The rain came in sideways across O'Connell Street, needling his face as he ran.
He didn't remember what the protest had been about anymore—housing, healthcare, maybe both—but he remembered the crush of people, the chant rolling like surf, the mounted Gardaí pushing the crowd back. Someone shoved, someone slipped, a bottle arced overhead. The police line surged.
He stepped off the curb, the world turned to screeching tyres and white light—
—and then nothing.
He woke to the sound of a rooster.
Not his alarm. Not a phone. An actual rooster.
His eyes snapped open to low, timbered beams and smoke-stained whitewash. The air smelled of turf smoke, damp wool, and something frying. His heart hammered.
What the—
He jolted upright. The rough linen shirt on his body stuck to his skin. His hands were wrong—bigger, calloused, older. Twenty-five-year-old Eoin Kelly from Cork city had gone to sleep in 2025 with a splitting headache and a mouth full of curses for the government.
The man who swung his feet out of the bed was not Eoin.
His soles met cold flagstone. A chipped, cloudy mirror leaned against the wall beside a small wooden chest. He moved to it on legs that didn't quite feel like his.
A stranger stared back at him.
Thick dark hair, a strong jaw, keen dark eyes that seemed to be three seconds ahead of everything. The face was familiar in the way the faces on old banknotes were familiar. He'd seen it in schoolbooks, in statues, in murals—half-remembered from history documentaries.
His stomach dropped.
"That's… not possible," he whispered.
Behind his reflection, the air shimmered.
A faint, translucent line of text appeared in front of his eyes, as if some cosmic HUD had booted up.
You have gained a new skill.
[City Design:] You understand how to plan and shape cities—balancing housing, roads, utilities, green spaces, and public services—allowing you to create efficient, livable, and future-ready urban environments.
Eoin froze.
"Oh, you've got to be joking."
Another line clicked into place beneath the first like a list populating.
You have gained a new skill.
[Finance:] You understand how money flows through businesses, markets, and personal budgets—allowing you to manage funds, assess risks, and make smart investment and spending decisions for long-term stability and growth.
Then another.
You have gained a new skill.
[Politics:] You understand how power, laws, and public opinion interact—allowing you to build alliances, read people's interests, negotiate deals, and influence decisions in governments and organisations alike.
The words hovered in mid-air, neither entirely in the room nor entirely in his mind. No matter where he looked, they stayed centred, luminous but not casting light.
"This is… this is a stroke," he muttered. "I'm in hospital. I'm dreaming. This is what I get for doomscrolling at 3 am."
The rooster crowed again, much closer.
"Michael! Are you up at all, boy?" A woman's voice, warm and sharp at once, floated up from downstairs. "Mass won't wait on you!"
Michael.
His mouth went dry.
He knew that name. He knew that voice was calling someone else with his face—Michael Collins, born in Woodfield, West Cork, 1890. The Big Fella. Minister for Finance of the first Dáil. Director of Intelligence of the IRA. Chair of the Provisional Government. Dead in an ambush in 1922, his death cracking the young state in two.
Eoin's mind printed the Wikipedia summary with clinical clarity, but it felt like reading his own post-mortem.
"I… I died," he said softly.
No answer, save the faint crackle of the fire and the combined heartbeat of two lives trying to sync.
The messages in front of him waited patiently, as if the universe were a badly-designed app.
More text faded in.
You have gained a new skill.
[Management:] You understand how to organise people, time, and resources—allowing you to set clear goals, coordinate teams, solve conflicts, and keep complex projects moving smoothly from idea to completion.
You have gained a new skill.
[Military:] You understand strategy, tactics, and logistics—allowing you to organise forces, plan campaigns, assess threats, and coordinate operations effectively in both peace and wartime situations.
You have gained a new skill.
[Intelligence:] You understand how to gather, analyse, and interpret information—allowing you to detect patterns, predict threats or opportunities, and make informed decisions while keeping your sources and methods well protected.
You have gained a new skill.
[Analysis:] You can read people with uncanny precision—quickly identifying their strengths, weaknesses, motives, and loyalty, allowing you to judge who to trust, how to persuade them, and where they fit best in any plan.
The last line settled into place with a subtle chiming sensation somewhere behind his eyes, like something slotting into the architecture of his brain.
A door banged below.
"I mean it, Michael!" the woman called again. "I'll not have you lazing about like some lord!"
He closed his eyes and took a breath. The air was colder, cleaner than the city air he'd known. Somewhere outside, a cow lowed. Somewhere else, a stream burbled. And below all that, under the sounds of a West Cork morning, history hummed: a taut string stretched toward 1916, 1919, 1921, 1922.
He knew what was coming. Rising. War of Independence. Treaty. Civil War. Partition. Collins' ambush at Béal na Bláth. His own… death? Future death?
Not if I can help it, he thought.
The decision landed as simply as that, a stone dropped in a river.
He straightened his—Michael's—shoulders and answered in a voice that didn't quite sound like his own but resonated deep in his chest.
"I'm up, Mam! I'm up."
The kitchen was small, warm, and crowded with the detritus of a farming family's morning. Bread on the table. A pot of tea gone slightly tannic on the hearth. A pan hissing quietly as rashers curled.
A woman moved between hearth and table with practiced efficiency. Her hair was pinned back, streaked faintly with grey, her face lined in the way of someone who had smiled and worried in equal measure. Later, he would confirm the memory: Mary Anne O'Brien, his mother.
His mother?
The [Analysis] skill stirred, almost of its own accord. It wasn't a voice, exactly—more like notes scribbled in the margins of his perception.
Mary Anne – high conscientiousness, strong sense of duty, fierce loyalty to family; cautious about politics; emotional leverage point: pride in children, fear of losing them.
Eoin almost flinched.
He'd read enough webnovels in his old life to recognise a cheat when he saw one. This was… overpowered. Even by isekai standards.
"You look like death warmed over," Mary Anne said, turning to look him over. "Were you up all hours again with your scribbling?"
He searched Michael's memory and found it like a second filing cabinet in his head: names, faces, smells, songs. Childhood in Woodfield. Schooling. Stories of Fenian uncles. The young boy in the stories had dreamed of Ireland free the way other boys dreamed of being sailors.
Eoin remembered different dreams: better public transport, a functioning healthcare system, an end to landlords that charged extortionate rent for damp boxes.
Now the two sets of dreams met.
"I was thinking," he said carefully, reaching for a slice of bread. "About the future."
"Will the future put turf on the fire?" she said, but there was fondness under it. "Eat. You're for Mass, and mind you listen to Father when he speaks, not drift away in the head like you do."
He nodded automatically, even as his mind ran calculations.
Year? He needed the exact year.
A calendar hung crookedly near the door, the kind given out by a local business. O'Driscoll's Hardware, Skibbereen. At the top: 1913.
So: three years before the Rising.
He felt dizzy with the weight of it. Three years before the GPO, the executions, the shift in public opinion. Six years before the First Dáil. Eight before the War of Independence kicked into full gear. Eight years and a bit before Soloheadbeg, RIC barracks burned, flying columns in the hills…
City Design, Finance, Politics, Management, Military, Intelligence, Analysis.
He had his skills. He had his foreknowledge. And he had—uncomfortably, unavoidably—the body and name of Michael Collins, who in his own timeline had become the brains and muscle of the whole movement.
If I mess this up, I don't just ruin Ireland's shot, he thought. I erase the man who actually did it.
The thought sat like a stone in his gut.
"Michael?" Mary Anne's brows creased. "Are you sure you're well?"
"I'm… fine, Mam. Just thinking too hard again."
She snorted softly. "Thinking is no bad thing in a man, so long as he remembers to do his share of the work as well. Eat."
He ate. The food was simple and heavy and perfect. Each bite grounded him further into this life. When he drained his mug of tea, his hand no longer shook.
Reborn as Michael Collins. Given a battery of skills tailored to revolution and statecraft. Dropped into Ireland three years before the match was struck.
"Right," he murmured, barely audible. "Let's not waste it."
Mass was in a small stone church that smelled of damp and incense. Sun leaked through coloured windows in strips of blue and red.
He knelt, stood, sat with everyone else, but his mind was moving along a very different liturgy.
[Politics] highlighted lines of power like faint threads: the priest with his hold over local opinion, the landlord's agent sitting stiff in a pew near the front, the constable near the door, scanning faces with a cop's lazy suspicion.
[Analysis] overlayed tiny assessments.
Fr. O'Leary – conservative, focused on stability; persuadable if framed as protecting parish from British abuse.
Constable Byrne – bored but not cruel; good target for soft intel, dislikes superior officer.
Agent – contemptuous of locals, sees them as children; will underestimate organised resistance.
Names, weights, odds.
If he squinted mentally, he could almost see networks forming: who talked to whom, who respected whom, who could be moved like chess pieces if you applied pressure at the right points.
This is insane, he thought, even as he let the system run.
In his old life, he'd studied political science and urban planning, then spent years shouting into the void of social media about corruption and short-termism. He'd run spreadsheets on budgets, tinkered with imaginary transport maps for Cork and Dublin, argued that Ireland could have been a model social democracy if people in the early state had just—
He stopped mid-thought.
In this life, he might actually get to test every "if only they had…" he'd ever muttered at a podcast.
The priest's voice rose and fell. Latin washed over him. Eoin-Knowledge told him about the coming Great War, conscription crises, the 1916 executions turning a failed rebellion into a foundational myth. Collins-Knowledge added local gossip, a feel for the land, the weight of the Famine only a generation removed.
He was halfway between worlds: one foot in TikTok Ireland, one in this parish of horse dung and oil lamps.
He let the sermon fade into static and gave himself a simple question.
What is the objective?
Not "freedom" in the abstract. That way lay slogans and statues and not much else. Objectives had to be concrete, measurable.
He thought of modern Ireland's problems, and the ones that had never really left since Collins' day: partition, civil war bitterness, housing, emigration, church control, economic dependency.
Long-term objective:
A unified, independent Ireland that's economically self-sufficient, socially just, and stable enough to survive external pressure.
Interim objectives:
– Secure independence with as few civilian and revolutionary deaths as possible.
– Avoid or minimise a post-Treaty civil war.
– Lay foundations for effective governance: civil service, financial stability, city planning, social housing, education.
Operational means:
– Use [Intelligence] to avoid disasters and ambushes.
– Use [Military] to run a smarter, more targeted campaign.
– Use [Politics] and [Analysis] to build broad support and avoid demonising future opponents.
– Use [Finance] to fund the struggle and then the state.
– Use [City Design] and [Management] once independence is in hand.
He realised he was humming under his breath like he did when he worked, a small habit that now probably sounded like pious muttering. Fine by him.
On the walk home, the parish spilled out in knots of conversation. He saw them now as nodes in a graph.
"Michael, you'll be off to London again before long, will you?" a neighbour asked, clapping him on the shoulder.
London.
Yes. That tracked—Collins had gone to London as a young man, working in the Post Office Savings Bank, joining the IRB under Sam Maguire. London was where he'd learn systems, finance, networks.
"I might, aye," he said, letting Michael's easy grin rise to his face. "Can't stay away from the big smoke forever, can I?"
"You'd do well there," the neighbour said with boisterous certainty. "Always said you would. There's no future in the likes of this." He waved broadly at the fields, the stone walls, the cows.
He's wrong, Eoin thought. There is a future here. They just never got the chance to build it properly.
He looked at the road ahead—literal and metaphorical—and felt the strange, electric thrill of someone who'd spent his life trapped in the commentary box finally being handed the ball.
That night, while the house slept, he lit a candle stub and sat at the small table in what passed for his room.
The messages were still there when he focused, neat and crisp.
[City Design] – Passive
[Finance] – Passive
[Politics] – Passive
[Management] – Passive
[Military] – Passive
[Intelligence] – Passive
[Analysis] – Passive
No instructions. No tutorial. No snarky goddess popping in to explain the system.
He dragged a finger down the edge of the page in front of him. It was an old school copybook, the paper thick and slightly yellowed. On the first line, in a younger hand, "Mícheál Ó Coileáin" was written in careful script.
He dipped his pen and wrote beneath it in firmer, surer strokes:
Strategic Plan for Irish Independence and Governance
It felt obscene and grandiose, but nobody would read it but him.
He began with a timeline, writing from memory.
1914: War in Europe.
1916: Rising in Dublin. Executed leaders.
1918: Sinn Féin landslide.
1919–1921: War of Independence.
1921: Treaty.
1922–23: Civil War. Collins dies. Partition entrenched.
Then he drew lines, arrows, question marks.
Underneath, he wrote in smaller letters:
Aim: Change critical decisions to:
– Prevent or shorten Civil War.
– Improve Treaty terms if possible.
– Lay foundations for better state (housing, transport, welfare, education).
– Avoid excessive centralised Church power.
– Secure unity with minimal bloodshed (if feasible).
The impossible list stared back at him.
In his old life, someone in his Twitter mentions would already be arguing that this was naïve, that the British Empire wouldn't have allowed X, that the North's unionist population would never have accepted Y.
Good, he thought. I'll start by assuming those critics are right, then see where they're wrong.
"Step one," he murmured, "don't die in 1922."
The candle flickered in agreement.
LONDON, 1914
London hit him in the face with soot and noise.
Horse hooves on wet cobblestone. Shouts in accents from every corner of an empire. The stink of the Thames at low tide. It was like Dublin scaled up and dirtied, the sky a permanent grey-brown soup.
As the train pulled out of the station behind him, Eoin-Michael squared his shoulders and felt [City Design] flare faintly, overlaying a ghostly alternative London on top of the real one—wider streets here to avoid bottlenecks, tram lines there, sewer improvements, green corridors.
"Later," he told it under his breath. "We've enough British cities designed by Irishmen."
He had a room in a boarding house off Gray's Inn Road and a clerk's job at the Post Office Savings Bank. It was dull, repetitive work, but [Finance] hummed happily at the ledgers, teasing patterns out of the flows of shillings and pounds.
He noticed undervalued investments. He saw where depositors clustered. He learned, faster than he should have, how the British financial bureaucracy actually worked.
And at night, away from prying eyes, he sought out the Irish in London.
Young men and women who'd left Cork, Kerry, Mayo for work. Labourers and builders and maids and clerks. They gathered in pubs and halls and small suffocating parlours to talk politics and sing songs that were technically seditious.
It was in one such back room that he met Sam Maguire.
"Collins, is it?" Sam said, hand outstretched, blue eyes sharp under heavy brows. "I've heard of you. A man after my own heart, they say—head full of plans and never satisfied with how things are."
[Analysis] pinged softly.
Sam Maguire – idealist, high integrity, attached to concept of honour; extrovert; natural recruiter; deep commitment to Irish cause; low tolerance for cowardice in leadership.
"A pleasure, Sam," Michael said, replying with the easy, disarming grin history said Collins had. "Suppose we might as well put such heads together, so."
Sam laughed. "Indeed. Tell me—have you given much thought to how we might actually win this?"
Eoin felt the weight of a century's hindsight settle on his tongue.
"I have a few ideas," he said.
The room was hot with tobacco smoke and possibility. On the wall behind them, a cheap print of a romanticised Wolfe Tone looked down, eyes forever fixed on a future he'd never see.
Eoin met that gaze for a heartbeat, then looked away.
He wasn't here to be a martyr.
He was here to win—and then to build something worth the winning.
Over the months that followed, the strands of his new life wove themselves into something dangerous.
He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood a little earlier and with more deliberate intent than the original Collins had. [Intelligence] helped him map the organisation faster, spotting weak links, blowhards, and genuine operators.
He listened more than he spoke at first, letting [Analysis] and [Politics] inform his approach.
There were dreamers who wanted a glorious rising no matter the cost. There were pragmatists who believed in slow constitutional work. There were British-watchers convinced that the coming war in Europe would change everything.
He could not yet reveal the whole of what he knew. If he told them the exact dates of the Rising and the Easter executions, they'd think him mad or a spy. Prophecy was not a safe political strategy.
But he could nudge.
Subtly, carefully, he began to argue for a few core principles in every meeting, every pub table debate, every late-night walk home with comrades.
"Organisation matters more than heroics," he'd say, voice firm but light. "We need an intelligence network before we think of any rising. Names. Positions. Movements. The British Empire's like a great machine—we can't smash it head-on, but we can learn where it's weakest and starve it of information."
"Local units must be able to act independently," he'd insist. "If they cut off the head in Dublin, the body can't be allowed to die. Cells, not a straight line from leader to man."
"Money is as much a weapon as guns," he'd repeat. "If we can make the empire spend ten pounds to counter every pound we spend, we'll win in the end. Especially if we build a state structure in embryo—civil service, courts, tax collection—before they even know we've done it."
People listened. Partly because he was Michael Collins—already charismatic in this timeline—and partly because [Analysis] let him phrase things exactly in the language that each listener found persuasive.
To the romantic, he framed organisation as the surest path to victory.
To the cautious, he stressed minimising bloodshed and protecting communities.
To the ambitious, he hinted that those who built the machinery of freedom would be the ones to run it after.
At night, alone in his narrow bed, he stared at the ceiling and whispered to the silent system that had gifted him his cheat skills.
"If you're there," he said, "if you're listening—this is not just about getting the tricolour over the GPO again. We're doing this properly this time. No half-built state, no handing everything to the Church and the landlords under a new name. We're building housing. Planning cities. Running rail lines that don't take fifty years to approve. We're not going to be anyone's bloody colony, not even economically."
No answer came, but that was fine.
He already had more than he'd ever expected: a second life, a legendary name, and an entire country's future on the line.
He rolled onto his side, folded his hands under his head, and allowed himself one fleeting, reckless thought.
What if, a hundred years from now, some student in a warm, well-lit Irish lecture hall curses my decisions—but for different reasons? Not because we botched the basics, but because we dared too much?
He smiled into the dark.
"First things first," he told himself. "Survive the Rising."
"And then," he added, feeling [City Design] and [Finance] stir like patient tools waiting on a workbench, "we'll see what kind of Ireland we can actually build."