Chapter 2:

The Outlaws

Literary Tense


There were three things this could be. One, a hallucination. I’d hallucinated before, though, and it didn’t feel like this. Not like I’d been transported entirely to another world. Second, a dream…there wasn’t really a dreamlike quality about it. I could smell the air, feel the fabric—it was an animal pelt, I thought—under me, feel the heat that didn’t exist back home…but a lot of dreams felt real at first. Could I be in a coma? I remembered getting hit by that car; going head over heels. I could easily be in the hospital right now, connected up to a bunch of feeds and tubes.

The chance of this being a prank show was basically zero, since I wasn’t really on the public radar at all and this scenario was too high-budget for my friends to pull—and they wouldn’t do that anyway. So that left only one remaining option; this was real.

That was the least likely option and I shouldn’t even be entertaining it. Occam’s Razor said coma, straightforwardly, was probably the truth. The likelihood of a world I’d invented being real and co-existing alongside my own and the likelihood of me being thrown into an alternate dimension were both next to zero.

But I was a fantasy writer. It was an impossible career to have without being at least a little open to the possibility of the most unlikely scenario—being open to the possibility of magic, and other worlds.

“She’s awake,” the man said. “How did you know where we were?”

“I had no idea. I just turned up here.” I’d written a group of fugitive Asan before. Minor criminals, escaped slaves from the capital city, people harassed by the government into hiding, revolutionaries.

“Who are you?”

I coughed a little to clear my lungs. I’d written the Asan as well-intentioned, so I might as well say the truth—minus saying I’m the not-so-benevolent God of this world. “My name’s Naomi.” I swung my legs over the side of the cot, which was made of a dark brown pelt set up on carved wooden poles. The man and girl both tensed, but I stayed seated on the edge. “Naomi Furukawa.”

A few other Asan came to look at me, curious, but the man waved them off and said seriously, “Where are you from?”

“A far-away country called Canada.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” the man said.

Yeah, you wouldn’t’ve.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“It’s up north.”

“Then why are you so pale? You don’t look like you’re from the north.”

The story I’d written was set in the southern hemisphere, meaning that all the main characters associated north with heat. “It’s far north. Further north than Kotorri and on a different continent. It’s cold, and the summer and winter are switched. But in any case, my family are immigrants, so my skin color and looks aren’t native to that country anyway.” Neither were most people’s, actually, given that First Nations were still only about 3% of the population. Not that I was going to explain my personal colonial empire at that moment.

“Where are you an immigrant from?” the man demanded.

“Another far-off country called Japan. Like I said, my family is. Look, who are you?” He had close-cropped hair and a militaristic bearing, and was paired with a bright-eyed girl in her late teens. I was starting to get an idea who this was, and wanted to see if I was right.

“Why should I tell you?”

“I told you so much about myself!” Why had I written such an obstinate, unpleasant guy? Well, for the sake of conflict—and because of course, someone growing up as part of a maltreated conquered nation would be paranoid and obstinate.

“I never said I was going to return the favor.”

“Come on,” the girl said to him, “she seems nice.”

“She could be Ry’san.” That was the word the Asan used for the Ry’ke, taking their word Ry and affixing it to the Asan’s own word for people.

“She’s not Ry’san, look at her.”

“From Ry’keth, then,” the man said. “They’ve got people from all kinds of nations bowing their heads to them like fools.”

“I have no loyalty to Ry’keth,” I said, raising my hands in a display of harmlessness. Did the Asan read that gesture the same way—I couldn’t remember! I needed my world notes!

Asan are not really animalistic but they do puff up their fur when they get defensive, and raise hands as part of the same desire, to make self seem bigger.

I remembered that note suddenly and lowered my hands. Luckily neither of them seemed too angry. It was natural for me to be a bit defensive and aggressive, I supposed.

“Look, I have important information. Let me prove to you that I know something, and in exchange, can you guys tell me some things?”

The man frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Your name is Casselian,” I said plainly. “Her name is Jayla.”

Jayla turned to Casselian. “Hey, did I say your name before? How does she know?”

“You could easily pick up our names somewhere,” Casselian said. “We could have said them while we thought you were sleeping.”

“You didn’t,” I said. “Look—” If I told them anything about being the author of this world, they’d be (1) confused and (2) extremely angry, wouldn’t they be? Casselian and Jayla had both been enslaved in Ry’keth, at different points. They both had dead families and a country and culture the Ry’keth empire was trying to eliminate. I’d made all that stuff up for, what, drama?

I knew that wasn’t completely right, but at that moment, I thought about it and just felt bad.

“—I was a spy in Ry’keth,” I ended up saying. “For Canada, who’d…we’d gotten worried, about their growing power from across the ocean.”

“They’re building ships,” Jayla said, “I told you they were building ships!”

“I was found out and tried to escape, but it was a mess. I lost part of my memory and don’t remember how I ended up here, and I don’t know the date. Just tell me those two things, and I should be able to let you know some important information. I found out a lot.” That was an understatement. I knew this world like the back of my hand.

“We found you lying out there, passed out.” Jayla jabbed her thumb towards the tent door.

“Jayla,” Casselian said.

“It’s fine, Cass! As for the date, it’s the ninth of Sesu.”

That meant the temperature and day length was roughly equivalent to Mexico in May. Aside from that…there was something about that date.

“Year?”

“Kol 133.”

Oh, shit.

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