This is my story.

But where should I begin?

I guess I should start at the beginning. Or perhaps even before that.

Originally I was born on a planet called Earth in a small country called Hungary 30-something years ago. Perhaps it was already over 40 years ago, I never had a good sense of time. I was born into a richer-than-god family, my relatives spread all over the globe. With a silver spoon up my arse, I had a good childhood growing up. I had two younger siblings with whom I was very close when we were kids, but we gradually drifted apart after we left the nest. Not because anything bad happened, but because all of us tended to prefer to keep to ourselves. To half my family’s dismay and the other half’s supportive amusement, I became a musician, writing and singing songs in both Hungarian and English. Fascinated with fantasy novels, RPG games, medieval culture, and rock and roll, I formed a progressive metal band with my two best friends. Ours was one of the very few women-only metal bands in the world. We started slowly, making video clips and posting them on the internet, and working our way up to the top, standing shoulder to shoulder with the greatest and best of the genre.

My younger brother had become a rocket scientist who worked with NASA developing and inventing rockets and engines for spaceships and furthering humanity’s ambition to spread our wings to outer space. My younger sister, on the other hand, became a programmer developing software for my brother’s spaceships. My life had its ups and downs but all in all, it was a good life. Until it ended suddenly, that is.

Well, I mean, if I hadn’t died I wouldn’t be here telling my story now, would I?

Anyway, when I was 27, my siblings and their colleagues launched a new space station into orbit with its very own artificial gravity, the first of its kind. The best and brightest were invited for its maiden voyage. They were the bravest and most brilliant scientists and astronauts, even a Novel prized journalist attended. And me. They said they needed a popular artist with a powerful presence to promote the project. I of course said yes. Who wouldn’t want to sing in outer space looking down at their homeworld? It was a great honor, I had no reason to refuse.

So I sat down and wrote a song, especially for this event. And when I arrived at that station, it was everything I could imagine, everything I dreamed of.

Planet Earth, floated in front of me, bright blue and beautiful. I sang my ballad looking down, admiring it, while my performance was broadcasted for the entire world to see and listen to.

And then there was a tremor. Seconds later we were all engulfed in an explosion. It didn’t hurt, and at first, I didn’t even realize I died it happened so fast.

I guess, the biggest clue was that I woke up in a small, dirty, half-lit room. It stank horribly from blood, sweat, and dust. And everything was eerily quiet and I was cold. Suddenly, I saw my hand. But it didn’t look like my hand. First, my hand wasn’t that small, with chubby little fingers, nor was it a chocolate brown color.

I was stunned. What was going on? Why did I have these hands (and tiny feet with adorable little toesies) when my hands were clearly already the big, slender hands of an adult? Where were my tattoos? Where were my calluses from years of playing the guitar? And why did I have a little knob in between my legs, when I was obviously a woman? Apparently, I was naked as a newborn calf.

Hmm.

I’ve read enough fantasy books. I realized what this was. Reincarnation, baby! I was isekaied by a space station explosion! I grew very excited.

What world was I in?

Would there be magic?

Elves? Dwarves? Dragons?

An epic journey to save the world?

Ow! Someone slapped my butt. It really hurt! Dude, whoever you are, do you mind?! I’m musing here!

I attempted to yell at them, only no sound came out of my throat. I tried to shout louder, but I couldn’t hear my own voice. Strange. I could clearly feel the vibrations in my throat, so I was making sound but… As I was thinking, I realized I didn’t hear the sound of the palm slapping against my bum either.

I… couldn’t hear anything. I was reborn deaf.

I guess I’m not going to become an epic ax-wielding bard mage. Maybe I could still be an ax-wielding warrior, or a mage, just not a bard. I won’t be able to hear myself sing, listen to music, or wake up to birds chirping ever again.

I was just about to give in to depression and mourn my lost hearing when I remembered my band-mate, Eszter, who played the drums. She was deaf but could feel the vibrations from the drums. She rocked the best gut-busting drum solos during our concerts.

Remembering her made me feel better. Yes! I would be fine! I could still be an ax-wielding bard mage! I would play the drums to raise battle morale, and then I would crush trolls with my magic and ax! Besides, she taught me sign language, so I could teach it to others here and make friends, and get along with my new family. Who knew? Maybe sign language already existed in this world.

But life has this way of letting a girl utterly down.

First, I was born in the slums, in a brothel. My mother was a prostitute, and one of her customers got her pregnant with me. My new ‘family’ consisted of my mother and her coworkers (both men and women) and their pimp. Most of the money my mother earned went to her pimp, who gave her drugs to keep her there. We were very poor and often didn’t have enough to eat. I didn’t have clothes that didn’t have holes in them, and I was often cold and sickly. Apparently, I had a very weak constitution.

Second, from what I could tell, magic and the fantasy tropes I dreamed of didn’t exist here. There were people with unique features like pointy ears, wings, shimmery scales, and tails, but that was thanks to a kind of engineering. This, I confirmed when I was 10 years old and was sent to have a pair of wings molded onto my shoulder blades. They were small and pointless as I couldn’t fly with them. The outer side was covered in black feathers, while the insides of the wings had flashy teal blue colors.

Third, people, including my own mother didn’t know I was deaf. Not that I didn’t try to tell them by pointing at my ears, but they didn’t care enough to try to understand me. They thought I was retarded, a soft in the head idiot. I tried to communicate with them, but they couldn’t comprehend the things I was writing for them. Maybe they were illiterate, or maybe they just couldn’t read my letters with this being a different world and all. They didn’t seem to appreciate the fact that I was born. I was one more mouth to feed, a burden. I couldn’t work and was often underfoot. I tried my best in my own way, I wanted to help out by doing chores. I swept the floors, cooked, drew baths, and did the laundry. Only, since I couldn’t hear, I often had accidents like walking in on my mother or her coworkers while they were with a client, or bumping into people while my back was facing them, or dropping (and sometimes breaking) things when someone startled me by tapping my shoulder to get my attention. I tried to restrict my ‘working hours’ to the mornings till noon when there wasn’t much business, but incidents still happened. I also tried to get my mother and aunties and uncles to hang colored paper tiles on their doors to signal me whether they were busy or not, but I couldn’t explain well what I wanted, and they didn’t want to be bothered.

Fourth, they didn’t appreciate me playing the drums. I was playing on the trash bins, and I think I was rather good too, but instead of giving me applause, my audience often beat me up instead. That happened a lot. Didn’t these barbarians know how wrong and awful child abuse is?! I was also pinched and slapped a lot, sometimes whipped. That nasty pimp of my mother’s liked to put out his cigarette butts on my skin.

And fifth, though I wanted to escape this hell, there was no way out. We lived in an underground ghetto, in a sort of ginormous vertical tunnel with platforms and sidewalks connecting the walls and crisscrossing each other. Things were high-tech but filthy, everything always smelled like aged oil, dust, blood, piss, semen, and garbage. The air was stifling and heavy. It was always dark with only barely enough lights that we didn’t have to live in pitch-black darkness. The mood was always foul and gloomy. I didn’t know how deep down we lived, just that we weren’t at rock bottom, and couldn’t see the exit of the tunnel. There weren’t any plants and I sorely missed seeing some greenery or the sky. Most of the machines didn’t work, and what did, belonged to gangsters. At least I think that's what they were based on their weird flashy, yet strangely uniform trashy outfits and haughty behavior that gave them the courage to bully everybody for ‘protection money’.

As I didn’t have the means to advance upward, I could only stick to my mother who hated me.

I tried to teach people sign language but nobody was willing to learn. They were too miserable and too busy trying to make it from one day to the next, they had no patience to deal with a weird kid like me.

Eventually, I gave up. My time was better spent doing my chores and exploring the tunnels for spare parts to scavenge and sell. I wanted to save money to one day get out of here and see what’s out there and learn more about this world. There weren’t any schools down here as it were.

Energy cells were in high demand, as it was problematic to power the place. That was what I was looking for mostly. That, and weapons. I couldn’t make heads or tails of these high-tech guns so instead of keeping them I always sold them instead.

I would also hunt for meerrats. Well, they probably weren’t called that, but I didn’t know what they were. I named them meerrats, because they were the size of meercats and liked to sit on their haunches to look around, and because they had mouse-like faces and I mostly saw them in the garbage heaps. They were hairless with black skin that was smooth in one direction and rough in the other like a shark’s. They had no eyes but had noses that were shaped like sea-anemone. They had tiny rotating ears and a long muscular tail about as big as the entire animal. They would scurry about on their tiny clawed feet and could squeeze into every nook and cranny. They could be eaten and were surprisingly delicious when cooked into a stew. Interestingly their hide was also very thick and tough, especially on their backs, so they had to be hunted by knocking them out first with a sling-shot aimed at their heads, and then quickly finishing them off with a knife stabbing through their soft abdomen positioned to pierce their little heart in between their forelegs. Their hide then could be sold. People would often wear gloves and accessories like chokers made from meerrat skin. My mother and all of my aunties and uncles wore them too.

When I was ten years old after I recovered from the surgery of getting my wings, the pimp also gave me a choker. I realized then that wearing these meant that one was a prostitute and was for sale. Sure enough, it didn’t take long that I was locked in a room with some friend of the pimp for ‘initiation’.

Despite knowing that this would happen sooner or later, despite me mentally preparing myself for it, it still was awful and painful. I didn’t struggle, I figured I would just be beaten on top of everything as well. I tried my best to smile and act like I was willing and inviting, but when the guy’s disgusting blackened member pierced me (with no preparation I might add) I thought I would be torn apart and suddenly it became very hard to keep smiling. I felt something wet glide down my butt and I cried out from the pain (not that I could hear it) but didn’t beg – we couldn’t understand each other and there was no point even if we spoke the same language. He tried to kiss me, but there was no way I would let him slobber all over me with his rotten teeth and putrid breath. I quickly put my hands around his neck and hugged him, and did my best to moan into his ear (which also smelled very bad and was overflowing with earwax – yuck) and fake that I enjoyed it. Somehow I remembered that in my past life I read a lot of BL too (despite me used to being an ace and having no interest in sex) and in the more pornographic ones the male leads would often get turned on by their partner's moans.

It worked. The guy flipped me over and bit my neck through the meerrat choker and finished soon after. Satisfied, he pulled his thing out of me and slapped my butt, then left.

Everything hurt. My back, my shoulders and hips, my insides, and my soul. I felt nothing but pain. I felt like I died, and for a moment I seriously wished that I did. I felt sluggish and I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to move. I was destroyed. My dignity was utterly demolished to dust. Is this what my life is going to be like from now on? How? How could this happen to me…? Why…

Suddenly, I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. I stiffened but didn’t dare to move. Did he come back? Did he want more?

I was turned over, but I shut my eyes tightly. No. Nonononononono, I didn’t want to do this again. Go away! No! Leave me alone! Iamnothere, Iamnothere, Iamnothere, playdeadplaydeadplaydeadplayde-

I was slapped across the cheek hard. Stunned, I curled up. What? Did he come back to beat me up too? Was having his way with me not enough? This sometimes happened to my mother and my aunties and uncles. One of my aunties was even beaten to death. No, I don’t want to die! Not like this! Not in this filthy brothel, not in this awful place! No!

My ear was pinched next. Wait… This… one of my uncles, Theo does this. I carefully opened my eyes.

He was staring down at me with annoyance and exasperation. When I saw him, I was immensely relieved. Though uncle Theo liked to pull my ears when I was being difficult, he was one of the very few people who didn’t abuse me.

He rolled his eyes and said something which I couldn’t understand. I tilted my head questioningly at him, and he shook a wet towel in front of my face and then gestured at my bottom. Then without waiting for me to reply (not that I could), he wiped me off with rough movements then wrapped me up in the sheets and picked me up. Uncle Theo was a thin, twig-like man with a girly face, rabbit ears, and an overbite. He wasn’t strong and strained under my weight despite me being a small malnourished child.

He carried me to the communal baths with difficulty and sat me down on a stool. He dragged my shirt off of me and had me enter the metal bathtub. With his help, I half-sat half-collapsed into it. My legs had no strength and I was shaking all over. He quickly shoved the sheets into the brothel’s only working washing machine, then he started to wash me. He cleaned me both outside and inside – which was awkward and uncomfortable and gross, but not as awful as what that guy did. He let me soak in the hot water for a while, occupying himself with this or that, before losing patience and taking me out of the tub to sit on the stool once more. He quickly and roughly dried me with a towel, and then applied some ointment to my torn backside. He gave me some clean clothes, and since they were big on me and kinda sleuthy, I assumed they were his clothes. He helped me up and half-carried, half-dragged me to his quarters. He put me down on the ratty couch that smelled like mold and sex and cheap perfume, and threw a pillow and a cover from his bed at my face.

He said something that I didn’t understand. I just stared at him, and after a while, he sauntered over, motioned me to scoot over, and sat down on the couch. He put the pillow he threw at me earlier against his thigh and pulled my head down to lay on it. He clumsily tucked me in with the cover, then pulled out some knitting from a nightstand next to the couch and started working on it.

I stared up at him blankly, at his hands that worked nimbly with the colorful threads, making some kind of clothing dexterously. Before I knew it tears started to sting my eyes, and sobs started to choke my throat. I tried to hold it down, so I wouldn't bother him, so he wouldn't kick me out and he would continue to let me have this temporary peace. I turned away from him, pulled the cover over my head, and desperately struggled to keep myself from crying.

Then I felt his hand gently petting my head through the cover, and I broke down. I started wailing, without holding back, howling inarticulately. He held me and caressed my head until I fell asleep exhausted.