Chapter Text
Waking up in a world that’s not your own is not for the weak, you grumble to yourself. It’s not cool like those reincarnation and isekai stories where you’re born wealthy and beautiful. Or well, it doesn’t work for you at least.
One minute you had been sleeping in your bed in your universe. The next second? You awake on a bench, clothes wrinkled and drool dried to your cheek.
It doesn’t register at first—where you are, what’s going on. It’s early morning—the sky is still a deep blue with hints of a yellow-pink emerging from the skyline of a city beside your small corner of your bench. It’s as if you fell asleep in your bed, wearing the pajamas you had put on for bed last night, and then were transported to this small bench overnight.
But after doing a quick overview of your body to make sure nobody has touched you, you realize that perhaps this whole issue must be because you had been sleepwalking. It must be—even if you can’t recognize the park you’re laying in. So you do what anybody naturally would do—you get up and check your phone to pull up Google Maps.
But your phone has nothing that can tell you where you are. It’s dead—probably because it had been in the charger while you slept, but no longer is. So you just rub your face, before putting one step in front of the other.
It doesn’t look too different—besides the fact you were in the city. But once you go further into the city is where you blink in a haze. There’s holographic ads on the side of the buildings, in a language you can’t read. Military propaganda—Fleet? It’s got to be an air force ad, gross—another talks about Hunters (like the animal shooting kind?) while another talks about some scientist company making a breakthrough in heart conditions. You assume, with the whole happy faces and detailed visuals of a beating heart.
It’s all a bunch of images and smiling faces—just enough context for you to assume, seeing as it seems to be written in characters you can’t read. It isn’t too unfamiliar. There are always places that won’t have the same language as your mother tongue, seeing as there’s over 100 different languages on Earth. But it raises a ton more questions—such as, you were no longer home.
On the bright side, it must be early dawn, because there is barely anyone on the streets you pass by. And those that are, are either attached to their phones, or are looking at watches with holograms. You would even say this just looks like a bigger and more advanced society than where you were from.
Or just an elaborate dream that is real. And it really does feel real—because a stray gust of wind causes you to shiver slightly as it passes by you. You hug your arms for more warmth, trying to see if somebody nearby looked like they had any authority. You normally don’t go looking for those in power in fear they’ll take advantage of you, but you really needed to get home. You didn’t have your wallet on you, nor any shoes on. If they could direct you to a shelter—then you could at least charge your phone and get out of this futuristic city.
Eventually you find a young woman yawning, black hair sleek from where it sits in a high ponytail. You jog over, hoping to everything you have that this person knows a spot you can crash in.
“Hey! Hey—sorry. This is gonna sound weird. Are there any shelters nearby?” You rush out all in one breath once the girl turns. She blinks at you for a moment, eyebrows furrowed as she catalogues your outfit—the lack of shoes, the thin pajama material. You were just happy you had clothes on.
She blinks again, before yawning once more. Her outfit is a sleek black, and you can see a gun perched to her side that is out of view. “Yeah,” her voice mumbles through the yawn, in an accent you can’t quite place. “That way.”
You follow with your eyes where she’s pointing, sighing in relief when it's across the street. You thank her quickly, ignoring the slight eyebrow raise and hum before she’s walking off again. You thank the stars that she didn’t just try to shoot you or accuse you of being a thief, opening the doors to the shelter.
Except it doesn’t really look like a shelter, and more-so the lobby of a hospital. There's a receptionist in the corner, a couple of chairs, weird swirls of paint on the wall meant to look abstract, and a couple of doors. But well, you weren’t an idiot—so you walk up slowly, smiling gently.
“Identification?” The man at the desk asks, glancing up from the desk. He pauses at your state of dress, and you smile to look less intimidating—or less stupid. Anything that gives you a charger.
“Lost my wallet,” You say softly. “Do you have a phone charger? I can’t access any money for a bus pass or taxi until it's charged.” You hold up your phone, shaking it so that he can see it. The man blinks at you, squinting at the phone you're holding.
He sighs. “Are you pulling a prank? An antique collector or perhaps? That phone hasn’t been used in centuries, Kid. Do you at least have your watch?”
“Antique..” You grumble softly. Okay, so it wasn’t the newest model that came out a few months ago—but you knew that this phone still worked. It wasn’t like it was made a decade ago! And then you blink again. “Watch? Um—no.”
The man mumbles under his breath, rubbing his eyes. You catch the sight of his name tag—Zander, but it’s quick to lose your interest when he moves to page somebody, mumbling into the mic. You try not to listen in—he’s so quiet despite you being right there, but you catch a few silvers of the conversation.
“---blood work, yes—-possible Wanderer attack—-ID needed—-Yes.” He turns to you, “Go through those doors, Kid, and turn left. A doctor will get you identified and send you on your way, okay?”
You nod, but one word sticks out to you, Wanderer, you follow his directions, but your mind is running miles a minute right now. Wanderer—where had you heard that term before? What…What does that remind you of?
It sounds like a Walking Dead term—something like a zombie or whatever. A woman with box braids and purple rimmed glasses stands with a tablet in her hands once you turn left down the hallway, white lab coat swishing in the air as she beckons you into the room.
“Alright, Dear.” She says softly—like you're the victim of a crime you can’t quite remember. “I’m Doctor Kander. Please sit here.”
You sit down, but can’t quite see her. Wanderer. Wanderer. Where have you heard that term before? Shit—you have the memory of a goldfish. It was kind of hard to remember so much when you were nearing the end of your stunt in college, busy with exams and presentations and the like. You feel your blood run cold when you can’t remember what you had been learning in college.
“Dear?” You turn to the doctor, smiling shakily. She hums. “Listen, we are just going to do some blood work, just to make sure you're healthy, alright? Then we are just going to ID you—once we do that I can give you a replacement watch and you can re-download all of your apps.”
You tune out as she takes your blood with a syringe, as she tries to make jokes that a nurse should be helping you, but that it’s quite early for anybody to be up—so you get me today while my lovely helpers have lunch! She takes your blood pressure, and a few other things. She asks you about your memories, if anything hurts. You just tell her you went to bed and woke up on a park bench, voice low.
You don’t voice the fact that when you try to remember your family's faces, your college career you had worked so hard for—-hell, even your address, was all a blur of memories. Not even your age—which you know was at least older than twenty, can come to you. You look the same as always—no new hair color or weight gain. You know instinctively that this is you—-and when you stare at the mirror when she leaves after taking your blood, you can see that this is real. You breathe in deep—amnesia, probably, you reason. Something small—a glitch in your brain, you reason.
You know you’re smart—not next level genius smart—but you have a good head on your shoulders. You know that you love to read—that you can be forgetful sometimes, but still good at heart. You ignore the fact that you don’t even get the date correct when she asks for it a few minutes later.
You sit alone for a while, kicking your legs against the mattress slowly, your shins bumping against the soft leather covered in paper. Your fingers clench the bottom of your pajamas, closing your eyes. It’s a dream—-is what you want to believe. Isekai and reincarnation isn’t real—the logical part in your brain reasons. Hell—you’re more likely to shift and lucid dream a brand new world than to have been transported there.
She comes back in quiet—Dr. Kander, her lips a little firm, as if in thought. She beckons your hand closer, where she places a watch on your arm, tightening it to its appropriate length. She walks you through setting it up, voice soft.
“A Nexus Interface Identification Watch. NIIW, is the abbreviation,” she explains to you quietly. “Every citizen here has one—it monitors your blood sugar, your body temperature, heart….All of the medical alerts. It also serves as an identification marker, so authorities and hunters know what to do in a crisis if you have a medical alert. You do have one on file—but it mentions that your heart stopped….last night.”
You blink up at her. “I died?”
Her mouth pulls. “I—only for a few minutes. And then it went offline. But—you’re here. You have some retrograde anemia, dates are mixed up, landmarks you can’t remember. Can you remember if you got stuck in a protofield recently? If a Wanderer attacked you? It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes a hit to the head can cause dates to get jumbled up.”
Those words again. Wanderer, Protofield. Where….Where had you heard of those before? Your head zaps you in pain for a moment, before you breathe out—right, existential crisis later, right now you need to get any answers you can.
“I don’t—I don’t remember.” You say shakily. “What are they? Wanderers, protocores?”
Doctor Kander breathes in deep, brown eyes, kind but also wary—as if what she’s about to tell you is going to scar you for life. Perhaps it will.
And then she tells you—about a Deepspace tunnel, how Wanderers started coming through into the world—not quite zombies, but not quite aliens either. How the world has hunters that fight and kill them to protect humanity, how they can create pocket dimensions through Protofields, how they can and have hurt and killed people for years now.
“I see.” You say softly, flexing the watch on your wrist. The time blinks up at you—holographic and futuristic. 04:21, it reads. Dreams don’t let you perceive time—your brain whispers to you—they act erratically, numbers blurring, times weak. The part of your brain that deals with time is asleep during dreams. And yet the time just blinks up and down—never changing, until the next minute passes. “Thank you. Do you need me to stay here, or can I go home now?”
Doctor Kander wipes her mouth slightly—a nervous gesture you don’t think she even knows she's doing. “Your bloodwork is perfect—you have no injuries, head wise or not. I still want to call for an examination of your brain—an MRI and CT, just to make sure you have no tumors or swelling in your brain. But all your reflexes worked perfectly, and outside of some memory—you’re as healthy as you can be.”
You nod in thanks, dropping down from the seat. She steadies you for a moment, eyebrows furrowed.
“Will you be okay getting home?” She asks softly—kindly, as if you are a frightened child in need of coddling. “I’ll call you a cab to get home—its quite the hike. I don’t know how you got so far to the outskirts of Linkon.”
You nod in thanks, watching as she leaves. You breathe in deep.
Wanderers, Protocores, Protofields. Linkon.
They sound silly when you label them in your head—like a futuristic technology that a child came up with when the world became too boring to them. It sounds fantastical, like a dream that floated in your mind on rainy days.
But you knew deep down what had happened.
You were in Love and Deepspace—-that silly otome game you had played for a week or so.
And you were so, so desperately fucked.