Prologue



July 3rd, 2014

Stamford, Connecticut



Doctor Jayden Brown, Chair of the Biology Department at the Stamford campus of the University of Connecticut, was not in a professional mood.





Your hair is scientifically impossible. I’m just saying,” he grumbled.





The girl blinked at him and then held up a strand of her bright blue hair. “Is it magic? That’s the only other option, right?” She had a bit of an odd accent.





“What? No, it must have a scientific reason, but it just...doesn’t make any sense. It isn’t logical, is what I’m saying.”





Dr. Brown pinched the bridge of his nose. It was too early to be trying to figure through biological mysteries, let alone explain them to other people. It always gave him headaches when he had lecture classes in the morning during the school year. This girl with the impossible hair and her companions—including one with a similarly bizarre flame red hair—had come into the department two hours ago, right when it opened, asking to talk to him. He’d humored them looking at what he’d thought was a piece of her wig under the microscope—and now he was very confused.





“Alright, so hair normally gets its coloration from melanin, a pigment that also determines the color of our skin. Your hair, though, has a completely different pigment inside of the cells. It looks like a flavonoid, like a pigment in a flower, which makes no sense at all. And it looks genuine to me? If it is real and this isn’t some kind of clever prank—which by the way would be grounds for disciplinary action, understand—it would mean that your DNA must be dramatically different to any other person known. And that’s impossible.”





The girl—Cecily, he thought her name was—frowned. “I don’t know very much about science...can I bring my friend in here now? He’s the one that actually attends school here.”





“Oh, of course.” The girl didn’t know about DNA?





Cecily gestured to her friend to come in and then sat precisely in the nearest chair. The boy with thankfully normal brown hair came in and spoke quickly, “Did you take a look at her hair?”





“I—yes,” Dr. Brown answered, “and it’s impossible. The bright blue pigment—something like a flavonoid, I think—seems to be inside of the cells, like it was produced there. It’s...an elaborate fake.”





“It’s not a fake, Doctor Brown, sir, I promise. Can you take a look at her DNA and analyze it? I promise you, sir, it’ll be different, too.”





“Don’t call me sir,” the doctor snapped. Then he paused. “Sorry, sorry, I’m tired and this is all a bit much. If her hair is...real, do you have any idea how? Why? And I’m already regretting asking this, but your other friend with the red hair...?”





“No, it’s not dyed either, it’s real,” the boy answered. “And, uh, as for how...I promise you won’t believe me.”





“I don’t believe that her hair is real now,” he retorted. “It’s not that hard to inject pigment into cells. Why should this department go through the effort and cost of sequencing her DNA?”





The boy grimaced. “You can’t just inject pigment into every hair on your head! Look, could you—I dunno—examine some of her other cells or something? The point is that her DNA is definitely different and it could be a really, really big deal for you, for the department!”





Dr. Brown sighed and pinched his forehead again. “Look, I’m sorry, but this department is mostly empty right now because we’re on the summer semester. Maybe when the school year starts you could come and use the lab, if you’re a Bio student—are you in the department?”





“No, I’m an International Relations Major. But—agh—could I, I dunno, pay you to get it analyzed? Like soon?”





“You sure are eager to do this, huh? It’s that big of a deal?” The kid—he didn’t even know his name—nodded firmly. “Alright...look, I’ve got a few summer students coming in about an hour. I’ll let one of them take a look at some of her other cells and analyze it a bit.”





“Thank you!” The kid looked tremendously relieved.





—————





“Doctor Brown? Doctor Brown!”





“Ah, yes?” He looked up from his online paperwork setting up the fall curricula. “Carlos, how’s it coming? Got the lab all set up?”





The second-year Bio Major was always full of energy, practically hopping from foot to foot normally, but today it seemed more like a nervous energy.





“Ah, yeah, got it all set up. But that girl who came in, with the blue hair? Yeah, so I took a melanocyte from her skin and it looks like the pigment production is, uh, actually able to produce multiple different pigments? Not just normal melanin, but also flavonoids, maybe even some other chemicals...I dunno, man, it’s weird.”





“Let me see this,” Dr. Brown grumbled as he pulled up out of his chair. He let Carlos go ahead of him into the lab—it was technically meant to be the student’s space to use over the summer—where Cecily and her friends were waiting. Now that he was really paying attention, all of the kids besides the one that went to school at UConn looked...different, somehow.





“Hello, everyone,” Dr. Brown said, “Carlos tells me he’s found something interesting in Cecily’s melanocytes.”





As he peered into the microscope and examined the cell, one of the other kids asked in a whisper, “If only you still had your elf ears, Llewelyn.”





“Do you not think I wish the same?” the other boy answered at full voice. A little loudly, actually.





“There are ways to fake those, I think, though,” the UConn student said. “Not so much with your guys’ hair.”





“Alright,” Dr. Brown interrupted, “I’m going to need to take a closer look at this for a few hours alone. There’s obviously, uh, something strange going on here, though.” He turned to face the group. “So if it’s true—Cecily here has natural blue hair and if you—what’s your name?”





“Katherine,” the redhead answered.





“Alright, Katherine has natural dark red hair, then I’d very much like an explanation as to how.” The headache was coming in, damn it...





There was a pause. Then the student spoke up, “Well, I said you wouldn’t believe us. That’s why I wanted you to check her hair first—to prove we’re not just, just full of bullshit, you know?”





“Wait, what’s your name? Sorry, I didn’t catch it.”





“Damian.”





“Right...anyway, go on.”





Damian took a deep breath. “Okay, so you’ve heard about stories where people find, like, a doorway to another world? Like Alice in Wonderland, or Narnia, things like that? Okay, so I know you won’t believe me, but about two months ago I—I was out hiking in this park up by Danbury and I found this fairy ring and I—well, I went to another world.”





Dr. Brown blinked at him and then abruptly moved to stand up. “Well, this was a great prank, or joke about shrooms, but I think I’ve been playing along long enough—“





“No! Wait, please! You don’t even have to believe me! That’s not the point!” Damian cried. “At least let me finish?” With a huff the doctor sat down again.





“Look,” Damian continued, “everyone else here, they’re from that other world. It’s...another dimension, I guess? And I know it sounds ridiculous—I know! But everybody here, they’ve got weird hair and I’m sure weird DNA because they’re part of a completely isolated group of humans! For, what, thousands of years?” He addresses this question to the others.





“According to our earliest myths, humans came from the Older World—here—about twenty thousand years ago,” Cecily answered.





“And you expect me to believe that five thousand years of isolation allowed people to develop flower pigments in their skin?” Dr. Brown said skeptically. “Humans in the Americas were isolated for something like twenty thousand years and they didn’t change nearly as much.”





“Oh, no,” Cecily answered. “It wasn’t natural—the Water nymphs blessed the people of Dinion, my home kingdom, with the power of the seas, and Fire nymphs blessed Erzur, which is where Katherine’s mother is from.”





“Actual literal magic? Seriously?” Doctor Brown shook his head, on the verge of laughter. “Is that why you said your hair had to be magic before?”





Cecily smiled faintly.





“That’s not the point, though!” Damian continued. “You can believe any or none of what we’re saying if you want. It’s just that my friends here are genetically different from normal humans. You’ve seen some evidence of that. The reason why we came here is to prove that and get the attention of scientists like you and hopefully eventually the government.”





“You want to get the government involved in this? Why?”





“None of these guys have any ID! They’re not citizens of any country on Earth, and they can’t get back to the other world. Believe me. we’ve been trying! But until we can work that out—we’ll even show you guys where the portal was, I’m sure physicists might be interested—they’re stuck here, and they need government recognition.”





Dr. Brown sighed deeply. “Christ, this is a mess. I don’t believe any of the rest of what you’re saying, but, well, whatever’s going on with those flavonoids is strange enough to warrant a DNA test. Carlos, you have something to say?” The kid looked nervous again.





“If...if you guys were actually from another world...that would count as a virgin contact scenario, right? Wouldn’t you all be incredibly vulnerable to our diseases?”





The blood drained from Damian’s face.





—————





AN: If the stylistically appropriate title didn’t give it away, the basic premise here is that Damian got isekai’d—not by dying though—but then got sent back to Earth along with his party by the Demon Lord. The world he went to is meant to be as stereotypically “Isekai” as possible, even though the story itself really isn’t—Damian isn’t Japanese, for instance, and he’s not a high schooler. That’s mostly because I don’t know nearly enough about Japan to write a story set there but I do know a lot about Connecticut and New York!



This story will be mostly meant to explore the shenanigans of a bunch of medieval fantasy characters stuck on Earth, although we’ll also be following shenanigans back on their home world. Magic does not work on Earth in this story except for making portals—it’s just my personal preference.