“Oh, it’s you again,” was one of those phrases Daniel wasn’t particularly fond of. It was up there with “Well well well, wot’s all dis den?” and “You’ll never catch me alive, hero!” While it wasn’t as likely to result in a fight, there was the promise of verbal, if not necessarily physical violence. It was one of those phrases that was used by slighted lovers, shopkeepers who you owed money in reparations to, and, occasionally, monarchs. Sometimes a combination of the above. 

Sally had her arms crossed, tapping her foot in the void, and Daniel got the distinct feeling she was getting even more annoyed at the fact that it wasn’t making any sound. He tried to move and found that the pain in his everything was gone. Wherever, whatever this place was, the damage to his body hadn’t been carried over. Speaking of which, it was his body again, which was a relief.

“Looks that way,” he said. The bench was there too, because the space between worlds doesn’t have to necessarily be uncomfortable. He sat down. 

“Are we dead again?” Sally asked. In another context this could’ve sounded remorseful, scared. But clearly Sally wasn’t going in for the ‘lost and scared in another world’ thing, and was taking it in -- annoyed -- stride. 

Daniel shook his head. “I don’t think so. The physicians where I ended up seem to believe I was healing -- if not as well as I’d like.” He stretched and bent his legs, in ways he hadn’t been able to for a while now. Whatever this place was, wherever, it was a little refreshing to be able to be himself for a bit, and to feel things the way he should. Sally looked at him for a bit, then plopped down on the bench and leaned her head in her hands with an annoyed huff. Luckily for Daniel, the body language of an annoyed twenty-something is almost universal across all dimensions, reality and universes, and Sally was most definitely an annoyed twenty-something.

“You know,” she said, “comfortable as it is to be back here and all, this whole thing blows.” Daniel raised an eyebrow. He had been to many different nations, learned a few languages, and found that words didn’t always mean in one dialect what they did in another. Still, Sally’s way of talking was new to him, so he was more than happy to let her ramble while he tried to figure it out. “Like, I’ve seen this in shows and movies, and there’s always this moment where the two bodyswapped characters have to pretend to be each other or whatever and the guy in the girl’s body squeezes his boobs and that always felt so gross to me but whatever, like, it was shown as this cool kinda-funny kinda-sexy joke exploration.”

Daniel blinked a few times. Sally had a way of stacking a sentence together much like a mother piling seventeen kids into a minivan and then taking it for a drive around a paragraph until even the run-on sentences grew tired. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“What I mean is that this fucking sucks.” She groaned into her hands. “There’s no freaky-Friday weirdness going on where I have to warn you not to do anything weird with that body because, if your experience is even a little bit like mine, you’ve been feeling like ass.” 

“I have,” Daniel nodded, “indeed been feeling like ass.”

“Good,” Sally said. Daniel raised an eyebrow. “Well, not good-good, but you know, shared pain and all that.” 

“I think I understand,” Daniel said. “There’s an expression where I’m from. ‘Shared grief is half grief.’ Knowing we’re both going through this makes this…”

“Easier.”

“Yes.”

They both sat there in silence for a bit. Then Sally looked at him again. “Just for the record,” she asked, “you haven’t, like, done anything weird, right? Like, I can imagine wanting to look down--”

Daniel winced. “No, I haven’t. Things get in the way. That’s it.”

“Ugh. Yes they do.” Sally stuck out her tongue in disgust and Daniel couldn’t help but laugh. There were elements of his anatomy he’d never really regarded from an outside perspective, but he could imagine that, if he was as uncomfortable walking around ‘as Sally’, she probably wasn’t any happier with what he’d been carrying. Even the thought of walking around as someone not Daniel made him shiver. 

“I apologize,” he said softly, nodding. Sally shot him a grateful smile. 

“Thanks for not making a dick joke. That would not have been welcome right now.” 

“I know.”

Another silence. Some people will tell you there are up to nine kinds of silence; these are based on the feelings of the person currently actively engaging in silence and are wrong. Empirically, throughout the universe, there are forty-eight kinds of silence, ranging from the silence right before the thing you just knocked off the kitchen counter at four in the morning hits the ground, to the silent scream made by the Muffler bird, a fantastic creature from some far-off and mostly-unremarkable little universe. It has evolved in a biome filled with all kinds of birds, all of whom have various songs to attract mates and attention. The Muffler bird’s call is so quiet it deafens all sound around it, and, usually around the mid-morning, its call interrupts the noise of the forest with a few minutes of blessed calm. It is the only bird throughout the history of the universe that has evolved a call not to attract a mate, but to get a few more minutes of sleep in. 

The kind of silence Daniel and Sally were experiencing was a little like that. It was deafening, because there were a thousand questions running through his head and all of them made it so much louder inside his head than outside of it. Sally, thankfully, broke the silence. 

“Your friends are worried,” she said, and then just let that linger for a while as if a phrase like that didn’t usually involve a conversation about drinking habits or similar. Daniel looked at her. 

“My friends?”

“You know, the dozen or so people that haven’t left me alone since I woke up in that body of yours,” Sally said, and Daniel couldn’t help but feel like he was being berated. He’d always kept his distance from people, he thought for a moment, but that wasn’t entirely true. Once upon a time he’d had plenty of friends. Him and the friends from his youth had gone on adventures together, and had faced hardships and adversity together and through this, their friendship had been forged in fire. 

Until the fire had gotten too hot, and one by one, his friends, his family, had sacrificed themselves, often heroically. He’d told a lot of widows, mothers, fathers and husbands how brave and noble their loved ones had been before they’d succumbed to one evil or another. After a while, Daniel had stopped celebrating, and stopped getting close to people. It turned out, Heroics was a lonely business. But there were some people, he figured, who cared, despite his best efforts. 

“Hrm,” he said, not knowing what to actually say.

“Yeah, they seem to think that this evil queen lady did something to your head and scrambled your brain, and they’re trying to bring me back and, to be totally honest, this whole us being here is a little reassuring because it means I’m not crazy, despite all your fr-- despite everyone trying to gaslight me into thinking I’m actually you.”

“People here seem to think I know myself well enough, but it’s only been physicians, so far,” Daniel nodded, and then frowned. “You mentioned the Demon Queen. She’s there?”

Sally grimaced. “Sort of. She doesn’t seem like the person they think she is either,” she said. Daniel chewed his tongue for a moment. 

“Yes, the real one is with me, here,” he said, and then looked around. “Well, back there, anyway. In the hospital.” 

“Gotcha,” Sally said. “Then who’s with me?”

“Don’t know,” Daniel said. “The physician says they haven’t found his name so far, but he appears to be a man in his mid-to-late twenties.”

Sally looked at him with an incredulous stare. “Really? Huh. I wouldn’t have called that one,” she said. After Daniel shot her a questioning glance, she waved her hand noncommittally. “Not to, like, lean into gender roles or anything, but whoever is in there doesn’t seem like your typical guy, if you know what I mean. “He” has been asking people what the evil queen’s name is -- which, apparently, the magic lady knew -- and asked to be called that, and keeps trying to make friends with people. There’s a lot of crying whenever someone yells at him.” Sally jutted her jaw forward. “I feel weird calling him ‘him’. I might need to ask about that,” she said, and then shook her head. “Anyway, most people here -- because someone thought to drag her body -- the queen’s body, I mean -- with us, and now they woke up, everyone keeps trying to kill them, but they keep reflexively conjuring up a shield nobody can get through. I feel bad for them, to be honest.”

“He saved your life,” Daniel said. “According to the people here. Well, tried to. I don’t know if he did. I still don’t know if we’re dead.”

“Oh,” Sally said. “Didn’t do a very good job but… I’ll have to say thanks. If I get around to it. Nobody’s giving me a lot of space to think much around here.”

“That’s… less than ideal,” Daniel said, nodding. “I might… I think I might have something.” Sally looked at him expectantly. “About what you can tell the others, I mean. You could pass on a message from me, saying I was… moved to the underworld or something, that you’re a spirit from another place who got lost, but until I get back, you don’t have a place to stay. I can give you some notes and phrases that should reassure most of them that the message is from me and it’ll keep them from trying to… exorcise you.”

“Yikes. That’s probably a good idea then. Being exorcised sounds unpleasant.” 

“It is,” Daniel said grimly. “Trust me.” In fact, Daniel had been exorcised on three separate occasions, although always by amateurs, and it had only taken root once. As it turned out, when someone is supposed to save the world a bunch of times, it’s really hard to keep them incorporeal before some very unlikely confluence of events just brings them back. In fact, that he hadn’t already been flung back into the world he’d come from was something of a surprise. He was supposed to be the Hero, after all. He was going to be saving the world until the end of his days. 

“On that delightful note,” Sally continued, interrupting his train of thought, “anything I can help you with? Maybe don’t try to like, talk to my family yet.” She grimaced. Daniel knew that face. Rejection of the older generation was a universal constant, too. “I know I haven’t. Anyway, I can imagine there’s a lot about my world you have questions about, and if you’re in the hospital you’re soon not about to be and it’s gonna suck to be you when you have to pay off those hospital bills which I just realized are going to be my hospital bills when I get back and euuuugh--”

“It’ll be fine,” Daniel said. “Start at the beginning. There is a small satchel with my belongings. There’s a square in there made of something like… warm, slightly bendy glass. It has a picture of you on it. I take that to be your identification. Everything else is a mystery to me.”

“Oh god,” Sally said, “I’m going to have to teach you about addresses and  PIN codes and… okay.” She took a deep breath. “There’s one -- it’s called plastic. It’s not glass -- one card in there that’s going to be the most important. It’s going to save your life. It’s called a credit card…”