Waking up... It wasn't just bad. It was downright awful—the kind that makes you regret the very fact you exist.
The first thing to hit was the sledgehammer of pain, cracking my skull from the inside. Not sharp, cutting pain, but a dull, throbbing rhythm in my temples, like some crappy satanic drummer had moved in behind the bone and was beating out hellish beats with every heartbeat. Next came the dry mouth. Not just thirst, but the feeling like someone had filled my throat with hot Sahara sand, then polished it off with sandpaper. My tongue, swollen and rough, rolled around in my mouth like a dead lizard dried out in the sun. Consciousness returned reluctantly, in ragged pieces, clinging to those merciful dark fragments of oblivion, but reality was persistent and ruthless.
Before I could fully snap out of it and piece together the fragments of my thoughts, a smell hit my nose. Nauseating, sour-sweet, unmistakably recognizable stench. The smell of puke. Ironic, but that stink cleared my head better than a bucket of ice water could have. I tried to wince, but even that simple movement of facial muscles triggered a new wave of nausea that rose to my throat.
Actually no... Everything turned out even worse. This wasn't just a smell. This WAS puke. A sticky, cooling puddle of my body's disgusting discharge had soaked through my t-shirt and was unpleasantly chilling the skin on my back and shoulder. Realizing this fact hit me with an icy wave of disgust that made me shudder. And hey, whatever, shit happens in life, but this definitely wasn't what I remembered from my last moments before sleep. I distinctly remember going to bed. At my own home. In my own clean, freshly made bed. Completely sober and in a normal state. But now...
With difficulty, leaning on the sticky, rough floor with trembling, unusually weak hands, I forced my poisoned body into a sitting position. The room swayed like a ship's deck in a force-nine storm. I squeezed my eyes shut, gripping the floor with my fingers and riding out the dizzy spell, and finally looked around. What I saw I absolutely, teeth-grindingly, did not like.
This isn't my bedroom. This isn't even close to my house.
A tiny studio apartment. Roughly speaking, maybe 250, 300 square feet. One big room—if you can even call it big—serving as living room, bedroom, and who knows what else. A beat-up couch with springs poking out here and there, seen better days back when Nixon was president. A clunky wardrobe made of cheap particle board with fake wood veneer peeling at the edges. A desk piled with papers and empty instant noodle packages. In the corner, a kitchenette—a couple cabinets, a sink full of dirty dishes, and a two-burner hot plate. Everything looked not just shabby, but pathetic and hopeless. Compared to my spacious private house, which I'd been rebuilding from ruins with my own hands for the past ten years, this place looked like a doghouse next to a palace.
But that wasn't the main question. WHAT. AM. I. DOING. HERE?
My thoughts were tangled, catching on each other. Kidnapped, forcibly drunk into oblivion and dumped here? Crazy idea. Who needs me? Friends pulled some idiotic prank that went way beyond good taste? No, totally not their style. Plus practically all of them are back in the city, hundreds of miles from here. What, they've got nothing better to do than drive out in the middle of the night to pull off such a complicated and pointless operation? Plus, they would've had to somehow get me out of the house without waking me up, pour gallons of alcohol into me... No, doesn't add up. Not at all.
And only now did it hit my still not-too-sharp mind. That very inconsistency that my subconscious kept stubbornly ignoring, but it kept pushing and pushing to the surface, causing a dull, gnawing anxiety. My body! The proportions! My hands! What the hell, why do they look so... skinny and delicate? These aren't my working, sinewy hands, covered with a thick network of old scars and calluses from a decade of working with wood and metal! Hands that could drive a four-inch nail into a pine board with one precise punch and not even notice. But these... These were only good for pressing keyboard buttons or turning pages. And overall, I feel like I'm somehow... shorter? Lighter?
Complicated. Too many questions and not a single answer. I only know that I don't know anything. But I need to figure this out. With the firm intention of finding at least some clue, I staggered toward the only separate room in this studio—the bathroom. Every step echoed with dull pain in my head, my body ached mercilessly, but somehow I made it inside. Calling it dirty would be too mild. Yellowed buildup on the toilet porcelain, a deep crack in the sink patched with gray duct tape, a slippery cheap bar of soap instead of proper soap. The single bare bulb cast dim, deathly light. Everything here screamed poverty, indifference, and neglect. My gaze landed on the grimy mirror above the sink, covered with dried splashes. It was into this mirror that I looked.
"Oh fuck no!" burst out of me in a hoarse, unfamiliar young voice. I recoiled from the mirror like it was a leprous zombie creature with a ticking bomb on its chest.
Looking back at me from the mirror was... not Me. That's the short version. The long version is that looking back at me was a guy about nineteen years old. Messy dark brown hair, big brown eyes that held a mix of animal fear and confusion, and a pretty ordinary, unremarkable face. None of my usual three-day stubble, no network of wrinkles around my eyes, no deep scar on my chin left by a chisel that slipped a couple years ago. Just smooth, pale skin with barely visible traces of teenage acne. Skinny build, about five-foot-nine by rough estimate. For clothes—a gray t-shirt soaked in vomit and checkered cotton shorts.
I stood there thunderstruck, staring at the reflection, but I wasn't seeing it. A different picture rose before my mind's eye. My workshop in the garage. The smell of ozone from the running welding machine, mixed with the sharp sweetness of pine shavings. My hands, which I'd so inappropriately thought about earlier... I remembered them down to the smallest details. Wide, calloused palms that could easily grip the end of a 4x4 beam. A network of small whitish scars—memories of slipped drill bits, sharp metal edges, and splinters that had become part of the skin's landscape. Under the nails—embedded, almost permanent dark strips of a mixture of machine oil and wood dust that no solvent could touch. Those hands were tools, extensions of my will. But what I was seeing now on myself and in the mirror... These pale, narrow palms with thin pianist or artist fingers, they didn't just repulse me—they triggered some deep, primal feeling of wrongness. Like someone had swapped not just my body, but my very essence. I clenched my fists, feeling how unfamiliarly the thin joints cracked. No, these definitely weren't my fists.
How? How did I end up in this... guy's body? Why me specifically? What happened to my real body? Who is this guy anyway? What the hell am I supposed to do next? Questions swarmed in my head like crazed bees, and the hangover pain that didn't want to fade turned into a deafening migraine.
With difficulty pulling off the puke-covered clothes and disgustedly flinging them into a corner, I climbed under the cold shower. The icy streams brought me to my senses a bit, washing away not just the dirt but part of the primal shock. Deciding for now not to overwhelm my sluggishly thinking head with a thousand and one questions, I bypassed the puke stain on the floor and collapsed on the couch.
Lying there and staring at the cracked ceiling streaked with fine wrinkles, I tried not to think about anything. Surprisingly, I started getting sleepy. That's good. Screw the problems, morning is wiser than evening. A weak, irrational hope still glowed in me that everything happening was just a dream. A bad, terrifyingly realistic, damn scary, but just a dream. With such encouraging thoughts I fell back into Morpheus's realm, and even the headache finally took a back seat.
How long I slept like that... I have no idea. But when I woke up, thick, velvety night already reigned outside the window. The city was living its life: neon signs and streetlights threw bizarre, dancing shadows on the room's walls, you could hear the rumble of cars and the distant, melancholy wail of a siren. Nighttime New York must be beautiful, except it's better not to go out on Hell's Kitchen streets at night. You'll be lucky if they just take your wallet and smartphone instead of your life. Though there's a chance the Devil of Hell's Kitchen will hear your prayer for help and deal with the thugs. But what would he ask in return? They don't call a simple vigilante the Devil just for his pretty eyes...
"What the?..." I whispered into the void, suddenly realizing these thoughts... weren't quite mine.
They rushed in suddenly, like a burst dam. Someone else's memories, feelings, emotions. I am John Thompson. An orphan. A student at New York College of Arts. And I'm head over heels in love with a redheaded girl from my class. The same one I literally caught with another guy yesterday. With some rich boy who picked her up in a shiny Audi whose price exceeded the cost of this rental studio several times over. Realizing this hit John's brain so hard that he couldn't resist and spent his last money on cheap whiskey. Decided to drown his sorrows in alcohol. And apparently, drowned himself instead.
No! No! NO! I am Aleksander Kowalski! A thirty-eight-year-old bachelor freelancer, bit of a jack-of-all-trades by my own humble opinion, who for the past ten years lived in his hometown, restoring from ruins a private house inherited from his parents. No stupid teenage crushes on redheaded beauties, no bohemian art colleges and certainly no act of senseless suicidal alcoholism that probably ended this damn John Thompson's suffering!
"I am ME, even with the memories of an inexperienced American idiot!" I declared firmly and clearly into the void, cementing this important fact primarily for myself.
It's one thing to simply realize, continuing to get confused in your own thoughts, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, and another to firmly know that your personality is the dominant one. I am Aleksander, who somehow ended up in this guy's body.
And for a moment it hit me. Not panic, no. Dull, black, hopeless melancholy. Home. My home. Ten years of life invested in every brick, every board. Memory flashed of the sharp smell of fresh pine shavings when I planed boards for the porch. The feeling of the familiar weight of my favorite hammer—old, pre-war, inherited from my father, and passed to him from his father. The view of the crimson sunset from the porch I'd finished just a month ago. All my work, all my plans... All of it just erased. Like I never existed. What happened to my body? Did it just die in its sleep? Is it lying now, cooling in the house that will now, in the absence of any heirs, go to the state? These thoughts put a heavy lump in my throat, and my eyes treacherously stung.
All that's left for me... is to accept it.
Whatever entity, law of the universe, or just cruel joke of fate was behind my transmigration, it's beyond my understanding. I don't have many options. Either jump off the roof, ending this ridiculous story, or... just live.
Living is exactly what I intended to do. The "body's" memories finally settled down, arranged themselves into a more or less coherent picture, and now I could separate them from my core personality. They were... dull, like an old faded photograph. Mentally running through John Thompson's biography, I realized the guy I'd inherited was maximally ordinary, unremarkable, and forgettable.
Lost his parents in a car accident at seven. Until twelve—an orphanage. Then a foster family that was basically no different from the orphanage, since besides him there were twelve other kids there. Obviously, the entrepreneurial guardians lived off substantial social payments from NYC. John felt no warm feelings toward them, perfectly understanding that to them he was just a business project. So as soon as he turned eighteen, he went out on his own.
Being an orphan, he got a subsidized social loan to study at the College of Arts as a theater actor. And for a year now he'd been dragging out the miserable existence of a poor student, scraping by on odd jobs, social benefits, and constant anxiety about the student loan he'd have to somehow pay back after graduation.
And it would seem, well, life is life, especially by American standards. Didn't get hooked on drugs, didn't end up in prison, even tried to study. But as soon as one specific name surfaced in the stream of memories, I understood what kind of global, universal clusterfuck fate had landed me in.
Mary Jane Watson.
The redheaded honor student, beauty, activist, and dream of all the college guys, over whom John suffered so unrequitedly... Such coincidences don't happen. And also the Devil of Hell's Kitchen. And also the Stark Industries tower piercing the sky in downtown Manhattan. And also the Daily Bugle newspaper with its scandalous editor-in-chief J. Jonah Jameson, famous throughout New York. Not enough? How about news of the mysterious state of Latveria? Or the upcoming space expedition that all the news was obsessing over—an expedition by one Reed Richards. The cherry on top of this cake of madness was Spider-Woman—the masked heroine who appeared in the city relatively recently but had already won over the citizens, and whom that same mustached troublemaker from the Bugle absolutely hated.
I'm in the Marvel world.
A world where damn mutants fight on equal terms with Asgardian gods. A world where some cosmic horror flying by can wipe out not just a planet but half the galaxy with a snap of its fingers. A world where the concept of the Multiverse is so basic that there are literally infinite numbers of them... The main thing is not to end up in that cluster that's subject to destruction from the whim of some Phoenix or by decision of the Living Tribunal.
"Yeah... Heavy is my difficult life, my cursed existence, my bitter little fate..." I muttered my mother's favorite saying, may she rest in peace, staring blankly at the wall.
Existential horror washed over me in an icy wave, threatening to paralyze my will. To distract myself somehow, I went to the window. The view opened onto a blank brick wall of the neighboring building and a narrow alley littered with trash. From below came echoes of a drunken argument, somewhere in the distance a siren wailed. Hell's Kitchen in all its glory.
So what am I supposed to do in this situation?
My gaze again hit the drying puddle of puke. I wasn't sleepy at all. Instead of loading my brain with heavy thoughts that would unlikely lead to anything useful, I decided to do what I at least could—clean up.
Finding something in the closet that vaguely resembled clean clothes, I filled a bucket with water in the bathroom and got to work. I scrubbed the floor furiously, rubbed away ingrained dirt, and this simple physical work helped organize my thoughts. Along the way I wiped dust, washed the mountain of dirty dishes in the sink, collected all the trash in bags, but didn't risk taking it out to the streets of New York's most dangerous neighborhood at night.
Having come to no concrete conclusions, I sat down at the desk where an old, scratched laptop lay. Opening the lid and automatically entering the password from John's memory, I was about to start searching for information about the current state of affairs in the world, but the higher being, or whoever's in charge of logistics for transmigrants, decided this was the perfect moment for a surprise.
Without fanfare, without unnecessary trumpets, a modest translucent blue panel flashed right before my eyes.
[System "Celestial Forge" Activated!]
Well, well... Now that's a twist. And what, I wonder, did I do to deserve such an honor? Maybe complete assimilation of memories occurred? Or I got enough information about the world and consequently realized what deep shit I'm in? Or maybe I'm overcomplicating things, and simply eight conditional hours passed since my first awakening? Ah, what the hell difference does it make! The main thing is that this is a system. And a system means a chance. A chance to not just survive, but maybe even achieve something in this crazy world.