Demesne

If there was one thing he found mildly aggravating about Demesne, it was that people kept mispronouncing his name. They kept going for the short vowel sounds instead of the long one. He'd given up correcting people and nowadays Ryan just rolled with it.

Still, it could have been worse. At least he was speaking the local language. He wasn't sure what dark and unknowable eldritch sorcery was involved– he'd done his research and Mentalism magic apparently couldn't be used to just shove information into your brain like that– but it was convenient nevertheless, since the last time he'd tried to learn a foreign language that wasn't English had gone horribly. Olympian-type gods and other sorts of Random Omnipotent Beings didn't seem to be have involved either, since the two major religions worshipped either the dungeons themselves (considering the Dungeon Binder as something of a living avatar or high priest at best, and not a deific being), or the scientific method.

Yeah, he'd been kind of surprised about that. Usually one expected it to be the opposite in a fantasy setting– and he called this a fantasy setting because MAGIC!– but no, the other common, widespread religion dealt with the rational analysis, testing, data recording and widespread dissemination of experimental results and conclusions. It was a proper religion though. There'd been schisms, wars, persecutions of those who believed in thought experiments over empirical testing… all the things a proper religion got around to eventually.

Despite him being a good Catholic boy, he was on the side of the empiricists on that one. Notes, or it didn't happen!

Still, after six years here, he thought he was doing pretty well. He'd found a job at a lumberyard delivering wood to carpenters and furniture makers, one of his coworkers had introduced him to her relatives who ran a boarding house, and he'd been pretty much resigned himself to never getting home or even finding out how the hell he'd gotten here. It wasn't like there was a convenient legend or ancient mythical being he could easily point to and say 'that done it'. So he just counted his blessings that being sent here didn't involve getting intimate with any part of Truck-kun and went on with his new life.

A new life that had started to chafe, to be honest. Because quite frankly, if he was going to live in a fantasy world from now on, then he could do so much more than being an inner-city manual laborer no matter how much he liked the job. He had good pay, good co-workers, he lived in a clean, peaceful city, the local sorcerous overlord wasn't a tyrannical megalomaniac ruling with fear and blood (he actually seemed a nice fellow, who had recently decided to increase funding to public schools and working on overhauling the steam-powered public transport of the demesne)… all right, it was a significant improvement to living in President Quezon's wish come true that was Metro Manila. But it hardly had that 'high-school-dropout-by-default living in a fantasy world isekai experience' shine to it, did it? If he wanted that sort of better life, he'd have moved to New Zealand or Canada after graduating.

So when news came of the new continent over the eastern ocean, and the new opportunities available for people to set up in the new demesne to be founded, he decided that enough was enough, he was going on an adventure. So he gave his employer his two months notice (because he checked the forecasts and predictions and found it would be dragons season soon, which was suicidal travel weather), and started getting ready.

That was when he finally learned he lived in a deathworld covered with some sort of unnatural, probably-magical rainbow poison that could only be kept out by Dungeons– which finally made sense to him, since he'd been living assuming that the local sorcerous overlords were into some kinky shit– and that people were essentially trying to settle a continent full of toxic waste. Full of dinosaurs. Not fun cuddly Flintstones dinosaurs, but man-eating landsharky dinosaurs.

He was ashamed to admit part of the reason he chose to go was that he really wanted to see and possibly ride a dinosaur.

Lots of people tried to talk him out of it, of course. His landlord, his landlord's daughters, his boss, his boss's daughters, his coworkers, that nice girl who manned (womanned?) the counter of the bakery he bought his lunch, that nice librarian who always helped him out, but in the end, he would not be dissuaded. He was young, he was healthy, he'd been sent to another world (somehow), he was going to have an adventure while he was still young enough to potentially survive it!

He had to explain this multiple times, but that was all right. People were just worried about him, after all, which was very nice of them.

His employer at the lumberyard had sighed. "Well, if you're sure… still, I'll be sad to see you go, boy. You're a good worker."

Ryan had laughed bashfully. "Oh, I'm sure you'll be able to find someone to replace me boss, inexperienced help isn't that hard to find."

"Well, it'll certainly be hard to find someone with your attitude," his boss had said. "Come with me, I've got something that can maybe help."

And so Ryan had followed his boss to the part of the lumberyard where the boss and his family lived, towards a storage room.

"Here," his boss had said, presenting Ryan with a sword he took out of a flat wooden case. It was cross-shaped, simple and unadorned, and there were some spots of rust on the blade. "If you're sure about going, then take this with you."

"Sir, I can't take that," Ryan had said. "Doesn't it belong to your family?"

"Belonged to my great-uncle," his boss had confirmed. "Well, he's dead now, and it's not doing anyone any good getting rusty here. You take it. Maybe it'll help keep you alive."

Ryan had solemnly accepted the blade. He hadn't had the heart to tell his boss he already had seven other swords from his various coworkers, his landlord's husband, the baker and that nice librarian.

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And so, down to one sword and with all his worldly possessions on his person, Ryan… sensibly took a boat down to the port city of Iskandaliya By The Sea Demesne, taking the time to read up on the quite frankly megalomaniacal woman who renamed the place, who apparently went into battle riding a kaiju-sized golem that fired frickin' laser beams from its eyes. While the ticket cost a lot, it was much safer than trying to walk cross country like some loose ten year-old who wanted to be the very best that no one ever was.

If this were a book, the boat he was on would probably have been attacked by some nebulous force of evil or something, but no, they made it safely to their destination, the air-tight glass canopy and lining of the boat supposedly protecting them from evil rainbow magic poison. His trip across the ocean was equally boring, albeit without any glass and more bathing in salt water. He lost the books he'd brought along to read because they couldn't be washed to get iridescence out, which was a shame and a waste, but they also didn't run into any of the giant salt-water crocodiles roaming the oceans or get attacked by pirates or any such excitement, so that was okay.

Ryan had originally applied to be a sailor on the ship so he could work his way, but had been refused for not being a properly trained and certified sailor. Apparently there was a trade school for that, which he hadn't been aware about. So with nothing to do to pass the time but looking out over the ocean and staying out of the sailors' way, he chatted with the other families traveling with him, who were more than willing to chat back since everyone was literally on the same boat.

A lot of them were from families living on the edges of demesne, on the curved, irregular portions literally right up against the Iridescence that were considered too close to the edge to farm or develop. Many had been farmhands for people who actually owned or ran the farms, or the cultivated woods cut down for raw material. Unlike him, they were doing this not for adventure but to find a better life for their families

It was a heart wrenching story to hear, and Ryan had really sympathized with his fellow passengers. A lot of them wore really worn and thin clothing, which were not faring well from the daily dunkings in seawater that they and their belongings all had to undergo to get rid of Iridescence. Why, Mikon's blouses were so thin it was practically transparent even without being wet, and unlike her aunt she had nothing to cover it up until he gave her one of his spare shirts. Umu was just as bad, trying to sit close to him for warmth and always telling him how cold she was at night and how nice it would be to sleep warm. After a few days, his heart couldn't take it anymore, and he'd given her his blanket to sleep with. He'd made do with the folded canvas he'd been planning to use as a ground cloth.

At night, while people slept, he liked to watch the moons from the deck. Even after six years of being on Demesne, he still found it fantastic they had four moons in the sky. And they didn't just look like the regular moon back home with a color filter because of budget reasons. The blue moon was clearly covered in water, and every night it was out the shapes of the clouds on its surface changed, visible to the naked eye. He'd read that astrologers had been keeping track of its weather patterns for thousands of years, and that they discovered Coriolis forces by observing the movements of storms on its surface.

The storm moon reminded him of a smaller version of Jupiter, covered in rushing clouds and swirls of storms. Bursts of enormous moon-wide lightning flashes that would crawl across the moon's surface, creating veiny formations of brightness against the slightly darker clouds, burning brilliantly on the nightward side. Scholars and wizards apparently argued back and forth about whether the storm moon was the source or at least the origin of dragons.

The red moon… well, he'd expected it to look like pictures of Mars, but it hadn't. Instead, it looked like portions of South America and Africa dyed red, with dark twisty veins of mountain ranges, and white caps on the poles. According to the book he'd read, the redness was from the native plant life of the red moon. Instead of clouds, water in the atmosphere apparently condensed as low-level fog at the borders of its day and night, so its face was never obscured.

Even the pale moon, the most like the moon he'd been born under, had been alien. It was haloed by a haze that was supposedly a cloud of dust surrounding it, and it had been pure white. From astrological observation through telescopes, it was covered in ice.

Sometimes he wondered if this wasn't a fantasy world, but instead a sci-fi world. Surely a fantasy world wouldn't have such mundane wonders that even a high school dropout who'd used to have a 'just-barely-failing' average could understand the principles behind? It should have ancient magical artifacts made with arcane secrets that required math that had to account for twenty dimensions and ancient beings with unpronounceable names that made sense in synesthesia. The afterlife should be a concrete, known quantity, and people should be swearing by the gods' bodyparts and goddesses' virtues. The moons should be the corpses of fallen gods slain at the birth of the world from doing battle against demons or something.

They shouldn't be mere balls of rock covered in ice and plants and weather and water.

Still, Ryan didn't feel shortchanged. They were fantastic rocks.

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It was only when they arrived in Covehold Demesne that things started feeling properly fantasy-esque, if the fantasy you were into was Filipino Human Misery Empathy fantasies. The waters of the docks reeked of pollution, the entire city smelled like human shit and piss, and in his group of people disembarking, at least three people lost possessions when someone in the crowd grabbed one of their bags and ran. It was, as the old desert hermit would say, a wretched hive of scum and villainy seemingly built to take as much as it could from people passing through, then kick them out when they had nothing left to take.

Ryan was filled with a strong sense of disgusted nostalgia, feeling strangely at home.

So of course when the next thief made to steal the bundle of possessions Umu was carrying, Ryan had punched the snatcher in the face and took the bag back. Then he'd smiled brightly at the other loiterers just standing around doing nothing and lying in wait for an unattended bag until they got the message and left.

After all these years, Ryan felt his fantasy isekai life was finally starting properly.

Hopefully he wouldn't get eaten by a dinosaur before he'd had a chance to ride one.