While walking through the Forest of Three, I asked Noel about The Terrible. She said it was a great being, one revered by all the elves that lived on the Plains of Serenity. I was surprised by the fact that the elves apparently lived in the plains, and not in the forests like they did in fantasy stories back on Earth.

Oh, and I told Noel that I came from a tribe very far from here. I asked if we could compare some things, in case there were more major differences between our tribes. I asked her what her tribe called this planet, to which she responded by asking me what a planet was. Realizing that she didn’t even have a concept of things like planets and worlds, I asked her what she called the ground, or the earth, to which she replied: Earth.

As the words were coming out of my mouth, I realized this particular line of questioning was pointless. To test my hypothesis, I asked her my next question in French: what do your people call the sky? The sky. I asked the next one in Spanish: what do your people call fire? Fire.

In Mandarin: what is blood? Blood. In Japanese: what is food? Food. In Russian: what is a tree? A tree. Latin: sun? Sun. Greek: moon? Moon. Arabic: stars? Stars. I even asked in Klingon: what is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything? To that, she gave me a funny look, and I told her it was nothing.

For whatever reason, it seemed like my words were being translated into her language. Since I had some understanding of the complexities of translation and linguistics, I couldn’t quite believe that words from all the languages I had been speaking were being perfectly translated into her elven language in real-time. Instead, I figured my words were being translated to the best possible translation and then somehow processed into a form that sounded like it was coming from a native speaker. I was sure it wasn’t perfect. I could probably pick apart how this was happening, what it was leaving out and what it was adding in, but now was not the time for that.

I asked her what she called her language. She replied that they didn’t have a word for it, they just called it language or speech. I asked if all the tribes of the Plains of Serenity spoke the same language, and Noel said they did, although there were some local accents and phrases. As we walked into a clearing in the forest, I asked her if she knew what ‘writing’ was. She said she had no idea.

I rubbed my temples. It was clear to me that this wasn’t a case of ‘living in the sticks’. It would be fine if she didn’t know how to write. I could explain illiteracy. But a few more questions clarified that she had no clue about the concept of writing itself. Using symbols to represent spoken words or sounds was something she had never even considered.

I didn’t know if this lack of technological development was unique to the elves of this world, or if this entire world was tens of thousands of years behind the Earth that I had come from. All I knew was that this was not a typical Medieval European-ish fantasy world, like in all those stories I had read on the internet. What was truly scary about that realization was that it meant I had no idea how I had arrived in this world.

I knew I came to this world after falling into the Charles river. After that, there were usually two possibilities. I had either drowned in the river and reincarnated as an elf in this world, or I had been transported from the river to this world, as if I had passed through a portal or something. I hoped that I had died and reincarnated. Was it scarier to have died? Sure. But it also meant that I had been reincarnated, either by a sentient deity or by some sort of rule of existence. And as long as there was some being or rule that had brought me here, I could always ask that being or manipulate that rule to go back to my Earth.

I was a little less optimistic about a ‘portal’ setting, because the portal could always be a one-way street. But still, if a portal had opened up at the bottom of the Charles river that day, I could at least try to find another one like it to get back home.

But now that I knew about Noels tribe’s lack of development, I couldn’t assume that this was a ‘typical’ setting. I had to be open to the possibility that there had been no reincarnation and no portal. That there was no deity or divine rule or multidimensional accident involved. If this world didn’t follow the rules that I was familiar with, I could simply ‘be’ here.

It was something I had always thought about when I was reading fantasy stories on the internet. Why did the author have to explain how the character came to the fantasy world if the entire story was set in that world? The answer was usually that it established a goal. If the character wanted to return to their world, they had to do something or find something which would help them return. Explaining how they got there in the first place helped set the rules for how they could return.

But what if there were no rules? What if the character did not and could not know how they had gotten to the fantasy world? What if they had no idea how to even begin searching for a way home? Well, in a situation like that, I thought to myself, that character would be quite royally screwed.

I sighed.

“What’s wrong?” asked Noel.

“Nothing,” I said. “How much farther to The Terrible’s lair?” I asked. She had said that The Terrible lived in a cave near the edge of the forest.

“We should get there before the moon reaches the horizon,” she said.

Great. They didn’t have standardized measurements for time, either.

We trudged through the forest in the moonlight. This time, Noel began asking questions. She started by asking about my tribe, to which I gave some vague answers based on my family back home.

I told her my mother had died a couple years ago, and that she had raised me and my brother all alone. Noel was confused when I told her my father had not died, he had just never been in my life in the first place. Had other members of my tribe not helped my mother? Not really, I told her. My tribe was strange, they didn’t really help each other that way. In fact, we liked to live on our own, only meeting for festivals or important events. She said she didn’t really understand, and I agreed, what a terrible way to live.

She asked about my brother, but I didn’t have much to say. He was my half-brother, and he was much older than me. He had already graduated college by the time I was in high-school. We had been close when I was younger, but drifted apart after he went to college. He’d fallen out with mom in high-school so he rarely ever called or came home during college. He didn’t even let her help pay for college, taking up a huge pile of student debt, instead. The day I had gotten into the college of my dreams, he unfriended me on Facebook.

“Facebook?” said Noel, contorting her lips to say the word. She’d held that look for most of the conversation.

Oh right.

“What I mean is,” I began, “my brother is a lot older than me and he doesn’t like my mom. So once he was old enough, he left our family and started living on his own.”

“Wow,” said Noel, “wasn’t he scared?”

I stopped walking. Scared? Guess I’d never thought about that.

“He was,” I said, “probably.”

“Then did he join other people in the tribe?” asked Noel as she stopped walking too.

“Er, I don’t know. Sort of? He has friends, and a partner too. He works all the time, has enough money to pay off his debts slowly. Really, I’m not too worried about that guy.”

“You don’t like him?”

“I just don’t like thinking about him too much,” I said. I put a hand on Noel’s shoulder and smiled. Then I wondered if that gesture would go through the cultural barrier. I guess she understood because we began walking, with no more questions about my family—or tribe, as Noel called it.

“We’re almost there,” said Noel, a few minutes later.

The moon may not have been below the horizon yet, but it was definitely hidden behind the trees. With the little moonlight that streamed through the canopy, I could barely make out a small clearing with a large rock formation jutting out of the ground.

The cave was menacingly dark. The rocks themselves seemed to dampen the moonlight and the wind stilled as it approached the entrance. The ground was craggy, with large crevasses that looked like claw marks from a massive beast. But the most startling thing of all were the crudely drawn runic symbols carved into the rock all around the cave’s entrance.

Somebody in this world knew how to write after all.