“This isn’t happening,” was all Izzy could think as he rocketed toward a lone figure on the ground.
He thought this over and over as the outline of a person on the ground drew ever closer and the roofs of buildings flashed by. He threw his arms across his face, refusing to see the moment of his death.
The moment of impact came and went.
With his heart trying to pound his eardrums out of his head, Izzy couldn’t hear much. What he did notice was that air wasn’t rushing past him anymore. He also noticed the smell; a thick, acrid smoke entered his nose assaulting his senses and almost making him gag. Almost choking and anticipating a cough, he pulled his arms away from his face and his breath caught in his burning throat.
He was looking down on a man adorned in green and brown armor, an outstretched fist pointing up at Izzy. Izzy looked down and almost squeaked; his feet were about two meters above the ground with the cobblestones slowly coming closer as he drifted softly downward. He looked back at the man, noticing he was mostly covered in a black ooze of some sort, covering a lot of the brown and green leather armor and marring a fair amount of his good looking face and pointed ears.
“Wait…” Izzy thought. “Pointed ears?”
Izzy’s feet touched the ground and he stood, feeling surprisingly light on his feet. Despite his lack of weight, he still nearly toppled over due to the disorientation of his ordeal.
“What are you doing here? Who are you?” The man asked with a mix of incredulity and exasperation. “And why are you naked?”
“Umm…” Izzy said. Not for the first time in the last few minutes, he couldn’t think. “Hi?”
The man cocked his head, taking in the state of Izzy.
Izzy’s shoulder-length dirty blonde hair was ridiculously wind-swept and his skin was a little red, like it gets when people are warming up from being cold. His piercing blue eyes were wide in fright and confusion and his slack jaw was wrapped in a dark blonde beard that traversed his entire square jaw mouth. It wasn’t very long, but it was very full, curly, and well past just being stubble. If the man in front of Izzy had known anything about Earth, he would have described the man before him as having Germanic or Scandinavian ancestry.
“Sometime,” a woman behind the pointy ear man started yelling, “today. Would be nice!”
The man looked over his shoulder and blanched, he turned back to Izzy who was still standing there looking nonplussed.
“Listen, I need to get back in there. There are a bunch of spell coins I dropped. I can’t use them in my bear form anyway and that’s where this fight is headed. Take them, use them to get to safety if you can find any.”
He turned and hefted his staff, but after a few paces he looked back at Izzy, who was looking down at the assortment of coins on the ground with a blank look on his face.
“And hey!” the man yelled. Izzy looked up at him quizzically. The tips of the man’s mouth curled up slightly, “maybe find some pants, too?”
With that, he ran off in the direction of the woman who had requested his help.
Izzy had to just let the experience wash over him as he just fought to keep his balance and start thinking again.
“What?” He thought. “Just… what? Did he say… SPELL coins? How am I alive? This is… All of this is impossible!”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
He looked up and watched as the man that allegedly saved him ran towards the woman and, mid-stride, leapt forward onto all fours as black hair sprouted over his entire body. Izzy watched with a mix of suspicion, horror, and confusion as the once vaguely elf-looking man turned into a black bear at a full sprint and slammed into a small group of floating jellyfish things.
Izzy continued standing there, slack-jawed. When he finally found his voice, all Izzy could say, once again, was “What the fuck?”
He looked down at the coins and, not being able to think of anything else to do, he stooped to pick them up. In the same moment he went to stoop down to pick up the slightly glowing coins, if he could believe his eyes, his sense of weightlessness disappeared. He tipped right over like a baby after its first step, slamming into the ground with the side of his face, his hands barely coming up to help.
Groaning, he opened his eyes and saw where one of his hands landed. Half of one of the coins was sticking out from beneath his palm, and he could feel the other half of the broken coin vibrating as both halves began glowing in a way he could no longer disbelieve.
He tucked his arms into his aching body and rolled away; whatever that light was, he didn’t want to be anywhere near it. After his impromptu barrel rolls, he got onto his knees and looked back at the glowing coin. A warm, yellow-red ball of light was building up near the two halves of the coin. The ball gathered quickly into the size of a softball and rose off the ground.
“That… this is impossible!” Izzy stammered, as the softball rocketed towards him and struck him in the chest.
Expecting to be blown off his feet, he again raised his arms to cover his face, but as the ball of light made contact, he drew in what felt like his first full breath of air since he had first opened his eyes above the city.
It was a glorious, sweet release of tension and anguish. He felt like everything in the past didn’t matter and everything in the future was going to be okay. He sat back on his heels, his shoulders slumped in relief, and he looked up to the sky and laughed and cried for the sheer wonderful strangeness of it all.
As the light left his chest, and the heady feeling went away, Izzy sighed in gratitude to that strange man who apparently was also a bear. It was as if, like magic, his mind had cleared and his adrenaline and fear had evened out to manageable levels. He squeezed the tears from his eyes, wiping them away with the back of his hand and stopped giggling like a madman. His eyes clear and his overwhelming confusion on pause for a moment, so he started thinking again.
“Okay…” he told himself, resolute in trying to figure out what was happening. “Okay… what do I know? I know that I have no idea how any of this is happening. So much of this has been impossible. Not dying when I fell from something like a kilometer. Not dying from the deceleration it would have taken to make me stop so close to the ground. A man that turns into a bear and has coins that have… what… magic??”
Izzy paused. He clung to the idea of something tangible he could test to learn more, and distract him from all the other stuff he didn’t know. He got to his feet, springing up with renewed vigor. He strolled over to the coins and bent down like he originally tried before he took a swan dive right onto the cobblestones. At that moment he remembered his face plant and reached up to check the side of his head. It didn’t hurt anymore.
“Huh,” he thought. “How did.. Wait, no. One thing at a time.”
He took a closer look at the nearest coin, not daring to pick it up yet. It was a bright red coin, about the size of a United States half-dollar coin and the thickness of three. It had a faint glow to it, almost like that of a lit fireplace that reflected off of a wall. On the side facing him, he could see a small pictogram of flames.
“If these do what I’m suspecting they do,” he thought. “I’m not starting with that one.”
He looked at the next one. This one appeared to be the same size, but instead of a bright red it was the color of shallow water, and shone with the light of a tropical lagoon. Looking at the pictogram, it appeared to be a hand held up like the “do not cross” part of a crosswalk sign.
Other coins nearby varied in color and shape of their pictogram, some of which he could see the upwards face, the rest had a single number embossed on them despite their other attributes. He saw numbers in the range of one through four, the majority being ones and twos. Izzy found one that he felt was relatively innocuous and gingerly picked it up.
“I really hope this works the way I think it does” he said to himself. “Here goes nothing. For science!!!” he exclaimed as he closed his eyes, and clenched his fist around the coin.
