Lodewijk Smidje regained consciousness. He wished he could lose it again. He had the Mother of Hangovers and his skin hurt from perspiring. He had drunk himself to oblivion out of self pity over his lack of love life and own stupidity. He was sure he was somewhere quite high in the queue for Darwin's Prize ...

The previous evening he had gone on a date with that pleasant girl, Marie-Claudine. After establishing that he voted Vlaams Belang, while she Socialistische Partij, they put political discussion off limits and simply enjoyed the evening. Although he considered the movie to be beyond stupid he benignly suffered it because he could hear her laughter at his side. And he saw her eyes twinkle. This felt Good. He then walked her home. She asked him to come in and help her put some heavy items on top shelves beyond her reach. Being almost 190cm tall next to a pretty girl felt Good too. While he rearranged the shelves Marie-Claudine changed to some sort of sleepwear. Lodewijk tried very hard not to stare at the garment (which began too low and ended too high) but took the hint – she was ready to turn in so said goodnight and left. Closing the door she looked dejected, though. Half way home enlightenment struck ...
He went to an all night store and hit the beach with an armful of bottles.
He could hear the sound of running water and felt damp in all sorts of places. Had he pissed himself in his blackout ... had the tide run in?

He sat up and once the black spots in front of his eyes had ceased their dance he looked around. No, the tide had not run in. He was on a beach and sitting in shallow stream of water weeping from the side of a cliff. A cliff? There are no cliffs in Flanders ...

GROAN

Some fucking jokers found him – passed out – on the beach in Zeebrugge and drove him into France! A fantastic joke.

GROAN

He examined his mobile with a squinty eye – it was dripping wet and unsurprisingly not working. He groaned again.

Lodewijk walked on all fours – it seemed a jolly good idea at this moment - upstream of the water seeping from the rocks. YES! There was a shallow puddle! He drank deeply and greedily. Feeling the liquid sloshing in his belly he collapsed on his side and was instantly asleep again.

He was awakened by his ribs being poked with some blunt tipped object.

Must be some sort of beach warden.

"Rot op!"

The poking continued

"ROT OP!"

No effect - POKE, POKE

He remembered – he was in France.

"Va te faire enculer!" – he snarled

POKE, POKE

"Fuck off!" – he went polyglot. Everybody knows "fuck off!" – don't they?

POKE, POKE

He turned his head upwards to look at who was bothering him. The sight made him flip over and scramble away on all fours, belly up, into the weep. He was looking at someone who was not human! LARPers were not THAT good. And they did not GLOW. It was a fucking elf! He had played enough video games to know how an elf looked like. Shit – his favourite band was called Ithilien and he even knew why! And he was looking at an elf and ... at two other elves!

The tension made him throw up into the weep.

The elves talked to him in several languages. He talked back to the elves in several languages too. None worked.

The next days were a blur – he recovered from his hangover but got diarrhoea - from the water, he supposed. He always got loose bowels when at a new place. The elves led him somewhere, they even showed him to people in some village. No language worked – again. The men and women – all rather dirty like and smelly – just shook their heads looking at him. Their gestures send the message "no" to something or other. The elves rolled up his sleeves and pointed to his muscles making him fell he was being auction off or – judging by the unimpressed faces of the locals – dumped on unwilling takers. The elves failed to unload him. Lodewijk did not know was it good or bad for him.

At one point his suddenly agitated escorts left him alone, gesticulating to him not to go anywhere. Not that he had anywhere to run – but Lodewijk supposed the elves did not know that. They even gave him a knife. They came back several hours later and led him to a partly burnt village. The elves had apparently managed to save part of the inhabitants. Lodewijk was put on corpse gathering detail. The short, elementary school children size, very ugly human looking creatures must have been orcs. Yrch he heard the elves say, so that must mean orc. Pretty they weren't and their fatal wounds did not add to their beauty. But the bodies of the humans – men, women and children – were worse. Some were mutilated, some bore signs of torture. He puked and wept and carried the bodies to dump into a freshly dug pit. The orcs he helped stack and burn.

The three elves now led him and the survivors through the wilderness. He surprisingly had much strength (was it from the elf biscuits?), diarrhoea having passed, so he helped the refugees with their belongings or children. The elves again tried to dump him with the refugees at the next village but the locals refused to take him in.

By that second village he had recovered his wits. He realised that he was in some sort of fantasy world. Which one? He did not know. He had seen Lotr and The Hobbit and Narnia and Avatar the Last Airbender and Dungeons and Dragons and – through a geek acquaintance – Willow and some other older titles. He was not much for reading but he also had played a shitload of CRPG and online MMORPGS – Elder Scrolls? Neverwinter? WOW – probably not – orcs too small and elven ears too short. Maybe it was Warhammer – the brutal killers would be goblins and the ear size was a good match.

But he decided to keep his mouth shut and not ask or reveal anything in attempts to establish which world he might be in. He had no idea whether mentioning Elminster, Gandalf, Sigmar, Conan, Bavmorda or Dumbledore would get him killed or treated better. For all he knew he might be in Warhammer during the Three Emperors period and swearing by Ulrik or Sigmar to the wrong people would get him gutted on the spot. He also had some knowledge of the benefits of silence in parallel worlds from an unexpected source.

Some time ago he had found a side splitting story on his older sister's laptop – his own having died to a coke-on-keyboard accident – his sister had dropped into the world of the Lotr movies, her burnt out by perms lanky hair suddenly became a lush ass length cascade of darkness, her occasionally zit graced face became porcelain smooth, she transformed into an elf, learned to sing and fight ninja style with two swords. Lodewijk read on fascinated by all the bullshit about dresses and hair colour Amarilvalaien – or something like that – seemed to be obsessed about. Legolas hit on his sister although initially she had hated him, but his love made her heart and core – what core? – melt and they married and she gave the elven prince her maidenhood. He snorted – he was fairly sure that in RL she had given it to Olivier De Graap from her class while on a school trip.

Poking around the web he found an entire site of such drivel. Lodewijk had then laughed himself silly at heliotrope orbs or slate spheres for eyes (people really had violet eyes?), page long descriptions of dresses, eye colour, hairstyles, problems with breathing when a certain blond elven prince – in some stories substituted by a certain blond dwarf prince or grumpy majestic dwarf or rugged ranger – brushed the girl's finger tips. In the boring, less funny ones which he skimmed and quickly abandoned Lodewijk noticed that shouting "Sauron" or "Voldemort" at the wrong sort of locals made them hostile, and that revealing future events could cause "butterflies", meaning that future events may change and not necessarily for the better.

So, even though he kept on comparing what he saw with the fantasy worlds he knew, Lodewijk did not take any steps to establish which world it might be. Not getting chopped into tiny bits over what he might know seemed like a good starting point for a plan of action. Or rather inaction in his case. He let himself be carried along by events. There was not much else he could do.

AN:

I hope all Belgians and Flamands in particular will forgive me ...