All things considered, healthcare on Earth isn’t bad. Sure, there’s planets that have full-body scanning-and-healing booths and those definitely line the top of the leaderboards, but there’re also still places where anxiety is treated with leeches and cocaine. While those are definitely interesting and lively places to exist, life there tends to be a little bit more all-or-nothing, with an interesting life-expectancy. By comparison, Earth is a place where, if you’re born in the right place, usually with the right skin-tone and within a fairly broad range of socio-economic classes, you can reasonably expect to not die due to negligence. It might happen, but it’ll be unexpected. 

However, these standards of care still vary a lot from place to place, and the socio-and-especially-economic demographic Daniel and Eliza appeared to be a part of were not included in the highest standards of profit-based care. As such, they were unceremoniously asked to leave, with a little ‘We’ll send you an invoice later’ smile from a nurse. She actually did have the bill on hand, but after a long morning that involved a stabbing and a lot of blood even before her shift, she was not in the mood for a possible tantrum. That worked out nicely for Daniel and Eliza, who had no table of conversion for interdimensional currencies. 

“Now what?” Eliza asked. Daniel was still walking on crutches (he’d been reassured they would also be on the bill), healing a little less fast than Eliza, who was getting along reasonably well with a cane (equally ‘to be monetized later’). The two of them looked around. They’d seen some of this world out of the windows of the hospital, but this was the first time they were actually out here and it smelled… 

Not great. To most humans who live in most cities, there is an inherent awareness of the smell of gasoline, diesel and general smog, but to someone from another world, these cities reek. It didn’t quite take their breath away, but both of them did wince for a moment. There were a few sad trees planted alongside the hospital, but all they really did was emphasize the lack of green grass or blue sky. Almost everything was a brown or grey, except for the cars, which were mostly silver or some muted, dark version of red or green. Sally had warned him about them, and he had, a little reluctantly, passed it on to Eliza. Cars. Chemically (he thought, anyway) powered vehicles had replaced almost all modes of transportation, and they were heavy and went fast. 

If they needed a reminder of what happened when they got hit by one, all they had to do was turn around and remember what it had felt like to wake up in there, every bone in their body some degree of jigsaw puzzle, ages fourteen and up at the very least. 

At least most streets were lined with elevated pathways for pedestrians, and crossroads had clearly marked crossings and lights, Daniel noted. In fact, there were a lot of lights. Sally had done what she could to give him as much of a primer on this world as she could, but it was still hard not to get overwhelmed. Everywhere had flashing lights, from cars beeping, to shop signs selling Beer-brand beer. Well, this world had beer. That was one thing. He also quickly picked up that green seemed to mean ‘go’ and red meant ‘stop’, when it came to traffic. 

“I say we try to find my… this body, Sally’s, residence,” Daniel said. “We need to find a place to recover while we strategize. She’s given me instructions on how to find it, and how to pay for food and lodgings.”

“What do you mean ‘how to pay for food’?” Eliza asked. “It’s payment. It can’t be that complicated. Surely you just give the shopkeep--”

“It’s complicated,” Daniel interrupted her darkly. “It seems most transactions involve direct communication with banks somehow.”

“Oh dear,” Eliza said. “I thought I ran an Evil Kingdom.” Daniel glared at her and she shot him a sweet smile. “Sorry, was that in bad taste?”

“Not at all,” Daniel said, looking around. “Just worried you’ll try to do the same thing here. It pays to be prepared when around the likes of you.”

“You’re one to talk,” Eliza said coldly. “Let’s go and find something to eat then.” She clearly wasn’t very comfortable with her cane yet, and Daniel, trying to keep up with his crutches, couldn’t exactly blame her. Sure, he was more used to this, having been in his fair share of fights, but he could imagine the kind of sheltered upbringing Eliza might’ve had, and how she’d never needed a mobility aid before. Despite that, she was easily a foot, maybe a foot and a half taller than him, and he was struggling. She either didn’t notice or didn’t care, only slowing down when she rounded the corner. 

When he caught up with her, he saw why. The hospital had been built just around the corner from a commercial street, which in this case meant a lot of shops, a lot of cafés and restaurants, and a lot of advertising. While places like this are common in a lot of cities in a lot of universes, as commercial ventures sort of clump together like clams on the underside of trans-oceanic boats, licking the salt off each other, the sight of post-electricity shopping streets was still a fair sight to people for who this kind of thing was often associated with more shouting, carts stuck in the mud, and people tossing buckets of latrine-water onto the street. The street was, compared to what Daniel was used to, practically spotless. He couldn’t even see any latrine-water. There wasn’t a single brown little boat happily floating down the gutter. 

He wondered what Eliza saw. Unless there was a secret city of demons up in the mountains -- and he highly doubted there was -- she had never really been in a city before. While crowds are universally sort of the same, and people chatting outside of shops have a kind of ingrained instinct to stand slightly too close to or too far from the building to easily walk around them, the streetscape was still almost too much for Daniel to handle. Eliza was probably on the verge of a meltdown. He knew he would’ve been. 

It wasn’t just the sights, of course. The sounds were everywhere too. Cars were noisy, and the hum of the hundreds -- maybe even thousands! -- of them, driving through the city was ever-present. But even with that constant white noise, there was still stimulation coming from all over. Many of what Daniel easily identified as boutiques, statues dressed in fine clothes behind the glass, had music coming from inside, and he wondered if this was electricity. 

Sally had mentioned electricity, but clearly she didn’t understand it very well. Apparently it drove a lot of things in this world, and was probably her world’s version of magic. That was understandable, at least. But it seemed to be everywhere, and he didn’t know yet what its limits were. Even the little plastic credit card had something to do with electricity, even though, Sally had reassured him, there was no electricity in the card itself. 

And electricity conjured up images on what he’d imagined were just large posters, playing music while they gleefully advertised food, or clothing, or what appeared to be perfumes, although fragrance advertisements are obscure across the multiverse and what they’re actually selling is anyone’s guess. Electricity also seemed to be in the little black rectangles everyone was looking at, and he wondered briefly if this society had completely cut people off from each other, until he saw at least one person talking with one of them pressed to her ear, and then briefly waving at a friend, and he quickly realized that it was mostly likely a device made for communication. If that was the case, the majority of younger people he could see actually did more communicating than he’d ever seen in the old world, which was… well, it wasn’t a bad sight. 

But he was quickly distracted -- and clearly, Eliza was too -- by the smells. The sights were everywhere and disorienting, and the sounds were loud and sometimes more than a little annoying, but the smells were everything. After the initial chemical smell of the cars had begun to drift into the background, he was able to pick up more and more. Many people wore exotic perfumes that he hadn’t smelled when he’d been invited to royal balls, but even those paled in comparison to the food. Smells of food from street-vendors, bodegas and restaurants wafted towards them, overwhelming them with smells Daniel had never even considered. He didn’t know there were that many smells, but clearly his nose knew something he didn’t, and immediately identified it as both food and delicious

After a while of careful and aimless walking and, they stopped by a food cart that sold food Daniel recognized: Sausages. In a bun. Daniel looked over at Eliza, but if she had opinions about them, she didn’t share them, giving a blank look as they waited in line to get one. Daniel made sure to listen to the transaction, to figure out what to say, how to say it so as not to sound too out of place. The sausage in a bun was referred to as a hot dog, and came with a variety of toppings, and, more problematically, no two customers picked the same ones, although there were some recurring elements. 

A few minutes later, after having paid and Daniel having to unclench his jaw at being called ‘miss’, the two of them found a little bench -- which reminded Daniel with slight annoyance of the bench in the in-between-world he kept bouncing back to. They had, between them, two sausages-in-a-bun. One with mustard, one with ketchup. What that actually meant, however, Daniel had no idea. The idea was that they’d both pick one, and if they both hated it, they could swap. If they both liked theirs, there would be no problem. And if one of them didn’t like their pick… well, tough luck. 

Eliza bit down on the one with mustard and couldn’t even swallow it before spitting it out. Daniel looked at her, making a mental note not to show the brief worry on his face. She told him that, no, it was neither poison nor terrible. It was simply too intense. If he hadn’t just experienced the streetscape they’d walked through earlier, he would’ve considered what she’d just said nonsense, but he believed her. When he tried a bite of his own, he understood what she meant. The bread was somehow sweet. The sausage was stuffed with who-knows-what, and the ketchup was an assault on the taste buds. They both had to take a moment to recover, mentally. Emotionally. When Daniel offered to swap, Eliza snapped at him with a sneer and he put his own sausage off to the side and looked at her. 

Eliza had her mouth full, but caught his glance and rolled her eyes, putting her own food away. “What?” she asked after she’d cleared and wiped her mouth. “Why are you looking at me like that, hero? Am I doing something uncouth, maybe? Delicate sensibilities get the better of y--”

“When we fought,” Daniel interrupted her, “we both fell.”

“I’m aware, hero. I was there.” She glared daggers at him. 

“You were ready to die.”

“So were you,” Eliza said, accusatory. 

“And now you’re not? Or you’re… what? Angry with me? You seemed fine then. What ch--”

“I’ll point out,” Eliza said, her turn to cut him off, “that we are not dead.” Daniel stayed quiet. She wasn’t wrong. “Not only are we not dead, Daniel, Great Hero, but I’m stuck in a body that’s more broken than the castle you trampled through, one that has a stubble in the morning, and worse the rest of the day. I’m stuck in a body that looks like it’s made to shovel dirt every day, with a voice like a cow gargling gravel and a face like a dying primate, a brow big enough to convert into a sun-roof, a jaw fit to crush rocks and a chest and shoulders so wide I practically have to walk through doors sideways, Daniel. This is revolting. If I’d known you’d do this to me, I don’t think I’d have lost.” Eliza’s breathing had become laboured and if he didn’t know any better, he’d think she was on the verge of tears. All things considered, what she said about her body wasn’t exactly warranted. The face was a perfectly normal, masculine face. The shoulders were no wider than that of any man he’d ever met, and he probably would’ve dwarfed the original owner if he himself had been in his old body, if on muscle-mass alone. 

But that, of course, wasn’t it. He knew exactly how she felt. He knew what it was like to look in the mirror and see not only a stranger, but a reminder that everyone else saw that stranger too, that the man who’d sold him the hot-dog had seen some twenty-something girl buy her boyfriend a hot dog and that he was most definitely not the boyfriend in that scenario. That the face that was so not him was supposed to be his face now and that this body, too thin, too small, too fragile, with hips and breasts sticking out like lumps of fat, big doe-eyes that looked almost child-like...

“I didn’t do this,” he said. “I’m stuck here too. This is… not my afterlife, either. I don’t want this, either. This is… this is…” He smirked. “I’m not as good at expressing my dissatisfaction as you are, but take my word for it that I can relate, if not quite in the same way.” He sighed, wishing he could express the feeling of waking up and feeling okay for a second until a single movement, something as simple as cloth against his skin feeling wrong on a fundamental level, on how going to the bathroom was alien and strange and that looking down was something he only did when he absolutely had to... Despite everything, the corners of Eliza’s smile went up too. 

“You didn’t do this.”

“I wouldn’t do this to my worst enemy,” Daniel said. “Let alone some Evil Demon Queen.” Eliza laughed, throwing her head back, and some people walking past looked at her. She didn’t seem to care, and it was strange to hear her express what seemed like genuine joy for the first time. When she calmed down, she leaned back and took another bite of her hot dog. 

“So I have a plan,” she said.

“If it involves world domination, I will have to stop you.”

“Later, maybe,” Eliza said. “First, I want to make sure this world doesn’t have any magic in it. Because if it does, even a little bit might be enough to fix these bodies, even if it can’t send us back.”

Daniel nodded. That would make it a lot more bearable to be in this place. “And in the meantime?”

“Well,” she said, and a bit of her confidence, the woman he’d met in the throne room, was seeping back into her voice, “I don’t know about you, but if all the food here is this good, I wouldn’t mind going a little native. I promise,” she said with a voice like ketchup, thick and sweet and overwhelming, “I won’t try to kill you too much.”

“That works,” Daniel replied with a smile. “I’ll try not to get away too easily.”

Elamimax

We're meandering around the end of act 1 and I couldn't love writing these two more. 

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