He opened his eyes to an unfamiliar place. Grey. Dimly lit by what might have been fireflies or torches spaced irregularly along the walls. Lying on a bed that may as well have been a platform of scrub brushes. He groaned softly, draping a forearm across his eyes. His head was killing him! Like somebody’d whacked the side of it with a three pound sledge.

  His free hand went to the source of the pain and his heart skipped a couple of beats. He withdrew the hand long enough to see the sheen of blood splotching his fingers before returning it to the wound. Wound? He wasn’t sure if that was the correct word.

  His fingers traced the outline and then surface of an oblong square of something that felt like hard plastic or aluminum protruding slightly from the edge of his skull just behind his right ear. There was a slot in its surface, almost like one of those old floppy drives. Bigger than a USB port, smaller than a DVD slot, with some sort of self closing flap, hopefully to keep crap from leaking into the inside of his head.

  It took him several minutes to work up the will to stop screwing with whatever whoever had implanted into his brain box, and the energy to look around again. Still the same small, seemingly stone room, low ceilinged and with no visible trace of windows or doors. He pointedly ignored the glowing letters hovering near the wall across from him. That for later worries.

  There was no sound. No skittering of rodents, no buzzing of flies, no scuttling of crawly insects. No breeze. Indeed, the air was still and heavy. Clammy. He tried to remember what he’d just been doing. What had happened to place him here. Surely he could work it out, right? He was a 21st century man of reason and all that. Right?

  Squeezing his eyes tight, he tried to bring back the last thing he could consciously recall. They’d been on the site, hadn’t they? Working away like busy little, or in their case, large, heavily overmuscled bees. Him, Redmond, Hughes, Mendoza, and the new guy... what was his name? Parker.

  He was running a jackhammer, busting concrete. The noise was hideous. Between the jackhammer, the compressor, the big, ten kilowatt portable genny, and the constant back and forth of the construction equipment and trucks, even with earplugs beneath his muffs, the noise level was enough to rattle his teeth. Which was why the bell had come as such a shock.

  Loud, sonorous, deep-throated. DONG! DONG! DONG!

  “Hey,” he’d hollered at his best volume. “Red! You hear that?”

  “Hear what? Redmond had leaned in over his shovel and cocked his head. “Whatchu talkin’ ‘bout, ....? Over this racket? I can barely hear you, dawg!“

  He frowned, laying there on the platform of brush bristles, warping his face as he tried to remember. What had Redmond said after that? He’d said something. Probably his name, he guessed. Except... now the frown deepened.

  He shifted his recollection back further. Last payday. The site foreman, Mister Stacey, had rolled up in his shiny white brodozer with the company logo on the doors and climbed out, the white hard hat perched comically atop the pinnacle of his shining dome adjusted three or four notches too tight, and called them all together.

  “Hughes!” he’d called out, holding a stark white envelope aloft. “Mendoza! Parker! .... Redmond!”

  He remembered trudging forward, peeling off his work gloves, and wiping his sweaty hands on his none too clean pants. He remembered reaching for his pay. But, somehow, he couldn’t remember hearing his name being called. What kind of crap was that? It wasn’t hard to remember, was it? How hard was it to just call out.... Wait... Wait a minute.... His bloodied hand came up and he had a go at his eyes with both. What the hell was it? How did he remember so much about everybody else — everything else, but not his own damn’ name?

  He gave up after awhile and went back to his conversation with Redmond.

  “The bells, Red! What’s up with the bells?”

  Redmond had been in the process of shaking his head in bewilderment when the clouds had closed in. Dark, billowing, blacker than an OSHA inspector’s heart.

  And now he was here. Wherever here was.

  He spent some quality time panicking after that. More than he’d ever admit going forward. Several hours. He used an abbreviated form of the modified stationary panic that Pat McManus had codified back in the day, but with less Russian Cossack dancing. Okay, maybe chose wasn’t strictly accurate. He wasn’t a panicking expert after all. Wandering around dangerous areas handling dangerous tools, sometimes in high places, didn’t favor panicky types. Generally speaking, he was pretty much able to keep a handle on things. But, if ever a situation deserved a good, solid panic, he figured this was it.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Or, at least, so he told himself in hindsight. No, the modified stationary panic hadn’t been deliberate, just sort of what had developed naturally, given his close confines and inability to engage in the full bore linear panic he’d have preferred, and which the situation properly deserved.

  Well, he decided as he lay flat on his back on his brush torture rack while he tried to catch his breath, his heart still racing. I’m not gonna figure out what’s going on lying on my back forever. So he forced himself to leave off fiddling with his new accessory, levered himself up and took a greater stock of his surroundings.

  Yep. Stone. A rough, grey, granite-like stone, dark stained and grim. About ten feet by ten, with a low ceiling he’d probably have to keep an eye on lest he smack his head, and a floor uneven from what might have been centuries of footsteps.

  As he’d noted earlier, no doors, no windows. Not even a drain. The only pieces of furniture in the place were the hard pallet he’d been lying on, a single roughly hewn wooden chair, and a table that took up most of one wall.

  A number of troubling items were scattered across the table’s surface, and something hung from a hook affixed to the wall beside it.

  He was still ignoring the glowing letters. Oh, it wasn’t as though he wanted to. He just couldn’t bring himself to look directly at them. Not yet.

  Putting hands to knees, he got another surprise. His jeans were gone, and his tee shirt. Likewise, his belt, Leatherman, and steel toed work boots. Instead, his arms were covered by the billowy, off white sleeves of a linen tunic that fell below his waist. His legs were swathed in soft leather trousers of deep brown, stuffed into the tops of tall, laceless boots, and giving no evidence of pockets. Shrugging his shoulders and looking to the sides, he noted that he was wearing a heavy leather, broad shouldered vest, even longer than the tunic beneath it, hanging open, although he could see toggles and loops that presumably served to close it.

  He took several deep breaths. He was getting scared now. Well, scareder, as the unreality settled itself into his brain with the growing certainty that he wasn’t dreaming this. You didn’t smell or taste dreams, and the air in the room was rank enough he could taste it. “well, Dorothy,” he mumbled half aloud to no one in particular. “I don’t think I’m in Kansas anymore.”

  Grunting to his feet, he hobbled over to the table on stiff legs. The items scattered across it were even more troubling up close. A heavy leather belt with a steel ring at one end but no trace of an actual buckle, and long enough it looked like it’d go ‘round the belly of a tall horse. Beside it, a long, frogged scabbard with the basketed hilt of what was pretty obviously a sword of some sort sticking out.

  Now he was really nervous. He’d never so much as held a sword in his life. Sure, he knew about them, in an intellectual sort of way. He’d watched videos, he’d watched movies. He even owned a couple of books on their history. But he was a construction worker in a bad economy, not a fantasy adventurer. He had too many things that needed his money to buy even a cheap wall hanger, let alone drop four or six hundred bucks on a real friggin’ sword.

  He left that be for now.

  On the far side of the scabbarded sword, a large pouch about the size of a laptop case lay open. Beside it, a long, wicked looking knife in its own sheath. Arrayed around these and across half the tabletop, were an old fashioned canteen that looked like it’d hold somewhere north of two quarts, a pair of heavy, black leather gauntlets, various and sundry cloth wrapped packages, a number of crystal bottles and jars of various sizes, tightly capped and sealed with what looked like hard wax. the contents of the bottles varied from shades of red, blue, and purple. To one tall cylinder that glowed a neon green that made his stomach roil.

  A short inspection revealed the majority of the wrapped packages to be foods of various sort, mostly hard bread, dried meat, and dried fruit. There were a few packets of bandages smeared with some ugly green goo that smelled of penicillin that he decided must be for first aid.

  A smaller flapped pouch with belt loops lay beside the bottles. Beside it lay three or four sticks of what looked like charcoal, several lengths of chalk in various colors, and a small tin container, opened to display what the vast library of youtube shorts he’d watched over the years suggested were primitive fire making materials. There was also what appeared to be a reasonably thick journal with a length of cord wrapped around a cleat affixed to its cover to hold it closed.

  It was the item resting against the sword, though, that intrigued him the most, and caused him the most apprehension. It looked out of place amongst all of the fantasy video game tropes. What looked like a fat, brushed aluminum RFID wallet , a little bit bigger than a smart phone.

  And in the wallet? Six rows of pockets, twelve to a row, with, incongruously, a couple of brand new No. 2 pencils and some sort of shimmery gold cylinder only a little thicker. In the first half dozen pockets, square slivers of what looked like fine marble. Slivers the size of... his hand went to the plate behind his ear. The size of the card reader he’d somehow acquired.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the glowing letters flanking the far wall. He knew for absolute fact that the script wasn’t English. Nor Cyrillic, nor any of the Asian languages he’d seen over the course of his life. But he could, nonetheless, read them without effort.

  BEGIN?