Everything started with the dawning of a morning and me awaking in an unfamiliar room. Above me, I could hear a quiet murmur and an occasional gnashing of teeth above of me. After a moment of hesitation, I remembered: Today my old junior highschool class would reunite!
We wouldn't meet in the city where the school had been but in the next bigger city. It suited me a lot, because I didn't like my erstwhile home town. It had been a small German town, nothing more than a shopping street with a suburb, on closer inspection. So I had been very pleased to have an alternative to meet the others. I enthusiastically had climbed onto the next express train and had moved into a Youth Hostel.
During my time at school, I hadn't had a very good relationship to my classmates. For the most part, the reason was that some of my classmates had leaned towards racism. I'm a dark skinned woman, so I had been a foreigner to their eyes.
So, suavity would be the best thing for me to expect. Nevertheless, I was anxious to the others' reaction about me. Because I had changed.
I had lost a lot of weight, and instead of long curls I had a short haircut now that suited me better. Comparing with the past, I was very content with my appearance. For this special occasion I had chosen a new red strap dress with a pattern of little white flowers. Small white buttons closed it on the front, from top to bottom. I had come to like wearing it. Despite of the quite warm autumn weather, I decided to wear a blue long sleeved shirt and a pair of short heeled boots with the jumper.
My roommate, a Vietnamese girl named Heather Lee, was a likeable one. We had talked until midnight.
I took my toilet bag and went for the shower. Suddenly, all lamps flared, and I could feel the ground shake beneath my feet. I winced and looked around. But I couldn't see any cause for this, so I shrugged and went into the shower.
Suddenly, my head was swimming so hard, I had to sit down in the shower cabin and close my eyes. After a few minutes, everything was back to normal again. So I stopped the shower and made haste to get dressed. The class would meet during the early afternoon, and I wanted to have a cup of coffee before that. I felt an urge to prepare mentally to face my former classmates again.
I took my black leathern jacket and my black clothbag, left the Youth Hostel and set out for downtown. But I didn't get very far. As soon as I reached a narrow alley I blacked out.
Regaining consciousness took a bit longer this time. At once, I realized something had changed.
First of all, there was a stench, much more intensive by far, touching my paranasal sinuses to the quick. As a reflex, I covered my nose and opened my eyes. In the next moment I wished I hadn't.
Instead of a brick wall I saw now irregular grey boulders piled up. They were held together with mortar that seemed to disintegrate by a piercing look. And instead of a smooth sidewalk, the floor was made of rough flagging, resembling the streets during the Middle Ages. However, I couldn't be sure of that, for the floor was heavily coated with filth and grime.
It startled me when I realized that I was sitting right in this filth with my brand new dress. Struggling to my feet at once, I snagged my dress on a sharp stone. The sudden movement tore the dress and ripped off a lot of the little white buttons on the low and on the top part of the dress. But that came to my mind much, much later, just like the fact that my bag was gone.
Carefully, I felt my way along the wall and tried to balance my impressions. My mind tried to find out what happened. My pulse quickened. I could feel it pounding in every vein. My legs were trembling. My nose was struggling to find a way to cope with the smell around me. And my hands were shaking badly.
Very carefully and slowly, I went to look around the next corner. I could hear voices discussing and laughing and promoting different goods. I could hear the clattering of horse hooves and the rattling and creaking of cartwheels.
My pulse slowed down a bit, and I took a deep breath. Wherever I was, this had to be a city, no doubt about that. There were people living here, and somewhere in this crowd I could find someone to help me.
Just in the minute I had finished this thought, I heard a voice that startled me. The voice was laughing in a high-pitched and nasally sounding tone. It was answered by another voice, sounding darker and a lot more orotund. Compared to the first one, it was a pleasant, clear tone.
The second voice was completely unheard-of to me, but the first one sent a shiver down my spine. So far, I had heard only one person laughing like this: Cecil Wormsborough St John Nobbs, alias Corporal Nobby Nobbs from Ankh-Morpork City Watch.