The mid-summer sun was setting deep as the colour of orange was slowly drowned out by a deep dark blue, and still, Kure sat in the library, neck-deep into a textbook. Why did it matter that it was a mid-summer sun that had set? Because the sun sets a lot later in summer than it does in winter. Today the sun set at 7:00 pm, and Kure's library usually closed at 6:30 pm, but Kure had been so strongly possessed by the words of the textbook she hadn't noticed the time, nor the librarian's calling the other students to leave.

"Miss Nakamura?" A stern voice shattered Kure's trance.

She looked up from her book and turned to see the head librarian looking at her with a smile that was just a little too tight.

"Miss Nakamura, the library is closed, you really must go home now." The librarian said curtly.

Kure looked at the clock and blinked in surprise.

"I lost track of time again, I am so, so sorry! I'll put the books away right now and leave." Kure got up from her seat and bowed deeply to the librarian in apology, before turning to pile up the seven books she had read today into a neat stack.

"I'll take care of that, Miss Nakamura."

"But I couldn't-"

"I really must insist, Miss Nakamura." Kure was interrupted by the librarian through gritted teeth.

Kure looked down guiltily before bowing once more in goodbye, hurriedly collecting her stationary and stuffing it into her satchel before heading towards the exit. Slinging the satchel over her shoulder, Kure tugged down on her amber sweater before absentmindedly checking her skirt's pocket to make sure she hadn't forgotten her phone.

She couldn't blame the librarian for wanting to get her out of there. Kure regularly lost track of time while at the library, forcing the librarians to have to stay behind longer than they should need to just get her out. A small blush dusted Kure's cheeks. It was so embarrassing, she couldn't even keep track of time properly, and ended up causing trouble for other people.

If only she was better. If she worked harder, surely, she wouldn't have had to take so long to do something as simple as understanding the advanced readings.

Kure had been considered a gifted student since she was in elementary school. Often praised by teachers for her talent and problem-solving skills. Kure had felt growing pressure on her shoulders as she got older and her sheer natural talent stopped being enough to maintain the level of excellence that was expected of her.

She wasn't smart like people thought. She knew that. If she were smart, she wouldn't be struggling so hard to do something as simple as maintaining straight A's. A smart person would have done it in half the effort and earned a few 'S' grades too.

It is what was expected of her after all. That is what she needed to do to be worth the investment her parents had made in her. She was such a failure. Kure sugged her shoulders and tugged at her hair painfully.

It was starting to get dark now. She picked up her pace as she navigated her way towards the train system. She felt a slight wave of relief as she entered the rivers of people making their way in and out of the station.

As she mindlessly headed towards her platform, she felt a strange wave of dizziness. Now, this certainly wasn't the first time she had felt a little weak in the head after studying, but for some reason, this felt different in a way she couldn't put her finger on.

She pulled out her phone and swiped her train pass and waited by the platform. The best thing about living in the city was that you never had to wait long for the train.

She felt another wave of dizziness and rubbed at her eyes from behind her glasses. Now that she thought about it, she wasn't that tired, as it wasn't that late for her. She has only ever got dizzy spells when she was studying at home past midnight.

Her train arrived and she stepped inside. The seats were all taken, so she grabbed onto one of the grips hanging from the roof of the carriage. She was only three stops away from her own, surely, she could last that long.

Two stops passed while she was in a trance-like state. It started to feel like she was floating in her own body, like her soul wasn't tethered properly.

The third stop came, she made her way to the carriage doors. The doors opened. She stepped out and was blinded by light. She raised her hands in front of her glasses in reflex while her eyes adjusted to the sudden sunlight.

Sunlight? The sun should be long gone by now. Kure looked up at the sky – Sky? Hadn't she just been underground? – and saw that it was mid-day. She immediately looked behind her and saw that the train she had just been in was no longer there, nor was the train station, nor the tracks, nor anything else she could recognise.

She was in a marketplace. But not like any marketplace she had seen before. Some of the people here that didn't look like they were human. Sounds of chatter burst roared, smells of exotic foods burned her nose as her senses become hyperactive. Kure shut her eyes and shook her head in disbelief, but when she opened them the marketplace was still there.

For the briefest moments, she considered the possibility that they were cosplays, and she was in some kind of convention, but no, these were far too detailed, to realistic, and more importantly, the atmosphere was wrong. Conventions had this air of excitement because they were an event that was a break from the mundane, but the air here was settled like it was any ordinary day.

Then what about a dream? She might have fallen asleep on the train! She immediately looked at her hands to count her fingers, a trick she had learned in her teens that would reveal to her if she was dreaming. However, she counted all ten of her fingers perfectly fine. This was not a dream.

The air within her lungs became thick, and suddenly it took all her concentration to breathe. What is going on? How can this be real? Am I insane? What is going on? How can this be real? Am I insane? What is going on? How can this be real? Am I insane?

AmIinsane?AmIinsane?AmIinsane?AmIinsane?AmIinsane?

A street performer shouted an incantation and a statue made of stone rose from the ground five meters in front of her. She felt the ground tremble beneath her feet. This was real. This was actually real.

She stared at the street performer in bewilderment, who continued to make different shaped from the earth. 'It's so beautiful.' How could this be real? It felt like a childhood fantasy, like how she used to dream of being taken to fairyland and seeing magic and knights and princesses.

She took a deep breath. She couldn't let herself get swept away by a fantasy, there had to be a logical explanation for how she got here.

Now, contrary to what one might believe, Kure wasn't just a nerd for her deep commitment to doing nothing but study and her lack of social life. She was a fan of pop culture. She didn't get to divulge in it much, but she loved the way science fiction and fantasy presented concepts of other worlds with different laws of reality, time travel, and magic. A beautiful dream. No . The concept of the existence of infinite parallel universes was founded in real-life science. It wasn't a dream, it could be accepted as a logical explanation.

So, she wasn't completely ignorant of the idea that she could have been teleported to an alternate universe. She questioned the absurdity of it, but the idea came to mind. She didn't have any other explanations for what was going on, so she was forced to go along with that one.

So, it seemed she had stepped through an interdimensional wormhole and entered a universe with a different set of physics, where it seemed magic of all things was real. She was lucky to be alive, honestly, she could have landed in a universe where the natural temperature was ten times hotter than on earth, or a world without oxygen, or even a world that instantly vaporised anyone wearing the colour orange. That was the thing with the infinite universe theory, literally, anything could be possible in one of the infinite other dimensions.

But she had her final exams in three weeks! A thought came into her head which she immediately dismissed. Stupid, stupid! There was no point worrying about something like that. Considering that her world had received no visitors from this one, it was highly unlikely that this world didn't have its own method of creating a way back, or at least a well-known one, and the likelihood of another wormhole naturally taking her back was one in infinity. There was no way she'd be able to go home to do her exams. (And if she did get home, surely her university would allow an exception for her to sit the exam separately?)

She took another deep breath to calm her nerves.

She was here to stay. In that case, she needed a survival plan. Logically, the solution to being introduced to any new environment comes in three stages. Readjust, establish, prosper.

To readjust, she needed to learn the new rules of this universes, like how to read the and the laws of the land. Then she could use her new understanding to establish herself a long-term living situation. Then finally once she was stable could see if she could use her understanding of her world's technology and ideas to prosper.

She walked over to a nearby stall and glanced over the food absentmindedly. Most of it looked familiar to her, which was a relief, but not really why she approached the stall. The stall's owner noticed her approach and greeted her.

"Hello, miss, would you like to buy some appas?" Kure was shocked that the man spoke the same language as her. She had been hoping to check if the language of the people here at least used sounds that she could reproduce with her own mouth.

The fact that they shared the same language felt impossible, but then again, the fact that she was here at all could be called impossible. She tried her best to not let the shock reach her face.

"No, sorry, I'm just browsing right now." She said bowing slightly.

The man hesitated, looking Kure over, before giving a slightly strained smile, "Let me know if you change your mind then, lass."

Kure smiled politely at him and moved on.

She didn't neglect to notice that the word for apples was different, but what she had found was a lot better than she expected. So, she could at least communicate.

What next?

As a student that had always too busy studying to do sports or have any hobbies, Kure lacked physical skills she could rely on to get work, so the next on her to-do list was learning to read and write. Glancing at the street signs, she knew she wasn't as lucky on that front as she had been with language.

She couldn't recognise any of these symbols from anywhere. Still, that wasn't too discouraging. If the language they spoke was Japanese, that meant the writing was also limited to the syllables the Japanese language was limited to. That meant that if she was lucky, she could limit the writing to 71 possible symbols, unless the writing split the 'vowels' and 'consonants' like in the English writing system, which in that case she could lower the number of symbols even further!

There was always the chance that they had multiple writing systems, or used something like Kanji, but she remained hopeful. There was a good chance that if she was right, she could memorize the writing within the day if she worked hard enough.

But how to check her theory? If she went up to a person and told them she couldn't read and ask them to read a sign for her, it was likely that they would reject her request thinking she was uneducated and from a lower class. It was the cruel reality of her world that people that lived comfortable lives often felt uncomfortable in the presence of those that didn't.

Luckily for her, she had a different method she could try. She readjusted her glasses and then, very carefully, she picked a store sign that only had three characters on it.

She walked up to a man that was eating an apple close to it and gently tapped him on the shoulder.

"Excuse me, sir, I'm afraid my glasses are faulty, and I need to get them replaced, could you please read that sign for me?" She asked with an embarrassed smile.

"Sure," the man replied, reading the sign for her without much thought. It was a three-syllable word, implying that her 71 character theory was right.

"Thank you, sir." She bowed to the man and as she walked away, she pulled out her notebook and a pen from her satchel and quickly took note of the three characters' meaning. Looking at the three characters she frowned. Continuing that way was going to end up very disorganized and make it difficult for her to memorise later, so she drew up a hiragana chart and next to the corresponding symbols put down the new ones.

Quite enticed by the puzzle she had made for herself; she found a larger sign this time and asked another person to read the sign for her. She repeated this process over and over, not always getting a polite response from the person she asked. Twice she found that the same sound was represented by two different characters, and once that one character represented two similar syllables.

But through the course of three hours, she managed to pin down 72 characters and couldn't find any new ones she didn't recognize. For the second time that day, the sun was beginning to set.

The crowds of the main marketplace were far too loud for Kure to concentrate peacefully on reading the symbols, so she found a quieter street, and sat against a wall near an alley. It was out of the way and not very visible, so it was unlikely that if she practised here, she would be disturbed or questioned.

She only needed to memorize 72 characters, she told herself. Just 72. Anyone could do it.

But her eyes were beginning to feel droopy and she knew she was exhausted. She had been studying in the library that day since 10:00 am, meaning she had already studied for nine hours before her arrival here, then followed by the shock of being transferred into a different dimension, and then three hours of questioning people to jot down every single character she could find, well, that was a lot of energy.

She really ought to finish memorizing those characters, she told herself. If she wanted food tomorrow, she would have to get a job, and she didn't have the skills to get a job unless she could read.

She read the characters again. Just a few more…

She was jostled awake by something tugging on her satchel.

"Shit, fuck." A man's gruff voice.

She brushed the sleep out of her eyes to see a man with grey hair and an ugly scar down his right cheek. The man was trying to take her bag, but as soon as he saw that she was awake he panicked and pulled a knife out and pointed it at her.

"Just-just keep quiet and give me the bag and you won't die!"

Kure had never had a knife pointed at her before, so she was surprised that her instinctual reaction to having a knife in her face was to grab it with her hand and pull it away.

It shocked grey-hair too, which is probably why a second later Kure was up and running away as fast as she could. Which was not very fast. Kure hadn't run in three years. Not just that, she was wearing a long so-called sensible skirt and was tightly clenching her own bleeding palm to her chest.

"GET BACK HERE YOU BITCH!"

She could hear the sound of grey-hair's footsteps getting closer. Oh god, he was going to catch her! She was going to die! Hot tears slipped down her cheeks as she screamed.

"Help me! Somebody, please help me!"

Her vision blurred in her own tears and she closed her eyes in fear. Her stride was broken as she collided with something solid and warm. She hesitantly opened her eyes and looked up to catch a glimpse of red. Red hair, she realized was the first thing she saw, followed by blue eyes.

"Alright, I'll help." The man said with a gentle smile