Morgan’s eyes opened as the groggy haze of sleep lifted just enough to let his awareness peek back into existence. He rolled onto his side, reaching for his phone to see what time it was. He had the feeling he had slept in far too late, since the light was so bright around him. But his hand only found empty air. He had to fight to try and get his mind functioning enough to process what that could mean.

  He took his time getting accustomed to his surroundings, panic barely beaten down as he realized that no, he was most certainly not in his own bed. He wasn’t even in a house, as far as he could tell. He thought he was in a tent, perhaps? Light bled through the fabric roof over him, and two more bunks with sleeping men were to his left. Walls of sheets surrounded him on all sides, though he could make out the moving forms of shadows on the other sides.

  Well, better than a bathtub at least. He checked himself for injuries or stitches, finding instead a partially healed head wound under his hairline. Some kind of gash that had healed over for at least a day, if he was guessing right. He wasn’t bleeding anymore, but the scab wasn’t hard enough to have been there much longer than a day.

  That was about as much time as Morgan had to try and figure out what was going on before two people pushed aside one of the sheets and stepped inside. The first was a young man in a long green tunic cinched with a wide leather belt at his waist. He had on a pair of round spectacles and dirty blonde hair held back behind the nape of his neck with a strip of leather. The other man was larger, built heavy in the shoulders and thighs and wearing a chainmail shirt that went down to his knees, and a splint mail shirt over top of it.

  Glasses and armor started talking to each other in front of Morgan who couldn’t understand a word. Hell, Morgan couldn’t even pick out the language being used. It wasn’t anything he had heard before at least. Armor turned to face Morgan and asked him a question, but since he couldn’t understand, Morgan just stared. He was sure that confusion was clear on his face, and he was as close to panicking as he could be without actually running away from the situation.

  And it only got worse when glasses stepped closer and put a hand on his head. Morgan didn’t even think to bat it away. He was paralyzed by uncertainty while his entire body began to glow a faint green. His head itched something fierce, and he reached up as glasses let go, touching the spot where his head had been injured. It was gone, leaving behind just a faint line where the hair was still missing. Both men said a few more sentences to each other then stepped to the next bed.

  They repeated the questioning and the healing twice more, and both the men in the bunks next to Morgan’s got up and left after they were done. And Morgan was alone once more.

  Morgan had felt like an old man for a long time. At 39, almost 40, he was a bit out of shape. He had a belly on him that had only grown since his daughter’s disappearance. His hair was grey and pulling away from his face. He had scars on his hands from accidents at work, a bad shoulder from a fall, and his back spasmed if he asked too much of it. His eyes had slowly failed him, and he needed glasses for anything other than reading. He was old, and tired, and his life had gone down the shitter for years now.

  He was also used to panicking. Used to the feeling of his heart beating out of his chest, his head pounding, his breathing growing tight. How many hundreds of nights had he woken up feeling just like this? Too many. Far, far too many. He shoved it all down and forced his mind away from the panic, turning it to analyzing.

  Metal armor. Tunics. Tents. There wasn’t an electric light or a beeping monitor that he could see or hear. His bed was a foldable cot of some kind, and he was wearing a simple grey tunic made of linen perhaps. So what had happened to him? He remembered being at the bar. Getting kicked out of the bar at closing. He had walked home, nearly falling into the street. He remembered opening the door, because his lock always stuck and was a giant pain to try and open when he was drunk.

  And that was it. That was his last memory. But he could guess. He knew himself, his habits. He had almost certainly pulled out more alcohol and started to drink himself into a blackout, hoping to sleep without the nightmares that had plagued him for so long. The same way he did almost every night now.

  Morgan finally opened his mouth and whispered something. “So how did I end up here?” He asked the open air.

  But nobody spoke back, not that he expected anyone to.

  Eventually, Morgan had to do something. He got up off his bed and found his legs could hold his weight. He was hungry, thirsty, and every time he let his mind settle, the anxiety and panic wound their way back into his thoughts. So he moved. His bare feet found a dirt floor and he walked out of his little tent room and right into a hallway of hanging sheets.

  He was going to leave. Leave and find his way back home. At some point, he had decided that if this wasn’t a dream or a hallucination, then it was certainly something mundane. Perhaps he had never made it back home and had stumbled into the fairgrounds where the local renaissance festival was being held. Maybe this was their medical tent. That green glow and his head could be explained by his groggy mind and leftover alcohol in his system, probably. It was fine. He’d leave, catch a ride home, call his boss…

  And probably get fired for not showing up to work. Again. “Fuck me…” He groaned, and stumbled out of the tent.

  The noise blasted him like the speakers at a rock concert. Outside of the tent was a cavalcade of motion and sound as men and women moved and worked and yelled at each other. A sea of tents stretched out in all directions as hundreds of people milled about their tasks. Morgan watched as the sights completely overthrew everything he knew about reality.

  One man carried an entire tree over a shoulder, walking it down a road between the tents and towards a walled city off in the distance. He watched a woman with knives dancing around her body of their own accord slice meat and vegetables for a massive stewpot. He could hear hammers on anvils banging away and watched men and women in various colors of tunics drawing sigils on the ground around tents or painting tall poles erected at the corners of blocks.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  Everyone was busy, everyone was doing something strange or impossible. And Morgan couldn’t help but just watch. He let out a little nervous laugh. “Ha…” then another, and another. “Hahaaa ha!” He had gone mad. He had finally gone truly mad. Or perhaps he really had fallen in the street and gotten hit by a truck and this was just a coma dream or hallucination.

  His ass hit the ground where he stood just a foot out of the medical tent until another young man in a green tunic put a hand on his shoulder and asked a question.

  Morgan still didn’t understand. He turned to the man, a manic smile on his face as he tried and failed to make sense of things. “I don’t understand you.” He said, barely suppressing a giggle.

  The young man tried to ask him another question, his face turning from gentle concern to genuine worry.

  “I don’t have any idea what is going on, at all!” He said again, failing to suppress the nervous laughter this time. His eyes turned wide, far too large for his face as he fought back against his own anxiety about everything. “Help me? Help me please?” He asked, turning and grabbing onto the young man’s sleeve.

  The young man’s expression shifted again and again and Morgan could practically watch the thoughts in his head go by. Concern for him, worry that Morgan might be dangerous, then determination. The young man helped Morgan to his feet and led him back inside the tent and back to his cot.

  For the next twenty minutes or so, the young man tried talking to Morgan. He tried at least two distinct languages that Morgan could pick out, but eventually gave up on that avenue. But they couldn’t make any progress together, not like this. Morgan could communicate simple ideas, and managed to get food and water after pantomiming eating and drinking. However anything more complex just seemed to be beyond what Morgan could manage to get across.

  It was frustrating, but at least he had managed to get something on his stomach. In the end, he was left alone in his cot once more, and simply waited. As he did, he tried to wrap his mind around the things he had seen. It pretty much had to be magic, after all. Magic, or he was going insane. But perhaps he could embrace that, accept it. Simply let it flow over him, instead of fighting against it. Magic was real. People here had it and used it.

  Yeah. That wasn’t going to happen. Morgan just didn’t have it in him to simply accept that. But he could exist alongside it perhaps? If he had the time, at least.

  They didn’t seem intent on giving him much though. In the middle of his considerations, someone came for him again. The man in armor once more. He tried speaking to Morgan, and while Morgan tried to communicate back, armor just let out a sigh and reached out to grab Morgan’s wrist. He pulled him from the tent and half led, half dragged Morgan through the tent city.

  Morgan absorbed everything on the walk, often tripping when he was distracted by a new sight unfamiliar to him. He watched a smith literally breath fire onto a spearhead he was working. A woman nearby poured a green mist from her hands into the earth, and saplings sprung up in neat rows. He decided to totally ignore the part of him that screamed at him that this was ridiculous, impossible, and wrong. It helped, but didn’t completely stop the panic that continued to flare in his heart.

  The armored man stopped him in front of a new tent. This one was black, and energy crackled over it in shimmering sparks from runes sewn into the fabric. Two women sat in chairs at the corners of the tent, eyes closed as they concentrated on the rune engraved stone circles at their feet.

  Morgan was led inside the tent. Armor, which had become the man’s name in Morgan’s mind, approached another gruff, overweight man in steel grey clothes. They talked for a moment, then the second man slipped into the back half of the tent and out of sight behind a curtain. He came back a moment later with a box, set it on the counter, and opened it.

  Inside the box were six round stones, each one about the size of Morgan’s thumb and glowing slightly with different colors. One was red, one was blue, one was brown, one was green, another was purple, and the last one was a steel grey.

  Armor pointed at the stones, then at Morgan. He held up a single finger. Morgan was fairly sure he understood, so he approached and examined the stones. He wasn’t sure what kind of significance this would have on his life, but the way the two men acted, it seemed at least a little important.

  So Morgan took his time. The red stone glowed like burning embers, and felt hot to the touch. The brown one seemed heavier when he lifted it up, as if it was eager to return to the ground. The green one was the opposite, he could barely feel it when he lifted it. The blue one was cool to the touch and seemed to slip around his hand, flowing easily from position to position. The purple one almost seemed to vibrate in his hand, as if it were filled with energy. The grey stone actually cut him when he picked it up, and his finger bled onto the table the box was on.

  Morgan only had the vaguest of ideas about what this could be about. He figured that four of the stones referred to each element, but the last two had him at a loss. Perhaps force and metal? That was his best guess at least. Almost on a whim, he picked up the purple stone, the one he thought might be force, and held it to Armor.

  Armor just shook his head, pushing Morgan’s hand away, and mimed eating. Morgan raised an eyebrow, which was apparently a universal gesture since Armor’s lips twitched in the faintest of smiles before he nodded and mimed eating again.

  “In for a penny…” Morgan shrugged. He was probably dead already anyways, and this was just all some intense hallucination by his oxygen starved brain. So he lifted the stone to his mouth and put it on his tongue.

  Instantly, the stone melted away, and electricity charged down Morgan’s throat, burning like fire and causing his muscles to convulse. He fell to the floor, mouth open in a silent scream as the lightning surged through his body, out to his extremities and back again and again. Coursing fire charged through his veins as he seized on the floor. Back and forth it ran, coursing from his heart and out to his head, his fingers, his toes, only to bounce right back to his heart again. The lightning burned through his body until he passed out.

  He woke up right back in the medical tent, in his now familiar bunk. Something blurred his vision, and Morgan rubbed at his eyes to try and clear his vision. But when he opened them, the obstruction was still there, swirling black lines shifting and changing until they settled into words.

  Congratulations, you have successfully assimilated a [Lightning Affinity Gem] into your core.

  You have assimilated your first Affinity Gem. You now have access to the system.

  [Lightning Affinity Gem] has changed your core affinity to [Lightning]

  “Oh what fresh hell is this?” Morgan asked, groaning as he laid back in his bed and closed his eyes. Confusion fresh again as he wondered why his life was suddenly giving him prompts like…

  “Oh shit. I really did fall in front of truck-kun last night, didn’t I?”