Totem 1. This Isekai Bullshit (Patreon)

So, this Isekai bullshit is not all it’s cracked up to be.

I woke up buck naked in the middle of a field confused as fuck. Strangely, it wasn’t the field part that confused me: We were all told that we’d soon be planet-side on a new world. My most recent memories were spotty, but one just doesn’t forget all of new-colonist orientation.

Only… the meadow around me looked mighty Earth-like. Just like in the videos before all the biomes collapsed.

Also, there wasn’t a stasis pod or a spaceship or any other human beings nearby. Just me and some tall-ass grass. That was worrisome.

Also, also, I had been de-aged down to a toddler’s body.

It took me an embarrassingly long few minutes to figure it out. I blame the shock. I tried to stand and figured that my legs were a little wobbly due to light-years in stasis (except, again, where was the stasis-pod?). I pitched over almost as soon as I stood… and that’s when I got a good look at the rest of me: The chubby arms and legs, roundish baby belly, and… uh, other things that hadn’t gone through puberty.

What. The. Fuck.

Granted, I couldn’t remember all the details from my last few days on good ol’ Earth, but you would magical de-aging would have been in the welcome packet.

Suddenly it occurred to me that these massive stalks rising above my head weren’t alien proto-trees. They were just big grass stalks because I literally stood at about knee-height.

Okay, what was going on here? I remembered… yelling? Fire? Being hustled with the rest of my colonists… somewhere?

Then this.

“Hello?” I called out in a very high, childish voice. “Anyone out there?” Nothing. “Help!”

No answer.

Above, some kind of hawk screamed in a way I’d only heard in Hollywood. The old ones with real animals.

With nothing else to do, I walked. I didn’t walk very well because the grass underfoot was pokey and didn’t feel at all like artificial carpet fibers my feet had only touched before, but it was better than crawling.

I didn’t know how old my body was. Two? Three? I don’t know kids. My coordination sucked and it felt like it took hours to reach the edge of the meadow.

The ground became softer after that. Too soft. Soon, I was muddy and verging on exhaustion from pulling my bare feet out of sucking mud. But hey, at least I soon found myself at a river’s edge.

And look at that. People! There was a cluster of ladies rustically washing clothes on the other side of the bank.

That’s when things got… weird.

On second glance, I wasn’t sure I was looking at actual human beings at all. I had been primed to find aliens, though none of the other human colonized worlds had come across intelligent life. Supposedly. You can never trust the government’s reporting on other worlds. The facts were few and far between and laced with a lot of ‘It’s going to be just fine! Now, sign over your life here and here, and don’t ask many questions, m’kay?’

So… maybe aliens? They looked humanish except for the fact some of the women wore… holy shit, where those animal parts grafted to them? Extreme jewelry?

One woman had striking blue plumage up and down her neck. Another had a big flat tail that pounded the earth behind her. The third, the one who was yelling at me in some language I couldn’t understand had grayish brown dotting her arms. Scales?

Whatever she yelled wasn’t in English. She probably wasn’t happy about a toddler — and don’t think I’d gotten over that yet. What the fuck, would I have to go through puberty again? How did this even happen? — hanging by a river.

The current didn’t look too bad. Kind of muddy and slow. I could swim in pool, of course. I’d never done it in an actual body of water because I didn’t have a wish to die from heavy metal toxicity.

But if these ladies were hanging by the river, the water couldn’t be that bad.

I was just wondering how well a chubby toddler body could swim when the lady with the weird arms yelled again and… after that things took a turn for the truly bizarre. 

* * *

So, yeah. I was just rescued by an alligator lady from… an alligator. My new world had magic. Or some kind of weird nanotechnology? Too soon to say.

The next few hours only got stranger. After my rescue via alligator powers, I guess, I was taken to the middle of the… town? Village? — where I was the center of attention.

People spoke around me in a language I didn’t understand. Most of these people looked like they were at least a quarter animal. There was no rhyme or reason to it, other than the animal parts corresponded to the animal necklaces everyone wore.

For example, the lady who saved me had green-gray scales up and down her arms, some very sharp teeth, and an alligator necklace.

There were also dog people, rabbit people with big ears and buck teeth, people with plumage of all colors, and more than a few tails.

It was like walking into a furry convention, only I didn’t sense any crippling social awkwardness.

Anyway, the alligator lady washed me free of mud and gave me a little linen man-skirt to cover my nudity. Then she picked me up and showed me around the village while adults argued over my head.

I got the impression no one knew who’s kid I was. Fair. I had likely dropped out of the sky.

Through this, Alligator Lady hung onto me like she was afraid I’d go diving back in the river if she let me go.

I was pretty exhausted and though she was part alligator or whatever, the way she held me was comforting. I fell asleep on her shoulder.

When I woke up, it was in an unfamiliar dirt hut in an unfamiliar, but soft bed. Alligator Lady slept next to me.

A soft rumbling sound like rocks rolling over one another had woken me.

I sat up and watched with wide eyes as a bearded man with a barrel chest effortlessly widened the dirt hut we were in with sweeps of his hands. His hair was black with a white stripe that went to the midpoint of his back, which was furry enough to give a man from Jersey a pause. His necklace was of a badger.

He smiled at me, said something, and then made a motion to push back a multi-ton wall of packed dirt like it was nothing.

I decided right then and there that I didn’t care how or why I got to this planet. Or why I was even a kid again. I had to get some of that bad-ass magic for myself.

My new parents — because it seemed there had been some important decisions made while I’d snoozed away — tried to rename me. I wasn’t having any of it.

“Nuru,” the lady who I was starting to think of as my mother said, poking my chest.

I pointed to myself and said, “Seth.”

She frowned. “Seethe?”

“Seth,” I insisted.

She got it eventually then taught me the words for mama and papa which were mami and papi. Not hard to guess.

They seemed pleased I was picking up the language, and I tried not to act like a twenty-five-year-old stuck in a two-year-old’s body.

I made it clear I was already potty trained, thank you very much.

***

What to say about my new world?

Aside from the animal parts, the people were pretty earthlike.

Technology was not advanced. I didn’t see any complex metal work anywhere. No nails, no grinding mills not run by donkey or water-power, and definitely no self-driven vehicles.

People paid for things with little wooden disks with cut out holes in the middle. I made a mental note to learn what kind of wood they were made from, just in case I ever got the opportunity to home brew a few coins myself.

I spent most early days following my mother around the four-room hut, trying to get a handle on the world and learning as much of the language as I could.

Sometimes she took me for playdates with other village children, which was as tedious as you could imagine.

On the other hand, it was easier to practice new words with toddlers. What better way to learn a language than with other people who were learning, too?

Plus, if I at least tolerated other kids, I wouldn’t stand out too weirdly. I didn’t want this village to get the idea to ‘burn the witch’ if I stood out too badly. Things were weird enough with me just showing up out of the blue.

I learned quickly. Guess it was true what they say about kids picking up language fast.

Within a few weeks I wasn’t at the, “Say, mother, by chance have you seen a spaceship land and deposit any other colonists in baby bodies?” yet, but I was comfortable with pointing shit out and asking, “What’s that?” and mostly understanding the answer.

In quiet moments, I wracked my brain trying to figure out why I was here, and what I was supposed to do. My memories just before coming here continued to be Swiss cheese. There were… blaring alarms? A sense that I was in deep trouble? Oncoming betrayal? Fire, maybe?

And that was it. The next thing I knew, I was in a meadow.

Maybe this was a second life.

An idyllic second life. The townspeople were a little weird looking, but they got along. People weren’t, like, dying of dysentery right and left. No oppressive government officials came to beat the shit out of their farmers for more grain. So, not at all what I imagined a low-tech agrarian society to be. Maybe the addition of magic helped.

So yeah, pretty nice.

Or so I thought, right up until the first attack of the deformed.

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