The time between death and rebirth is a strange thing, Morgan. After I died, it almost felt like I was floating through some ephemeral void of nothingness; ironically, a lot like the Oblivion Realm. Eventually, that abstract dream ceased, and I gained consciousness on Earth for the first time. I woke up in the backwoods of Alaska of all places, with a bear hovering over me. After letting him get in a few sniffs, I made a gesture and conjured a bear of my own – one thrice his size and with teeth that could mangle an oak tree. It was an illusion of course, but the bear didn’t know that. He got spooked and ran off deep into the woods, never looking back to see the giant bear he was running from fall apart into fragments of light.

“Now, just where am I?” asked myself.

I pieced together two pieces of information fairly quickly: One was that I was in unfamiliar territory. Two was that I was naked. I hadn’t the means to investigate the root cause of two, but one was something I was sure I could figure out with just a bit of scrying.

Scrying was every lost witch’s usual go-to trick. So when it didn’t provide any results, that was when I actually began to grow a little worried. I came to my first revelation that I wasn’t in Validar anymore: I couldn’t sense any magical energy whatsoever. There were also the smells around me; they were all new. We dragon-kin have famously keen senses of smell, so being surrounded by so much unfamiliarity unsettled almost more than the lack of magic did. I concluded that I would be better off surveying my new surroundings from the sky.

“It’s been a while since I had to make a broom like this,” I said to myself while inspecting trees.

After finding a suitable one, I tore it down with a spell and then spent some time burning, fashioning, and enchanting it into a magic broom. It was some of the shoddiest work I had ever done but good resources were severely lacking and beggars couldn’t be choosers. I hopped on and started flying high above my surroundings. I didn’t see a single landmark I recognized, though I did fly over a small town. Before you ask: No. No one saw me. It was too late in the afternoon, so I basically had the little town to myself. I even stopped by a school and stole an American flag off its flagpole to turn into a makeshift dress to help keep out the chills. Even dragon-blooded witches hate flying in such low temperatures with nothing on, you see.

I had flown to the southwesternmost end of Prince of Wales Island, though I didn’t know it was called that yet. I also didn’t know that body of water in front of me, the Dixon Entrance, was just the first in a series of American-Canadian straits and not the greater ocean. So, I took off towards it, I expected a much lengthier journey before discovering land again. As it was, after I flew across the Dixon Entrance, the Hecate Straight, and Queen Charlotte Sound, I found myself brushing up against the coast of British Columbia in no time. I decided to ride the coast, following the Queen Charlotte Sound, until I arrived in the Vancouver Metro Area and eventually in Vancouver proper. With no way to determine where I was, I opted to stop flying blind and stop in the city. I decided it was better to stay grounded after I saw a plane for the first time cruising through the night sky. It was a bad idea in Validar to share air space with dragons, griffons, and the like. I had never seen a commercial airplane in a bestiary before, but I was sure the same rule applied.

I walked Vancouver’s streets that night, still trying to piece together where exactly I was. Though, by that point, I had seen enough to realize I wasn’t in any of the Nine Realms. Nothing in Validar could match what I saw in Vancouver. Vancouver was far from the biggest city in North America or even eastern Canada but still outshone the most grandiose cities in Agnathia or Zokaria by miles. If a city like it existed in Validar, I most certainly would have known about it.

Also, Validar didn’t have cars, planes, trains, street lights, or sneakers. I was still missing the last item on that list. I made a decent enough dress out of the American flag I stole, weaving the fabric into something decently elegant. The lack of shoes or even sandals was a problem. If I weren’t half-dragon, I might have caught frostbite a long time ago with all the snow.

“Hey! Excuse me!” I heard a woman shout while walking the sidewalk.

I looked over to spot some woman who had been calling out to me from a car.

“Are you lost?” she asked.

I didn’t respond because I couldn’t understand what she was saying. It was my first time hearing English. Well, almost. I remember you saying “Oh my God…” and the occasional English swear when you were frustrated, Morgan. I had never heard someone speak an Earthling language in earnest before that moment, though. I just blinked at the woman when she spoke. She proceeded to get out of her car and approach me; a novel experience. I had grown used to people putting distance between themselves and me. The Canadian woman continued to question me.

“Excuse me, I was asking if you are lost. Can you not speak English? You’re wearing an American flag-styled dress, so I assume you’re from the States. Are you a foreigner?”

“…,” I said to her in a Validaran language. “”

The Canadian miss just blinked at me. "Uh… I’m sorry; I only speak English and some French. I have no idea what you’re saying. I just saw that you weren’t wearing a jacket, or a hat, or… shoes.”

She said that last one while looking down at my feet, probably wondering why they hadn’t changed color yet.

“I’m sorry if this is rude to ask, but are you homeless? I work at a shelter and can take you there if you are?”

She spoke with gestures, hoping I would understand. I mostly didn’t with an exception for when she motioned for me to hop in her car. I had seen plenty by that point and was interested in riding in one for the first time, so I nodded and followed her back to her vehicle. It might have been dangerous for a regular woman to hop into a stranger’s car in the middle of the night, but I was a witch. I was fairly confident that nothing in this new world was a threat. Thinking back, she probably thought I was a mail-order bride running away from my spouse or maybe a foreign escort escaping from a client.

Regardless, being taken to the women’s shelter worked out well for me. I found it comfortable enough to not mind staying for a few days while I absorbed as much information as I could about the strange new world I had awakened in. I received some old clothes, some half-decent food, and had plenty of free time to practice English. It didn’t take me long to learn thanks to my proficiency with lingua magic. You’re still familiar with those, aren’t you, Morgan? They’re how that old codger Cerdric taught you Validaran languages so fast.

They’re supplementary magic that targets the part of your mind that deals with comprehending languages and boosts its performance significantly for short amounts of time, allowing one to master new languages in short order. It can be quite dangerous if you aren’t a skilled spellcaster, but that obviously wasn’t a problem for someone like me. All I needed was enough exposure and someone to practice with. The shelter had a TV usually tuned to some soap opera or old movie, and it had some elementary-grade books for women who came in with kids. What I found most useful was a woman who was… let’s just call her eccentric. She wasn’t loud or rude. She was quite quiet and withdrawn actually. But once you got her talking, she wouldn’t stop going off about a litany of conspiracy theories she was obsessed with. She was the perfect practice partner. It was largely thanks to her that I mostly mastered English in roughly two weeks.

I still had an accent, but I figured it would be useful for what I had planned next. As I’m sure you know, Morgan, I can be quite methodical when I want to be. It only took me a few days of absorbing the media, walking the streets the Vancouver, and eavesdropping on conversations to get a feeling of what life in a big city on Earth was like. Turns out, aside from the extra noise and things moving faster, it’s not that much different fundamentally from how big urban settlements in Validar operate. Which I realized meant that there were bound to be, just like in big cities in Validar, places where men of affluence flocked to spend portions of their wealth on women they deemed to have an abundance of beauty and scarcity of integrity.

So, I decided on a plan. First, I took some donated clothes from the women’s shelter and modified them, magically reweaving the fabric of old clothes into new outfits being a specialty of mine as you know. The new design was based on what I observed was popular with Earthling night fashion – tight in all the right places with enough room for cleavage to show, and short enough to catch the eye, but not too short as to not leave things for the imagination to work itself.

Finally prepared linguistically and aesthetically, I went down to this upscale cocktail bar in Vancouver. Naturally, I got in for free. Even classy bars can’t say no to the type of business a pretty face and nice figure could draw. I enter the bar and immediately start grabbing attention. Even men already talking to their friends or other women over drinks glanced my way. Ignoring them, I took an empty seat at the edge of the bar and waited.

The bartender didn’t even get a chance to ask me what I wanted to drink before the bait was taken. And he was, at least externally, a really fine catch.

“Excuse me, but you aren’t here alone, are you?” a smooth-voiced man asked.

Before I could answer, he had already grabbed a seat beside me. This wouldn’t be the last brash thing Nathan – I’m pretty positive that’s what his name was – did that evening. He was tall, about as tall as you and your father, and his frame filled out the suit he wore nicely. His face was nice too, and he gave me this smile that, if I was a less experienced woman who had never dealt with a deviously good-looking man before, would have made my heart skip a beat. His more important quality, of course, was that he had money. Lots of it.

Immediately after I greet him, he orders the most expensive drink the bar has. He doesn’t even bother to ask if I wanted it. I didn’t, but I drank it anyway. I needed to reel this catch in after all. It didn’t take me long to realize that I reeled in a perfect catch: a full-time investor and part-time playboy in his late 20s with lots of money to throw at pretty women who caught his eye. After a few more drinks, I decide to seal the deal and let him to me back to his place. We head to his expensive car. I still don’t know much about cars, but I could tell at a glance that his was, and probably still is to this day, the most expensive I’ve ever seen in person. Granted, I would have known that regardless because he wouldn’t stop bragging about it and how he managed to pay for it in cash.

“Go on. Hop in,” Nathan said, giving me a love tap on the rear while he held open the passenger’s side seat.

I just smile and slip in. After he starts up the ignition, he takes the showboating to another level by letting the car can drive itself. This gave him plenty of wiggle room to get handsy before we even made it to his place. He must have overestimated how drunk I was considering how aggressive he was with the kissing and fondling. He didn’t seem to care that I wasn’t reciprocating either. I had to wonder just how drunk the girls he brought home with him usually were.

Anyway, after we make it to his fancy condo, he realizes I’m not as drunk as he would like, so he naturally suggests we should share even more drinks made personally by him at the little at-home bar setup he had.

“Maybe we should loosen up a bit more? How about a daiquiri cocktail?” he asked. “Every girl I’ve given them to loved them.”

“Well, how am I supposed to say no then?”

After I took him up on his offer, he encouraged me to ‘get comfortable,’ ‘have a nice look around,’ and ‘maybe go check out the bedroom’ while he fixed our drinks. The fool legitimately thought I didn’t see through him. I pretended to go along with his ploy. I had a very good look around the condo, including the bedroom. While I was in the latter, I whispered a spell under my breath.

“Devil Pixies...”

A small squadron of doll-sized spirits manifested from my magical energy, all of them looking very eager.

“Search the room, but don’t break or move anything out of place.”

They went to work expeditiously; going under the king-size bed, rummaging through drawers and his closet, and even surveying his bathroom. One of them soon found something conspicuous – a camera that was hidden from plain sight. It had been set in such a way to capture Nathan’s bed and was already recording when the pixie showed it to me. I still didn’t know that much about technology, but I could tell what Nathan’s game was.

“Nathan, what a nasty boy you’re turning out to be…”

I had the pixie put the camera back as it was before dismissing it and the others.

I left the bedroom and spent the rest of the waiting time on the couch. As I sat there, I wondered how many naïve girls wound up in that guy’s place and somehow managed to not see what Nathan was up to.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Veronica,” Nathan said when he finally arrived with the drinks.

Immediately, I smelled a special ingredient in one of them that no Earthling woman with ordinary senses would have been able to detect. Nathan was an even nastier guy than I thought. You would think a man so handsome and rich wouldn’t resort to nasty tricks like spiking drinks, but I guess it all does come down to character at the end of the day. What a shame on his part that he had to bring me of all people home with him that night.

“Hey, I’m feeling a little warm. Can you turn the temperature down a bit?” I asked him.

“No problem. Give me a minute.”

He set his drink down before heading for the thermostat. A tragic mistake on his part, because I pulled from my cleavage a small vial of something I cooked up prior and poured it into his drink. It was colorless, tasteless, and odorless, so the playboy was none the wiser when he returned to fetch his drink.

“Cheers,” we said in unison before throwing them back.

A few minutes pass until Nathan finally said “Man, you must be tired though.”

“Am I?”

“Of course you are. You had a busy day. C’mon, let’s get you to bed.”

Again, like at the bar, he didn’t wait for me to get a word before he decided to act. He got handsy again and was way more aggressive than when he was in the car. Nathan nearly stripped off my clothes and tried to do me right there on his couch, but he decided to drag me to his bedroom instead. He had to catch it all on film after all. He threw me on his bed and started casting off his clothes, a hungry look on his face as his eyes glazed me up and down. The idiot was so horny he didn’t even aware I wasn’t affected by his drug. Not that it mattered. Right before he climbed into the bed after me, the secret ingredient I added to his cocktail kicked in. Nathan’s eyes locked eyes with mine for a few seconds before he dropped down on both knees, clasped his hands together, and belted out with tears welling in his eyes:

“Veronica… Please marry me!”

I blinked. Then I snapped my head back and cackled maniacally. I think residents in the other condos might have even heard me. I was a grandmaster when it came to brewing love potions, but I never had one work so dramatically before. The brew I made was weak as well. I lacked most of the proper ingredients only found in Validar that I would need to make an authentic one. Had I given it to an ordinary Validaran man, I would have been lucky to make him blush. Tragically for Nathan, the magical immune system of Earthlings was practically nonexistent.

“Veronica, please… Please give me an answer!” he continued to plead. “Please say yes!”

After calming myself down, I slid to the edge of the bed and sat my feet down in front of him.

“See my toes?” I asked him.

He nodded.

“Kiss them.”

He didn’t hesitate. He went down and kissed my feet like I was his personal goddess. With the way my love potion was playing with his mind, I essentially was. The goal from the start was to snag a rich man, and then, while he was lovestruck by the potion, get him to give me a large sum of money I could live off of before a few months. But seeing the opportunity quite literally presented at my feet, I changed my goal to something a bit more ambitious.

“Will you give me an answer now?” Nathan asked

I scowled at him. “When did I tell you to stop?”

“Uh… I didn’t mean to---“

“Just for that: go sleep on the couch tonight.”

“What? But… This is my bed…”

“Is this how you talk to a woman you want to marry?”

Nathan shook his head, promptly stood, and then hurried out of the room with his clothes in hand. After basking in the tremendous results of possibly my worst brewed concoction ever, I hopped in Nathan’s shower, watched a bit of his television, and went to sleep blissfully in his bed. When I woke up the next morning, he had already brewed me coffee and made me breakfast. I asked him for a lump sum of cash before he headed off for work, and he gave me a few thousand with no further questions asked.

This was the template for the next month of my and Nathan’s ‘relationship’. I would ask for something and he would give it without questions asked in hope that I would give him some validation and reciprocate his love. I never did, but I never outright rejected him either. Instead, I kept him standing on a tightrope, stranded in an eternal feeling of suspense. It must have been agonizing for him.

It made my first few weeks on Earth an absolute delight though.

I got him to get me my own apartment, my first phone, all the expensive clothes I wanted, and dinners at any place I desired. I even got him to book me a trip on a cruise liner. I went without him, of course. I didn’t want him badgering me about marrying him every other hour. Eventually, I started to get tired of it all though. I had enough money saved up in cash at that point, so I lost my main reason to keep Nathan around. Surprisingly, the love potion still hadn’t worn off despite the better part of a month having passed. I thought about just leaving him, but he insisted on taking me with him on a business trip across the border in Seattle.

“Please, Veronica! I’ll buy you whatever you want!” he begged. “Just please, come with me! I can’t stand being apart from you!”

I sighed. “Fine. But I want my own hotel room.”

Apparently, he had already made sure to rent me a separate hotel room because he recognized by that point I didn’t want to share a room, let alone a bed, with him. In the end, it didn’t matter because I wound up spending most of my time away from the hotel and wandering Seattle. I realized then that I was feeling a bit… Would vacuous be the right word for it? I was wanting for nothing in my new life. Only just a few weeks ago I had arrived in this mysterious world where nobody spoke a language I was familiar with. And yet, in short order, I had mastered the language and gotten a man to finance the most affluent lifestyle I could want. I was no closer to figuring out why I was on Earth to begin with, but I can’t say I cared about that anymore. Unlike you when you arrived in Validar, Morgan, I had no prophecy from the gods directing my future actions. I had no old wizard to help guide me along some predestined path.

I was just a witch in a world without witches. And, as it turned out, living in a witchless world when you were yourself a witch was a pretty easy thing. Hell, if I wanted, I could have just married Nathan before the love potion wore off, got Canadian citizenship, have him put me in his will, killed him with magic, and then lived the rest of my days on Earth off his fortune knowing Earthling investigators would never be able to piece together the evidence.

To be honest, I was too unmotivated to even go through with that. My new life was a blissful one, but it was also a pointless one. How many new outfits and fancy dinners did a witch need before it all lost its luster? It was in this mood that I decided to grab my broom and go for a ride one fateful night. Not sure why. I just got a strong urge to go to the beach.

I thought that would have it almost all to myself when I got there considering it was almost midnight. So imagine my surprise when I spotted a silhouette already standing on the beach, staring at the waves as they rode in and then coasted back out to shore. His thin silhouette betrayed a strong back that only became apparent when you got close. The night air made his hair and tie toss gently. Yes, he was honestly wearing a full suit and tie while he stood at the coast. I wondered what type of man in his right mind would do something like that. Then, as if hearing what I saying in my head, he turned back to face me. The type of man who would do something like that turned out to be surprisingly handsome.

He also happened to look an awful lot like a certain Chosen One I knew.