The meal that Hana brought for Lopi was a bit mushy on one side, but not dirty or beyond recognition except for one of the meat-filled dumplings. Lopi silently sat Hana down at the table, pulled two wooden plates from a shelf, and moved to sit across from her on the opposite bench. He laid the plates down.

“Eat.”

“Ah, yes!” responded Hana. She pulled out the meat pie and sliced off a piece.

Lopi pulled out a steamed bun with poppy seeds on top and bit into it. It was quite oily and strange, but he’s on a different planet, so the flavors probably couldn’t compare to the ones he was accustomed to.

“You seem very quiet. Do you need my help with helping you find a cultivation manual for Fera? I’m sure that if she sees the amazing beautiful coat of arms from your grandfather’s ancestral collection she’ll start talking to you again and give you the respect you deserve as an honored lord of the kingdom. I can’t believe that she would spread so many rumors about you just because she was caught talking to you alone in an empty room by the assistant dean.  I wonder if she is the one who also told people where your cheat papers were. You only told her so that she could fake her magic tests too!”

Hana finished her first slice of rabbit pie and picked up another slice. Meanwhile, Lopi was feeling full after the one meat roll. He just wants a single vegetable. Something to balance the oily flavor.

“I’m sure those rumors about Misses Fera being caught around your cousin Bannon are completely un-related. He knows you like her. Or at least he should. You train with him all of the time. Yeah, you aren’t allowed to come to your father’s family home right now, the Matron won’t even allow it, and send you that weird short letter.” Hana gulped down her second slice. She picked up a third sliceSometimes it’s good to go back to your roots. At least they’re still helping you manage the finances of this town. That is convenient. Oh, wait! I’m not supposed to be eating at the table with you!”

Hana jumped up and quickly bowed. Lopi was thinking that the mood was very casual, even for a commoner from the 21^st century, since even his eleven-year-old younger cousins wouldn’t just blabber on and on like this, but he couldn’t tell if the entire conversation was mind-numbing like it would be with them because genuinely everything Hana said contained a new shocking piece of information. He had to go to some sort of magic school where no one liked him. He had a family that equally didn’t like him apparently, and he had to fill out mad tax forms most likely because there’s no way he could trust that sketchy bunch with his accounts. Also, his parents? Where are they?

“Ah, I’ve disrespected you too! I’m sorry Sir for being way above my station! This is the last time I’ll forget!”

“No, child. Sit down. If I’d been bothered I would have said something about it,” Lopi said, trying to calm her down. He even tried smiling while tilting his head and sticking out his tongue. Just really selling the goofball image to say he shouldn’t be taken so seriously. It had worked with his cousins somewhat when they were babies and he was a big bad adult sitting next to them at the kid’s table for Thanksgiving dinner. It was a borderline ahego face, sure, but it comes off normally to innocent minds untainted by hentai imageboards. He just looked like a wacky cartoon character.

“Um, sir, are you okay? When you were thrown out of the old mansion did you by any chance hit your head?”

“No I'm healthy, sit down.” Maybe he should have said yes and pretended to have amnesia. Well, Hana sat back down anyways so Lopi put a steamed bun on her plate.

“Thank you for the treat, sir, even though these dishes are your favorite. I was able to get them from the best restaurant in town, just across the street from the hotel that used to be your family’s manor.  It sure is awful that when you went to check out a room in what is technically your house that you are renting, a guard kicked you out. They’ll see. Maybe you can call Gerart and he can help you. He’s the one who hired that manager! It’s technically breaking and entering for them to stay there after you ask them to leave. The king’s father specifically gave your great grandparents that building after the second generation of martial knightship. It’s such a great honor, and that stupid hotel manager is breaking the law by allowing you to rent out the rooms you aren’t using for profit. You barely get any living expenses for that! Wait, wait until Guard Gerart comes out of closed-door cultivation, then we’ll get him!”

Lopi just nodded while pretending to eat. No other important information came out after that, other than Gerart being in a specific cave, and being this big bad knight gaurd that used to work for his father. Oh, and apparently his parents are dead. He could guess that’s a big deal, but it’s not like they’re his real parents, and he hasn’t seen either of them since he was three. It’s good that he found out beore trying to talk about them like they should be alive, because peoplel would think he'd gone crazy.

He wished Hana goodnight and went back to his bedroom. He wasn’t looking forward to sleeping on a pile of hay and rough wool so Lopi decided to snoop around the room for more information. Hana then rushed into the room like a tornado.

“Ah, I completely forgot that I had to spread your bed! Let me just…”

Hana touched a bronze bracelet on her wrist and pulled a broom out of thin air. She then beat the pile of hay, and a small creature, kind of like a rat, but without fur and with much sharper teeth and a shorter tail, scurries out of it. Hana then proceeded to pummel the creature to death with the broom and shove its carcass in the trash bin. She then pulled a thick duvet twice her side out of the bracelet on her wrist again and pulled out a blue silk futon twice the size of her body and laid it on the pile of hay.

“Goodnight, Sir.” Hana said, cheerful as ever. She thankfully took the garbage bin with the dead rodent out with her and left the room.

Lopi’s eyes went round like saucers. How? What? Okay, calm now. There’s magic, maybe that’s why it’s possible to casually reject the notion of space and time? Yeah… It just breaks so many rules that he lives by as an engineer, especially as an engineer who makes experimental machinery for a bunch of physicists, chemists, and so on. He just had to get a very strong working knowledge of physics for when it was explained to him and rule #1 is that full-size brooms don’t magically appear out of three inch wide solid pieces of jewelry! Okay, calm down.

Lopi sat back down on the bed and closed his eyes telling himself not to scream. Right, so maybe he can search his memories for what brought him here. Arrow was born blessed with a photographic memory. He doesn’t necessarily process and pull details from everything he’s experienced, but he can reference every sound, sight, or smell he experienced down to the minute detail from his memory. It was a very unfair advantage during school, and he could never relate to most of his classmates' study habits. Other than practicing a few math problems, he really didn’t need to study in the same way by memorizing information or formulas from the textbooks and lecture notes, and spent more time on comprehension by reading further articles and related books so that he could relate the knowledge he needed for the class into real-world applications.

The point is, Lopi was able to look into his memory for a clear picture of exactly how he ended up in this circumstance. So he was changing out a machine part. The owner of that physics lab room came in with another colleague and began to discuss the experimentation results with mild excitement. Lopi pretended he wasn’t there because the two doctors both had their fellowships and he didn’t want to get too involved with them and the office politics that were going on amongst university staff most of the time. Several of the chemistry and biology majors were trying to push for whole wheat rolls in the cafeteria and a lot of the old dogs in the physics and engineering department were pushing back to keep the normal type. With all the bickering and bribery involved it was too much for Arrow to want to get involved with. So far they’d decided to have both types of dinner rolls available in the cafeteria, but it got very rough there for a second, with people posting petitions in the staff cafeteria pinboard and coaxing anyone they can to sign it. Arrow preferred to stay with his small group of friends who were also new to the school, some of them were still trying to get their post doctoral. However, yhese university big shots were the type Arrow generally avoided getting too warm with. He was the same age as some of their grandchildren so they didn’t seem to care to form a deep relationship with him either. They’d honestly long stopped keeping track of what people his age were interested in.

“After running my test on lab rats the strangest things have happened to them. I was hoping that your expertise may be able to lend itself to my experiment. The specimen has been frozen since it died while being run through the machine, but I’ve already made some x-rays here if you would mind taking a good look at them...”

“Amazing, it looks completely different. This isn’t even recognizable as the typical mus musculus. The skull is completely misshapen, there’s no tail. There is the same number of vertebrae, which means the tail completely shrunk. The wild type mus musculus is also completely missing fur and it’s gone from pink and white to completely black. This machine seems extremely dangerous. Hopefully, it isn’t releasing any rays.”

“Yes dangerous, quite dangerous. But see, I’ve had a modification installed so that I can activate the machine rather far away. See?”

And that’s when things went dark. Arrow’s next waking moment he was abducted to another world. Lopi regrets not greeting his two seniors as they came into the room. They clearly turned the machine on when he was still in it, not knowing that he was still working inside of it. It’s safer to check! The university needs to get better at picking the people they sponsor because they’re very unsafe since they don’t use the basic clearance rules, but on then again transdimensional travel is very impressive.  Lopi helped make the machine so he understands how the machine should work. It collects hypothetical invisible zed particles that should hypothetically destroy a mu particle and either explode or create a new particle, but also pump mu particles back in, basically leading to a vacuum of some sort hopefully, which would make the mouse age or more likely just get cancer from the radiation. The theory behind the experiment has nothing to do with interdimensional travel, and the formula is completely off in certain places within modern theoretical understandings of physics. If anything about the experiment was known then that scientist wouldn’t do it. Lopi is hesitant to replicate the experiment because at best chances are that if he tries to go back the same way he may end up like the dead rat. He also hasn’t seen an outlet for him to hook the machine that brought him here up to, and he’s unlikely to find machine wiring and the parts he’s accustomed to using back at work.

Lopi calmed down a bit once he found out how he got here. In some ways, he was lucky that he didn’t simply die. He just needed to find out what the results of the experiment could possibly mean. It wasn’t easy though since essentially nothing is known about interdimensional travel in the modern world. However, even if it was impossible to replicate the experiment in this primitive place, it wouldn’t hurt to theorize with pen and paper.

Lopi searched the desk and looked around for a pen and paper. He found a scroll of paper, a feather quill, and a pot of ink. Lopi, of course, had never written with something like those before, and after trying to write, he was stuck at the first letter. The quill kept running out of ink. How was this thing supposed to work?

 Lopi was getting increasingly frustrated and restless when he noticed a little black book on the desk. He turned to the first page and saw the words:

“Diary of Lord Lopi Crystallin.

Year 855 of the Melony Kingdom-”

Lopi immediately picked up the book and moved back to the bed. It looks like the body he took over had written in a diary. Thank god, because what if he met this body’s best friend and couldn’t recognize them. He’d be immediately recognized as an imposter. Arrow hunkered down and read Lopi’s diary.

The beginning of the diary was cringier than Arrow was expecting, even having experienced being in an American school and going through and witnessing the awkwardness of his peers. Lopi thinks school is a waste of time and also the guy is completely girl crazy. Lopi’s diary had several pages dedicated several pages complaining about what was and wasn’t polite to do in public with women, and what he’d rather do and honestly it was a little insane. Puberty is something else entirely for Lopi than it is for Arrow, maybe modern internet porn was a decent outlet so he hadn’t gotten crazy enough to sexually objectify half his school. The diary had rankings for all the girls in his arithmetic class according to breast size, sluttiness, and overall attractiveness. He did a rank of the top twenty most attractive girls in the school ranging from year one to year eight, and no one is safe from his perverted eyes. The only reason Hana was safe was because she was on the chubby side according to the diary. Arrow felt nauseated so he scanned through until he saw mention of his academics.

Arrow began reading the diary, but a couple of pages into reading it his face turned black. How awful. His academic life read like a mode of operendi crime sheet! In the past several semesters Lopi essentially went through every means possible to cheat every major test at his school. He wrote answers for written tests on his arm in concentrated high-intensity glow in the dark ink. To see the words carefully he would have to hold his arm up in the light from the window and then hide his arm under his desk. He would bribe the student in front of him to put a cheat sheet on his backpack. He would hire a townsperson from the capital city, where the school is located, to dig a hole for him, then cover it in a seamlessly with a thin layer of earth and grass for him so that he could pass his magic test. The first thing that Arrow needed to do if he was going to take on Lopi’s identity was burning this diary before a teacher or someone with something against him found it and turned it into the school dean. There was no way that Arrow could pretend to be an uneducated wannabe womanizer like Lopi for the rest of his life, but he’d have to gradually change his public perception into something reasonable. Arrow continued reading the book reluctantly, even if all he wanted to do was set fire to it from the first part. He glanced over the words, not comprehending them, and it committed itself to his memory.

Thankfully the next part was much more useful fussing. He was annoyed with his cultivation junkie of an uncle who used corporal punishment and locked him in his room without snacks or toys whenever he saw him in order to force him to seriously cultivate. His uncle’s wife and two young children didn’t even pay attention to the rest of the family. Luckily his uncle spent most of his time in solitary cultivation instead of taking charge of Lopi’s education full time and left his education up to his grandfather’s second wife and her children, who were his half uncles and aunts on his father’s side. He wasn’t forced to cultivate with their children if he didn’t want to, which was essentially all the time. Lopi’s diary then waxed on about how powerful many of his cousins had gotten. His oldest cousin already became a local tyrant and held political office at the head court, the second cousin was a female and was married into a powerful general’s family. His third eldest cousin who was in the same year as him, followed by a fourth who was a year younger and apparently the whole trio was interested in military affairs and set their eyes on being knights of the kingdom. All of his cousins were top of their class, the only one out in that household was Lopi. The youngest daughter who was only seven and who could barely write her name, and only knew her two and ten times tables and was already at the mid-stage condensation stage of cultivation, whereas he was still at the beginning. Lopi then stated a shame towards his own ability, which meant he had to train harder with a sword to make up for it.

Arrow snapped the diary closed. This identity he had taken on was possibly the complete opposite of him. He decided to read the rest later, in case his mind rot. Lopi stuffed the diary under his pillow and began to search the room for something less stupid. The first book he opened was a book on alchemy called “Foundation Level mid-level Dovetail alchemic training  method and recipes.” Lopi expected to see a proposed way to turn horse pee into gold like alchemy books he heard of from the early renaissance, but the alchemy book turned out to be less silly than that. The book just had incredibly complex methods for creating chemical reactions. The book didn’t mention why they would work.  It was possible to infer what type of chemical reaction was going on due to the method used, but none of the chemicals were known. Every procedure in the book said to take various plants, extract chemicals from them, mix them in certain ways and in certain amounts in a cauldron over a fire. It had very specific expectations for the fire controls, and it seems impossible to control the heat inside the cauldron to the degree mentioned in the book. However, Lopi remembered, “magic”. Magic existed, so maybe that’s why this book was possible. It’s just that “magic” overall didn’t seem that predictable or easy to replicate. For some recipes in the back of the book, there’s a stated success rate of .01%. These recipes are the vaguest of the bunch though. Amazingly, someone would print that even though they are unclear about the method to produce an experiment.

Either way, Lopi was interested in the magic here. Before he finds a way to safely get back to a planet/dimension/whatever it would not hurt to learn a little bit of the physics of this planet. Maybe it would give him some insight for life back on Earth.

Lopi fell asleep with his head in the books on the bookshelf. The last book he got to was a family tree, which he was reading from a dimly lit light stone. He wanted to learn more about his new family, however, the book itself was too dry, so at around midnight he ended up falling asleep.

a/n: The cover is being worked on. Gudetama's little egg booty is a placeholder.