Mark stood in the ruins of a burned down house, looked into the cracked mirror, and knew he was insane. He had a whole head full of memories, and none of them seemed to match the reality in front of his eyes.

He saw a young boy, maybe ten, not older than fourteen, staring right back at him. That was not his age. That was not his face. His memories were all full of a programmer named Mark in his late twenties, with sandy blonde hair that was already balding. The boy in the mirror had thick black hair, cut short, with sky blue eyes, eye-catching eyes like Mark had always been jealous of.

The biggest problem was the vicious oozing scab going all the way across the top of his scalp and down to the middle of his eyebrow. Spots of blood like splatter marks were dotting his shoulders and face, but he didn’t feel hurt at all. More importantly, Mark had never gotten an injury like that in his life. Not even in the car crash.

The car crash. The last thing Mark remembered before waking up here was his car slipping on the ice and the crash. He’d been rushing home, eager to finish a couple hours of work from his home computer before finally being done for the day. His mind had been on work the entire drive, and even after the crash, when his body was screaming with pain and he felt the sting of the cold pavement drain away his life, he’d still been distracted with work, thinking about who was going to finish his project if he didn’t make it in tomorrow. His last thoughts… had been about work. What a stupid life. He was glad it wasn’t real.

But that had to have been a dream, right? He hadn’t gotten any head injuries. The image in the mirror looked like an ax had chopped straight through the skull and into the boy’s brain. But that couldn’t be; the gash was already scabbed over, and he didn’t feel any kind of injury on his skull.

The car crash, this weird boy in the mirror, it was all a dream. If this was really real, and he was really real, then he would be freaking out right now. Instead, he took it all in with a strange sort of detachment. His head hurt, and he was dizzy, but… but that could happen in dreams, right? He’d wake up any minute now.

He didn’t. He stared into the mirror, and the boy stared back at him.

The boy was skinny, starving maybe, but full of lean, corded muscle. Mark had never had muscles like that, not even as an adult. It painted a certain kind of picture. This boy had been expected to work for his dinner, and work hard.

Would he object to the fact that Mark was living in his body now? Maybe not. The house also had the smoldering remains of two adult bodies. His parents? The bodies were so disfigured by fire that he couldn’t tell anything about them, not even age or gender.

The fire hadn’t burned away everything, though. There was the mirror of course, as well as a stone fireplace, with a big black pot and a fire poker nearby. A house fire wouldn’t be hot enough to melt iron. He could search for valuables? He looked at the corpses again, and decided he didn’t want to.

His head swam. His stomach felt queasy. He needed to get out, to go outside. Although, outside was a relative term; the ceiling was completely gone, and he could see straight up to the gray misty clouds. It was going to rain soon.

He put a hand to a remaining section of blackened wall to steady himself, and it crumbled under his slight weight. He stumbled away from it, startled that it had moved.

Outside of the burned home, it was worse. There was a long dirt road, lined on each side with black and burned out houses. Some of them still smoldered silently, but most lay cold and empty. Nothing moved, except for a murder of happy, hopping crows.

In the street not six feet away from him, lay the corpse of a man. It had the same rough woolen clothes that he realized he was wearing, but much more ornate with lines of colorful embroidery all up and down the legs and arms. The body wasn’t decaying yet; whatever happened in this weird town hadn’t been too long ago. Maybe a day. There were more corpses, here and there, down the street. He didn’t look at them.

He knew he should be… something. Emotional. Scared. Panicking. Crying, maybe? He didn’t feel anything. Even the scar on his head didn’t seem to hurt, a little itchy maybe, but that was it. He just felt numb.

He walked away, past house after house, until he got outside of the town. There were wide fields next, post-harvest. It was autumn, then? It didn’t look like it. The trees in the distance were still bright green.

He walked until he got to the trees and he couldn’t smell ash anymore and sat down beneath a tree. He didn’t know what kind. The leaves were five-pointed, in a perfect pentagram. Maybe that wasn’t that weird; he didn’t know much about trees.

He sat beneath the tree and waited for whatever this was to be over. And waited. Hours passed, and the whole experience started to feel real.

It wasn’t like he never watched anime; he knew what this had to be. He’d been isekai’d, right? Except which was more likely: that he’d actually been transported to another world, or that he was in a coma from his car crash and his imagination had painted a world exactly like he’d expect from the media he’d consumed?

But if it was a dream, why was nothing happening? The entire time he’d been sitting under the tree, nothing had happened. The one thing about dreams was that they never stayed still.

He was starting to get thirsty. Hungry, too, and most of all bored. He stood up and walked the entire way back to town.

He found a lot of bodies; more than he would like, but they didn’t affect him as much as he’d thought they would. Numb. Why was he so numb?

He felt the cool breeze against the muggy heat. He felt the dirt road through his thin shoes. But in his heart he felt… not much. Cold calculation.

That man laying in the street looked like he died from bludgeoning. That child in a house over there died from fire, probably asphyxiation first then burning. This woman in the doorway died from decapitation. This was probably all a dream anyway, best if it didn’t affect him too much.

One structure still stood; an old-fashioned well. It was the kind with a big bucket that you had to pull up with a wooden crank. He dropped it in and cranked until his arms burned, then took a deep drink right out of the bucket. The water was cool, refreshing, almost sweet, and much too real.

The bucket itself was pretty neat; it was all wood, except the various planks it was made of were held together by slotting into each other perfectly like a jigsaw puzzle.

The dirt road and the small houses without any concrete in the walls or foundation had made him think this town was medieval, but the bucket made him think otherwise. Something this perfect had to have been made with machine tools. That, or by someone with way too much time on their hands.

Curious, he steeled himself and started to search the houses.

Like the first house, many of them had big cast-iron cooking pots in stone fireplaces. That alone made him think it was a pre-industrial society. But there were oddities. The doors had very intricate brass doorknobs and locks, and he found the remains of a clock in one larger home.

He smacked his forehead. The mirror. He’d found a mirror in the house he’d woken up in. Household mirrors hadn’t become a thing until the 19th century.

He was in 1850 or so? The only problem with that were the bodies. Every corpse that wasn’t burned away showed signs of violence, but not a single bullet wound. Slashing and bludgeoning wounds, unnecessarily large and brutal. But no bullet wounds, not a single one.

He didn’t find a single gun in any of the houses either, or on any of the corpses even though several of them still carried their weapons. Spears and halberds mostly, but one man had a scythe and another some kind of ridiculously oversized ax.

That’s how he knew for a fact that this wasn’t real. The technology didn’t match the time period at all.

Despite knowing it wasn’t real, time continued to march on, and he didn’t wake up.

He found a nice big rock and sat down. The sun was starting to cross over the horizon. He’d been searching the houses all day. He felt the warm, muggy air. He heard the cawing of the crows, and felt his stomach churning unpleasantly. It felt real.

Maybe it was time to start acting like this was real life? Honestly though, he didn’t want this to be real.

Something appeared in front of his eyes. A blue box, with white letters.

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