My breaths come in deep, shuddering breaths, yet despite my desperation I never lose the feeling of breathlessness. I cannot feel my skin, but my airways burn and itch. I feel nothing but my fever and pain, delirium has its hooks in me, and I mutter and curse in my mind, my thoughts a haphazard jumble.

I know I’m alive, but I’m not sure if I’m better off this way, to stew in slow agony. I wasn’t entirely sure how long I’d be alive either, my breaths can only be so deep so long. I can’t open my eyes, it’s like my eyelids are welded shut… I supposed they likely were. So I lay impotent once more, my hallucinations more often returning to the experiments and sometimes to home.

[Are you fully conscious?] Page asked me, once I had reached a more lucid phase.

Yes, I thought back, my head throbbing. Start at the beginning.

[You fell into a teleportation point. however, before that your skin was carbonized by the extreme heat and multiple layers of muscle were harmed. Despite less than a second of contact, your extremities were utterly charred on the outside, your eardrums burst, eyes were rendered non-functional, and it scorched your lungs.]

How am I still alive?

[Nanomachines were jolted from hibernation, lungs were primary focus, securing the most important resource to your body at that moment: air.] Which explained why I can breathe normally now. [Eschars were then broken down to prevent harm to the body, sensory organs were also repaired. During this your body reacted with inflammation, and bacterial infection took hold, most of them were ineffectual, but you contracted a fever as a result. Someone has been feeding you throughout this process. Muscles are now primary focus, including the tongue.]

I obliged, my eyelids brushed against some form of rough cloth, though the thick scarring prevented me from opening it more than halfway. I wanted to move to get rid of the cloth on my face, but decided against moving a body coated in at least third-degree burns. Page appeared to have noted my hesitation, and spoke up again.

[Scar skin has formed, likely aesthetically displeasing and highly restrictive, however extent of restriction requires physical testing. Removal of blood clots in ears also required if regeneration is to finalise.] I would have asked how long I was out, considering how much I’d healed, but it didn’t have a timepiece, and I wasn’t in any condition to provide information for it to deduce anyway.

I struggled moving my hand to my face and removed the bandage, to find that my body was practically mummified, and the cloth strips were sticking to my skin but they weren’t bloody, rather dried to my skin with pus, though that seemed to have stopped as well. Luckily, all the blood had dried and clotted, so removing it from my ear was mostly a matter of tilt and jerk. Task completed, I looked around.

It appeared that I was in a stone hut… heh, maybe I’m with a hermit. It was slightly reassuring that this wasn’t some futuristic or exotic structure. The ground is earth, and the walls have no windows. The only light came from outside, and while I’d like to go out, I didn’t even know what I looked like, though I’d also kept most of the bandages on, the scarring was likely hideous. It was a novel experience not to be able to feel anything, not texture, not even pressure. My muscles were apparently mostly fine. Some parts would feel unresponsive as I moved, as though I’d been slightly paralyzed, not to mention the scarring was straining most of them.

The home I was in held a straw mattress, which I’d risen from, a wooden basin and rough rags, likely used to clean my skin as the cloths were changed. As I moved I could feel thickened scar skin folding on itself as I bent my joints. I grimace slightly at the exertion.

The light in the room darkened, and a person appeared at the door, hunched over slightly, with a scarf tied over their face, they seemed to be male, though the various pouches and satchels obscured their figure. Maybe I was in a rural village. I attempted to speak, to find my tongue still stiff.

[Movement aggravates tissue, slows healing.]

They began to shift their posture, and gestures suggested they were speaking, though all I could make out sounded like it came from underwater, I stared perplexed. Their movements became slightly more agitated as I stood unresponsive, culminating in them exasperatingly pointing at their ears. I gestured at my own with my hand and swivelled my wrist, hopefully it was a universal gesture. The healer hesitated, before beginning a series of rapid fire movements that were probably sign language. None of which I understood.

When will my hearing be fixed?

[Cannot give reasonable estimate, no time measuring apparatus.]

For the record, are the nanomachines capable of supplementing my body’s healing to where I can get my normal skin back?

[Affirmative, cautiously recommend changing bodily structure to better suit the local ethnic appearance, as observations suggest that you wish to integrate into your surroundings as seamlessly as possible.]

… Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ll see in time.

The healer stepped forward to wave his hand in my face, snapping me from my thoughts. He looked me over once or twice before nodding to himself, then gestured back to the mattress in the room. I sat down uncertainly, and he began an examination of my body.

Lumpy skin stretched itself across my body, knotty and blemished but strangely smooth, and waxy in complexion. No creases adorned it at the joints yet, it looked almost like synthetic skin I saw once. A pop accompanied the return of my hearing like when water leaves the ear, and I gestured to them. He looked at me strangely for a moment, and began to speak.

His voice cleared any remaining doubts regarding his gender, deep and slightly hoarse, sounds were fluid, seeming to flow into each one rather than be distinct sounds. Possibly a language with phonetics that string together, similar to English?

Regardless I couldn’t understand a sound he said. Page, can you decipher it?

[No context, error prone translation. Rudimentary understanding of language conventions will be required.]

So how did it work with Greil?

[I was capable of providing context. You were already able to understand base language due to me acting as interface between language and meaning.]

Guess there was no way around it. I looked into his eyes, and shook my head.

Over the next two months, I learned the nuances of the language, each meaning ascribed sounds and symbols. I learned at a frenetic pace, my memory was good enough for vocabulary, and I relied on Page for grammatical accuracy and pronunciation. I mostly practiced with Raque, the man who had healed me, deciding to share some off my background, as trust was a give and take affair.

I woke in Raque’s home, on a spare mattress that was now a permanent fixture. Disappointment washed over me, as it normally did every day since I’d met Greil. For a long while, it’d been accompanied by the thought that I was waking from a dream, and that I’d be looking up at the white ceiling of my room.

I’d changed my appearance, fairly light skinned with a head of copper hair, along with dark brown downturned eyes. I had maintained my height of around 180 centimetres, my muscles had atrophied somewhat, but recently I’d been working as something of a handyman which had helped build myself back up to fit.

One of the first things Raque had asked was about medicine and the body. Naturally I couldn’t identify their herbs, though many seemed familiar, but strangely enough our anatomy was uncannily similar, and disinfection appears to work well regardless of when and where you are. I lived with Raque for the time being, as it was the easiest place to live. When there was a patient I helped out. We’d managed to pass me off as something of a drifter.

“So what will you be doing today?” Raque inquired, a serious look in his eyes. He’d been the one to encourage me to take up handyman jobs, believing that having people used to me would make them less suspicious of my origins.

So far he’d been right. “Repair work for the Jeanost family, I was commissioned for a latrine pit for the hamlet along with a few others, nasty work, and the Hearnost family wants me to patch their wall and replace their door. So I’ll do the Hearnost job first then do the latrine pit around mid-afternoon and the repair work will wait for tomorrow once I have the materials.”

The hamlet itself wasn’t really very tight when you looked at how the farming family houses were spread, out of necessity due to space requirements for farms, but in between it allowed taverns, weavers, and Raque, a sage of sorts, to help link the community together.

Even so, it took me quite a while to run over to the Hearnost home. This world was almost identical to my own, no weird plants, animals, suns, weather, or even races. It was almost like walking back through time.

And yet, so much is different. Geography, ocean to land surface ratios, even the governance systems were different, some more drastically than others.

I inspected the Hearnost wall. Honestly it’d been built fairly well, but from what I saw it was now a large patchwork of mending that was unlikely to serve its purpose much longer. I stared at it for a while, wondering if I could salvage any of the wattle embedded in the daub, before deciding it’d be best for me to just get new materials.

First, I needed to take it apart, carefully avoiding points of structural importance, if this thing collapsed I’d likely have to build it back up and be charged for that. Taking a trowel like tool I began to chip away at the edges, where it became readily clear that proper maintenance had in no way been enforced. After that stronger tools were used.

As I grouped the remains a young girl came up to me, maybe ten years of age. She stared quietly as I began weaving the sticks I’d found into the wall. Unlike normal DIY, I’d had to work with imperfect materials, difficult. I spared her a glance, she wore a flax sack, really the only proper description, with black hair and curious darting green eyes. She met my gaze for a second before grinning and running off. I smiled as she peeped past the wall corner. A quiet child, Kial I think.

I remember when I first began, doing odd jobs left and right, while learning the ropes regarding walls and basic carpentry. It hadn’t been a cakewalk, Raque had trained me by asking me to do and redo repairs on small animal pens. The man seemed to trust me, despite my origins. “You don’t seem to want to cause trouble, so long as that’s true, I will help as I am able.”

I focused back into my task, weaving them as well as I could so they didn’t snap or protrude. One of the few traits that helped me was an exacting attitude and focus. My handiwork was slow, but always the best I could do, and I rarely took breaks.

I mixed clay and sand together into a small pot, before mixing in some old straw from animal bedding, inevitably inserting small amounts of animal dung into the mixture. Disgust over that had left me over time, and now I was only left with a small amount of apprehension on how to clean my hands after. Whatever usable daub from the broken panel had also been salvaged and mixed in so I didn’t need to collect too many materials.

Once I’d completed the new panel, I brought away all the trash to be disposed elsewhere, and headed to the nearby river. Hygiene now is not the same as what I was experiencing, but I can at least be glad that washing of dirty items occurs downstream of where we get water to drink and cook, with the weekly bath area between them, I kneeled at the river and began to scrub off the accumulated daub on my hands.

I stared at myself for a while, in stories we keep getting the glory from being sent back in time, fighting epic battles and ending as legends. I was suffering from the dirt I encountered, the lack of daily baths, using the latrine was an ordeal. The sponge had given me a double take, short end indeed…

I met up with the rest of the group in charge of the latrine pit at around noon, exactly when I’d been told. The pit’s specifications had already been given, we were just supposed to dig it. This at least, was simple and not really dirty, I took the nearest shovel, and struck the earth.

Any community has its rhythms, this one had a tavern, so one of the few things to count on was for the adults, roughly thirty in number, to gather there. I didn’t like crowded spaces, I was here for a different reason.

“Here’s your meal.”

The tavern was one of my most frequent clients, because of sheer use of every single object within. My mechanical knowledge was tested the first time I was contacted, and now I handled maintenance of most things in the tavern.

“Thank you.”

Hamlets like this had little use for money, almost cut off from the world, had it not been for the tax they send to those who protect them. Transients pass through sometimes, chasing rumours of greener pastures. In the end, their currencies were favours, everyone contributes to each other, bartering their goods and their manpower for what they lack. Trade occurs through one man, Ivges, who is likely the only person in town to own money.

Siea smiled politely as she moved through the throng yet again, pragmatic grace in her steps. Tavern goers were keenly aware of the unspoken rule in this tavern: touch her and you don’t get to use the tavern for a month, Trvian was exceptionally keen eyed, with quite a punch as I saw once. Both had seen almost thirty full harvests, making them old, though Raque, at almost fifty, was practically a living marvel.

Loran sat next to me, a rancher’s second son, one of the first to attempt to befriend me. “We chased that damn chicken round the whole ranch, tenacious little devil. It learned to fly in the last leg, well more slow falling, but you get it.” He leaned in close so I could hear him, grinning from ear to ear.

“And then the chicken crossed between you and Kala and you both tumbled into each other? That’s nothing new, you two have been at it for days.”

“Well…” He smiled at me sheepishly, obviously hiding something, I let him off, I had no intention of learning about his puppy-love scenarios. My accent was still off by a bit, but people had stopped commenting on it, which was progress, it’s always hard to learn to speak a language.

Bitter foul beer accompanied it, never liked alcohol. Beer was quite a staple. Water wasn’t always sterile, so it ends as something of an essential. Low alcohol content kept us sober, mostly. I drank it sparingly, preferring boiled water unless the water was too murky to even consider that. I stared at the beer in the mug unhappily, before downing it in a gulp before I could protest.

The next day I worked carpentry on Jeanost tables, as well as some small repairs on their chairs. Alida of the house watched me work, roughly the same age as Loran, and if full harvests translated to years maybe a year or two older than me. She asked many questions, often about what I thought on many topics, which lead me to learn quite a bit on the world. Sometimes she’d ask to be shown what I’d just done.

The calm of the hamlet was therapeutic, and life, while sometimes unpleasant, was at least enjoyable, days like these I wish could last forever.