A Land of Life

Yuya wandered the streets of Ak-Toum, looking for some kind of public venue, anywhere he could sit down out of the sun and talk to more locals. He needed to get his bearings. He was still reeling from the discovery of what had befallen him, from that first interaction. In his rational mind, it seemed like a dream he was bound to wake up from at any moment. But the sand scorched his bare feet, sweat stung his eyes, and the midday glare off the white buildings made him squint. Nod felt real.

He thought back to what had led up to his departure from Earth. He had coughed up blood, then fallen down the stairs looking for help. He could be in a coma, but he wasn't even sure people dreamed in comas, much less as vividly as this. He could be dead. This could be his reincarnation, or he might have entered into some realm of the afterlife. The former was a common premise for stories mirroring his situation, where someone from Earth found himself in a fantasyland. But, while it was based primarily on the Buddhist model of death and reincarnation, it took certain liberties with those teachings. A person reincarnated should be born anew, a new creature with no memories of the soul's past save the faintest instinctive recollections. Not cast into their next life in the same body, the same age, wearing the same clothes. He still had his cellphone in his hand, damn it. Actually, there was something he could do with that, at least in the short term. He'd come back to that thought. If this were some world of the dead, his things following him here might lend credence to ancient cultures who interred burial goods with their dead, like the richly-stocked tombs the pharaohs of Egypt were laid in. What was on his dead body on Earth, was here with him now. This place felt unusually Earth-like to be such a realm, though. Many Earth religions, Christianity perhaps most iconically, had a notion of Heaven as a paradise and Hell as a place of eternal torment. Other such places could be even more one-note than that: the Valhalla of the Norse specifically hosted a feast until the end of days, a paradise with only a narrow set of experiences to offer. Nod had people leading ordinary lives, geopolitics, at least one religion of its own with its own version of Heaven and Hell. Not things that suggested its residents were in some eternal end-state of being. Even if Yuya was dead, he yet walked among the living.

Living or dead, he was increasingly convinced this Nod was a real place, and he was really here. If some deity or cosmic force was behind it, then moving either backward– returning to Earth– or forward– finding some new path for his life here– would be far easier if he could understand who or what, and why. He would need to ask about the local religious beliefs, superstitions, understanding of magic, whatever could give him a foundational understanding of the greater forces at work in this world, to then expand and build upon. And if he learned to use magic along the way… well, if it was as real on Nod as Sorkil and Lahmki seemed to believe, that would make this whole situation a lot more fun.

But that was all the business of another day. Today, he needed to figure out food and shelter, getting a place to relax and time to think. And he had an idea.

Yuya was within sight now of a gate in Ak-Toum's defensive wall, which along most of its length was an earthen ramp behind a single outer layer of rough-hewn stone bricks. People trickled in, dressed in wide-brimmed hats or sweat-stained keffiyehs, their loins girded and their hands dusty. Farmers, it took him an embarrassingly long moment to realize, taking a break during the worst of the midday heat. He followed a group of them as they ducked together into a house. The structure looked no different than the other private homes on this street, except the door had been left ajar and a painted sign reading OPEN hung vertically from a peg on the frame. Yuya did a double-take when he realized he wasn't reading the Japanese hiragana, but symbols made up of overlapping wedges, each representing all the consonant sounds within a given syllable. The vowels, he could guess from context, despite not having spoken a word of this language before today. It still felt like Japanese to him, really, unless he stopped and thought about it. Shaking the thought loose of his head, he stopped to enter the low doorway.

The only light within reflected off the walls from high windows above a loft encircling most of the interior. It looked half a bar and half a family home, with children chasing each other in an open space ringed by low tables, where the laborers sat down on cushions to ale and a cold millet-and-herb pottage. Yuya seated himself next to a row of younger men, many about his own age. Two, including the one he sat beside, turned to stare at his strange clothes and pale, by this point slightly sunburned, skin.

He gave them a cross-legged bow, which they returned, and leaned to whisper to the nearest youth, about nineteen or twenty in a gray tunic with a long girt fringe and a straw hat hanging down his back by a cord.

“Hey, friend. What's your name?”

“I am Ashset ba-Ashfa, outlander. And you are?”

“Yuya of Osaka. A pleasure. Ashset, you strike me as a… a man who can appreciate both the simple and the fine pleasures of life. Would you care to see some drawings of pretty girls in… daring outfits, from the best artists in Lugo? I'll give you a peep for enough money to buy a mug and a bowl.”

Ashset smiled wryly. “Heaven bless you, stranger. You may not realize how much you are asking– food is still costly here from last year's bad crop– but I will still pay. A good bawdy show has not come through this town since I was hardly old enough to appreciate it, and, uh… the town mare is nearing the end of her racing days, if you take my meaning.”

“Old enough to be your mother?”

“My grandmother, given the ages some men are trying to get bride-prices out of their daughters these days.”

“Tell me about it.” Yuya wondered if Sorkil and Lahmki were one of the couples Ashset was taking issue with, or if this town had younger brides still.

“Perverts and degenerates, the men who enable their greed. And greed it is, no matter their talk of ‘mouths to feed’ in this mildest of famines.”

“Not like you, a good, old-fashioned horndog.”

Ashset smiled, and pushed some cold, angular things into Yuya's hand. Holding one up to the light, Yuya saw it was a coin, of sorts: a square wafer of pewter, with ridges running around the edges but the faces smooth and unadorned. Yuya caught a glimpse of Ashset’s wallet as he tied it back to his belt, a long rectangular box of carved wood.

Yuya braced his phone against the edge of the table, and navigated into some files he'd datamined from a mobile game. Namely, this was a gacha game, a genre that made its money largely from encouraging players to spend real yen, won, yuan or dollars to expand a collection of playable characters. This one, like many, kept its audience by making each new character more sexually appealing than the last. And the file he pulled up was a folder full of character portraits.

Soon, the entire table was huddled around Yuya, casting coins into a pile in his lap.