A few days after my thirty-fifth birthday, actually, nothing big happened, well at least nothing big besides that one very big thing.
You know what I mean, it's just one of these things that suddenly happen without any buildup at all. They just happen and you have no clue as to how or why. Though what happened to me was on a slightly different scale.
I was just walking over the street and bam! No, there weren't any cars and the light was green for me in the first place. There also weren’t any suspicious lights, magic circles that suddenly appeared or strange voices. It just ended up happening while I was crossing an empty street on my way to work.
One moment, I was on that empty street, and the next I was running away in a panic. What was I running from? I had no idea, well, not until I turned around a corner and caught a glimpse of a man screaming and running after me a good twenty meters behind me.
Only when I had turned around two more corners and could neither see nor hear the man anymore did I finally stop.
For the first time, I got to take a good look around. What I saw, was something I had never before seen in my life and yet, it was something I was very familiar with. The alley I had ended up in was very small, just barely enough for two people to walk side by side and packed with one house beside the other without wasting even the smallest bit of space. Even the upper floors were hanging over the street until it was almost impossible to see the sky.
But where I normally expected to see the brick, steel, and glass of modern architecture, all I could see were walls of wood and stone, shuttered close windows and doors made of wooden planks. Ignoring the fact that I didn't have the slightest idea how I got here, I could at least tell that this was some kind of historical site. It looked straight up medieval.
Although, that thought changed the moment I looked down on my hands, lost in thought.
It's interesting what kind of things you sometimes end up realizing in the most inappropriate situations.
Being a researcher is probably the occupation were you look at your own hands the most. Most Jobs are supposed to be done while looking at something else, be it the face of your customer or the monitor of your computer, but being a researcher, you have to be very careful whenever you start fiddling with small objects and stuff, so you always end up looking at your hands.
Ok, watchmakers get to see their hands even more probably... Seamstresses too... as well as pretty much every single craftsmanship profession...
Ok, researchers don't look at their hands the most, but still quite a lot.
What I wanted to say is this: I quickly realized that those hands weren't mine. Taking a look at my body, unsurprisingly, the rest was unfamiliar as well, and a lot smaller to boot. The body I was stuck in was maybe fifteen years old at most, not that I had ever been very good at guessing someone's age.
I never understood how people could guess someone's age just by their looks. The few times I had to guess, I was lucky when I got it right within a range of ten years.
On that note, do you know these kinds of women? They tell you: "Hey, try guessing my age!"
I say: "Let's better not, I'm bad at it."
They say: "Just try! Doesn't matter if you get it wrong."
And when I make them ten years older then they actually are, they suddenly act all huffy as if I just insulted them. I mean, I warned them, I told them I was bad at it!
Anyways, let's get back on track, all of that is not very important. What actually was important at that time, would be the fact that my clothes were completely dirty and tattered and of pretty low quality. The parts of my body I could see were dirty as well and I quickly found several badly healed scars. Combine that with the deep seated hunger I was feeling, and everything indicated that I had a life on the streets behind me. Well, my new body at least.
Oh, and did I mention that certain body parts were missing while others had been added? No, my race didn't change, just my gender.
What? Did you expect me to start screaming at my misfortune or go raving mad? First of all, that simply wasn't my style, and secondly who hasn't at least once imagined how it would be to be of the other gender?
I mean, I wasn't attached to my dick, in a metaphorical sense, as if it was the only thing that made me who I was, and while I certainly did have some apprehensions... a lot of apprehensions about starting a relationship with another man, considering my track record, I didn't have any relationship plans for the near future. In the first place, I had a lot of more urgent problems. Urgent... Why does this word always make it sound like you need to go to the toilet? Let's just say, I had more important problems.
One of those problems I already mentioned, I was extremely hungry. Though that was actually easily taken care of, considering what I was holding in my hands. While I didn't recognize them at all, what I held was some kind of fruit that looked like a pear with the skin of an apple. Well, when I bit into it, it tasted almost like an apple, a spicy apple. Weird, but surprisingly good.
Thinking about it for a moment, it became obvious why I had been running away earlier. I most certainly didn't pay for my food.
Or, should I say the person whose body I was occupying didn't pay?
Actually, maybe they did pay and I'm just assuming things... Yeah... Probably not.
As an avid reader of fantasy and science-fiction, it was inevitable to get involved with good old Isekai stories at some point, so I could at least take a good guess as to what kind of situation I was currently in. Considering what I had seen until now, I could only get to two possible conclusions. Either I was in a coma having a very weird dream, or, for some reason, I had traveled to another world, taking over this body.
Well, there were also some other possibilities like an alien invasion or Divine punishment, but the end result didn't really change. I couldn't do anything about it right now and had to priorities my survival. I didnt plan to do somethig as stupid as killing myself in hopes of waking up.
So, let's sum it up. In the span of the last few minutes, I who was a successful, male, researcher in a modern world, had become a hungry, female, child living on the streets of a medieval city.
Oh, and did I already mention that it was snowing?
