Awakening… It wasn't just bad. It was downright shitty—the kind that makes you regret the very fact of your existence.
The first blow was a hammer of pain, splitting my skull from the inside. Not sharp, cutting pain, but a dull, throbbing rhythm in my temples, as if some amateur satanist drummer had taken up residence behind the bone and was pounding out a devilish beat with every heartbeat. The second thing that hit was the dry mouth. Not just thirst, but the sensation that my throat had been packed with the scorching sand of the Sahara and then polished with sandpaper. My tongue, swollen and rough, rolled around in my mouth like a dead lizard baked dry in the sun. Consciousness returned reluctantly, in ragged scraps, clinging to the saving, dark fragments of oblivion, but reality was insistent and merciless.
Before I could fully come to my senses and piece together the shards of my thoughts, a smell hit my nose. Nauseating, sour-sweet, unmistakably recognizable. The stench of vomit. Ironic, but that reek cleared my head better than a bucket of ice water ever could. I tried to grimace, but even that simple movement of facial muscles triggered a new wave of nausea rolling up to my throat.
No… It was worse than that. It wasn't just the smell. It was the vomit itself. A sticky, cooling puddle of the body's vile outpourings had soaked my T-shirt and unpleasantly chilled the skin on my back and shoulder. Realizing this fact washed over me with an icy wave of disgust, making me shudder. And it would've been fine—shit happens—but this was definitely not how I remembered the last moments before falling asleep. I clearly recalled going to bed. At home. In my clean, freshly made sheets. Completely sober and in my right mind. And now…
With difficulty, leaning on the sticky, rough floor with trembling, unaccustomedly weak arms, I forced my poisoned body into a sitting position. The room swayed like the deck of a ship in a force-nine storm. I squinted, digging my fingers into the floor and waiting out the dizzy spell, and finally looked around. What I saw I categorically, down to the gnashing of teeth, did not like.
This wasn't my bedroom. It wasn't even close to my house.
A tiny one-room apartment—or rather, a studio. Roughly twenty-five, maybe thirty square meters. One large room (if the word even applied here) serving as living room, bedroom, and God knows what else. A battered sofa with springs poking out in places, still remembering better days under Nixon. A clumsy wardrobe made of cheap particleboard with peeling "wood-grain" film along the edges. A desk buried under papers and empty instant noodle cups. In the corner crouched a kitchen unit—two cabinets, a sink piled with dirty dishes, and a two-burner electric hotplate. Everything looked not just shabby, but wretched and hopeless. Compared to my spacious private house that I'd rebuilt from ruins with my own hands over the last ten years, this place looked like a dog kennel next to a palace.
But the main question wasn't that. WHAT. THE HELL. AM I DOING HERE?
Thoughts tangled, snagging on one another. Kidnapped, forcibly plied with alcohol until blackout-drunk, and dumped here? A ridiculous idea. Who needs me? Friends pulling some idiotic, beyond-the-pale prank? No, not their style at all. And practically all of them were in another city, hundreds of kilometers away. What, they had nothing better to do than drive in the middle of the night to pull off such a complicated and pointless operation? Plus, they'd have to somehow drag me out of the house without waking me, pour liters of booze down my throat… No, it didn't add up. Not at all.
And only now did it dawn on my still-not-quite-functioning brain. That very inconsistency my subconscious kept stubbornly ignoring, yet it kept crawling out, causing a dull, gnawing anxiety. My body! Proportions! My arms! Why the hell do they look so… skinny and delicate? These weren't my work-hardened, sinewy arms covered in a thick web of old scars and calluses from ten years of working with wood and metal! Arms that could drive a 100-mm nail into a pine board with one precise punch and not even notice. These… these were only good for pressing keyboard buttons or turning pages. And overall, I felt… shorter? Lighter?
Hard. Too many questions and not a single answer. I only knew that I knew nothing. But I had to figure it out. With a firm intention to find at least some clue, I staggered toward the only separate room in this studio—the bathroom. Each step echoed with a hollow ache in my head, my body ached mercilessly, but somehow I made it inside. Dirty… would be putting it mildly. Embedded yellow stains on the toilet porcelain, a deep crack in the sink crudely patched with gray duct tape, a slippery cheap bar of soap instead of anything decent. A single bare bulb gave off dim, deathly light. Everything here screamed poverty, indifference, and neglect. My gaze locked on the grimy mirror over the sink, covered in dried splatters. That was the mirror I looked into.
"No fucking way, fuck!" burst out of me in a hoarse, alien youthful voice. I recoiled from the mirror as if it were a leprous zombie creature with a timed explosive strapped to its chest.
Staring back at me from the mirror… wasn't Me. In short. In long—staring back was a guy about nineteen. Tousled dark-blond hair, big brown eyes swimming with a mix of animal fear and confusion, and a completely ordinary, unremarkably average face. None of my usual three-day stubble, none of the crow's feet around my eyes, none of the deep scar on my chin from a slipped chisel a couple years back. Just smooth, pale skin with faint traces of teenage acne. Scrawny build, height around five-nine if I had to guess. Clothing—gray T-shirt soaked in vomit and checkered cotton shorts.
I stood thunderstruck, staring at the reflection, but I didn't see it. Before my mind's eye rose another picture. My workshop in the garage. The smell of ozone from the running welder mixed with the tart sweetness of pine shavings. My hands, the ones I'd just been thinking about… I remembered them down to the tiniest detail. Broad, callused palm that could easily grip the end of a 4×4 beam. A network of small white scars—memories of slipped drills, sharp metal edges, and splinters that had become part of the skin's relief. Under my nails—the ingrained, almost permanent dark streak of machine oil and wood dust no solvent could touch. Those hands were tools, extensions of my will. And what I saw now on myself and in the mirror… These pale, narrow palms with pianist-thin fingers evoked not just rejection, but some deep, primal sense of wrongness. As if not just my body had been swapped, but my very essence. I clenched my fists, feeling the unfamiliar crack of thin joints. No, these definitely weren't my fists.
How? How did I end up in this… guy's body? Why me? What happened to my real body? Who the hell is this guy anyway? What the fuck do I do now? Questions swarmed in my head like enraged bees, and the already unrelenting hangover pain turned into a deafening migraine.
With difficulty peeling off the vomit-soaked clothes and disgustedly tossing them into the corner, I climbed under an icy shower. The freezing streams brought me somewhat to my senses, washing away not only the grime but part of the primal shock. Deciding for now not to overload my sluggishly thinking head with a thousand and one questions, I skirted the vomit stain on the floor and collapsed onto the sofa.
Sprawling out and staring at the cracked ceiling riddled with fine wrinkles, I tried not to think about anything. Surprisingly, I started drifting off. That was good. To hell with problems—morning is wiser than evening. A faint, irrational hope still flickered in me that everything happening was just a dream. A nasty, terrifyingly realistic, goddamn scary dream, but just a dream. With those comforting thoughts I sank once more into Morpheus's realm, and even the headache finally retreated to the background.
How long I slept… no idea. But when I woke, thick velvet night already reigned outside the window. The city lived its life: neon signs and streetlights cast bizarre, dancing shadows on the room's walls, the hum of cars and a distant, mournful siren wail drifted in. Nighttime New York must be beautiful, only you don't want to set foot on Hell's Kitchen streets after dark. You'd be lucky to just lose your wallet and smartphone, not 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 will he ask in return? They don't call a simple vigilante "Devil" for pretty eyes…
"What the…?" I whispered into the void, suddenly realizing those thoughts… weren't entirely mine.
They crashed in suddenly, like a breached dam. Alien memories, feelings, emotions. I am John Thompson. Orphan. Student at New York College of the Arts. And I'm head over heels in love with a redheaded girl from my class. The very one I literally caught yesterday with someone else. With a rich pretty-boy who pulled up for her in a gleaming Audi whose price exceeds the cost of this rented studio several times over. Realizing that hit John's brain so hard he couldn't hold back and spent his last money on cheap whiskey. Decided to drown his sorrow in booze. And, judging by everything, drowned himself.
No! No! NO! I am Alexander Nikiforov! Thirty-eight-year-old bachelor freelancer, a bit of a jack-of-all-trades in my own modest opinion, who for the last ten years lived in my native small town, restoring from ruins a private house inherited from my parents. No stupid teenage crushes on redheaded vixens, no bohemian art colleges, and certainly no act of pointless suicidal alcoholism that apparently ended the sufferings of this damn John Thompson!
"I am me, even with the memories of some inexperienced idiot from the USA!" I declared firmly and clearly into the void, cementing this all-important fact first and foremost for myself.
It's one thing to just realize it while still confused in your own thoughts, trying to separate wheat from chaff, and quite another to know firmly that your personality is the dominant one. I am Alexander, somehow transplanted into this kid's body.
And for a moment it hit me. Not panic, no. A dull, black, hopeless melancholy. Home. My home. Ten years of life poured into every brick, every plank. In memory rose the tart smell of fresh pine shavings when I planed boards for the veranda. The familiar weight of my favorite hammer in my hand—old, Soviet-era, passed down from my father, and to him from his. The view of a crimson sunset from the porch I finished just a month ago. All my labor, all my plans… All of it simply erased. As if I never existed. What happened to my body? Did it just die in its sleep? Lying there now, cooling in the house that, for lack of heirs, will revert to the state? From those thoughts a heavy lump rose in my throat, and my eyes traitorously stung.
All that's left for me… is to accept it.
Some essence, law of the universe, or just a cruel cosmic joke—whatever was behind my translocation was beyond my comprehension. Options for action were few. Either jump off the roof and end this absurd story, or… just live.
And live is exactly what I intended to do. The "vessel's" memories finally settled, forming a more or less coherent picture, and now I could separate them from my core personality. They were… dim, like an old faded photograph. Mentally reviewing John Thompson's biography, I realized the guy I got was maximally ordinary, unremarkable, and inconspicuous.
At seven he lost his parents in a car crash. Until twelve—orphanage. Then a foster family that in practice was little different from the orphanage, since besides him there were twelve more such kids. Clearly the enterprising guardians lived off hefty social payments from the New York City Hall. John felt no warm feelings toward them, perfectly understanding he was just a business project for them. So the moment he turned eighteen he set off on his own.
As an orphan he got a preferential social loan for studying at the College of the Arts, acting program. And for a year now he'd been dragging out the miserable existence of a broke student, scraping by on odd jobs, welfare, and endless anguish over the student loan he'd somehow have to repay after graduation.
And you'd think, well, life's life, especially by American standards. Didn't get hooked on drugs, didn't go to prison, even tried to study. But the moment one particular name surfaced in the stream of memories, I understood what global, universal shitshow fate had dragged me into.
Mary Jane Watson.
Redheaded straight-A student, beauty, activist, and dream girl of every guy in the college, for whom John pined so hopelessly… Coincidences like that don't happen. And also the Devil of Hell's Kitchen. And also the "Stark Industries" tower piercing the sky in central Manhattan. And also the "Daily Bugle" newspaper with its outrageous, New York-famous editor-in-chief J. Jonah Jameson. Not enough? How about news of the mysterious state of Latveria? Or the upcoming space expedition they were dissecting on every channel—an expedition by one Reed Richards. The cherry on this cake of madness was Spider-Woman—a masked heroine who'd appeared in the city relatively recently but already won the townspeople's love and earned the fierce hatred of that mustachioed loudmouth from the Bugle.
I'm in the Marvel world.
A world where goddamn mutants fight on equal footing with Asgardian gods. A world where a passing cosmic horror can snap its fingers and erase not just a planet—half the galaxy. A world where the concept of the Multiverse is so basic there are literally an infinite number of them… The main thing is not to end up in the cluster slated for destruction on the whim of some Phoenix or by decree of the Living Tribunal.
"Well… My life is hard, my existence cursed, my fate bitter…" I muttered my late mother's favorite saying, rest her soul, staring blankly at the wall.
Existential horror rolled in like an icy wave, threatening to paralyze the will. To distract myself at least somehow I walked to the window. The view was of a blank brick wall of the neighboring building and a narrow alley littered with trash. From below came echoes of a drunken argument, somewhere far off a siren wailed again. Hell's Kitchen in all its glory.
So what the hell am I supposed to do in this situation?
My gaze snagged again on the drying puddle of vomit. No sleep in either eye. Instead of burdening my brain with heavy thoughts that probably wouldn't lead anywhere 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 in the bathroom and got to work. I scrubbed the floor furiously, scoured the ingrained grime, and that simple physical labor helped organize my thoughts. Along the way I dusted, washed the mountain of dirty dishes in the sink, gathered all the trash into bags, but didn't dare take it out at night onto the streets of New York's most dangerous neighborhood.
Having come to no concrete conclusions, I sat down at the desk where a battered old laptop lay. Opening the lid and automatically entering John's password from memory, I was about to start searching for information on the current state of the world, but the higher power—or whoever handles logistics for isekai protagonists—decided this was the perfect moment for a surprise.
Without fanfare, without unnecessary pomp, right in front of my eyes flashed a modest translucent blue panel.
[System "Celestial Forge" Activated!]
Well, well… Now that's a twist. And what, I wonder, did I do to deserve such an honor? Maybe it was the complete assimilation of memories? Or gaining enough information about the world and consequently realizing what deep shit I'm in? Or maybe I'm overcomplicating it and it just took the standard eight hours since my first awakening? Whatever! The main thing is—this is a system. And a system is a chance. A chance not just to survive, but maybe even achieve something in this insane world.