Marcus woke up to the most aggressively medieval bedroom in history.
And that was saying something, considering he'd once crashed at a Renaissance faire after a particularly disastrous faculty party.
His first coherent thought was that someone had replaced his brain with cotton batting soaked in stupid juice.
His second was that hospitals had developed a truly bizarre approach to interior decorating—all rough stone walls, flickering candlelight, and what appeared to be genuine medieval tapestries depicting people doing unpleasant things to dragons.
His third thought was that the woman hovering over him was speaking in what sounded like Latin filtered through a wood chipper and translated by someone who'd learned human speech from a drunk parrot.
"The young master stirs at last!" she declared in words that Marcus somehow understood despite never having heard them in his life. "Blessed be the forge spirits, we feared the fever might claim your mind permanently!"
Marcus tried to sit up.
Big mistake.
His body had apparently been replaced with that of a malnourished twelve-year-old. Everything felt wrong—too light, too small, too decidedly not-thirty-five-years-old with chronic back pain from hunching over lab benches.
"Where's my lab?" he croaked, because priorities were priorities.
The woman—definitely a servant, judging by her rough-spun clothes and the way she was treating him like precious cargo—looked genuinely confused.
"Lab, young master? You've been in the family manor since birth. The physician says you took a terrible tumble in the courtyard. You've been unconscious for three days, speaking the most peculiar words in your delirium."
Manor. Physician. Courtyard.
Words that belonged in history textbooks, not in Marcus's very carefully planned Tuesday afternoon of revolutionizing materials science while dodging corporate assassins.
Marcus examined his hands.
They were small, soft, unmarked by the chemical burns and scars that came from twenty years of convincing dangerous substances to behave. These were the hands of someone who'd never accidentally set fire to a fume hood or discovered new ways to violate OSHA regulations.
"Mirror," he managed.
The servant woman hurried to fetch a polished bronze disk that probably cost more than his graduate stipend.
The face staring back at him was his own. Sort of.
If someone had taken his features, de-aged them by about twenty-three years, and somehow managed to preserve the particular brand of intellectual exhaustion that came from trying to explain quantum mechanics to people who thought "advanced mathematics" meant long division.
"Well," Marcus said to his reflection, falling back on the academic's time-honored tradition of treating impossible situations as merely fascinating research opportunities. "This presents some interesting theoretical challenges."
The servant looked concerned. Which was probably fair since he'd just responded to discovering he was apparently a medieval child by talking like he was reviewing grant proposals.
"Young master? You're speaking strangely again. Perhaps I should summon the physician?"
Marcus considered this.
He was apparently a kid, in what looked like a pre-industrial society, with his adult memories intact and a working knowledge of advanced materials science.
He was either having the most vivid hallucination in academic history, or he'd somehow managed to quantum tunnel his consciousness into what appeared to be a fantasy novel.
Given that his last clear memory involved accidentally creating a localized space-time distortion while trying to prove that carbon could be convinced to behave like a noble gas under specific pressure conditions, both options seemed equally probable.
"No," he said finally, his mind already spinning up to tackle the problem. "I think I'm exactly where I need to be. Tell me—this world has metalworking, yes? Blacksmiths, forges, that sort of thing?"
The woman nodded, still radiating the kind of concern usually reserved for people who'd just watched their employer's heir start babbling about theoretical physics.
Marcus smiled. For a moment the twelve-year-old face carried the expression of someone who'd spent his entire career turning "impossible" into "published paper with full tenure credit."
"Excellent. Then I believe I have some very interesting experiments to conduct."
After all, the fundamental principles of metallurgy didn't change just because you'd accidentally reincarnated yourself into what appeared to be a world where people still thought the height of technology was folding metal eight times instead of seven.
Carbon still made steel stronger.
Heat still affected molecular bonds.
Pressure still did fascinating things to crystal structures.
And if this world had magic…
Well, magic was just science that hadn't been properly peer-reviewed yet.
The servant woman edged toward the door, clearly unsettled by the way her young master was staring at the bronze mirror and muttering things like "molecular lattice integration" and "theoretical applications of supernatural energy fields to metallurgical processes."
Marcus didn't notice her leave.
He was too busy mentally designing his new curriculum.
Medieval Metallurgy 101: How to Revolutionize an Entire Technological Paradigm Using Only Basic Chemistry and Aggressive Academic Stubbornness.
It was going to be the most interesting course he'd never been officially qualified to teach.
Three weeks later, the kitchen staff would report finding young Master Marcus at dawn, earnestly explaining to a confused chicken why "controlled combustion environments" were superior to traditional open-flame forging techniques.
The head cook would mention discovering him in the pantry, delivering what appeared to be a lecture on "optimal iron ore purification methodologies" to a sack of flour.
The stable master would swear he'd overheard the boy having an animated discussion with a horseshoe about "thermal expansion coefficients and their practical applications in equine footwear engineering."
By the end of the month, the entire household staff had reached the unanimous conclusion that their young master had somehow developed the conversational habits of the world's most eccentric scholar, despite being barely old enough to tie his own boots.
They had no idea how right they were.
Or how much trouble their precocious little academic was about to cause for everyone involved.
Including the local Mages' Guild, who were about to discover what happened when someone with a PhD in materials science got access to a world where the laws of physics were more like friendly suggestions.
But that was a problem for future Marcus.
Present Marcus was too busy figuring out exactly what kind of metals were available in this world, and whether any of them had properties that might respond interestingly to someone who understood atomic theory.
The revolution would start small.
It always did.