Awakening… It wasn't just bad. It was outright lousy, the kind that makes you regret the very fact of your existence.
First came the hammer of pain, splitting my skull from the inside. Not a sharp, cutting pain, but a dull, throbbing rhythm in my temples, as if some inept satanist drummer had taken up residence behind the bone, beating out a devilish roll with every heartbeat. Second came the dry mouth. Not just thirst, but a sensation as if my throat had been filled with red-hot Sahara sand and then polished with sandpaper. My tongue, swollen and rough, moved in my mouth like a dead lizard dried out in the sun. Consciousness returned reluctantly, in ragged shreds, clinging to the saving, dark scraps of nonexistence, but reality was persistent and merciless.
Before I could fully come to my senses and piece together the fragments of my thoughts, a smell hit my nose. A nauseating, bittersweet, unmistakably recognizable stench. The smell of vomit. Ironically, this stench cleared my mind better than a bucket of ice water could have. I tried to grimace, but even that simple movement of my facial muscles caused a new wave of nausea to rise in my throat.
Actually, no… It turned out even worse. It wasn't just a smell. It was actual vomit. A sticky, cooling puddle of my own body's vile effusions had soaked through my T-shirt and was unpleasantly chilling the skin on my back and shoulder. The realization of this fact washed over me like an icy wave of disgust, making me shudder. And that would be fine—plenty of things happen in life—but this was explicitly not what I remembered of my last moments before sleep. I clearly remember going to bed. At my place. In my clean, freshly made bed. Absolutely sober and in a sound state of mind. And now…
With difficulty, propped up by trembling, unusually weak hands on the sticky, rough floor, I forced my poisoned body into a sitting position. The room swayed like the deck of a ship in a nine-point storm. I squeezed my eyes shut, clutching at the floor with my fingers and waiting out the bout of dizziness, and finally looked around. What I saw, I categorically, to the point of gritting my teeth, did not like.
This wasn't my bedroom. It wasn't even close to my home.
It was a tiny one-room apartment, or rather, a studio. At a glance, about twenty-five square meters, maybe thirty. A large room—if that word even applied here—serving as a living room, bedroom, and God knows what else. A frayed sofa with springs poking out in places, which had seen better days back during the Nixon administration. A clunky wardrobe made of cheap particle board with the wood-imitation film peeling off at the edges. A desk piled with papers and empty instant noodle packaging. In the corner sat a kitchenette—a couple of cabinets, a sink with a mountain of dirty dishes, and an electric stove with two burners. Everything looked not just plain, but wretched and hopeless. Compared to my spacious private house, which I had been raising from ruins with my own hands for the last ten years, this place looked like a dog kennel next to a palace.
But the main question wasn't that. What. Was. I. Doing. Here?
Thoughts tangled, catching on one another. Was I kidnapped, forcibly drugged into unconsciousness, and dumped here? A nonsensical idea. Who would want me? Did my friends pull some idiotic prank that went beyond the pale? No, not their style at all. Besides, practically all of them were in town, hundreds of kilometers away. What would they be doing driving in the middle of the night just to pull off such a complex and meaningless operation? Plus, they would have had to get me out of the house without waking me up, pour liters of alcohol into me... No, it didn't add up. At all.
And only now did it reach my still not-quite-sober mind. That same discrepancy that my subconscious had been persistently ignoring, but which kept crawling out, causing a dull, gnawing anxiety. The body! The dimensions! My hands! Why the hell did they look so… thin and soft? These weren't my working, wiry hands, covered in a thick web of old scars and calluses from ten years 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 fit for nothing but pressing keys on a keyboard or turning pages. And in general, I felt as if I were… shorter? Lighter?
It was complicated. Too many questions and not a single answer. I only knew that I knew nothing. But I had to figure it 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 a dull pain in my head, and my body ached mercilessly, but somehow I made it inside. Dirty… would be an understatement. Engrained yellowness on the porcelain of the toilet, a deep crack in the sink crudely patched with gray duct tape, a slippery bit of cheap soap instead of normal soap. A dim, deathly light came from a single bulb without a shade. Everything here screamed of poverty, indifference, and neglect. My gaze fixed on the grimy mirror, covered in dried splashes, above the washbasin. That was the mirror I looked into.
"Oh, for fuck's sake, dammit!" escaped me in a raspy, foreign, youthful voice. I recoiled from the mirror as if it were a leprous zombie creature with a one-hour time bomb on its chest.
Looking back at me from the mirror was… not Me. That's the short version. The long version was that a youth of about nineteen was looking at me. Disheveled dark blond hair, large brown eyes filled with a mixture of animal fear and confusion, and a rather ordinary, unremarkable face. None of my usual three-day stubble, no web of wrinkles around the eyes, no deep scar on the chin left by a slipping chisel a couple of years ago. Just smooth, pale skin with barely noticeable traces of teenage acne. A thin build, height about five-foot-nine, judging by a rough estimate. Clothing consisted of a gray, vomit-soaked T-shirt and plaid cotton shorts.
I stood there, thunderstruck, looking at the reflection but seeing something else. Another image rose before my inner eye. My workshop in the garage. The smell of ozone from a working welding machine, mixed with the tart sweetness of pine shavings. My hands, which I had so inopportunely thought of earlier… I remembered them down to the smallest detail. A wide, calloused palm capable of easily gripping the end of a four-by-four beam. A network of small whitish scars—memories of slipping drills, sharp metal edges, and splinters that had already become part of the skin's texture. Under the fingernails—an ingrained, almost permanent dark line of a mixture of machine oil and wood dust that no solvent could touch. Those hands were a tool, an extension of my will. But what I saw now on myself and in the mirror… These pale, narrow palms with the thin fingers of a pianist or an artist caused me not just rejection, but a deep, animal sense of wrongness. It was as if not just my body, but my very essence had been replaced. I clenched my fists, feeling the thin joints crack uncomfortably. No, these were absolutely not my fists.
How? How did I end up in the body of this… kid? Why specifically me? What happened to my real body? Who even is this kid? What the hell am I supposed to do next? Questions swarmed in my head like enraged bees, and the hangover pain, which already refused to subside, turned into a deafening migraine.
With effort, I pulled off the vomit-stained clothes, threw them disgustedly into a corner, and stepped under a cold shower. The icy streams brought me to my senses a bit, washing away not only the dirt but also part of the primal shock. Deciding not to burden my slow-thinking head with a thousand and one questions for now, I walked around the vomit stain on the floor and collapsed onto the sofa.
Lying back and staring at the cracked, wrinkle-riddled ceiling, I tried not to think about anything. Surprisingly, I began to drift off to sleep. That was good. To hell with the problems; the morning is wiser than the evening. A weak, irrational hope still flickered within me that everything happening was just a dream. A bad, horribly realistic, damn scary one, but just a dream. With such encouraging thoughts, I fell back into the realm of Morpheus, and even the headache finally faded into the background.
***
How long I slept like that… I have no idea. Но when I woke up, a thick, velvet night already reigned outside. The city lived its life: neon signs and lanterns cast bizarre, dancing shadows on the walls of the room, and the hum of cars and the distant, mournful wail of a siren drifted in. Nighttime New York must be beautiful, but you'd better not venture onto the streets of Hell's Kitchen at night. You'd be lucky if they just took your wallet and smartphone instead of your life. Although, there's a chance that the Devil of Hell's Kitchen might hear your prayer for help and deal with the thugs. Но 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 that these thoughts… weren't entirely mine.
They rushed in suddenly, like a burst dam. Foreign memories, feelings, emotions. I am John Thompson. An orphan. A student at the New York College of Arts. And I am head over heels in love with a red-haired girl in my class. The very one I caught yesterday with another guy. A rich spoiled brat who came for her in a shiny Audi, the price of which exceeds the cost of this rented studio several times over. The realization of this hit John's brain so hard that he couldn't resist and spent his last money on cheap whiskey. He decided to drown his sorrow in alcohol. And, apparently, he drowned himself.
No! No! NO! I am Alexander Nikiforov! A thirty-eight-year-old bachelor freelancer, something of a handyman in my own humble opinion, who for the past ten years lived in my home village, restoring a private house inherited from my parents from ruins. No stupid teenage infatuations with red-haired vixens, no bohemian art colleges, and certainly no act of meaningless suicidal alcoholism that likely ended the suffering of this damn John Thompson!
"I am Me, even with the memories of an inexperienced idiot from the USA!" I stated firmly and clearly into the void, anchoring this important fact primarily for myself.
It's one thing to just realize it while continuing to get confused in your own thoughts, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, but it's another thing to know for certain that your personality is the prevailing one. I am Alexander, somehow ended up in this boy's body.
And for a moment, I was overwhelmed. Not by panic, no. By a dull, black, hopeless longing. Home. My home. Ten years of my life invested in every brick, every board. The tart smell of fresh pine shavings when I planed boards for the veranda surfaced in my memory. The sensation of the familiar weight of my favorite hammer in my hand—an old, Soviet one, inherited from my father, and from his father before him. The view of the crimson sunset from the porch I had finished just a month ago. All my labor, all my plans… All of it just wiped away. As if I never existed. What happened to my body? Did it just die in its sleep? Is it lying there now, cooling in the house that, since I have no heirs, will now go to the state? At these thoughts, a heavy lump formed in my throat, and my eyes stung traitorously.
All that's left for me… is to come to terms with it.
A deity, a law of the universe, or just a cruel joke of the cosmos—whatever stands behind my displacement is beyond my understanding. There aren't many options for action. Either jump off the roof, ending this ridiculous story, or… just live.
And living was exactly what I intended to do. The memories of the "vessel" finally settled, forming a more or less coherent picture, and now I could separate them from my main personality. They were… dull, like an old faded photograph. Mentally running through the biography of John Thompson, I realized I had been dealt a maximally ordinary, drab, and inconspicuous kid.
He lost his parents in a car accident at age seven. An orphanage until twelve. Then a foster family that, in fact, differed little from the orphanage, as there were twelve other such children there. Obviously, the enterprising guardians lived off substantial social payments from the New York mayor's office. John felt no warm feelings toward them, perfectly understanding that for them, he was just a business project. Therefore, as soon as he turned eighteen, he set out on his own.
Being an orphan, he received a subsidized social loan to study at the College of Arts, majoring in theater acting. And for a year now, he had been leading the miserable existence of a penniless student, scraping by on odd jobs, social benefits, and eternal torment over the student loan that he would somehow have to pay back after graduation.
And, seemingly, well, it's just life, especially by American standards. He hadn't become a junkie, hadn't gone to prison, even tried to study. Но as soon as one specific name surfaced in the stream of memories, I realized what a global, universal clusterfuck fate had brought me into.
Mary Jane Watson.
The red-haired straight-A student, beauty, activist, and dream of all the guys in the college, for whom John had pined so unrequitedly… Such coincidences don't happen. And the Devil of Hell's Kitchen. And the Stark Industries tower piercing the sky in the center of Manhattan. And the Daily Bugle newspaper with its flamboyant and famous-throughout-New York editor-in-chief J. Jonah Jameson. Not enough? How about news of the mysterious state of Latveria? Or the upcoming space expedition being discussed in all the news—an expedition by one Reed Richards. The cherry on top of this cake of madness was Spider-Woman—a masked heroine who appeared in the city relatively recently but had already managed to win the hearts of the citizens, and whom that same mustachioed scandalmonger from the Bugle had taken a fierce dislike to.
I am in the Marvel universe.
In a world where damn mutants fight on equal terms with Asgardian gods. In a world where a passing piece of cosmic horror can wipe out not just a planet, but half the galaxy with a snap of its fingers. In a world where the concept of the Multiverse is so basic that there are literally an infinite number of them… The main thing is not to end up in the cluster scheduled for destruction by the whim of an entity like the Phoenix or by the decision of the Living Tribunal.
"Well… My life is hard, my existence is cursed, my fate is bitter…" I muttered my mother's favorite saying, may she rest in peace, staring blankly at the wall.
Existential dread washed over me in an icy wave, threatening to paralyze my will. To distract myself at least somehow, I went to the window. The view opened onto the blank brick wall of the neighboring building and a narrow, trash-filled alley. Echoes of a drunken brawl drifted from below, and a siren wailed somewhere in the distance. Hell's Kitchen in all its glory.
Well, and what am I supposed to do in such a situation?
My gaze again fell upon the drying puddle of vomit. I wasn't sleepy at all. Instead of loading my brain with heavy thoughts that were unlikely to lead to anything useful, I decided to do what I at least could—clean up.
Finding something remotely resembling clean clothes in the wardrobe, I filled a bucket of water in the bathroom and set to work. I scrubbed the floor with a vengeance, scouring away engrained dirt, and this simple physical labor helped organize my thoughts. Along the way, I wiped off the dust, washed the mountain of dirty dishes in the sink, and gathered all the trash into bags, but I didn't risk taking it out to the streets of New York's most dangerous district at night.
Having come to no concrete conclusion, 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 entity—or whoever is in charge of logistics for transmigrators—decided that this was the perfect moment for a surprise.
Without pathos, without extra fanfare, a modest semi-transparent blue plate flashed right before my eyes.
[System "Celestial Forge" Activated!]
Oho… Now that's a twist. And what, I wonder, did I do to deserve such an honor? Maybe a full assimilation of memories occurred? Or did I gain enough information about the world and, as a result, realize what deep shit I'm in? Or maybe I'm overcomplicating things, and simply a set amount of eight hours has passed since my first awakening? Oh, what the hell does it matter! The main thing is that this is a system. And a system is a chance. A chance not just to survive, but also, perhaps, to achieve something in this mad world.