"Oh, crap", came the panicky thought, just before she slammed into the ground.
The impact knocked the wind out of her, but once she could breathe again and take stock, Jenny found that she seemed to have come through the experience relatively unscathed. If you discounted the fact that she appeared to have gone completely insane, anyway. "Okay, take it a little at a time", she thought. Physically at least, she seemed to be fine. Things started to get a little gray around the edges if you went any further than that so for right now, she'd just focus there.
The day had started normally enough. Jarred from bed by the alarm, nothing to wear, traffic its usual nightmare snarl, late to work, bad coffee, e-mails from four clients who wanted reports yesterday. The usual.
It wasn't until she sat down at the computer to work on the reports that things started to get a little odd. At first she just felt a little faint, nothing to worry about. She dismissed it as tiredness. The feeling went away as she opened up the document file and examined the unfinished report.
"While the statistical analyses of the relative standard deviations show no significant variations," she typed, "previous studies (ref. 3, 4) on the compound of interest have determined…."
It was then the faintness came back. "Jeez", she thought, “maybe I…". Then the pain hit. A white light seemed to explode just behind her eyes, and for a moment, it was all she could do to keep from crying out. The pain receded slowly, but left her with quite a headache.
"What the hell was that?", she muttered. Migraine? She'd never been susceptible to migraines before, but she'd heard they could come on this way. Aspirin. There was some in the break-room. Take a few and maybe go home if the headache didn't go away. She wondered if she ought to call her doctor.
White light. Pain. This time it came on slower. She could sense it coming like a freight train behind her eyelids, bearing down on her. "Uhhg", she groaned as it built up. When it hit full force, it was as if she had been struck in the head with a sledge hammer. Twice as bad as the first one, it was relentless. It went on only moments. It lasted forever. When it finally began to fade and her vision cleared, she found herself slumped over her keyboard, her breathing ragged.
"I'm having a stroke", she thought groggily, beginning to panic a little. "Help, I need to get help". She began to get up when the mother of all white lights hit her again.
This time, when she recovered, she found herself falling…
"All right, I’m fine", she muttered. "Let's see where I am". She certainly didn't want to. The couple of surreptitious glances at her surroundings she'd allowed herself showed her nothing she wanted to see and she just as quickly blocked any thinking along those lines from her head. But there was no help for it, it was either that or sit on the ground forever.
The ground. She seemed to be sitting on a patch of dirt which was pretty strange, there was no dirt patch in the office! Lifting her gaze a bit more, she saw the patch of dirt was in, of all things, an honest-to-god meadow. Obviously she was nowhere near her carpeted fourth floor office which she was pretty sure was meadow free.
Grayness again. Okay, too much to deal with. Perhaps she should try something a bit smaller. "What I'm wearing, for instance", she thought, "get a grip on that first". When she'd gone to the office that morning, she'd worn a fairly conservative business suit, her usual fare. Now she was wearing nothing of the sort. She had on some sort of grayish wool chemise which looked like something out of the middle ages. Not even a well made wool chemise, it itched intolerably. Certainly nothing she'd put on this morning, nothing like anything she even owned! Which begged the question of where it came from and why she was wearing it?
"Hmmph, you came through that better than most."
She looked around, startled. There stood a grizzled man wearing mostly brown leather. He had a largish knife on his belt and a couple of smaller ones on the other side. He looked for all the world like he'd just stepped out of an Errol Flynn movie. She would have laughed if things weren't so deadly serious just then.
"Who are….what….where?"
"Huh, or maybe not", he said. "Newbies", he muttered with some definite eye rolling.
"Look", he relented, "at one point we were all where you are now, so I'll help you get your bearings. What's your name?"
"Jenny", she replied.
"Good. Pleased to meet'cha, Jenny. I'm Rick, or I was anyway. People round here mostly know me as Merlin these days. Not the most original, I know, but hey, if you can be anyone you want, why not, eh?"
"I was at work…” she said, still a little dazed.
"Work, huh? Did you like it?"
"Well, you know, not really. It pays the bills…"
"Here's the good news then. You don't have to do it anymore. You're done with that job. No going back. Can't get there from here, as they say."
"Done? Am I….did I die?"
"Could be. Some folk around here figure they died back in the old world and this here is the afterlife. It ain't like any afterlife you've read about in the Bible, though," he chuckled. "I don't believe it personally. You'll hear all sorts of ideas about where we are and how we got here. I figure it don't really matter all that much in any case."
"Is everyone here from back home?"
"Earth, you mean? Yeah, near as we can tell. I'm from Chicago myself. We've all compared notes and it's always the same story. Faintness, white lights, blinding pain, and then you wake up here."
"So where is here?” she asked.
"Who knows? Like I said, doesn't matter, really. We know there's no way back, a lot of people have tried. The important thing is the rules are a bit different here than what you're used to. For one thing, you can't die."
Jenny stared at him with obvious disbelief.
"Well, it's true. That is to say, you can die, but it don't stick, if you take my meaning."
"Huh?"
"Which I suppose you don't, now that you mention it. Anyway, you'll find out. I figure I've died eighty or ninety times since I've been here. It ain't pleasant, I can tell ya, but it's not as traumatic as it was back in the old world. And wait until you get a load of the magic". He gestured and multi-colored sparks flashed from his hands.
"What was that?” Jenny gasped.
"Nothing to worry about at the moment, you'll learn all about it before too long. But for now, there are more important things you need to know." He visibly shifted gears, going into a more lecturing tone. "Now, most folks around here spend their time hunting the local fauna. Dangerous job that, because unlike back home, the fauna here fights back. Still, it's a profitable line of work since you can pick up trophies and trinkets and such to sell in the towns. Oh, yeah, we have towns here", he said in response to her unasked question. "A lot of the more successful hunters have built their own little places and some have congregated together. You can buy and sell most things there you'll need. A few of the rarer items you'll have to go looking for yourself, but you won't hit that point for a while yet."
"One more thing. Some of the more powerful around here have begun starting their own feudal governments. Nasty business, that. I’d stay well clear of it if I were you. That's exactly how problems got started in the old world. Some folk may want you to join their cause, pay their taxes." He spit into the dirt to show what he thought of that. "Just you stay clear of them and you'll be all right."
"Well, I better be getting to where I'm going. Got my eye on a nice broadsword in town and I need a few more pelts before I can afford it". He pulled one of his smaller knives from his belt. "Here", he said, offering her the knife. "This ain't the best of blades, but it'll help you get started. Stick to the small stuff for a while until you know what you're doing." He gestured, “Nearest town’s that way, can't miss it. Good luck, Jenny."
With that he stalked off, leaving Jenny to make her way in her new world. Surprisingly, as the shock wore off, she found her interest was piqued. Magic? Hunting for treasure? Possibly her own little cabin in the woods someday? The possibilities seemed endless. The first step would be getting a new wardrobe, she thought, scratching irritably. She pondered Merlin's words about being anyone she wanted to be. She began to contemplate her new name.
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