A Hero, If You Can Keep Him

The first human to pass from Earth in its twenty-first century to Nod in the waning days of Lugo’s Fourteenth Dynasty was a girl of fifteen years by the name of Francesca Conti, from Assisi, Italy. Next was Emmanuel Acheme, twenty-three, from Harcourt, Nigeria; then Lee Sangwoo, sixteen, from Busan, Korea; followed by Samantha Nguyen, twenty-seven, from Vancouver, Canada. None of these four had particularly much in common with any of the others, yet their stories ended on much the same note. All had perished by the time the fifth, Yamamoto Yuya from Osaka, Japan, arrived on Nod.

Yuya did have some things in common with those who came before him, most obviously with the Korean, Sangwoo. Aside from coming from adjacent countries with cultures influenced by each other and by shared neighbors, both were high school students, not fat but certainly sedentary in their lifestyles, with future prospects in computer science if not in professional sports. Both proudly wore the label of otaku, a Japanese word which for Yuya carried much the same meaning as geek might for an anglophone, but for Sangwoo implied an interest in Japanese popular culture specifically. As a practical matter, it meant they were fixated on much the same media, and both had watched or read many of the same treatments of how being suddenly transported into a fantastical otherworld might play out.

You would be forgiven for thinking these similarities would bode ill for Yuya, that his arrival on Nod would assuredly go as Sangwoo’s had. But for all their similarities, Sangwoo and Yuya were still different people. Different virtues, different vices, different ways of interpreting the world. And, when placed in grave circumstances, the smallest variation between two people can mean the difference between an unceremonious death and a rise to greatness.

Yuya's last morning in Japan didn't feel like the start of a path to greatness. His nose was stuffed up and he felt a faint pressure behind the eyes. A head cold, or maybe just hay fever, but his school didn't need to know if it was. The thought crossed his mind, for a brief moment, to get caught up on an assignment for the one college-level class he had enrolled in, an introductory Java programming course. He set it aside immediately; Java was an overrated programming language, anyway. Instead, when he crawled from his bed to his desk and fired up his PC, his cursor hovered between a video game– a Western role-playing game with a delightful open world, if not very deep mechanics for actual roleplay– and a pirated download of an anime featuring a young man reincarnated into a medieval fantasy world as a magic-wielding cat. Titillating shots of that world's womenfolk were the unapologetic focal point of the show, but every other aspect of it rode the line between painfully bad and comically bad. Yuya thought maybe he should look for something a bit more edifying to watch, read, or play, but no. If he were in a mood to be proactive, he would have gotten ahead on his assignment. Or sucked it up and gone to school. He reached for a tissue…

And blew his nose.

The sheet came away from his face red. It was the worst nosebleed Yuya had ever experienced. He coughed into the crook of his elbow. More red.

“Kuso”, he muttered. Then he stood, and nearly fell on his face from the wave of dizziness that washed over him. “Okaasan”, he called weakly, then thought, you heard your parents leave for work, idiot. He grabbed his phone, wondering whether to dial 119 or look up some non-emergency number, and made for the stairs to hopefully catch a neighbor outside.

He fell at the first step, and never felt his body hit the landing.

Yuya awoke on a street of fine yellow dust, between rows of whitewashed adobe houses like giant, lopsided sugar cubes. He was still wearing a t-shirt and pajama pants, and his smartphone was still in his hand, though the blood was gone from his lip and arm. He no longer felt even slightly ill, his nose open and his head clear. As he stood, the dirt burned against his bare feet, enough for his next move to be a power-walk toward the nearest shadow. That, moreso than the dirt road or the strange buildings, assured Yuya he wasn't in Osaka anymore. The air in that city never grew quite this hot, or nearly this dry. Shielding his eyes from the beating sun, he looked up, and found something like a moon visible in the daytime sky. Only, this moon was striped in silver, blue, and tan, and it took up an enormous portion of the firmament, rising nearly halfway to its zenith while a full quarter of the celestial body lay beneath the horizon.

A few people were out and about on this street. Not many, at this apparent late-morning hour, and they hugged the shade cast by the houses. Men and women both wore flowing overgarments made from thin sheets of cotton, generally in light colors: white, tan and yellow were most common. Everybody had some kind of head covering, ranging from a rolled cloth headband or something like a fez to a headscarf and veil that together left only the eyes visible. Only two seemed to notice Yuya, a young man maybe five years his senior and a girl about the age to be a first-year at his school, walking together until they stopped and stared at him. Each wore a yellow robe and an embroidered white cap, the faces and hair in between both a rich coppery color. His eyes were green, and hers a lavender that further drove home to Yuya that he was no longer on Earth. Nonetheless, they did on the whole appear human, though he couldn't correlate their appearance to any one particular race, culture, or ethnicity he knew of.

Not knowing how else to greet them politely, he clapped his hands to his sides and bowed at the waist. To his pleasant surprise, they returned the gesture, albeit with their hands in front of them, one in a fist with the other clasping it. Almost exactly like how the Chinese did it back on his planet.

The next surprise followed the first immediately, when the man greeted Yuya. “Heaven bless you, sorcerer.” he said, and was understood as clearly as if he were speaking Japanese in Yuya's own Kansai dialect. “We pray you find what you seek here, and return home in peace.”

Yuya stared dumbly for a few seconds before he could form a reply. “I… am not a sorcerer, or at least I don't think I am. I don't think I understand how I got here, any better than you do. Where, if it isn't too insane to ask, is here?”

The young man laughed nervously. “You appear from thin air in my sight and my wife's, and you fear to sound insane? This is the town of Ak-Toum, where the eastern end of the Kingdom of Jalabarta meets the northern end of the Galkha Desert.” When Yuya met him with a confused stare, he elaborated, “Jalabarta is the northernmost tributary realm to the Empire of Lugo.”

“Thanks, but I'm afraid I've traveled farther than you realize.” He gestured to the enormous planet looming over their heads. “We do not have that in the sky where I come from. What do you call this…” he swept his hand broadly across the horizon. “this world?”

The man took a step back, and his young bride clasped his arm. “All of it? Everything between the Turquoise Throne and the Place of Nightmares? You lay your feet upon Nod, my lord. I-I presume in asking, but… what are you? A god? A demon? The messenger of the Turquoise Emperor Himself?”

Yuya’s next decision was profoundly, in both a practical and a moral sense, correct, even if he made it for the wrong reasons. Impersonating a god or a demon sounded like a horribly tiring charade to keep up. “I am only a man.” He considered correcting himself to say boy, as he was only seventeen, but he glanced back at the man's wife. Definitely younger than him. This was a place where people had to grow up fast. “I am Yuya. Yamamoto Yuya, from the city of Osaka, in a country called Japan, in a world called Earth. Good to meet you.”

The man bowed again, relief and suspicion battling in his eyes. “I am Sorkil ba-Sorgat. My wife is Lahmki bi-Jashesh. We are natives of Ak-Toum, and wish you a pleasant stay within our walls, Yuya of Osaka.” The girl bowed again, but continued to let her husband speak for both of them. Maybe she was just shy, or maybe it would have broken some law or custom to do otherwise. She did speak to him, in a whisper, casting nervous glances back as they shuffled away.

Nod, Yuya decided, was a place that would chafe at his modern sensibilities.