Normally a very sexy, feminine voice wouldn’t cause Kyle to jump, especially not one as warm and smooth as melted butter, but this voice came out of thin air and startled the crap out of him. To be fair, it was also true that the last woman who had spoken to him had shot him in the back. But it had been his intention to stand up and look around anyway. So, he went with that before demanding to know where the imaginary voice was coming from.
Standing up was simple. Or it was supposed to be. After all, he had been doing it since he was ten months old, nine if you believed his father. Instead of standing though, Kyle found the minimal effort he had ordered of his muscles sent him flying up into the air. His vertical clearance would have been enough to make an NBA scout drool. Actually, more than that, as his feet were off the ground likely well above the height of a rim. Kyle didn’t have much time to focus on that before he was falling. Again.
This time Kyle crashed through the thatched roof of a small house next to the alley he had originally landed in. He didn’t come down with much grace and was fairly ashamed to admit that he flailed about and maybe, just maybe, shrieked a tiny bit. Then again, he played baseball for a living and didn’t have much experience acting the stuntman and falling through roofs with style.
His fall was partially broken by a shoddy wooden table that turned into so much kindling after absorbing the impact of his rather massive body. Three small children and a rather haggard looking thirty-something man had been sitting around it.
They all jumped back, at least as well as they could when Kyle came down on top of their table. For his part, it didn’t really hurt and he was just glad that he hadn’t squished any of them, especially one of the kids. He might never have wanted kids, but that didn’t mean he wanted to see one hurt.
A few feet away, a woman, likely the wife and mother, was stirring something in an iron pot hanging over a fire pit. She was the first to react aggressively. She yelled something at him that he didn’t recognize, and then flung a ladle of hot stew at Kyle.
All he had time to do, was raise his arm up to shield his face. It stung as it hit his arm, but definitely didn’t burn like he had been expecting. Still, he didn’t want to sit there on the receiving end of that type of abuse, but he also wasn’t about to charge at this little slip of a woman. He figured he was the one who had fallen through her roof, after all.
This time, when he tried to stand up it went a bit better, at least relatively speaking. He was only flung backwards ten feet and knocked a hole in the plaster of the back wall, but did manage not to go all the way through it. Even better, he was able to stay on his feet and right himself.
Looking at the little woman though, things weren’t getting any better on that end. She was shrieking again as she shooed her children around behind her and tried to hand the man a six-inch blade. He clearly didn’t want anything to do with it, but eventually took the knife, if reluctantly.
From the way he held it, Kyle assumed that he was more used to cutting bread than enemies, but then again, what did he really know about knife fighting? He almost stumbled forward when he heard that same feminine voice in his head say, “Pretty much everything there is to know about it. It is sorta your thing.”
Once again, he had no idea where the voice was coming from or what it was talking about. He couldn’t even claim to be from the rough side of town. He had grown up in a typical middle class suburban family, in Florida, before baseball had taken him to the big city.
Now Kyle figured he was having the most vivid dream ever, possibly as he bled out after being shot by a woman who felt he had spurned her. The alternative was that he was in some kind of magical world.
As his mind tried to adapt to his current situation, it dawned on him that both the man and woman were trying to talk to him. The woman was yelling, while the man seemed more cautious. But Kyle thought he’d be a monkey’s uncle if he understood what either of them were saying.
He had picked up some Spanish; it was more or less a requirement in baseball now if you wanted to be in on all the jokes. Even learned a little Japanese to chat with a teammate. Turned out that besides baseball, Kyle had quite the knack for languages. Not that he was gonna suddenly make a career change to translator.
Thing about it was though, that whatever they were speaking sounded completely foreign to him. They had a bit of the same accent that the big guy in armor had had, but with him Kyle had been able to understand his words, even if the meaning had been gibberish. Not so with his involuntary hosts.
Eventually he put up his hands with his palms out in what he hoped was a universal sign for, ‘I mean you no harm.’ Then he said out loud, “Sorry about the table, not quite sure what is going on here.” He sounded perfectly normal to himself but neither the man nor woman seemed to understand what he was saying.
The two adults looked at one another, confusion clear as day on their faces. Then the man tried talking to Kyle again. This time he spoke much more slowly and enunciated his words.
