Waking up in a new body is a bit like learning how to pole vault. I know, because I never tried to learn to pole vault, and I had no intention of ever learning to pole vault. In much the same way, if I hadn't been placed inside someone else's adult body, I never would have suggested someone try it. You see, pole vaulting isn't the sort of thing a person ever wants to be the first one to do; instead, someone has to come to you and say "Hey, this is pole. Run at that little hole there, put the pole in the hole, and hold on. Whatever happens, you'll be okay, I promise."

It's the kind of claim that you usually want proof of first. But since I had probably just died, and been given some kind of strange second chance, there was not a whole lot of "going wrong" that was worse than I had just escaped. So I tried to wiggle my hand and got an erection instead. I tried to bend an elbow and stubbed my toe--which is not easy to do when laying flat on your back. I accidentally thought about breathing manually and almost suffocated before I figured out how my lungs actually worked.

But seconds turned to minutes and things that were in the wrong place slowly sorted themselves out. It wasn't so much that I learned and more that I... maybe rotated my soul to fit in the right places, or something. It was weird.

I panicked when I realized my thoughts and memories might have been left behind. I got that thought after trying to speak and realizing that I knew a new language. That meant a new brain, right? And memories were a part of the brain, not the soul. Except a few long minutes later, I realized that I knew concepts that my new body had no words for, like "Electricity", "Quantum", "Universe", and "Quesadilla". That meant... what? That I'd been ripped straight from my universe to a new one, with benefits?

All in all it was probably a half hour or more before I tried to sit up. I made a few aborted attempts at the beginning, but each one made me more and more convinced that my motor skills were not up to the task. But one thing after another fell into place: I stopped being scared of breathing, I could move my fingers and arms, my sense of touch started to be more or less consistent in telling me that the ground was behind me, and the sky above me, and my eyes started looking at what I wanted to look at, and not wandering wildly.

And then I sat up, and my balance said that down was still behind me, and I had to struggle to stay sitting up. That settled too, and before long I switched to kneeling, then squatting, and finally, fell over backwards, hitting my head against the ground and cursing.

Somehow, though, the pain made me laugh.

I was alive. Whatever god had put me here, I was alive. And I--

Wait, a god?

This time I sat up sharply and looked around, grabbing at something like grass to keep me steady. I wasn't in some kind of ethereal plane, and I wasn't in a dream. But more importantly, I wasn't in a hospital, or a freezer. And my hands and legs didn't look the same.

Adrenaline surged. Yes, okay. I was in fact alive, and a new person. Maybe this was a normal afterlife thing, or maybe I was special, but whichever it was, this was real. Or, maybe, a very good simulation. Either way, I was alive.

I let that soak in for a long minute. I was still woozy, but getting less so by the... well, tens of minutes, at least. It was slow progress. As my thoughts turned to time, I looked at the sky, realizing that I didn't know if it was morning or evening, only that it certainly wasn't noon or night.

But night would come, and I was alone in a very large, very empty field of grass.

I stood up. My balance didn't want to let me, but I couldn't afford to sit if night might come. My new body came with clothes, so he must have had a life prior to this. I needed to find his home. I looked for tracks in the grass, but my eyes had trouble focusing. The way things were, I wasn't sure what I was looking at, even though I knew what things probably should be, under the circumstances. Just calf-high grass, with a line of what had to be trees that way, that had to be mountains there, and that splotch of color...

Was that a house?

I made my way there, one plodding footstep at a time, eventually making my way close enough that even my malfunctioning eyes could confirm that it was, at least, a building--a log house of some kind with a split log roof. The doorway was uncovered. Something was inside.

I stumbled in and recoiled, but I wasn't immediately sure why. I stumbled outside again and vomited in the grass.

"Oh... right." A somehow familiar not-figure was over my shoulder. Oddly, it wasn't the not-figure I mostly remembered having sort of met. "You need to stop. You shouldn't stay here."

I tried to talk, but couldn't. He heard me anyway.

"I know, I know. But you don't want to be found near here, because they'll kill you. I'm going to put you somewhere else. You won't have a house, but I will guarantee your safety, at least until..."

He made a promise that I couldn't hear, and I passed out, this time actually disappearing into the blackness of sleep.

Waking up in a new body, even for the second time, is a bit like riding a swimming pool down a hillside. If a person told you that you should ride a swimming pool down a hillside, you'd say he was crazy. If you told someone that you'd done so, they wouldn't begin to believe you. And even if it did in fact happen to you, you'd be at a loss to describe how it happened.

So when I woke up with my hand dunked in a river and face half buried in dried vomit, I had a sudden urge to try to write the experience down, turn it into a story. "You'll never believe that a guy like me once rode a swimming pool down a hillside," the story goes. "But it actually happened. It was one dark night..."

I stopped when I realized it was, in fact, now night time.

I also realized I was thirsty and my deific friend had placed me right next to water. I pulled myself over, dunked my head in, and drank. As dizzy as I was I had to make certain to very carefully drag my face back out of the water before I drowned, but when I was done, I started to feel better. Because after pole vaulting and riding a swimming pool, I was starting to feel a bit more human.

Only wait, a part of me said. Actually, you know, I was looking forward to dying, a little bit. I wanted to rest.

I rested my chin on the dirt and entertained the thought. Yes, actually, I had been exhausted after fighting a terminal disease for two and a half long years. And the body wasn't in great shape either. And here I was, in a brand new stressful situation.

My eyes didn't quite focus on the water. My head still hurt, a lot.

But, I decided, I was alive.

So I pulled myself a little ways away from the stream. I was supposed to be safe, now, right? So all I could do is sleep and hope that the headache would subside. And hope that tomorrow I could find shelter and food and... well, find a way to survive.

Some part of me, just as I was getting to sleep, reminded me I'd made a promise that I was about to forget.

It didn't seem important. I trusted that I'd figure it out. Or maybe "had faith" is a better way to phrase it; I was a bit too far gone to really deliberately choose to trust myself. Except somehow, that's what it felt like.

Waking up in a new body for the third time is a bit like getting kicked in the chest by a goat. I know, because I woke up with a goat eating my shirt, and when I scrambled to my feet, he kicked me in the chest. Not very philosophical of me, I know, but you only wake up in a new body for the third time once, and that's what it was like. I doubt you would have a different experience, but by all means prove me wrong.

I fell over backwards into the river, which was deeper than I'd realized. The body I'd been reborn into apparently couldn't swim, but I knew enough to get myself back on shore safely. Mostly, that meant "Don't panic", "Don't breathe water", and "Dog paddle for shore", but considering the circumstances, I did okay.

This time my eyes did manage to focus on the goat. It was just a goat, mostly, except it had big curly horns like a ram, except that a ram's horns didn't also have extra thorns on them for goring you. Under the circumstances, I was glad I got hit by hooves and not those things.

There were other thorn-goats nearby, watching as they chewed on grass and scrub brush. I realized I was starving, and that left me with an awkward thought: I'd never had to kill for own food before, but I also didn't know what plants out here were edible.

I realized quickly, though, that "hungry" was an understatement. The more I thought about food, the more it sank in that my body was ready and willing to bite into raw goatflesh for sustenance. If I just left it to my instincts, I would survive, even if it meant becoming some kind of gross carniverous wild-man.

But there were other options. Options that didn't require facing thorny devil-goats without a weapon.

I turned to the river and peered into it. There were, of course, fish. The river was deep in the place I fell in, but other places were shallower. So I skittered off downstream, looking for a shallower patch where I could wade in.

I felt a presence over my shoulder as I stepped into the water, felt like I was being judged as I scrambled around trying to catch anything. And when I finally caught something and allowed my instincts to tear into it with abandon, I felt like I was being laughed at.

But I didn't judge the god, if that's what he was, for laughing at me. I was doing a pathetic job, but I was also a newborn. If he expected miracles within hours of having been born, he was expecting too much. Instead, as I spat out fish scales and felt food in my stomach, I laughed too.

Because I was alive.

"You shouldn't eat raw fish," the god said.

"I can't exactly cook," I retorted.

"There were the goats--"

"That's asking too much." I kept smiling. I was ALIVE! "Maybe later. I have time, now."

"I am mostly just wondering why you don't, you know... oh! Your people didn't have that, did you?"

I stopped, waist deep in the river. "Didn't have what?"

"You know, elements. Powers, magic. Those things."

All of a sudden, I realized why my eyes didn't want to focus: they were seeing things I'd never seen before. The river was alive with flowing bands of blue. The air had currents--well, the air always had currents, but they were visible, which was not a thing that air had ever done. Even the ground beneath the river had patterns to it that I could feel under my feet.

I took all of that in for a moment.

"No," I admitted, "we didn't have any of that."

"Well." The god's shadow appeared on the shore. It looked a bit stooped, a thin figure leaning on a bit of a cane. "I mean I'd thought that this would be a good place for you to start, but then, if you need instruction on the basics, maybe a bit more civilization would be good." He paused. "But then, you will need a place of your own. I suppose it's up to you."

"I don't..." I paused. "A good place for me to start at what? The basics of what? For goodness' sake, man, I died, I woke up, I am starving, my body doesn't even work right; I don't even know what you're thinking, and you want me to make a choice about... what, exactly?"

"Hrm." The shadow raised and lowered his cane, which I suppose meant he was tapping it on the ground. Presumably, he wasn't actually a shadow and that was making noise somewhere, but not here. "What do you remember?"

I wanted to just argue, because I was feeling more than a little put out. I wanted to, because I alone in a new world with someone who was acting like I was supposed to just accept everything and go at his pace. But, he was also not quite being a dick. So, I took a deep breath and tried to sort out my thoughts. "I... am not sure. It was like a dream, one of the weird ones. I could tell you what I thought I remembered, but I'm... mostly sure it wasn't really that."

"You met a god."

"Sure." I guess.

"That was a god of your world, where there is no magic and little spiritual power. He could only watch and whisper, and well, people don't listen." If his shadow was to be believed, the stooped old man pushed his cane into the ground, then picked up his legs, floating cross-legged above the dirt. That might be impressive in person, but it was just weird when he was a two-dimensional shadow on the ground. "You said a few mean things, a few true things, and a few naive things, about what a god should be. Mostly, for lack of a better term, you left out the... human element." He picked up his cane and made a gesture, I assume at me, except that the whole thing was covered up by the shadow of his body. "So... call it a punishment, or karma, or just old gods being grouchy, but he called in a favor. See if it's as simple as you made it out to be. Who knows? Maybe you're right and we're all just idiots." He chuffed, and put his cane back down. "...and have been for tens of thousands of years."

I admit, I wasn't entirely thrilled to have my last words twisted like that. But, along with the censure, was an important answer to an important question. "So, you are saying... that I'm..."

"One of us? Hah! Sort of." The old man put his legs back under him and scooted up to me. "There are a lot of lessons to offer, but the most fundamental is that a god's power comes from others. Deserve it, and you get it." He paused. "I assume you know what I'm talking about."

"Faith... or prayer?" It was a guess, but as guesses go, I guessed it wasn't a bad one.

"Your world has no equivalent, but yes, that's close." He shrugged, and started to pace away from me. "It cannot be taken; it must be given. But it is more potent than any magic. It makes many things possible that were not. So." He whirled around suddenly and, I presume, pointed at me with his cane. Which, again, I couldn't see, because he was just a shadow. "You seemed more like the quiet country type than a big city god, but it's up to you. There are options open to you, although I'd advise you not to take my help for granted." A sense washed over me that somehow felt like the shadow was amused.

I spent some time thinking about it. "I need to spend some time thinking about it," I decided.

"Yeah." He stepped closer, the edge of his shadow touching mine and joining with it. "Anyway, I'm not really here to teach you magic and the ways of the world. If you need help with that, you'll have to find someone to do it. Which, of course, would be easier... not out here."

"Yeah, yeah." I sat down on the edge of the river. "I... I'll get back to you."

"Mmhmm." With a wave, the man's shadow collapsed into a bubble, which immediately just became a part of my shadow and stopped being anything weird or gody.

That left me with my thoughts, and some fish, and some thorn-goats. Of those things, the fish were definitely not interesting, and the thorn-goats were ready to leave me alone for a bit. So really, it was just me and my thoughts, and I guess a headache from having been dead until just recently, and also a river.

Of those things, it was actually the river that ended up consuming all my time and attention.

Sitting there looking at the river got me looking at the horizon, and as it happened, the horizon had kind of a view. That told me I was up on a plateau, hill, or mountain. So after staring at it for a bit, I just started walking. And maybe a couple hours later, I stood on a high cliff with a waterfall, looking out over a long stretch of forest, jungle, and river, with no real civilization in sight. And there I ended up sitting, with my legs hanging off the edge, thinking about the idea that I was supposed to be a god, on a world I'd just arrived at, that operated by rules I had no idea about, populated by who knows what kind of people, and the big question was whether I should try to go it alone in the hopes that things would somehow work out, or spend some time living in a city I knew nothing about in the hopes that things would somehow work out.

So I stared at the horizon, felt the breeze, listened to the wind and the water, and tried to sort out just what kind of miracle I was expecting. I tried to think about what I could contribute, if anything, in a world with different rules. And, eventually, I just turned and looked at the water as it fell. That was peaceful, but it took me a while to really drink in the calm that was the roaring waterfall.

Around evening time, the shadow reappeared behind me. I kind of noticed, and kind of had to be told. I'm not exactly sure where the line was because there was a god involved. Two gods, if I counted as one, which was still kind of surreal.

"I think," I said to neither of us really, "I belong right here. There are a few things I know about myself, but the big one is... this." I gestured not really at the horizon, but at the world below. "I know the view of the world from on top. Not the view of a ruler, but someone who watches the world from the sky. There were many tall buildings in our world, and... ways we could fly, for a short time. I have never been afraid when I looked down. It was all the rest of my life when I was afraid."

"...but," I admitted after only a moment, "I can't survive out here. I want to come back here. But I'm not ready to be alone. I need help. So..." I shook my head. "Take me. If you can... teach me how to get back here, but I belong somewhere else."

The sense of the god behind me altered, and I suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked back in surprise, wondering if this was going to be some kind of touching moment.

Except damn, that ugly, bearded old man was creepy.