A sharp rap on the door broke Noah from his research. He dropped his book and dove to the ground in preparation for a crazed monkey to come swinging at him. It took him several moments to realize that he wasn’t in the forest anymore.

“Hello?” Noah asked, slowly standing back up and grabbing his book on the way up.

“Vermil! I heard you were back,” a deep male voice called. “What happened out there?”

“I took a pretty bad hit,” Noah replied. “Sorry. I’ve got a little memory loss. I’m not feeling too well right now, but I’m sure I’ll be good again soon.”

“Idiot,” the man on the other side of the door said with a chuckle. “Can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t remember.”

“Just how bad is that memory loss, Vermil? You’ve got a class in a few hours. If it’s serious enough that you can’t teach it, we’re going to need to find someone to take over.”

“That sounds like a gr–”

“And we’ll send for a mage who can really take a look at what happened and see if we can get that damage repaired. The Linwicks are going to be furious if they find out you got seriously injured and didn’t get proper treatment. I'm heading back to report later today and will be gone for a few months, so I can't cover for you.”

Noah paled. He wasn’t sure who the Linwicks were, but the absolute last thing he needed was a mage taking a closer look at him and finding out that he wasn’t Vermil at all.

“I actually don’t think there’s any need for that,” Noah said, trying to force a casual tone into his voice. “I can handle myself. It’s just a little bit of memory loss. Details and the like, but I’ve still got the important stuff. When’s my class again?”

“Gods, has it been that long since you actually taught? Building G, room 100. You’ve got an hour until it starts.”

“Right. Thanks. I’ll be there.”

“Make sure,” the man rumbled.

A few hours. Okay. It’s been so long since time mattered to me in the slightest, but that’s not too long. Not too short either, though.

The man’s heavy footsteps echoed away and Noah let out a sigh of relief. He leaned against the wall and ran a hand through his long hair, bunching his hands up in it as he slid down into a seated position.

Okay. I’ve just got to convince people that I’m actually Vermil, just with some memory loss. From the way Richard treated me, I don’t think Vermil had too many friends. That should make things easier.

Noah pulled his hands out from his hair. He blinked, then rubbed his fingers together. Grimacing, he stood and headed back to the restroom. “But first, I’m going to need a shower. I feel disgusting.”

The knobs on the sink looked fairly similar to the ones back on earth, and a quick twist proved they worked the same way as well. Water poured out of the curved faucet and Noah dunked his head into it, scrubbing at his hair as hard as he could.

He finished a few minutes later, grabbing a towel from a hook on the wall and furiously drying his head off. Noah found a spare set of Vermil’s clothes in the closet and changed into them before heading back into the main room and sitting down on the bed.

Noah picked the leatherbound book up and flipped through the pages again. His time reading had lent him far more information than he’d hoped for, but far less than he suspected he needed. It was like trying to learn math by starting at derivatives instead of addition.

Despite that, Noah had managed to pick up a few key facts. He walked over to the desk and plucked a mostly blank page from the piles next to it. Using a quill that Vermil had kindly left sitting in a pool of ink that Noah had cleaned, he started to write what he’d put together.

Runes let you cast magic. Already knew that.

People can have more than one Rune, since Vermil had a whole bunch of them in his book. I am unsure as to if there is a limit to how many you can have.

There are probably variations in the Runes. I’m unsure as to how this actually changes their function, if it does at all. Vermil placed more importance on the complicated looking Runes, though. That probably means they’re better somehow.

Noah stared at the paper, tapping the quill impatiently against his thumb as he tried to think of something to put down for the fourth point. Nothing came to mind. Sure, the book was stuffed full of research on Runes and where they’d come from, but none of that actually told Noah how they worked.

Luckily, I think I’ve got the perfect strategy to figure out some more without actually giving anything too important away and I can help make a cover story at the same time. Two birds with one stone, as it were.

His plan decided, Noah smoothed out his wrinkled robes and approached the door, grabbing the key from his desk on his way. He rested his hand against the knob, fingers wrapping around cold metal as he paused. He touched the gourd hanging from his waist.

On the off chance that something happened, people would see what happened if he revived. Then again, leaving it in his room hardly felt safe. Noah let his hand drop, leaving it at his waist.

The door clicked open, and Noah stepped into a narrow stone corridor. He glanced down both ends of the corridor, but they looked the same. Greyish-black stone made up the floor and walls, coming to an arch just above his head.

Doors lined the walls to the right, while open windows ran along the left. Noah approached one of the windows and his eyes widened in awe. A beautiful garden stretched out before him, winding brick paths weaving through the exotic foliage.

Horse-sized flowers dotted vines the width of Noah’s waist, their petals a rainbow of colors. They glistened with liquid pollen that dripped like rain, falling to large clusters of pink and bright yellow bushes below them.

Trees warped and twisted in ways that Noah had never seen. Leaves of gold and silver shimmered like a sea of riches within their branches, rustling in the faint wind. Everywhere Noah looked, the majesty of completely foreign nature sprawled out.

Beyond the gardens, spires pierced the clouds. Tall towers rose between them, and stone bridges linked everything together. Noah could just barely make out the forms of other people walking along the bridges, but a large wall at the edge of the garden kept him from seeing the bases of the buildings.

He shook his head, pulling back from the window.

I’ll have time to admire the world later. I need to focus on not getting killed again.

“I wish I had a coin to flip,” Noah muttered.

He chose a direction at random and strode off through the halls. To his delight, after turning down several corridors, he came across a small metal board hanging from the wall. It had a miniature map of the building he was in, including a small gemstone that presumably marked where he currently was. Above the map, printed in what Noah was starting to suspect to be the common language of this world, was the letter T.

There were a dozen other buildings, all labeled with letters. A small key at the bottom of the map identified the meaning of each one and, the more Noah read, the less it sounded like a school and the more it seemed like a fortress.

Distributed throughout the multitude of normal school buildings was an Armory, a Transport Cannon, Drill Fields, and a multitude of other locations that he didn’t recognize.

I wonder if every letter has an equivalent to English, or if I’m just somehow translating everything to the closest thing to it. I bet it’s the latter, since human brains are fantastic at making things up to adapt to new visual information.

After memorizing the map, Noah set off once more. Even with the path in mind, the building was surprisingly difficult to navigate. He’d never considered himself to have either a good or a bad directional sense, but whoever had built this building clearly hadn’t been a fan of straight paths.

He finally reached an exit after several minutes of walking and more than a few mistaken turns that ended in dead ends. Noah stepped through it and into the beautiful garden, letting out a relieved sigh.

His nose twitched as a myriad of sugary, warm scents entered his nostrils. It was like a bakery that had been mashed with the essence of every fruit in the world and condensed down into a single smell.

He ran his tongue along his lips.

Food. I want to eat something.

He took a step toward the garden, then paused. Food could wait. He was pretty sure his hour was going to run out fairly soon – or had that already happened? Noah pursed his lips, then shrugged. He was probably fine.

Noah started down the path, keeping close to the building’s wall to avoid getting lost in the thick garden. Especially from ground level, some parts of it were so thick that they might as well have been a forest.

Through no small amount of luck, the path he’d chosen led straight up to a large stone circle in the ground. At its center was an obsidian pillar, bearing yet another map. It depicted an eagle’s eye view of dozens of buildings, along with another small red gemstone just above a building marked T.

His eyes darted around the map before landing on his target – the G building. It was just two buildings behind him, opposite the garden. Noah studied the path for a few more moments to make sure he wouldn’t get lost, then set off.

Just around twenty minutes later, he found himself standing in front of a stout stone building. Heavy vines wound around it like the embrace of a kraken and the wooden entry doors were worn and weathered by years of exposure to the elements. One of them hung slightly askew, and the other was heavily rotted. In the stone just above them protruded the letter G. The top half of the letter was chipped away, but he could just barely make out the pale area where it had once been.

“Looks like they had just as big of a budget as I did,” Noah grumbled, tugging on the door. It ground open, scraping across the ground. Once it was large enough for him to fit through, he squeezed inside.