Chapter Text
Blinding pain.
That's all I felt. Just pain. It felt like one of my severe migraines. I reached for my
migraine meds, and that's when I smelled the smoke.
I jerked myself into a sitting position and opened my eyes. My bedroom was gone. My husband wasn't sleeping beside me. I was somewhere foreign, unfamiliar. To my right was a river, flowing merrily, as though there was nothing wrong in the entire world. To my left, however, was a massive THING. I can only describe it as a spaceship. That's all my mind could come up with. I blinked a few times, trying to make it go away and when that was unsuccessful, I put my head in my hands.
My head snapped up, and even as my brain protested in agony, I realized that I was alone.
What happened to my husband? Where were my children? Where the fuck WAS I?
I stood up and brushed sand off my pants. I hadn't been wearing pants to bed. I slept in a nightgown. Nevertheless, I was in my most comfortable pair of jeans and plain grey t shirt. My grey boots were on my feet and I could feel that I had socks on, too. I looked around, trying to get my bearings when I saw a familiar bag. It was mine. My fake leather bag was sitting about 5 feet from me. I wobbled over to it and started to look through it. It couldn't have been MY bag. This thing looked endless on the inside because I could see that it should have been overflowing with the amount of stuff that had been crammed into it, but it wasn't. I reached in and pulled things out to see what was there.
A sweatshirt with my kids' school mascot emblazoned on the front.
Another pair of shoes.
7 pairs of my favorite underwear
Toiletries, including deodorant and lotion.
My favorite perfume, which smelled of grapefruit, leather, and vetiver. Very earthy.
A second perfume, this one more airy, with fig and freesia.
Another bra.
My phone.
Wait...my PHONE!
I grabbed it, dropping my bag. I immediately unlocked it and looked hopefully.
No signal. Fuck.
But it had a full charge. I wondered if I could play music on it.
I'd have to find out later, because at that moment, a strange looking man came into sight. I had never seen someone look like this. I had to be hallucinating from the pain in my head.
The man was tall, nearing six feet. His skin was blue. He had HORNS and a TAIL, and he was dressed really funny. Like Ren Faire funny. He wore what appeared to be a leather tunic, belted snugly at the waist and form fitting pants. He had a sword on his back and a strange looking necklace. I stood stock still as I watched him approach a body lying on the ground.
I hadn't noticed the woman lying there. Her dark hair was plaited in a very long braid and her clothes were just as strange as the man's. She looked like she was wearing chain mail. She had a scar across her right cheek, ending on the bridge of her nose.
"Did I somehow fall in with a traveling Ren Faire?" I asked myself. I sank to the ground, so confused. The migraine wasn't helping. I picked up my bag to look through it for my migraine meds. No such luck. Dammit.
As I set my bag back down, I heard the man clear his throat. His shadow had fallen over me and I was oblivious. I slowly looked up, hoping the fear wasn't evident on my face.
He spoke to me, but I couldn't understand anything. It was like he spoke gibberish. I tried to say hello and my name, but he furrowed his brow, clearly unable to understand me as well. He looked at the woman, and she shook her head.
"Of course, I'd find myself in some strange place and not be able to speak the goddamn language," I groused. Turning to the man, I looked in his eyes, trying to show that I wasn't a threat and needed help, when pain ripped through my head all over again, stronger this time.
Images flashed in front of my eyes. I saw a bunch of people who looked like the man running from something but I couldn't see what. I saw his hands wielding a sword against what appeared to be a training dummy. I saw through his eyes, giving a hug to someone he was obviously close to, someone who meant a lot to him. Then it was gone.
I shook my head wondering what that was. He, however, had gone extremely pale, now a distinctly lighter shade of blue than the rest of him. He staggered back and put his hand over his mouth, as though he were about to vomit. I had to wonder what he saw in my head, because it was pretty clear that there had been an exchange of images. Surely it couldn't have rattled him that badly. It wasn't like it was all out of the ordinary.
‘Was what you saw ordinary?’ my mind asked me.
I realized with a jolt that what I saw wasn't normal. Had I been sent back in time or something? Was I in the medieval era? That couldn't be true. But I still stepped back, my hazel eyes on his golden ones. He grabbed me by the arm and squeezed, saying something to me. It had to be a question; his voice raised up at the end of the sentence. I had a feeling he wanted to know what he had seen. He shook my arm, asking me again.
The woman put her hand on his arm, and spoke something to him. It seemed to settle him a little. He told her something and her eyes went wide. She whipped her head to look at me, and her eyes narrowed. Her hand started glowing.
"What are you doing?" I said, and she touched my forehead. I felt a very strange sensation and saw that she was looking at me again. She tapped her temple, trying to get something across to me.
'What the fuck do they want from me? How can I communicate with these people? Am I going to have to play charades or something?' I thought. The woman smiled and she turned to the man and told him something that made him break into a smile. She turned back to me and made an encouraging sign with her hands.
All I could do was think about home and how badly I wanted to be back there. Wondering where the hell I was and what they were going to do to me. How badly I was about to be hurt. I started shaking.
She put her hand on my arm and shook her head as if to indicate that she knew what I was thinking. But how could she know? This was all insane. She picked up my bag and motioned for me to follow the two of them. I didn't have anything else to do, nowhere to go and no other prospects of how to figure out what was going on, so I hefted my bag onto my shoulder and followed.