JessicaRae

Bit of a content warning for this chapter, the history Allan learns here gets a bit dark. I don't believe that it goes too deep as to become triggering, but I wanted to give fair warning anyways.

My shower was kept short as possible while still getting the job done.  For the first five minutes, the water that gathered in the combination tub shower ran brown with muck. The body wash, shampoo and conditioner that sat in the cabinet were a bit fruitier than my usual choices and I didn’t at all recognize the brands, but they left my skin feeling clean and softer and my hair a good bit shinier than it had been previous. Overall I was rather happy with the results. The oversize fluffy purple towel was rather luxurious and far from the three nearly threadbare bath towels I was used to from my home. I made another mental note to buy some new towels as well. 

I used the hand sprayer attachment from the shower and rinsed the tub out as best I could after I had stopped dripping water everywhere. It was almost a sense of spiritual relief as the remaining filth washed down the drain. I had certainly gotten the adventure I wished for, but now my mind was less troubled by the fear and panic that had consumed me the last twenty-four hours. Seeing that filth drain away felt like watching all of those negative feelings wash away too. I vowed then to make a fresh start with these people. It wouldn’t do to let my anxieties hold me back from taking some enjoyment from getting a surprise vacation to another world. Not just anyone could say they had ever had the opportunity, so why not make the best of it while I could?

Just as I was about to dress, I heard a knock on the door. I quickly wrapped the towel around my waist before any potentially embarrassing moments. 

“Allan? I have your clothes from the wash, I’m just going to open the door a crack and put them on the counter, okay?” It was Grace’s voice that filtered through the door. That woman was an angel, even back then, I swear.

“Thanks, Grace, go ahead. I’ve got a towel on.” The door quickly opened just a crack and I saw her hand squeeze through with my jeans shirt and socks, all folded nicely and placed on the vanity. The door then closed and I heard the footsteps of Grace walking away. The clothes were cleaned and I almost wondered if she had somehow replaced them with identical copies. The fabric felt refreshed and smelled of fresh cotton. I was flabbergasted at the results. This magic stuff was no joke! I’ll admit to some disappointment when I pulled the shirt on. After wearing that sleep shirt loaned to me, this one felt rough and heavy by comparison. It would have to do for the moment though. Not like I had much other choice. I felt vastly more prepared for the day ahead however now and was even a bit eager to explore what this new world had to offer.

By the time I had made it to the kitchen, a plate was on the counter holding a sandwich and a handful of orange crisps that almost looked like an odd mix of a cheese cracker and a potato chip. Grace was sitting in one of the armchairs near a window and holding a phone to her ear, but upon noticing me, motioned to the plate and then to me. Her meaning was clear. I took a quick glance at the stove top and looked at the clock. Apparently it was just before noon. 

“Goodness,” I thought. “I really take some long naps when I'm exposed to all of this magic mumbo jumbo.” Too true buddy, at least you’ll finally learn to enjoy a good nap. 

I sat down at the small bar top that divided the kitchen and living room to eat my food. It was actually rather good and my thoughts on the orange crisps actually turned out to be fairly spot on. They tasted heavily of baked cheese, but also carried a hint of a few other things I couldn’t readily identify. The sandwich really hit the spot too, it seemed to be a simple ham and cheese, but the flavors were vibrant and the ham held a bit of sweetness that really complimented the package nicely. As I ate, though I hadn’t really at all intended to, I found myself listening in on the phone conversation that Grace was holding just across the room. 

“Yes, dad, I took precautions. The wards were set before I went to sleep. You taught me better than that. I had a feeling about him though, and he just seemed so lost and afraid, I had to help him! What else was I going to do? Leave him there? Turn him into the council? The second option probably wouldn’t be too bad, but you know how grumpy the night receptionist is. He probably would have ended up in a quarantine cell for the rest of his life before the bureaucrats approved any plan to send him home.” I really didn’t like the sound of that. The woman paused for a few moments and then winced at what I could assume was her father’s reply. 

“I know, I know. My head is going to stay just where it is though isn’t it? I know you wouldn’t let me down like that, daddy.” Her voice slipped into a younger tone that reminded me strongly of Arianna just that morning. This woman obviously had that man wrapped around her finger. I found myself suppressing a laugh at her obvious manipulation despite the apparent troubles I could find myself in with this council she spoke of. 

Apparently it worked too, judging by the way her expression lit up. “You’re the best dad! I promise you I’ll make him behave until you have the paperwork done!” A pause. “By the spirits! Of course not! He seems to be a good sort, just a bit lost, possibly in more ways than one.” I mean, she wasn’t wrong. I really was. I may not have known the full truth of the phrase at the time, but I really was.

“Okay dad, I love you! Talk to you again soon!” I heard a loud and exasperated sigh emit from the woman as she laid back in the chair, dropping her phone into her lap. Her hands came up to her face and rubbed at it for a moment before she turned in place and looked over to me. 

“Sorry ‘bout that. I called my dad to try and get things moving, but he felt the need to give me a lecture on bringing weird men home in the middle of the night.” That seemed fair. “Good news is though, he is going to do the paperwork needed to get you a travelers visa. When he has it ready, we will just need to go to the council building and get your information put into the system.”

I kept my response measured. “So I am just going to walk in there, tell them who I am and they are just going to accept that?” That didn’t sound like a governmental agency at all. Politicians were corrupt and greedy individuals though, with no sympathy for an individual. At least, that's how I knew them to be in my world.

“Oh I am sure they will have plenty of questions and read you and me both the riot act to make sure you don’t step out of line, but between a few favors pulled in by my dad and a few greased pockets, I’m sure everything will work out. Off worlders are pretty rare, but they do occur. Most come from worlds possessing magic though, and are usually better equipped to handle the situation than you are, no offense. As for your identity here? Yeah, you tell them who you are and they give you credentials based on that.” She stopped for a moment and gave a thoughtful look. “You actually have a pretty unique opportunity here, you know? You can be anyone you want to be as long as you are here. Hmmf, oh well. I need to take a shower real quick. Feel free to hang around on the couch. I put a book on the table you might find interesting. I’ll bring you down to the bar after that and you can take a peek around. Just make sure you make it back up here before closing time. I’d hate for you to get lost yet again.”

I waved at her as she walked back to her room, but my attention was more on that lost thought she had shared. It was a fascinating concept to me and really held my interest. If given the opportunity, who would I choose to be? I had always been Allan. I had never really given much serious thought to my in real life identity. Online was a different story, but that was just online. Nothing online was real. Except when it was. 

I continued munching on the provided lunch as I pondered the question. Anyone I wanted to be… I could make myself older or younger, I could have even made myself out to be some sort of actual alien from another world. No one here could prove me wrong. I knew I would have to think about it for a while before I was prepared to give an actual answer.  At least the food was good.

When I finished the plate, I stood and took it to the sink, placing it in the basin that had other dishes already in it. I then walked to the couch and sat on the shorter side that hadn't been folded out into a bed. As Grace had said, a book was sitting on the coffee table. The thing looked like it had been stolen from a grade school classroom, but this history textbook was likely just the thing to learn the basics from. I might have guessed that it had been borrowed from her older daughter’s school backpack since her youngest was probably only in kindergarten, but then again, the subject matter contained within might be a bit too in depth even for a fourth grader if the Ancient Greek looking bust on the cover meant anything. I shrugged my shoulders and pulled the second bottle of sports drink out of my bag before laying back with the book and began flipping through pages.

Evidently, my earlier thoughts on the matter were indeed correct as I read through the history of this world. Things were incredibly similar between this and my original world in the vast scope of things. Many events seemed to be the same or at least similar to what I learned in school. Many names seemed to be different and there were the everpresent effects of magic existing that shook things up, but I was able to follow along and piece together a rather interesting if brief knowledge of the history here. Things like the crusades seemed to have never really happened, but there were several small scale wars in the area though that seemed to accomplish much the same things. The squabbles mainly centered on philosophies concerning magic and harboring non-humans that one side or the other deemed as ‘evil’. Coming forward in time, it seemed that exploration had happened much more quickly here than in my own world and colonialism was still rampant, possibly even more so. The so called conquerors of savage lands were aided in their explorations by the mages they carried with them. Such mages were able to assist in locating landmasses and increased the rat at which their ships could travel. As a result there were many horrific stories mentioned in the book including ones of completely massacring a group of native non-humans that inhabited the area I could recognize as Hawaii. None of the magma dwellers as the text described them had survived the settling by eastern invaders as they waged war against the Vulcoro, or ‘People of earth and fire’ as they called themselves.  

This world had held its own version of the witch trials too. In the americas, one of the native peoples were a group of shapeshifters that had lived a nomadic lifestyle, changing themselves to their heart’s content into various shapes to become closer to the natural world which they held as sacred. When the settlers came from across the oceans, they attempted to hide amongst them as fellow colonists in order to survive. Once one was discovered after revealing themself to someone they thought they could trust, the colonies lit up in flames of what they thought was cleansing fire. What it really was, was pure and simple hatred towards anything that wasn’t them. With little way to truly tell who was human and who wasn’t they had come up with a series of gruesome tortures that would supposedly force any changeling to shift their form in order to avoid the pain. I was horrified reading some of the details.

Disturbed by what I read, I quickly moved on from that era and into more modern history. Apparently at one point in time, the non-human community attempted to hole up and hide from the human population of the world. Parts of this movement would lead into what seemed to me as analogous to the first world war albeit nearly thirty years earlier. Humans of several countries made the terrible leap of logic that this was their chance to rid the world of the people that didn’t adhere to their ideals of what a person should be. Other countries saw this for the evil act it was and banded together for the greater good to stop the aggressors. Alliances formed and war erupted on a global scale. Whereas the great war of my homeworld had only lasted four years, the conflict here had raged nearly three times that length at eleven bloody years. Disturbingly, another war erupted just two decades after, when several bands of the magical races came together and formed a country in what I recognized as Australia that only existed as the platform for them to wage war on the humans that had attempted to eradicate them. This war only lasted two years, but the scale of bloodshed was ridiculous during that time as both sides saw heavy losses both military and civilian. This war eventually came to end in essentially a stalemate as the armies of human soldiers were ill equipped to deal with the incredibly powerful magic that the other side could bring to the field of battle, but the opposing side was stopped in its tracks by the threat of the human’s latest weapon of mass destruction. In an eerie parallel development, that weapon that ended the second global war was once again the atomic bomb. 

In recent history, just over a century later at this point, the world had settled into a somewhat uneasy peace as the next generation after the wars had begun to cross the boundaries that had once separated their peoples. There were still some definite issues with descrimination between humans and the magical races, but the gap seemed to be narrowing. There were still a multitude of examples of groups thinking themselves oppressed in one way or another and causing a racket. The most recent entries in the book seemed to deal with one particular group of humans in the Mediterranean region that had tried to hold force segregation on a bunch of local schools, eventually culminating in a hostage situation that a group referred to as the knights of the circle dealt with rather swiftly. 

Looking through the references, I learned that the knights of the circle were a storied group of actual knights drawn from several of the communities in Europe, both human and not. It represented a task force established to promote unity between the peoples of the world and to quell the usually minor squabbles between both peoples before they could blow up into another large scale conflict. The group was in fact descended from a similar circle of knights that had existed during the fifteenth century or so in what was the first recorded successful kingdom that counted members of all races of sentient life as citizens. Unfortunately that country had been razed and conquered by another nearby power that saw the peaceful nation as anathema to their own beliefs. The modern knights were commissioned to uphold those ideals though and they had ever since shortly after the last world War.

Despite the darkness of it all, I found myself really enjoying learning about all of this from the surprisingly thorough and honest textbook. It was incredible to me comparing and contrasting one world to the other. Both had their high points and both had their lows. The world I came from had gotten over themselves much quicker during the years of war that plagued it, but also hadn't made many of the same strides that this one seemed to be making towards a longer lasting peace. 

It was most of an hour later when Grace finally came back out of her room and pulled me from the depths of the history textbook. She looked a lot more put together now to me. For one, she was now dressed in a pair of ripped and faded blue skinny jeans and a scoop necked black shirt that had the words "professional intoxicologist" scrawled across her chest. A pair of high heeled boots completed the attractive but casual attire and I suddenly no longer had doubts about how she was making money. The woman was gorgeous. My mind of course chose that moment to shove my foot into my mouth. 

"Wow, you're telling me you've had two children already and can still pull off a look like that?" 

The woman froze and looked at me and it was all I could do to prepare for the worst. I was taken by surprise then, when she burst out laughing. 

"Oh spirits take me! Allan! You are so sweet!" She calmed down a bit after just a moment more, a wide smile still plastered on her face. "I've only given birth to one child actually. Ariel actually is by birth the product of Andrew and a former fling of his from before I came along. I really do appreciate the compliment though! Now come on, door opens in less than an hour and I need to prep the bar still."

Reading the history was fun. Looking back on my memories of the car ride here was enlightening now that I was past the panic and could accept what I saw. 

Going downstairs and getting an up close look at magical society in its natural habitat? That sounded like a psychological study in social anxiety for the me I was in the old world. 

But I could be anyone here. This was my chance to change as much as I wanted about who people saw me as. 

So for the me that was excited to experience more of this new world? A magical bar sounded like the perfect place to be.