Chapter Text
The last thing Kaito remembered before the rain was the glow of his phone screen.
It had been a long shift. The kind that left your shoulders knotted and your eyes burning from fluorescent lights that buzzed overhead like dying insects. He'd clocked out late… again... and stepped out into the downpour without an umbrella because he'd left it on the bus three days ago and hadn't bothered to replace it. That was just the kind of week it had been.
The sidewalk was slick. His sneakers were worn thin at the soles, and water soaked through them with every step, cold and unpleasant. He didn't care much, though. His thumb was already scrolling across his phone screen, catching up on a chapter of a story he'd been following. The protagonist had just gotten isekai'd — dropped into another world after a humiliating death — and was currently surrounded by beautiful women of every race imaginable who all inexplicably wanted him. You know… the typical stuff that you find every other week online.
'Wouldn't that be nice,' he thought, not for the first time. There was always a reason to read them after all. But in this case, it was to his detriment...
He never saw the truck.
He didn't even hear it. Not really. There was a horn — distant, almost lazy — and then a sound like the world splitting apart, and then nothing at all. His phone went spinning through the rain, its screen cracking against the asphalt as notifications piled up unread.
Kaito didn't know any of this, of course. He was already gone.
The last thing he felt was the rain on his face.
And then, somehow... impossibly, he felt it again….
The rain was warmer here.
That was the first thing his sluggish brain managed to piece together as consciousness returned to him in sluggish, uneven chunks. Not the cold, biting rain of a late autumn night back home, but something heavier. Thick with salt and the pungent aroma of fish. It hit his face in fat, lazy drops that clung to his skin instead of bouncing off.
Groaning, he rolled onto his side. Cobblestone. Wet, uneven cobblestone pressed into his cheek and palms. 'C-Cobblestone…?' That was wrong. His street was paved. Asphalt. Cracked and patched in spots, but asphalt all the same. Who the heck paved roads like this anymore?
Pushing himself up on trembling arms, the world swam in and out of focus. The first thing he saw clearly was a boot. Not his, he didn't own boots like that. It was leather, thick-soled, and worn at the heel. It stepped over him without pause, its owner not even glancing down.
"Outta the way, kid."
The voice was gruff and male, one he didn’t recognize. And it was followed by a second boot that narrowly missed his fingers.
Flinching, Kaito curled his hands inward as the man strode past without a backward glance. He wore clothes that looked like they belonged in a Renaissance fair. A heavy wool coat dyed a muddy brown, a thick belt with a brass buckle, and trousers tucked into those worn boots. On his hip sat a pouch that clinked.
'What the hell…?'
Sitting up fully, he blinked as his vision finally cleared. And what he saw made his mouth fall open.
He was on a street. A real, honest-to-god cobblestone street lined with buildings that looked like they'd been plucked straight out of medieval Europe! Timber-framed structures with plaster walls and overhanging upper floors crowded together on either side, their signs swinging gently in the rain. A blacksmith's hammer rang out somewhere to his left. To his right, a woman was hanging laundry from a second-story window despite the weather.
And beyond the buildings, was a harbor?! Ships. Not modern ships. Wooden vessels with tall masts and billowing sails, docked along a stone quay that stretched out into gray, choppy waters. Gulls cried overhead, their calls cutting through the din of a bustling morning market that sprawled out before him in every direction. Whatever this place was, it geographically couldn’t be his city. Hell… he doubted it was even his own country…
"Okay…" he whispered, his voice cracking. Wincing at the sound of it, Kaito felt his cheeks darken oddly. That wasn't his voice... It was too high! Too light. Like a teenager's voice caught mid-puberty. "Okay… okay, this is… this is fine. This is—" he paused, his eyes traveling down to his hands.
Staring down at them, more oddities arouse causing Kaito to tremble as he looked at his shaking digits. They were smaller. Slimmer. The calluses from years of warehouse work were gone, replaced by smooth, unblemished skin. His fingers were thinner. His arms were shorter. The sleeves of his jacket — the same jacket he'd been wearing from before, hung loosely off his frame as if they'd been sized for someone twice his build...
'That's not… that's not right…'
Scrambling to his feet, he stumbled forward, his legs feeling wrong beneath him. Shorter. Lighter. His center of gravity was off, and he nearly tripped over his own feet twice before catching himself against a wooden post. His breath came in short, panicked bursts as he looked around frantically for something — anything — that made sense. Thankfully, he found salvation.
A rain barrel. There was a rain barrel sitting at the corner of the nearest building, half-full and rippling with raindrops. He lurched toward it, his legs carrying him in an uneven, clumsy stride that felt nothing like his usual walk. Gripping the rim of the barrel, he hoisted himself up and stared down at his reflection. But what he saw, was what he had feared. It wasn’t him!
A kid stared back.
Not a man. A kid... Maybe fifteen? Possibly even younger. His face was rounder than it should have been, softer, with the last hints of baby fat clinging to his cheeks. His hair was an unnatural white. Pure, stark white, short and a bit unruly, sticking up in every direction from the rain. But it was his eyes that made his breath catch. These weren’t the eyes of a normal person at all. One was sunset orange. The other was sky blue.
'Those aren't my eyes. That's not my face. That's not—'
He stared at the reflection for a long moment, his mouth slightly open. The face staring back was unfamiliar in every way — the coloring, the youth, the softness of features that had no business being his. And yet something about it nagged at him. Something that he couldn't quite place. Despite knowing this wasn’t him… it felt, like it should have been...
Then it hit him.
'Caster…' The name surfaced from some deep corner of his memory. An RPG character he'd made years ago. Spent hours on the customization screen, tweaking every detail until it was perfect. White hair. Heterochromia — one orange, one blue. He'd been so proud of that character and played it for hundreds of hours. The game had been his escape! He spent every waking hour on it he wasn’t working grueling hours at his job. He looked just like him! This was without a doubt his characters avatar! Though that was a sci-fi game, and this… whatever this was… this was some fantasy world. Different genre entirely. But the face was the same.
‘I look exactly like him…' He almost laughed. Almost. Because laughing at a time like this felt ridiculous, and he was already pretty sure he'd lost his mind. 'Great. I died and reincarnated as my own video game character. In the wrong genre! That's not terrifying at all...'
He pushed away from the barrel, the faint humor evaporating as quickly as it had come. Because none of this was a game. The cobblestones were real. The rain was real. The ache in his muscles was real. And the face in the barrel wasn't his. The lopsided baggy clothes that was several sizes too large for someone as short as he now was. This was all… all real…
"This isn't me," he breathed. His voice cracked again, and the kid in the barrel mouthed the words back at him. 'This isn't me.' But it was. Somehow, impossibly, it was. The reflection moved when he moved—blinked when he blinked—raised a trembling hand to touch its cheek when he did the same.
He stared at himself for a long, long time. The rain drummed against the barrel's surface, distorting his reflection into something dreamlike and unreal. He was short. Really short. Barely five feet, if he had to guess. His jacket hung off him like a tent, and his pants pooled around his ankles where they'd once fit snugly. Of course out of the hundreds of characters he had designed in his lifetime, he wound up with the one that was a kid instead of a musclebound audonis…
"Okay," he said again, quieter this time. "Okay. So… I died. I’m pretty sure I did, right? Y-Yeah… yeah the truck… And now I'm… here. Wherever here is." the memories were vague. He was on his phone, when he saw a light. Then pain. Then, here...
He didn't believe in reincarnation. He didn't believe in isekai either! He didn't believe in any of that crap! But the cold rain on his skin, the ache in his muscles, the smell of salt and fish — all of it was too real to dismiss. And the face staring up at him from the rain barrel wasn't his own. This was his body. The body of someone only he could intimately know about.
He was still reeling from that realization when the market sounds finally registered properly in his ears.
Not the shouts of merchants hawking wares. Not the clatter of carts or the bark of dogs. Something else. Something that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up straight. A woman's voice. Sharp. Pained. Followed by the unmistakable sound of metal striking flesh.
He turned, and the first thing he saw was a woman with pointed ears.
Not like an elf from a video game — well, actually, no, exactly like an elf from a video game! Long, tapered ears that extended past her skull, poking through a curtain of silver hair that was plastered to her face by the rain. She was tall. Taller than him, certainly. Her skin was a dark umber, smooth and rain-slicked, and she wore what looked like a thin, threadbare cloth sack that did almost nothing against the weather.
Around her neck was a metal collar.
Thick. Iron. It sat heavy against her throat, connected by a short chain to the wrist of a man walking ahead of her. He was human — or at least, he looked human — and he didn't look back at her as she stumbled behind him. He yanked the chain when she fell behind, and the collar jerked her forward with enough force to make her choke.
"Keep up," the man said flatly, not even turning his head.
Feeling his stomach drop, Kaito watched the woman catch her footing, her bare feet splashing through a puddle as she struggled to keep pace. Her eyes were downcast. Golden, he noticed — a striking, luminous gold that might have been beautiful if they weren't so hollow. Her gaze was void of anything. Empty. Resigned. The look of a person, who had all but given up on life...
He wanted to say something. To shout. To do something. But his legs were frozen, and his mouth wouldn't form words, and by the time he even processed what he was seeing, the pair had already disappeared into the crowd.
'W-What the hell was that…?'
But he didn't have time to dwell on it. Because as his eyes adjusted to the chaos of the market, he started seeing more. A man with scales. Green, iridescent scales that ran up the sides of his neck and across his jaw. His hands were bound behind his back with heavy iron cuffs, and a leash was attached to a ring through his nose, leading to a woman on horseback who rode ahead without a glance backward.
A child. A little girl, maybe eight, with small horns protruding from her temples and a tail that swished nervously behind her. She was being carried under the arm of a large man like a sack of grain, her small balled up fists dangling uselessly against her sides as she sobbed in a language he didn't understand. Nobody around them batted an eye.
A woman with the lower body of a horse — from the waist down, she was equine, her hooves clattering against the cobblestone as she was led by ropes tied around her wrists. She was pregnant. Visibly, heavily pregnant. And the man leading her was advertising something to passersby, gesturing at her belly like it was a selling point.
His hands gripped the edge of his jacket so tightly his knuckles turned white. His breath came in short, shallow gasps as the scope of what he was seeing began to settle over him like a suffocating blanket.
They were everywhere.
Collars. Chains. Restraints. On men, women, and children whose only crime seemed to be that they weren't human. Pointed ears and scales and horns and tails and fur and feathers — all of them being herded through the streets like cattle. Some were led on chains. Ropes dragged others. A few were carried in cages on carts, their hands reaching through the bars as the wheels bounced over the uneven stone.
And the humans around them — the regular, ordinary humans — walked past like it was nothing. Like this was normal. Like seeing a woman with fox ears being led to an auction block was as mundane as buying a loaf of bread. All around him, now that he finally looked, were creatures from another world. And they were all in chains of some kind...
'Okay… okay, just… think. Think about this rationally!' He forced himself to take a breath. His mind raced for an explanation — any explanation — that wasn't the one staring him in the face. 'Maybe they're prisoners of war. Maybe there's a conflict going on, and these are enemy combatants. That happens in war. Prisoners get restrained. That's… that's normal. That's not…’ His mind trailed off before his eyes dimmed at his desperate attempt to rationalize the scene before him.
A scaled man in cuffs. A pregnant centaur woman on a leash. A horned child under someone's arm… He almost wanted to smack himself for trying to find a way to normalize what he was witnessing. 'Combatants. Right. Because a pregnant woman and a little kid are clearly dangerous enemies of the state....'
He swallowed hard, his rationalization crumbling before it had even fully formed. But he wasn't ready to give up on it yet. 'Maybe… maybe they're criminals? Maybe whatever justice system exists here is just… harsher. Different world, different rules. Maybe these people did something terrible, and this is how they're punished.'
It was thin. He knew it was a weak argument even as he thought it. But it was something to hold onto. Something that kept the alternative at bay. Because the alternative — the obvious, glaring alternative — was that this was just slavery. Plain, unvarnished, institutionalized slavery. And that was too big. Too horrifying. Too much for his brain to accept in the first thirty minutes of being alive in a new world.
And then he saw the girl...
She was small. Smaller than the horned child. Maybe five or six, with pointed ears that poked through tangled auburn hair and a thin, scrawny tail wrapped tightly around her own leg. She was kneeling on the cobblestone, her hands gripping the hem of a woman's dress — another pointed-eared woman, taller, with the same auburn hair. Her mother, almost certainly. The woman's wrists were bound in iron, and a chain led from her collar to the belt of a man who was already walking away.
The girl was screaming. Not words — sound. Raw, animal, guttural sound that tore through the market noise like a blade. Her fingers clutched the woman's dress so tightly that the fabric tore, and the man yanked the chain hard enough to drag the woman forward two steps. The woman stumbled, looking back over her shoulder — not at the man, but at the girl. Her face was a mask of devastation. But she didn't fight. She didn't resist. She just looked. And then the chain pulled again, and she was gone.
The girl sat in the puddle where her mother had been. Her hands were empty. Her mouth was open. But no sound came out anymore. She just sat there, rain pouring over her, staring at the spot where her mother had knelt. She stayed like that, until a man with a similar appearance as her came over, and dragged her away, both fading into the streets… And through that entire ordeal, nobody stopped. Nobody looked. The market moved on like she wasn't there.
His eyes darkened.
'That's not a prisoner of war.' His hands trembled at his sides. 'That's not a criminal. That's a child. A child watching her mother get taken from her...' The thin justification he'd been clinging to evaporated like smoke. It had been a desperate attempt to make sense of this — to fit this world into a framework he could understand and accept. But there was no framework for this. There was no justification.
Even if some of them were prisoners — even if some of them had done something wrong — that didn't explain this; it didn't explain the sheer number of women. It didn't explain the children. It didn't explain the collars and the chains and the cages and the absolute, casual indifference of every human on this street.
This was just what it looked like. Plain and simple. And no one cared, because it was simply, normal.
'Because it is normal here,' a voice in the back of his head whispered. 'This is normal.'
He thought he was going to be sick.
He turned away from the market, pressing his back against the nearest wall as he fought to keep his stomach from emptying itself. His legs were shaking. His whole body was shaking. The rain continued to pour, soaking through his already loose-fitting clothes as he stood there, paralyzed by the sheer weight of what he'd just witnessed. 'I died,' he thought, squeezing his eyes shut. 'I died, and I woke up in hell!'
He stayed there for a while. He wasn't sure how long. Minutes maybe? Longer? Long enough for the rain to soak through to his bones. Long enough for his hands to stop shaking — or maybe they just went numb. Eventually, though, the cold forced him to move. His body was smaller now. Younger. It didn't handle the weather any better than his adult one had, and the thin jacket he was wearing was useless against the downpour.
Fumbling in his pocket as he tried to warm up his digits, his fingers closed around something familiar. Pulling the object out of his pocket, the young boys eyes widened. His phone. It was there — cracked screen and all, still in its case. He pulled it out with trembling hands, and the screen flickered to life—fifteen percent battery. The notification bar was cluttered with messages he'd never read, from people who probably hadn't even noticed he was gone yet.
'Fifteen percent…' He stared at the number, a lump forming in his throat. Fifteen percent. That was all he had left of his old life: fifteen percent and a dying phone in a world that didn't even have electricity.
He turned the screen off to conserve it. Then, with no other options and nowhere else to go, he started walking. He just wanted to be anywhere, but here…
The streets got worse the further he walked. The market while chaotic, unorganized and messy with stalls and people had at least been fairly neat and orderly in it’s appearance and upkeep. But as he ventered farther from it, the same couldn’t be said for the rest of the city. Or at least the place he now found himself in.
The cobblestones became cracked and uneven, with weeds pushing up through the gaps. The buildings sagged. Their timber frames were rotted and their plaster walls stained with mildew. The crowds thinned out, replaced by fewer, warier faces. The kind that glanced at him and then looked away quickly. He kept his head down and walked. And as he walked, he tried everything.
He turned the phone on three more times. Each time, the battery had dropped another percent. He tried making a call — no signal. Tried opening a browser — no connection. Tried sending an email — nothing. He even tried the GPS, hoping against hope that maybe, somehow, satellite signals might still reach whatever planet he was on. They didn't. The little blue dot that was supposed to represent his location just sat in the middle of a gray void, blinking uselessly.
'Come on… come on, do something! Anything!' Why couldn’t he have ended up in a world with his phone like that one guy?! He tapped the screen desperately, swiping through apps that couldn't connect to servers that didn't exist in a world that shouldn't be real. The phone responded to his touch — sluggishly, because of the cracked screen, but that was it. It was a device built entirely around infrastructure that didn't exist here. No cell towers. No Wi-Fi. No satellites. No electricity to charge it.
He stared at the battery icon. Twelve percent. Eleven. It was draining just from him turning the screen on and off. In another half hour, maybe less, it would be dead. And then it really would just be a fancy paper weight. A piece of another world that had no place here, no purpose, no use. Cursing under his breath, he shoved it back in his pocket and kept walking.
The lower district was a maze of narrow alleys and crumbling structures. Some buildings were entirely abandoned, their doors hanging off hinges and their windows shattered. Others were occupied, but barely. Laundry hung between buildings on lines that sagged under the weight of the rain. The smell of sewage mixed with the salt air, creating something acrid that made his nose wrinkle.
He passed few people here. A woman with sunken eyes who pulled her child closer as he walked by. An older man sitting on a stoop who watched him with the kind of tired suspicion that came from living in a place where trust got you killed. Neither spoke to him.
And then he saw them.
Two figures huddled beneath an awning across the street. One had pointed ears like an elf, or whatever the term was here. The other was smaller, with what looked like a pair of horns curling back from his temples sort of like a ram but much smaller. They were thin. Gaunt, even. Their clothes were little more than rags, and they moved with the kind of cautious, measured movements that spoke of long practice in avoiding notice.
He didn't think. He just acted. Crossing the street toward them, he raised a hand in what he hoped was a friendly, non-threatening gesture. "Hey — excuse me? Can you tell me where—" Kaito began, before his breath caught in his throat.
He didn't even finish the sentence. The moment he stepped toward them, the two recoiled like he'd drawn a knife. The elf's eyes went wide not with surprise, but with fear. The kind of deep, bone-level fear that made the body move before the mind could catch up. The horned man grabbed the elf's arm and yanked her backward, both of them scrambling toward a doorway behind them.
"W-Wait, I'm not—"
The door slammed. He heard a bolt slide home. Then silence, save for the rain. He stood in the middle of the street, his hand still raised, his mouth half-open. The empty awning where they'd been standing was already collecting rain again, as if they'd never been there at all.
'…They're afraid of me.' The realization settled over him like a cold wave. 'Because I'm human.' It wasn't a guess. It wasn't an assumption. He'd seen it in their eyes. The same hollow, resigned fear he'd seen in the collared woman's golden eyes back in the market. The same fear as the little girl watching her mother being dragged away. To them, he was just another human. Another face from the race that put collars on their necks and chains on their wrists and sold them in the street like animals. Why wouldn't they run?
He lowered his hand slowly and kept walking. His feet splashed through puddles that he barely noticed anymore. The phone sat heavy in his pocket, draining toward oblivion. And the world around him just kept getting darker.
He walked until his legs ached and his clothes were soaked through. He walked until the market sounds faded and the streets grew quiet. And then, when he was starting to think he'd have to sleep in an alley, he saw it.
It was a building. Larger than the ones around it, but only by virtue of the fact that it hadn't completely collapsed yet. Two stories, with a faded wooden sign hanging over the door. He couldn't read the letters — the script was something he'd never seen before — but there was a picture carved into the wood beneath the text. A bed. A simple, crude drawing of a bed. It looked much different compared to many of the other structures. Almost japanese in fact. A very westernized version at least. But it brought him a sense of familiarity all the same.
'An inn…?' He hoped so. He didn't have money, but maybe he could work something out. Trade labor for a room? Something. Anything. He just knew he needed to get out of the rain soon, and out of the clothes still two sizes two big for his new child-like frame.
Pushing the door open, he stepped inside.
The interior was dim with few candles burned on tables that looked like they hadn't been cleaned in weeks. The floor was sticky. The air smelled like stale ale and something sour he couldn't identify. It was, in the most generous interpretation, an establishment. What kind, he wasn't entirely sure. And somehow blending in with it’s dilapidated state, behind a counter at the back sat a man who looked exactly how you’d think someone working in a place like this would look like.
He was big. Not tall — though he was that too — but big. Broad-shouldered with a thick neck and heavy arms. His face was flat and hard, with small eyes that sat deep beneath a heavy brow. A scar ran from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. His hair was cropped short and greasy, and his clothes looked like they'd been slept in for several days with wrinkls and crust on the edges of them.
He smelled like a brewery as well! The sharp, acrid tang of alcohol rolled off him in waves, thick enough to taste. Empty bottles littered the counter around him, some on their sides, some standing, a few knocked over and rolling in lazy circles on the sticky wood. The man had a half-finished one in his hand, and he didn't set it down as he looked up.
His eyes swept over the kid — the small, soaked, white-haired kid in an over-sized jacket — and his expression settled into something between indifference and contempt. "We're closed," the man grunted.
Kaito’s eyes darted around the room. 'Closed' seemed generous. This place looked condemned! It looked like it hadn't been open in months. But when the alternative was the downpour outside, well, beggers can’t be choosers... "I-I just need a room," he said, his voice cracking again. Damn this body. "Just for the night. I don't have any money, but I can work. I can—"
"Kid." The man's voice was flat. "I said we're closed. For good! Place is shut down! Get out!" He snapped, anger in his gravely voice. He didn't move. He should have. The man's tone made it clear he wasn't interested in conversation. But he was cold, and wet, and exhausted, and he had nowhere else to go. So he stood there, dripping on the sticky floor, trying to think of something, anything he could offer.
The man took a long pull from his bottle, draining it. He slammed it down on the counter, where it joined its fallen brethren with a hollow clink, and immediately reached for another from a crate beneath the bar. The cap came off with a pop, and he took a swig before even settling back into his seat. And judging from the look he was starting to give him, his patience was all but worn out.
"Kid, I ain't gonna ask again—" He began as he started to stand up, but something echoed out in the room. Something that caused both of them to stiffen immediately. A sharp, electronic ping cut through the stale air. Both of them froze. The man's eyes — small and deep-set as they were — narrowed instantly. His head tilted, and he stared at the boy's pocket where the sound had come from.
"The hell was that?"
Kaito felt his heart sink. 'The phone. The battery warning!' Ten percent. The damn thing had pinged loudly to warn him the battery was dropping, and now the man was staring at his pocket like a dog that had just spotted a squirrel. Why now of all times?! It wasn’t like someone from this place would know what a phone was and ignore it.
"What's that noise brat? You got something in there?"
He hesitated. Every instinct told him to lie, to play it off, to say it was nothing. But the man was already leaning forward, and the glare in his eyes — still faint, but unmistakable — told him that whatever he said next mattered. 'It's just a phone. It's useless here. It can't even make calls.' But it was also the last thing he had from home. The last piece of a world that might as well not exist anymore. 'But… what else do I have?' He couldn’t just show him thin air. And it was better to just get this over with then escalate whatever was about to happen if he didn’t show the man. Especially since he had two sizes over him in this new body of his...
Slowly, the white-haired youth reached into his pocket and pulled out the phone. The screen was dark, but when he pressed the power button, it flickered to life showing off the bright ten percent battery notifcation. The glow was faint, but in the dim room, it was enough to catch the man's full attention.
Leaning forward at the bar, his small eyes locked onto the phone with an intensity that hadn't been there a moment ago. The bottle in his hand was forgotten. "W-What… the hell is that? I ain’t seen anything like it before. Is that Dwarven technology?" He leaned forward, his small eyes narrowing as he stared at the device. The screen cast a pale blue glow across the kid's face, and the man's expression shifted. Not wonder. Not curiosity. Avarice. The look a merchant gets when he spots something he can flip for triple its value. He knew whatever it was, it was rare. Very rare.
"I-It's… a device," he said, not sure how to explain a smartphone to someone who'd never seen electricity. "From far away. It does… a lot of things. Here, let me show you". It would probably be simpler to just use the few features it was still capable of then try to explain it was made back in his own world and not by… did he say Dwarves?
Fumbling with the phone, wincing as the cracked screen responded sluggishly to his touch, Kaito flipped through his apps until he found the one he wanted. Most of the things it could do weren’t operational thanks to there being no cellular service in this world. But the camera still worked! He'd tested it earlier, taking a picture of a building to see if the lens had survived the impact. It had. Barely...
Turning the phone around, he pointed it at the man and tapped the shutter button. The soft click of the camera was barely audible, but the result was immediate. The screen displayed the man's face, his scar, his deep-set eyes, his greasy hair, the bottle in his hand. All captured in perfect, frozen detail.
The man stared at the screen. Then at the kid. Then back at the screen. "That's… that's you," Kaito said, turning the phone so the man could see it better. "It captures things. People. Places. Anything you point it at. Permanently." The phone could do a lot of other things too but this would probably suffice for an explanation. If he got pressed for more details later he could try another application.
The man's hand reached out, almost involuntarily, before he caught himself and pulled back. His eyes were wide now. Not with wonder — with calculation. The kind of look that was busy doing math. "A device that captures a man's likeness without paint or parchment," the man muttered, more to himself than anyone. "Permanently, you say?"
The younger boy nodded quickly. "Permanently. And it does other things too. Lots of other things." No need to be stingy. It seemed the man was calmer now then before. The man stared at the phone for a long moment. Then his eyes shifted to the kid. Then back to the phone. His tongue ran across his lower lip.
"Alright, kid," the man said, his tone shifting from dismissive to something almost conversational. Almost friendly. The kind of friendly that a snake might use. "Here's what I'll do. You give me that little device there…" He pointed at the phone with his bottle, a lazy, sweeping gesture. "And I'll give you the rooms. All of 'em. How's that sound?"
He blinked. 'The rooms… all of them?' The phrasing was a little odd, but he was exhausted, cold, and desperate. The man was offering him a place to stay it seemed. And multiple rooms, even. That was generous. More than generous. It was probably just the way people talked in this world. Flowery language for a simple arrangement. Hopefully that meant more then one night. 'So he's letting me stay in exchange for the phone. All the rooms, even. That's… actually not bad.' The phone was useless here anyway. No signal. No charger. No Wi-Fi. It was a paperweight in a world that didn't have paper to weigh. Debating it just a moment longer, Kaito finally nodded. "Okay, deal."
The man's scarred face split into something that might have been a smile on someone less ugly. "Good. Good. Smart lad." He reached beneath the counter and produced a worn ledger book and a quill. "Just need you to sign here. Standard paperwork. Nothing fancy." He slid the ledger across the counter. The page was mostly blank with few faded entries he couldn't read, and a space at the bottom for a name. ‘A guest book?’ It had written names on it faded terribly, but there was a long list of words on the top he couldn’t read. It seemed a bit much for just signing into an inn...
Picking up the quill, the younger boy saw the ink drip onto the parchment. It was thick and sticky, and the nib scratched unpleasantly against the paper. He wrote his name — his real name — in careful, slightly wobbly letters. Kaito.
The man leaned forward to read it. His brow furrowed deeply. His small eyes squinted at the characters, then shifted up to the kid's face with a look that was equal parts confusion and annoyance.
"Key too?" He said it like he was choking on something. "What the hell kind of name is that?" His lip curled, and his tone took on a sharp, unpleasant edge. "You one of them eastern dogs? Those keep washing up here lately..." He spat the words like they tasted bad, and a derisive snort followed. "Coming here with your weird names and your weird, whatever the hell that thing is!" he pointed to the phone.
The man's eyes narrowed further, and for a moment, the greed gave way to something harder. Something that looked like it could turn ugly fast.
Fidgeting, Kaito’s free hand tugged at the hem of his oversized jacket as he felt his heart rate spike. 'This is bad. This is really bad!' He didn't know anything about this world! He didn't know its politics, its conflicts, its prejudices. But he'd already seen what this place did to people it didn't like... The collars. The chains. The little girl watching her mother dragged away. And if people from the east were looked at the way this man was looking at him right now…
'I don't know if they'd even believe me if I told them the truth. Another world? Reincarnation? They'd probably think I was insane.' And even if they did believe him — even if by some miracle this world had some concept of people arriving from other worlds — there was no telling what would happen. Maybe people from his world were welcomed. Maybe they were feared. Or maybe they were persecuted just like the people he'd seen in the market and hunted down. Collared. Enslaved.
He didn't know. And not knowing was dangerous. He needed to be cautious before he divulged anything about his past life. The wrong answer might make this new one end as abruptly as his had before. 'It's safer if everyone just thinks I'm a normal human.' The thought crystallized in his mind with cold clarity. 'No weird names. No stories about other worlds. Just… normal. Be normal.' And then, unbidden, a name floated to the surface of his mind. The rain barrel. The reflection. The white hair and mismatched eyes. The RPG character he'd spent hours perfecting. The one that stared back at him every time he looked in a mirror now.
“C-Caster.”
It wasn't his name. But somehow, it felt right. More right than anything else he could think of. It was a name from this world's genre — or close enough. It wouldn't raise eyebrows. It wouldn't prompt questions about eastern provinces or foreign origins. It was just a name. One he felt comfortable with, since he had spent so long calling himself it anyways. It just, worked. The look on the mans face as he said it seemed to calm him somewhat as well.
Nodding in affirmation to himself, Kaito grabbed the quill again, his hand moving before his brain could second-guess itself. He scratched out the previous entry and wrote a new one beneath it in careful, deliberate letters.
Caster. His new name, was Caster.
The man leaned forward again. His brow furrowed, but differently this time. Not annoyance — just confusion. He mouthed the word silently, testing it. "Caster." He said it out loud, slower. Tasting it. "That… ain't so bad, I guess. Sounds local enough." He shrugged, the annoyance from before already fading. Then his eyes dropped back to the ledger, and he tapped the page with a thick finger. "Guess it don’t matter much now anyways where you’re from. Last name?" he finally barked.
Hesistating, Kaito, err, Caster, almost said his japanese surname before catching himself. He just barely avoided a landmine this time and almost walked right back into another! His mouth opened, then closed. 'Last name…' He didn't have one. Not one that fit this world. Not one that wouldn't raise the same questions he'd just avoided. His character in the game he used to play was just known as Caster. The set character length for naming schemes hadn’t allowed more then twelve digits. And no spaces were allowed either to break apart names into first and last. So, he had just been called Caster. Which meant...
"That's... all I have," he said quietly.
The man stared at him for a beat. Then he let out a grunt that was half laugh, half sigh. He shook his head and took another swig from his bottle. "No last name? Like a fucking Demi," he muttered, rolling his eyes. He said it casually — the kind of offhand comment that carried no weight because the thing it referenced was so common as to be unremarkable. Like commenting on the weather. "Well whatever... The signature alone is good enough. This place is your problem now."
He stamped the page with something heavy and official-looking, then closed the ledger and slid it back beneath the counter. Then he reached down and produced a set of keys — heavy iron keys on a rusted ring — and slid them across the surface toward him.
"There you go, kid. Place is yours. Every room. Every floor. Like I said." He grabbed a coat from a hook behind him and started for the door. "I'd wish you luck, but…" He shrugged. "Not my problem anymore. Oh, and kid, the two in the basement are your problem now too."
Snatching the phone off the counter, the burly man walked leaving Caster gaping, not sure if he had just heard him correctly. But, he was gone before he could ask what the man meant. The door swung shut behind him, and he was alone.
Standing there in the dim, empty room, holding a set of keys he didn't fully understand, in a building he'd just signed for, in a world he didn't recognize Caster continued to gape as he stared down at the key ring, then over to the ledger, then back to the door the man had abruptly walked out of. The silence pressed in around him. The rain drummed against the roof. A candle guttered and went out.
“D-Did… Did I just?” No, he was… renting a room, right? Not… not trading his phone for the whole building! But, why give him the keys and leave then? He looked like he had been in a hurry. Like he hadn’t wanted him to change his mind…
Feeling like he had just made the mistake of his life, Caster sat down on one of the crooked stools as he cupped his mouth. But, as he tried to piece through the events that had occurred, something in the man's parting words echoed back to him — not the ones at the door, but the ones he'd tossed over his shoulder as he'd rounded the counter. Casual. Offhand. Like an afterthought.
'Oh, and kid, the two in the basement are your problem now too..'
He stared at the keys in his hand. Then at the dark hallway leading deeper into the building. Then at the keys again.
'Two…? Two what?'
The rain answered with a low rumble of thunder, and somewhere below the floorboards, he heard the faintest sound. The sounds, of chains rattling, as something began to move…