already be able to figure out the situation since the spell only works on people familiar with the basic premise…,” The person lying there grumbled into the bedding before sighing and rolling over to look at me.

A frail girl met my stare, her eyes the same bright blue I had seen before. She looked to be perhaps in her mid teens, although it was hard to tell for sure, and she had short, light hair that was matted over half of her face from the sheets she had temporarily buried herself in. Her voice was husky but feminine, and her fingers smoothed down her plain dress almost reflexively.

“The basic premise,” I echoed. “Spell?” I shook my head as if the words were gibberish, and in this context, they were.

“Spell,” she replied. She looked impatient, but she didn’t say anything else.

“Where’s my fiancée?” I asked, feeling the quick cold stab of panic. I looked around the room, scanning for her, for anything that was familiar. My fingers gripped the bed linens as I swung my legs over the side of the bed, but a wave of dizziness kept me from leaping to my feet. I inhaled slowly, counting to ten inside myself. This has to be a dream, I thought. A bad, silly dream.

The girl remained expressionless as she tapped one finger idly on the bedding. “She’s not here. But don’t worry, she’s safe. She’s back in your world.”

My world? What does that even mean? I shook my head quickly as if to clear it, but the room and the girl stayed unchanged. I felt like reality was just out of my grasp.

“Where. Am. I,” I said again, trying for an edge of malice to mask the fear. The girl smirked, waiting.

I felt that cold trickle again, this time down my spine. Back in your world. Which meant that I… was not. I was somewhere else, somewhere not my world. But where could that even be? What sense did that make?

Desperately, I fought with myself to believe that this was just a dream or misunderstanding of some kind. There was no logic to this, after all. I wanted it to be a hallucination. But somehow I knew. I knew deep inside myself that this was reality. Some part of me clicked together with assurance that was both steady and terrifying. I was in another place.

“Where is this place?” I asked now. “Did you bring me here?”

“Yes! I summoned you as my proxy to he-”

“Why?” The cry in my head escaped my throat and interrupted what was probably the beginning of an expositional monologue. She cast an irritated look at me and raised an eyebrow.

“Why me?” I stammered. My head was beginning to ache. “Why did you bring me here?”

“As I was saying,” she sniffed, managing to look down her nose at me despite my greater height, “I chose you after watching your progress over the years. Every member of my family, the royal family, may choose a preselected candidate from any point in their lives with the purpose of acting as a proxy for the upcoming f-”

My blood was rushing in my ears. I understood the words she was saying, but together, they made no sense. I felt like I had been dropped into a story already in progress with no idea of the plot. What family? What progress? Had she been spying on me?

“Why now?” I wasn’t sure what “any point in their lives” meant, but if there was a reason for me to be in this place at this moment, I wanted to know what it was.

“That’s easy. Not only are you the fittest you’ll ever be since that new baby is going to stop you from working out as much, bu-”

“New… what?” My mind filled with static as my senses seemed to drift away from my body.

“Oops, you weren’t supposed to know that yet, my bad.” The girl’s unchangingly apathetic yet cheerful tone cut through the white noise, and I grasped her shoulders harshly.

“New baby,” I repeated in a voice that didn’t sound like my own. “My fiancée is pregnant?”

“She is,” the smirk deepened despite my fingertips cutting into her flesh. “Surprise, I suppose.”

“How do you know that? How could you even know that?”

“I told you, I’ve been watching your progress,” she replied, shifting out of my grasp. My fingers felt numb.