I didn’t think I would be visiting another world today, but I guess you never know exactly what the effects of randomness will have on your life. I sat in my college’s library at one of the tables in the corner. I had my backpack to the side and my notebooks on the table and one earbud in pumping music into my ear. I had a math assignment due in an hour that I hadn’t finished that I was now rushing through. It was really my fault I hadn’t started it earlier, but I had a bunch of excuses that now no longer mattered. I also had a psychology test soon after the math class which had held most of my attention over the past three days.

As I worked I got a text about food from a friend. I told them I was busy in the library and would have to skip lunch this time. My math class was at 12:30. As I put my phone on the table I heard a voice behind me.

“I think you will do well,” said the deep voice coming from behind me.

I barely had time to let out a confused ‘what’ before my seat rocked back and I teleported between worlds. I felt a pull from my back and then the world blurred, and I tried to grab the table, but my hand went right through it. I felt my stomach clench up and I was more aware of my body’s presence than before. I felt my body rise and then a moment later my chair hit the floor then my head. I groaned.

“What happened,” I mumbled to myself.

I got up quickly and pulled my seat up when I noticed the first thing wrong. The chair I pulled from the ground was different from the one I had sat on moments earlier. I tried not to show it on my face when I looked around in surprise at the changes. The desk I was sitting at, and the chairs were nicer than the ones from before and made from metal completely with a nice foam pad instead of plastic.

Next, I looked around and went around the corner to see other people in the library. I knew I was still in a library because of the bookshelves in front of me. I watched for their faces and was not quite as surprised that they had completely changed as well. I looked around and I saw that there were fewer people in this section of the library, but they had become as weird as everything else. A few of them had very non-human features. Ignoring the different colors of hair there was also one student with horns growing out of their shaved head.

I gulped and turned back and returned to my corner and focused on my desk and stuff around me. I picked up my phone and checked the date and time. It still read the same day and blinked 11:49 at me. The phone was thinner than my old phone and looked like it was made to be bulletproof based on how the back felt. I stuffed it in my pocket after checking that my old code worked. I grabbed my backpack and headed to the bathroom to think through some things and try to process the last minute of my life.

So, I just isekai-ed myself into a new world somehow. It seems to be like my old world but there are definitely changes. I guess I should look around the library and figure this shit out a bit before I go. It is too bad I don’t seem to have received a care package of information. It is going to be awkward to figure out who I am in this world. Who was I and what happened to my old self? Did they die as soon I entered this world? Did I just replace their mind in their body?

I opened the bathroom door to a single-person room and saw myself for the first time here.

“Definitely new body, new me.”

I closed the door behind me and looked. I hadn’t changed much just a few changes that were very noticeable. My short hair was still brown but had grown out almost an inch and was styled differently. My eyes were still the same but seemed to be more vibrant. Like it had been touched up in photoshop.

I guess a lot of people here have altered features. I wonder how drastic that could be. I am glad I didn’t isekai with a tail or horns. I rather liked my human features and didn’t want them changed at all.

I stared at myself in the mirror, and it felt unreal. As the realities of my situation came crashing down on me then stronger than ever I started hyperventilating. I felt weak and slid down resting my back against the door. This wasn’t on my earth anymore. I was now someone else entirely someone that didn’t quite look like me. I took some more time to finally stand back up and see myself once more in the mirror.

As I looked at myself I found that even some of the little things had changed about me. My fingers held fewer marks and were better maintained. Last of all my clothes had changed. I had blue jeans, but it wasn’t like the one before and my shirt had changed to a simple striped design. Finally, I had on a jacket with a logo I didn’t recognize. It just had an HW on it. I wanted to google it and so much more right away but didn’t even know where to start. I needed to find out more about myself and the world that I was now stuck in.

“This library should have all the answers I need in the short term. Afterward, I can look up stuff on my phone.”

I looked myself over one last time and left the bathroom. I was missing information, and this was a place I knew I could get it. Starting with the history section was or used to be, I found it was no longer there. Students walked by ignoring me and continuing on to their destinations. Something else I noted pretty quickly was how I recognized none of the brands and devices. Everything looked like it was from a semi-futuristic world fifty to one hundred years in the future. The final thing I noted was the ads and sighed.

The food court on the library’s first floor was running a promotion with a celebrity. The celebrity’s name wasn’t important to me but her title. ‘Legacy the Soaring Superhuman’. She wore a yellow suit with black accents. She was smiling toward the camera in a display of capitalism present regardless of the world. I sighed and accepted where I now was for the first time. I had been transported to a world with superhumans and presumably superheroes and villains.

I am going to have to do a deep dive into popular culture soon if I want to adapt to this world. I’ll add it to my list of searches because I doubt the history section has the latest in the who’s who of the superhero world.

I continued to wander around the library for a bit before going into the history section. The history section was made up of four rows of bookshelves. I walked down the shelves first looking through their titles. Many of the titles meant nothing to me but I wanted to find something I could recognize to start from to tell me how this world diverges from this one. I skipped over the more specific topic ones and found the most general history of the world book to start with. There was a lot to go over but it started with the East India Trading Company.

Starting in 1623 the superhuman was introduced. After investigation, the precursor to the U.N. found that the first supers came from a ship from the EITC. One of their regular voyages was traveling away from Africa after launching from Spain. The crew was brand new and so was the ship when it sailed through a strange storm by all accounts and encountered some form of Kraken. The exact accounting gets blurry, but we know the crew landed on Atlantis. The survivors returned to Spain as superhumans. Afterward in the years to come a variety of people would gain powers regardless of race or nationality but the 12 survivors became the 8 dynastic super families that live on to this day (See page 117) for information on the 8 dynasties.

Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting. Usually, in stories, superheroes come around during the nineteen hundred because that is when the modern superhero was invented. Now, who are these families? These people should be pretty important to know if they are still referred to in modern books. In fact. I think I saw a few books on the subject.

I set my first book aside and pulled out a book just titled ‘Dynasties: The First Heroes’.

The last three heroes who stood out to me were Alice Godfrey in her work as the healer, Freya.

As well as the Alvarez family and their long-standing Fire School that is run much like a clan and has separated itself in many ways from the rest thanks to the initial efforts of the Alvarez brothers.

I set the book down and went over everything I had read. While doing so I started walking out of the library unsure of where I should go next. It was then my stomach reminded me that it was lunchtime and I need to eat. I got in line for food at the library food court and waited.

I guess it makes sense that they can be described as modern-day pseudo royal dynasties. I imagine that anyone else in that position would gain power quickly within the world and shape the future. I’ll have to look up their current incarnations and maybe what other heroes have popped up since then.

I got to the front of the line and ordered my food. The credit card I took out looked different than my usual one of course but what caught my eye was my school ID. I took it out after moving away from the line. I took it out and looked it over. My face was on it, and I had a dumb grin on but below it was more important info. ‘Issued: 2022 Status: Human Power: None’. My calm face shifted, and I almost swore as I saw the info.

What? I portal through worlds and I get no powers. This can’t be right. Couldn’t I have received something?

I dumbly opened my phone up and searched ‘How to know if you are a superhuman’. The first search results pulled up a health site and I opened the link.

All superhumans will gain access to their powers by the time they are fifteen or sixteen. Superhumans have a natural sense for themself and other superhumans around them. If you feel like you may be superhuman contact the Super Collective registration branch to catalog your power and get registered. Being superhuman and unregistered is illegal and you will be found in violation of the vigilante act if you don’t register by the age of 18.

With that answer, thoughts ran while I ate my lunch. It would be false to say that I was happy to be normal, but it was more complicated than that. I had thoughts of coming to this world and jumping into the world of heroes. I generally crossed having powers off my list as I hadn’t noticed anything drastically different about myself. I couldn’t hear better, see better, and my stuff hadn’t felt like it weighed any lighter. I hadn’t accidentally crushed my phone and the like. I also thought about the superhuman registration.

I am already over eighteen years old, and it would be weird to rush out and try to get tested and register. Even if I could find somewhere to get tested for superhuman abilities discreetly I’m not sure if I want to accept what that means and be forced into the restrictions of what being super means. I’m also not sure if playing a super in a costume is for me. I’ve seen the shows and movies. Once you are in the life of a hero you are in for life or until you are no longer useful. Maybe in another life.

I laughed at my little joke and cleaned up my plate.

When I finished up my lunch I found a new place to sit down and start going through my phone. I needed to know about the current heroes. I found that nearly all of the superheroes from the dynasties were active currently except for Frost Cloak who had been injured and was waiting for his child to take up the mantle. I tried looking up more info on the current successor but there was little public information available. There was only the fact that she was a teen. No public pictures were available. In this rabbit hole, I also learned that it was with the help of the Rodriquez family that this occurred. During their childhood, the family members of all the dynasties would be hidden while they attended school and trained their abilities. This helped to prevent attacks against their families which had occurred before.

I stopped searching after that and looked through my phone. I hadn’t thoroughly checked it out previously, but I now realized how strange it was. The phone was scratch-less and so was the back. I then tried to put a little pressure on it, and it didn’t bend at all despite its thin and light build.

The old me really went out and got the best model. This thing is built like a tank. It must be a phone model for superheroes to use.

I unlocked the phone and started searching. The apps were different as I had come to expect but their icons told me what they were well enough. I started with the news app. Headlines on superheroes covered half of the screen with the rest devoted to business, tech, and politics. There was some apartment building collapse in the city and other news about what areas to avoid while reconstruction and clean-up occurred.

Out of curiosity I searched up the construction efforts and found out that it was an entire side business within the superhuman world. While most damage was avoided when possible sometimes villains destroyed things before they were stopped. So superhumans specializing in repairs rebuilt anything that fell down in a matter of days instead of months. As long as stuff wasn’t disintegrated it could be rebuilt.

I skipped over the superhero stuff getting bored of it now and went to politics. Through the news app and some searching on the web, I got to know the president's name and some of the global issues of the time. As usual, some countries were at war with another, and superhumans were involved. That was when I realized some more major changes. Sure, the president was different, but I didn’t care too much. The more important thing was that borders had changed. 1623 was the middle of the colonial era. The U.S. hadn’t even formed yet or rebelled. This changed the borders of a few countries mainly situated in the southern hemisphere. How the European world had spread through the continent had fundamentally changed.

Due to the Spanish origins for many of the original crew of the trading ship European politics had changed as well. Their country had completely taken over Mexico and everything south of it for very different reasons. Most of the countries had declared independence like in my old world but often much later and for reasons related to superhumans more often than not. When I checked more on the history of the current U.S. I found much of the same. The Rodriquez’s had finished their journey to America and settled here with their business. This brought many other supers including the rest of the dynastic families soon after. The ‘New World’ became the breeding ground for supers and the wild west for a while as the government's thousands of miles away tried to find solutions to this new problem. A few wars were fought but the superhumans didn’t intervene, so things turned out ok in the end.

I put away the news app and focused on myself. I opened the messaging app and started scrolling through. I found a list of a few initials of people I had texted in another life and little else. I was still parentless and had no siblings I could see from an initial look. I went back to the top of my messages list and opened it. RJ had messaged me this morning saying, ‘Is it ready?’ to which I had responded with ‘yeah it is at my place’.

“Strange. Is this a work phone,” I said to myself.

I checked the other messages and saw similar conversations within them. Most of them started with the respondent asking me for something and me telling them when it would be ready and where to grab it. My suspicions started to grow and then were confirmed when I read this string of messages.

RJ: I need the modifications done before my fight with Goliath.

Me: I’ll pick up your suit at my place and take care of it after I get done with my stuff. You need it all to have the new padding right?

RJ: Yeah those punches are a bitch from them otherwise. Should I pick it up at the usual?

Me: Give me a day and I will have it ready to go the morning before the fight at 8 AM.

RJ: See ya then.

Fuck. I don’t have a simple life, do I? It looks like I was involved in the superhero business after all just in a different sense. More of the Lucius Fox style. I think I might be reconsidering that wish to have powers and be a hero. I don’t know how to modify super suits and make gadgets anymore or do hacking or anything else that a superhero might require of me.

I put my phone down and started taking deep breaths. Nothing good could come from panicking. My goal was to blend in. I needed to be careful with how I proceeded going forward. These heroes already know me or at least a lot about me. I can’t just run away and try to flee. That might work for a while until they track me down. I’m not sure I could evade them. Ultimately it is a choice between two very meh options. This is something I will need to do or try to until people find out I am an imposter. If I can sell stuff to heroes for a while maybe I can become this alternate self. At this point, I barely care about who I might be at school. If I don’t figure out this superhero stuff I am dead. I need to head home and do an in-depth eval on my former self and become them with a bit of my knowledge and self added in.

I was getting ready to go through my phone some more when I got a new text message. I read it over and died a little inside.

RJ: Remember to have the mask ready at 2. I’ll see you at your base. (Winky Face)

I checked the time, and it was almost one. If I had a math class at 12:30 in this world then I had already missed it. I opened up the GPS app on my phone and searched my recent locations and began my walk to my warehouse.