A/N: I'm going to be out of town all next week, but posting will resume the week after.

...-...

So...I don't know where to begin, really. Not a lot has happened since I fell out of the sky, but it feels like way too much. I don't think I've even been here a day. Well, maybe a day or two at most.

I passed out before I hit the ground. And apparently I never hit it? There's like this huge language gap here and so I have to rely on understanding hand motions and I'm really way too freaked out to do that.

And I think I might be an indentured servant. To a gremlin.

Well, let's see if I can make a bit of sense about what's happened.

I woke up nice and comfy, wrapped in all these nice blankets. At first I thought I was back home, you know? That the whole world ending thing had been some long, horrible nightmare.

But when I looked around, I didn't recognize the room at all. And the bed was on the shorter side, like it was for kids. In retrospect, I think it's probably for adults...if that's what they are.

Every time I start to think about them, I see their beady little red eyes in my head and it freaks me out. I mean, my brother played a regular person warlock thing, but he had said that there were elves, so I thought Warcraft was gonna be like Lord of the Rings. Like maybe the scariest thing would be a talking tree. I admit, I kinda slept through those movies. That was another 'bonding' moment with Greg.

It's not my fault they were so boring at the beginning. Like anyone cares about a bunch of hairy-toed, spastic...

Anyway.

I woke up in a strange room. Well, at first I was really confused, right? Like, I'd been pretty sure that'd I'd been plummeting to my death and all. So then I thought maybe this was heaven. That was right about when I moved my arm and found out just how much I'd hurt it.

No way would there be that much pain in heaven.

But my arm was all bandaged up. I was really careful moving the rest of my body, because I was afraid I'd find out that half my bones were broken, lying in wait for me to move wrong before they revealed that they were damaged, so that I'd twist or something and mess them up more and never be able to walk again. Or something.

I had a few other places that were sore, but that was it. And I was still in my clothes, which were blood stained and dirty and ripped and total proof that this wasn't heaven, on the off chance that the aches and pains were just a fluke.

Well, I wanted to just curl back up in the least painful position I could find, close my eyes, and pray that I would wake up with Greg making fun of me or Bethany calling to tell me about her newest crush. Anything that would prove my life was still normal.

So cliché, right? But it's not.

I'm not some amazing girl like in the movies who has some secret power or talent that makes me awesome and totally cut out for adventures. I'm not super pretty, but there are boys who ask me out. I'll never be valedictorian, but I'm not failing any of my classes. I can't play an instrument or draw or sing...and I can lose at chess like nobody else can.

Sure, sometimes I wish that Zach Effron would sneak through my window and take me away to live in a mansion where I'll never have to worry about paying the bills—but where I can still get a cool job, like being a fashion designer—but that's about as much adventure as I'd ever really wanted.

I liked my normal life.

It's just...with everything going crazy and that email from Greg. I was so scared of being alone. I think...I think that I thought maybe Greg would be doing the same thing, somehow. Like, I'd walk through the portal and there he'd be. With an anti-demon weapon that would save the world.

He's much more into heroics than I'll ever be.

Anyway, I guess I got a little side tracked.

So I knew it wasn't heaven and I knew it wasn't home. So I threw all my hopes toward Azeroth. And I have no clue if this is Azeroth.

I tried to look around to get a feel for whoever it was who must have saved me. Everything was really tidy, if not a little on the frugal side. And the house was made of wood, but it was far from the best craftsmanship I'd ever seen. Like, it's weird that someone so neat would live in a place where the wood's gotten so warped that there are visible cracks in the walls, letting in sunlight.

And I could totally smell the ocean.

I wanted to make a good impression, so I combed my fingers through my hair and tried to make myself look a little bit more presentable, and then walked over to the door. Well, stumbled would more adequately describe it.

My left leg started cramping so badly the minute I tried to put weight on it. I never really had a charlie horse before, but I think that might have been one. It took a few minutes of me sucking in sharp breaths and staggering before my leg realized it wasn't going to get out of walking and finally eased up a bit.

By then I'd made it down a short hall and out into what I guess would be the living room/dining room/kitchen. There was an aroma in the air from something cooking that I wasn't really sure that I liked. I mean, I wasn't trying to be snotty or anything, it just...didn't smell like something from my world, I guess.

And that makes sense...but still. I would have liked it if I'd been able to place what was cooking, you know?

As I was wondering what the smell was, I saw him. I think it's a him. He only came up to about my waist and he had giant green ears. And his arms were way long and his hands were huge...and I'm not sure because my brain started to like short out or something so I kind of stopped registering details, but I think he only had four fingers on each hand.

I know I should have considered that with all the worlds I'd glanced into before that other species were just a part of life, but...I hadn't been within a few feet of those other species. I'd only seen a few of the demons up close and they weren't friendly at all.

I think I started to hyperventilate because one of the gremlin's ears twitched and then they both perked up, sort of like what my neighbor's dog does when it's listening for squirrels, and then he, it turned around and looked right at me with these red little eyes.

At first he was smiling...I think that was a smile. I hope it was...he had all these sharp little teeth and I couldn't help but think that he was going to eat me. Anyway, when he saw me, I must have had, "Dear God, I'm gonna die." written on my face because he raised his eyebrows and his smile(?) disappeared.

When he spoke, I had no clue what he was saying. I wish I could equate what he said to some language I knew, but honestly, this was like nothing I'd ever heard before.

I didn't respond because I was trying to remember Warcraft and figure out what the hell this little thing was, when he walked over and touched my hand with his giant fingers.

I'm not really proud of what I did after that, but in my defense, I think I handled things better than some would have.

The second he touched me it was like everything was real. Like somehow I'd been living in this protective bubble that kept all the craziness an arm's length away, that allowed me to treat it like it wasn't real, allowed me to make foolhardy decisions like running through portals. And with a touch, he broke it.

I screamed and ran away. The house was pretty small, so it was easy to reach the front door, but when I opened it, there were dozens of the little gremlins on the street—I use street loosely...really it was more of a bunch of planks of wood nailed together haphazardly—and they all looked at me with those little red eyes and so I swung the door shut and looked for somewhere else to run, saw that the one whose house I was in was standing right behind me, arms crossed and eyebrows raised, and I just burst into tears and fell to the floor. And re-hurt my already hurt leg, so then I started crying even harder.

That freaky little gremlin is kinda nice, you know? I was still freaking out, but he gave me this little handkerchief. I think I ended up hugging him and crying on his shoulder, but I was too busy coming to terms with really being in another world to remember.

God, I don't know how long I bawled. When I finally stopped, and looked around, there were a few gremlins leaning through a window near the door, watching me with their creepy eyes glued on me, like I was the freak.

The one whose house I was in went and got me something cold to drink—I think it was alcohol. It tasted really awful and the second it hit my tongue I was gagging and all the gremlins were laughing at me.

The freakiest thing, though, was that he didn't have a fridge or anything. Instead, while he was touching the mug, he mumbled something and I saw frost spread across the surface of the thing. From his fingertips.

That actually kind of gave me hope, right? Maybe he's one of those warlock things. Maybe I ended up in the right place after all.

Anyway, when he saw that I wasn't going to immediately curl up in the fetal position and go all despondent on him, he started talking really fast. I think I must have one of those dumb looks on my face because he trailed off in what I think was the middle of his sentence. Or maybe that's just the way they talk. There was a lot of trailing off going on in the conversations outside.

Then he motioned to me and said something else.

I still couldn't look him in the eyes. My friend had those red contact lenses once, right? And I'd thought those were freaky, but there was something just completely unsettling about seeing an actual iris that was red. When I dared a glance at our audience, not all of them were red eyed, though they did look creepy, none the less. If would figure I'd be saved by the scariest one of them all.

I finally shrugged and mumbled that I couldn't understand him.

He leaned his head toward me, his ears perking up again. Then he shuffled forward and started speaking—much slower—again. He would say something and then pause and watch me and then say something else. It took me a minute to realize that he was rotating through different languages.

I'd never heard any of them, so finally I held up a hand to get him to stop talking.

"Do you speak English?"

Dumb, I know. But I took three years of Spanish and I can't even remember how to ask how to get to the bathroom. While I really wish I'd paid more attention to other languages, I don't think any of them would have helped me here.

The little gremlin gave me the strangest look and then looked at the others in the window and started talking in that first language. I think he was asking if any of them knew what I'd said, because a few called out things in even more languages.

Of course I didn't know any of them.

And then it dawned on me that in the time it would take me to learn to communicate why I'd come and talk them into calling off their demons that my world would already be gone and I burst into tears again.

Somebody from out the window reached out to pat my shoulder and I jumped and dropped the mug and it shattered on the floor. The gremlin who owned it's face went all blank and he stared down at it like it had been some great treasure. Then his lips dipped into one of the most animated frowns I've ever seen and he held his hand out.

I had already started to pick up the pieces and apologize inbetween my hiccups—why do I always get those when I cry?—and when I saw his hand come toward me, I cringed away at first. He wasn't as sympathetic as before.

When I merely stared at him blankly, tears still running down my cheeks, he rubbed his fingers together, sort of like that thing people do when they want money? I think that's what he wanted, so I supposed that it made sense that I pay him for his mug, even though it seemed a little heartless to be harping on something like that when I was a wreck as I was.

But I fished through my pockets and found that I had five dollars to my name.

I really didn't think that portal thing through.

So I gave him the money. And he just stared at it and then it occurred to me that, duh, they probably didn't use American currency. I almost started crying again, but he gave me this really cross look and I was too freaked out...like maybe he really would eat me if I annoyed him enough.

So I settled for quiet sniffles while he shooed the people at the window away after having a few quick words with them and then went about picking up the rest of the broken clay...or whatever it was made of.

Then he pointed at me and did all these hand motions. I'm not completely sure, but I think I have to work off however much that mug cost. And maybe room and board. And the price of being saved. And...I really don't know what all his hand motions meant.

But he kept my five dollars.