On the other side of the desk is a blonde girl, wearing a white sundress and an expression of confused suspicion.

After a moment, she says, "What."

"Hello," the woman says. "I'm sorry for the confusion, but you see, we needed you, and you would otherwise be dead, so we thought this was probably better than the alternative."

"...okay," she says. "That's. Nice of you. I guess."

She pauses, trying to think of a better question than 'what', and can't, and falls awkwardly silent instead.

"Our world is in great danger," she says solemnly. "Every few centuries, a Demon Lord arises. In order to prevent the utter destruction of our way of life, it is necessary to summon a Hero in order to oppose them."

"I, um," she says. "Um. Do you - what. How? What. Why me???"

"As for why you exactly, I do not know," the woman says. "I know that the one who is chosen must be among the recently dead of those worlds from which we have the capacity to draw, and they must be someone capable of taking up the Hero's task. But what it is about you that makes you worthy is opaque to me." 

"...great," she says. "Okay. How... do I hero, then."

The woman makes a gesture as though plucking something from thin air, and then lowers her hands to the table, now laden with a sheathed sword. 

The sheath is polished redwood filigreed with gold, with tiny clusters of ruby along the filigree. The hilt of the sword largely matches, and when she draws the sword slightly to demonstrate what the blade looks like, it shimmers like opal, with a thousand intricate shades of silvery-gold and silvery-red and every color that could be made if fire fucked a bar of stainless steel. 

"This," the woman says solemnly, "is your Sword. A Hero's Sword is the surest way to take the life of a Demon Lord; they tend to be resistant to lesser measures." 

"I don't... have any idea how to use a sword," she says, although that thing is gorgeous and her hand itches to pick it up.

The woman smiles, the corners of her eyes crinkling. "That happens, sometimes. Go ahead and pick it up anyway; nothing can be permanently harmed, here."

Like fuck does she believe that. She does pick up the sword, but very very carefully, as though half expecting it to catch fire the moment it's in her hand.

The sword does not in any way catch fire. The hilt fits her hand perfectly. 

Okay! Magic sword! That's a thing that's happening, apparently!

"Do you have any more questions?"

"...I'm still pretty much at the 'what the fuck' stage here?"

"You died--I admit I know not how--and the forces which guide the choosing of our fated Heroes selected you from among those recently departed, to bring you back to life here in this place, I know not precisely why. It is my duty to prepare you as much as possible for this role."

"—are people normally—like, you do this a lot, apparently—do your fated Heroes usually have better questions than 'what the fuck' in the first five minutes? ...and if so, what are they?"

"A lot of them want to know if they can go home. Some of them want to know things about the Demon Lord's tactical situation."

"It honestly hadn't occurred to me that I might be able to go home. ...can I?"

She shakes her head. "Not from here. It's possible from within the ordinary magic system of the world, but I cannot access it."

"...fair enough I guess. Uh. What... besides the magic sword... do I get to help me fight the demon lord? Because if the demon lord is any good at being a demon lord and all I get is one magic sword then I think I'm pretty fucked actually."

She gestured at the sword. "There is this, of course, but it is far from all. You will be equipped with Skills which allow you to function in combat well above the level which a native could confidently aspire to reaching without getting themselves killed. And the fact of being a Summoned Hero will cause mana to collect around you much more deeply than an average member of your species at your Skill level."

"Side note, why do I keep hearing capital letters when you talk."

"Skills are a metaphysical construct separate from ordinary skills. The Summoned Hero is a figure of singular importance--you are not simply an ordinary hero who happens to have been summoned, you are the Summoned Hero."

"...okay, I... guess that makes sense? Um. Still kind of feels like I'm missing something."

"Does it have to do with the capital letters, the concept of Skills...?"

"...it has to do with... like I'm not, actually, objectively a good pick for Summoned Hero. I don't know how to sword, and even if you magically make me know how to sword I feel like there's going to be related skillsets I'm still missing. I like to think I'm a quick learner but nobody is that quick. Like, Demon Lord implies lord, implies kingdom, implies army, right? I'm gonna be showing up alone and totally unprepared in a strange world with a straight-up evil overlord evilly overlording at it somewhere and my job's gonna be to find them and stab them in the face? If destiny wants me to manage that, destiny is gonna have to do a lot of work to get me there!"

"Nobody is that quick is part of what Skills are about. Skills are a--a metaphysical application of--look, does your world have video games with, like, skill points and XP and leveling up, this will be much easier to explain with that concept space to point at."

"...yyyyes," she says. "You're telling me I'm gonna be showing up alone and totally unprepared in a strange world with a straight-up evil overlord to assassinate and my path to victory is gonna be leveling fast enough to get them before they get me?"

"--I think I should back up and assure you that the Demon Lord hasn't actually amassed a huge power base yet, the Demon Lord hasn't actually made themself publicly visible yet, we know about the upcoming Demon Lord because of how we're patched into the system."

"Okay, that's... better than I was imagining. Still."

"And not sending you in totally unprepared is why I'm here."

"That's... fair but I feel like relying on me to come up with all the right questions is not a good strategy for getting rid of your Demon Lord."

She makes a faint apologetic smile. "That's fair. Let's see..." she drums her fingers on the table. "The world has five continents, each of which is inhabited but not all of which are inhabited by all of the extant sapient species. The continents are Jyouzo, Harkhdeth, Abrasir, Velmonth, and Araketh." She makes another gesturing motion, and pulls a map out of thin air and spreads it out on the desk. 

"Okay," she says, studying it. "Do you know where the Demon Lord is?"

"We think somewhere in Velmonth, but it's hard to be sure."

"Where are you putting me?"

"Well, Velmonth was the idea, but if you'd rather be somewhere else that's fine."

"I would maybe rather have more distance than that while I'm doing my leveling, yeah."

"Hmm. Southeastern corner of Harkhdeth?"

She squints at the map, then shrugs. "Sure."

"Farthest place I can think of, by actual transit if not as the crow flies."

"Sounds good!"

"Hmm, what else...the major polity in that area is Ttakhree, an oligarchy ruled by a council of the heads of several noble clans and presided over by the head of one of said clans, chosen by election."

"Okay, good to know." Is she going to be able to pronounce that? She's embarrassed to ask.

"The amount of fine detail I can get is limited but I know they don't have a particularly xenophobic slant at the moment, you should be able to present yourself as a generic foreigner fairly frictionlessly."

"Generic foreigner, that's me," she murmurs, mostly to herself. "The most generic foreigner in the world, you might say."

Then she sighs.

"Well, I can't think of anything else to ask, which probably means I'm forgetting ten really important things and will be slapping myself in the face about them the second I land, but whatcha gonna do."

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Are you ready, then, or do you want to wait in case you think of something else?"

"I mean, how long do I get to wait? Because if I get to sit here for a week that sounds great, but if I get half an hour I feel like I'm going to spend twenty minutes of it staring blankly at a wall and then when I remember all the things I should've thought of in that time I'm going to slap myself in the face even harder."

"I can do a few hours. I can't do a week," she says apologetically. 

"Yeah that sounds like prime slap-myself-in-the-face time to me." She sighs. "So... magic sword and magic skills, but not, like, money, or a house, is that about the size of it? Clothes, how about clothes? Because let me tell you, being homeless and naked in a foreign country is not my idea of a good time."

"We can do clothes," she says. "We can do a modest amount of currency, too, if you don't mind a few odd looks for it being old." 

"Sounds good!"

"Do you want to keep the clothes you have, or show up in something more locally appropriate?"

"...I can see arguments for either..." she says thoughtfully. "No, you know what, I'll keep these. I feel like I'm not gonna succeed at passing for local to the first five people I meet so I might as well have proof that I'm magic instead of crazy."

"Alright. Ready?"

"I mean, no," she says, "not really, but I'm not gonna get much readier with another couple of hours to fret about it."

The woman gives her a lopsided, sympathetic smile. "I understand." 

And then the world goes white. 

When April's vision clears, she's standing by the side of a road, wearing her own clothes with the addition of a leather belt around her waist, laden on one side with the sword in its sheath and on the other with a leather purse that gently clinks when she moves. 

Off in the distance in one direction is a city. In the other direction, much closer but still far enough off that making out the details is difficult, are several figures on horses and some yelling. 

...oh boy.

On the one hand, she super does not want her introduction to her shiny new sword skills to come in the form of getting in the middle of a fight between a bunch of people with horses.

On the other hand—

It's so clearly a plot hook, you know? And if it turns out that she cannot in fact understand the local language, or it's not clear who's attacking who and for what reason, or something, she can always backtrack and try the city instead.

She goes for the commotion.

The commotion consists of three men on horses holding swords roughly circled around a young woman on a fourth horse. Every now and then she tries to dart through whatever gap between horsemen seems widest, only for them to close ranks, brandishing their weapons and laughing at her. 

Yeah, that's... that's clear-cut enough that she's not worried about intervening except for the part where there's three of them on horseback and one of her on foot. Didn't she read somewhere that horses were basically the tanks of the Middle Ages? Why exactly is she contemplating facing off against three tanks, again?

Whatever. She's here now.

She draws her sword and calls out to the men, "Hey, how about you fuck off?"

Her muscles know exactly how to draw the sword, how to hold it; how to twitch to slice through a horse's neck or a rider's femoral artery, if she so pleases. 

One of the riders turns to look at her. Assesses her strange clothing, her clearly magic sword. 

"What business is it of yours, then? We're just here to escort this young lady home." 

"Really?"

"Really," he says. "She's run away from home and her guardians sent us to bring her home safely. I admit my fellows," he gives the other two a pointed look, at which they sober up quickly, "could be being more professional about it, but--" 

He is interrupted as his quarry takes advantage of her hunters' distraction to make another break for it. This time she successfully manages to break out from between the two men not the one talking to April. 

The talking one curses and wheels his horse around to pursue. 

"I don't know about you, but when I'm trying to bring someone home safely my first thought usually isn't to draw a sword on them," April points out.

The man is too busy to answer her. He and his companions catch up with the fleeing young woman quickly, and this time instead of just vaguely circling her one of them wrenches her from her horse. 

She cries out in pain at the rough handling, then looks down at how far she would fall if he dropped her, looks up at him, and tries to kick his horse to make it startle and cause him to drop her. It doesn't work. 

And meanwhile, April is walking in their direction.

"Seriously, let her go."

"Lady, this really isn't any of your concern."

"And yet, I'm concerned about it! Funny how that works."

The man who has ahold of the girl has now successfully dragged her in front of him on his horse such that just making him let go wouldn't be enough for her to not be attached to this horse anymore. 

"Lovely. Look, if you want to report the incident to the town guard or something and have them look into it, that's fine, we have in fact been licitly hired by this girl's legal guardians. But I really, really don't want to swordfight some random stranger who sees a situation like this and goes 'I know, I should stick my nose where a warhorse might accidentally step on it.'"

"That's nice for you!" she says. "Hey, girl they're trying to kidnap, you want off this ride?"

"Help, please," she begs. 

"Tamsen!" the talking man roars. The man holding the girl, presumably Tamsen, claps a hand over her mouth. Talking man points his sword directly at April. 

"Seriously, back the fuck off," he says coldly. "This is your last warning."

Up comes the sword. "No thanks."

He rears his horse at her, with the intention of bringing heavily-shod hooves down on her crunchy endoskeleton. 

Hey, magic sword skills? This guy should stop having a horse.

"While the horse is rearing" is not a great time to slit a horse's throat. 

Luckily, there are many, many ways to apply a sword to a horse to fuck them up! 

Shortly this guy does not have a horse. Or a completely unbroken skeleton. He is, however, intact enough to stagger to his feet and attempt to sword at her. 

She's hesitant about leaning into the magic sword skills too hard because she doesn't want the first thing she does in this world to be 'kill a guy'. Should've asked if there's healing magic so she'd know how badly she can hurt him and have him be basically fine later. Maybe when the dust settles she'll find time to slap herself in the face about that. In the meantime, she defends, tries to get a sense of how hard he's coming for her, tries not to escalate too far past that. Also he has friends, what are the friends up to?

Probably Tamsin is attempting to bind the girl while the other one dismounts, having observed what she did to the first horse. 

Oh good. She has nothing against the horses and would rather they didn't get in her way.

She'd also rather not be outnumbered, of course, but you can't have everything. What do her sword skills think of this tactical situation? Because if she doesn't seem to have anything lined up for handling two opponents at once, it behooves her to make sure she faces them one at a time.

She has anything lined up for handling two (or more) opponents at once, but dealing with one is a lot simpler and safer. 

Which complicates this decision slightly more than if she either definitely did or definitely didn't. But they aren't any less openly trying to kill her than the first one was when he tried to run her over with his horse, and that is enough to tip her over onto the ruthless side of the equation. She changes tactics from 'defend and don't escalate' to 'fastest route from here to no longer facing a meaningful threat'.

It's a pretty fast route! Messy, too. Fortunately her Skills extend to stepping out of the way of the arterial spray. The other one sees this, pales, and changes tactics, fumbling for a crossbow at his belt. 

That looks an awful lot like a meaningful threat to her. How about no.

When she has crossed more than half the distance to him before he's managed to fit a bolt to the string, he gives it up as a bad job, dropping the crossbow and fleeing off the side of the road on foot. 

Works for her. She turns back to the girl to assess the situation.

The girl is successfully thrashing around enough that her captor can't just turn his horse around and ride off at top speed with her, to said captor's increasing frustration and fear. When April's attention settles on him, he looks at his dead friend and his dead friend's dead horse and his fled friend's abandoned horse and growls, "fuck this, I'm not getting paid enough," and shoves the girl off the horse, still bound, and then rides away at top speed. 

He wasn't exactly being careful of her safety, but there weren't any sickening cracking noises when she hit the ground, so that's good...?

"You okay?"

"Ow. Um, yeah--thank you so much--um. Could you help me get loose?"

"Yeah, 'course." She will make one good-faith effort to untie the girl without getting her sword involved, in case magic swords are like kitchen knives in this respect and using it to saw through rope would make it worse at its job, but that girl is getting untied whether or not she has to risk the health of her sword in the process.

The guy didn't have very long to bind her; the shitty knots come undone without needing swordly intervention. 

"Thank you so much," the girl says, sounding close to tears. "...I'm Anasekrah Sorren. Who are you?"

Should've asked if there's any fuckery with names. Add it to the list of things to slap herself in the face about later.

"April," she says, and it's the first time since she landed that she actually pays attention to what the hell language she's been speaking and how.

The language she's been speaking has more velar consonants than English does. She can just sort of...understand it. And speak it. She could compose a pun in it if she really wanted to, although it would take more thinking about than an English pun. 

"Is there anything I can do to repay you?"

"I'm really not sure," she admits after a moment's thought. "I'm kind of, uh. Disoriented. Disoriented seems like the word. Would you believe me if I said I was in a different universe ten minutes ago?"

Blink blink. 

"Uh. I would be--alarmed. I would be very alarmed." 

"It's pretty alarming!"

"Great. Well, uh, if you're the Summoned Hero I guess that explains the rescuing. Um, I should probably say, they were...technically...not lying. It's just. My guardians are awful. Really awful."

She shrugs. "I don't actually care whether they were paid to kidnap you or just doing it for kicks, it's not like being sent by your awful guardians makes it better that they're trying to drag you off somewhere against your will. Anyway, wanna be my native guide while I figure out what the hell I'm doing? 'No' is a reasonable answer, I hear there's gonna be a Demon Lord on the lookout for me sometime soon and I'm sure not looking forward to that part so I don't expect you to be either."

"The problem is that my guardians are legally allowed to hire people to kidnap me back to them," she says, mouth pressed into a tight line. "And, honestly, I would much rather hang out with you where I know the kidnappers will get scared off anyway, having to deal with a Demon Lord but not my guardians sounds like a great tradeoff." 

"That works out all right, then! Where were you headed, and can you think of somewhere better to go now that you've got me along? I hear I'm supposed to be gearing up to fight a Demon Lord and I have approximately no idea how to actually do that."

"I was headed to Khargorn," she says, waving in the direction of the city April passed up in favor of rescue, "and even if we end up going somewhere else we'll have to pass through Khargorn first, because the alternative is going back to where my guardians are, and even with the Summoned Hero on my side I refuse to deliberately be in the same city as them." 

"Fair enough!"

"I don't actually know that much about Summoned Heroes and Demon Lords, but, um, you seem to be pretty good with that sword. Probably not kill-the-Demon-Lord-right-now good, but, do you want to more capitalize on that, or learn magic, or what?"

"The sword is magic and makes me better at using it. I want to learn anything and everything that I could plausibly throw at a Demon Lord, in some kind of sensible order, and I have no idea what that order should be. Magic does sound like a good stop along the way though."

"I know... a little magic, and nothing about swords, except, like, 'sharp bit goes in the enemy.'"

"So maybe I should start by learning a little magic from you, since you're right here and all and I have no idea where to find somebody who can teach me how to operate my magic sword instincts more usefully."

"Okay--the thing I'm best at is a healing spell that does bruises." 

"Thaaat sounds like an uncomfortable story but also a useful spell."

"You've got it pretty much exactly right! So--" she locates a bruise on her own body that's not too awkwardly located, on her calf, and pulls her pant leg up to demonstrate. "You circle the affected area with your finger--it can be any finger, but you have to use the same finger, for the next bit, which is--" 

She draws a fairly complicated pattern over the bruise, about a millimeter in the air above it. When she finishes, the bruise starts fading until her skin is unmarked. 

"I can draw the strokes for you on a piece of paper, you'll want to practice it before you try it free-hand." 

"...huh. Yeah that looks like I'd need to practice to get it right."

She goes over to her horse, who is now cropping grass by the side of the road with the two surviving horses of her abductors, rummages in her saddlebags, and pulls out a sheet of paper and a pack of brushes. 

She starts drawing strokes on the paper with a brush, not apparently needing any external source of ink. "It's important to do the bits in the right order, so I'm going to do them in different colors and label them with numbers." 

That's not how she's used to drawing working but that seems like a side issue to revisit later. She pays close attention to the drawing.

Every time she needs a different color, she pulls out a different brush, placing the old one back into its case. 

When she's finished, she hands the paper to April. All the ink is already dry. 

"Will something weird happen if I practice tracing all this stuff on the page?"

"Nope, that one won't do anything at all if it's not over skin. ...So, like, maybe don't put the paper against your leg, or anything, but it shouldn't do anything even then, if you don't demarcate a boundary, and even if it did do something, it probably wouldn't be bad? But, uh, better safe than sorry." 

"Sure, okay."

She sets the paper on the ground and traces it.

"And what happens if you do it on a part of you that's not bruised?"

"Prrrrrroobably nothing? But, like, doing a healing spell when you don't need the healing will be fine, like, uh, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, and then like nine times out of ten if it does do something unexpected it'll be positive, but one time in a thousand you'll accidentally give yourself cancer or a stroke or something? I'm pulling these numbers out of thin air, you understand." 

"Okay, good to know... Does it only do bruises or will it help with other stuff too?"

"This one in particular mostly does bruises but will also help with internal bleeding or a hematoma or whatever. Also I tried it on a sprain one time and it might have helped some but I'm not sure."  

"...huh, what about external bleeding then? If you have a cut or a scrape or something?"

"It doesn't do anything for a scrape or a shallow cut. I don't know about a deeper one." 

"Okay. ...what's, the, like... why does drawing things fix bruises? Or is that not a thing you know?"

"--Uh, it creates a pattern for magic to flow through? And that's what the magic does, when it flows in that particular pattern?"