Before you begin reading this story, I just want to get a few things out of the way:
- This is a work of fanfiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fanfictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental -
- I do not own the Inheritance Cycle, and I am not C. Paolini -
- There are no trigger warnings in this story, and there is graphic content + language -
- Don't expect updates to be frequent or regular -
- The views of the characters are not necessarily those of the author -
- Review! Reviews make me happy, and I write better when I'm happy -
- Follow and Favorite if you like the story; FFs make me even happier -
- I change my Pen Name a lot, so if you think someone stole my story, don't worry -
- Accents annoy me, so, out of spite, I usually don't put them in -
- I consider this story to hit its stride in Chapter 15, so if you still don't like it after Chapter 15, feel free to give it up. I beg you, however, to read up to Chapter 15 before you decide to keep reading or not. It shouldn't take you very long -
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An American Yankee in Nasuada's Court
Wrong Place, Wrong Time
Most people in this modern world of ours have no idea how to repair a clogged sink or fix a broken toilet. We take a break from our white-collar office job to call upon the lowly plumber, mechanic, or electrician who can do the dirty work for us while we order another set of stocks from our e-broker. When we get a flat tire, we don't pull over, whip out our jack and start fixing! We whip out our cell phones and call AAA for a quick rescue.
That's where I was different. I grew up fascinated by things and bursting to find out how they worked. My parents, God rest their stinking rich souls, thought me a child-genius and were only too happy too indulge my desires to understand as much as I could. While a girl in California could tell you all about the features of an iPhone app, I could tell you all the steps there were to making that iPhone on an assembly line. A boy in Colorado could tell you how many bad guys James Bond shot in his last movie, but I could tell you how to make Bond's Walther PPK and it's ammunition.
I had more books, blueprints, and diagrams in my room than files on my father's computer. When I graduated from a prestigious private high school, I enrolled in [name withheld for legal reasons] and studied several topics ranging from engineering to computer programming. I had an internship at the patent office for a brief while. I saw all sorts of experimental designs that sparked my own imagination.
With my fathers blessing (and his funding) I started my own company, Wyatt Industries. Using bits and pieces pulled off other designs I had seen at the patent office (they say copying is the highest form of praise, and I believe it) and my own improvements, I invented a new type of power generator: the proton defraculator. It generated clean, renewable energy by splitting the shells of protons and shooting the quarks through a sort of atomic net made of Hydrogen atoms. The best part: I could power it with 5% of it's own output. I could offer power at insanely cheap prices.
I was the symbol of success. I made a fortune. But what my father loved to laugh about, and what drove him and all my investors crazy with glee was that there was only one way to make a proton defraculator work. You couldn't do it with any other atomic piece, and it couldn't be improved any more. There was only one way. And my company had the patent. My face went on all the magazines and newspapers when I put five different power companies out of business in the same month.
I was called the god of energy; I was heralded as a saint for stopping half of all carbon emissions in their tracks. I passed twenty billion dollars when California announced that solely my company powered it. I had a photograph of me shaking the president's hand in front of my Washington D.C. plant. Thanks to Citizens United, I could decide the outcome of any election in the United States.
Despite my cheap prices, I could afford to give away billions to charity. I paid for the boats that cleaned up the great pacific garbage patch. I ran my own brand of e-reader to stop half of all deforestation in the Amazon. Not one person could doubt that I was the savoir of the planet. I had a legacy that beat all others. It could be summed up in the single photo of me letting a polar bear sniff my hand. I liked that one. It went right next to the president on my desk. The money just kept rolling in.
All this at age 29, mind.
My passion for knowing things never stopped. I spent a month living with the Dalia Lama after I arranged his return to Tibet. I learned methods of organizing my brain to store as much information in my head as I could. Sherlock Holmes, eat your heart out.
It was a bit after this that my adventure started. Thanks to Mr. Lama, I remember the whole experience as though it were yesterday.
I was at my vacation house with my latest girlfriend. It was dark, and I was in the small kitchen on a conference call with my board of directors, agreeing to launch a new series of e-reader. When it was all settled, I hung up. I was going to go upstairs to my bed and, more importantly, my girl, when I looked out the small window over the sink and saw an eerie green glow lighting the grass out side the cabin. Doing the stupid thing, I grabbed my coat and ran out to investigate. The circle of light was still there. It was about five feet wide. Of course I thought it was aliens. Who wouldn't? I ran back inside and grabbed two things: my cell phone and a canister of pepper spray from my girlfriend's purse. I ran back outside and snapped off about a dozen pictures. Oddly, when I looked up into the sky, I couldn't see anything besides the stars. I thought that maybe the source was only visible from directly beneath it. So I stepped into the circle of light. The instant my foot entered the patch of brightly lit grass, my vision went black. I didn't have time to panic before I felt a falling sensation, and then a jolt of impact. My breath was pushed out of me in an explosive whoosh, and I passed out.
When I came to, I was lying on soft grass. I sat up. I was in a field of green. I looked behind me, expecting to see the cabin, but it wasn't there. There was just more grass. Now I had plenty of time to panic. There was no sign of civilization in sight. I whipped out my phone. No service.
For reassurance, I pulled out the can of pepper spray. I had no idea what was going on. I willed myself to stay calm. I turned off my phone and slid it back into my pocket. I was so bewildered it took me a moment to realize that it was broad daylight. It should have been night. I thought about using my phone's compass but I could not think of any direction I should go. I tightened my grip on the pepper spray and choose a random way.
I had only walked a couple hundred feet when I came to a dirt road that cut through the endless meadow. Finally, something was going right. I figured I could find a gas station and find out where I was and then get a ride back to civilization. After following the bumpy trail for what felt like half a mile, I found myself on the outskirts of some town. The houses looked like a throwback to the 19th century. I figured it was just some sort of rural retreat, a place people could go to get away from it all. I checked for service again, but got nothing. I gave the village a closer look. Then it hit me: no power lines. Nothing that looked newer than the Gold Rush.
As I stepped into the town, faces peered at me through windows. They all looked scared or solemn. Toward the center of the village, some men were filling buckets with water from a well. I was blown away. A well? First no power, but no running water? These people must be insane. It was clearly some sort of funny farm thing. No sane person would live like this.
As I got closer, I realized that the men were dressed in some sort of tunic thing, made of some sort of rough cloth. It didn't look comfortable at all.
"Excuse me," I said to one of them. He turned to look at me, a sour expression on his face like I had just told him I was from the IRS. Then his expression changed to surprise, and he just stood staring at me like a loon. These people must be whacked, I thought. No other possibility. The way he stared at my clothes, it was as if I was dressed in a spacesuit. I was wearing jeans, a tee shirt, and a North Face jacket. From the way he looked at me, my skin might have been green and luminous.
"Pardon me, but could you tell me where the hell I am?" I asked, trying to keep my irritation at his reaction invisible.
"You're in Marna," said a voice behind me. I turned and saw another man, this one slightly younger. He too looked at me queerly, but he was earing a bemused expression, rather than one of utter shock.
I racked my considerable brains. I had never heard of the place. Maybe I was in a deferent country. However, these people spoke English with no trace of difficulty, so I doubted that they were foreign. That left North America and the UK. I ruled out England because they had no trace of a British accent. Screw where this place is, I thought. I'll just pay whatever it takes to get a helicopter out here and bring me back home.
"Do you have a phone I can use? I'll pay any long-distance cost."
They both looked at me like I was a zarg from Planet X-5.
"A what?" asked the younger one. The older guy just looked at me, oblivious to the water in his bucket slopping onto his shoes. I took a second look at his shoes. They looked nothing like my New Balance sneakers. And he had no socks. It was like I had been teleported to Little House on the Prairie. With a sinking feeling, I wondered if I had. They clearly had no idea what a telephone was. They were English speaking whites.
The sinking feeling deepened as I realized with crushing certainty. There were two possibilities. The first was that I had lost my marbles. The second was even worse. I wasn't in a different country. I was in a different world.