Minaiyu wakes up, and his first thought is relief.

He feels so much better today! His fever has finally broken!

Of course he shouldn't do anything remotely strenuous yet, not so soon, but he's looking forward to being able to focus on that history-of-rubber book he tried to read earlier this five-day and had to set down--

--wait, hang on, what's that sound? What's that smell?

He opens his eyes.

A low hum pervades the soundscape. It's not the hum of a ventilation system; it's more organic than that, it ebbs and flows. The smell is of unwashed human, beeswax, and sheep, all quite strongly. 

He appears to be in some sort of hexagonal capsule hotel; a faint beam of daylight at his feet shines in to provide a bare minimum of visibility. He's lying in a pile of sheepskins and other furs. 

...what??

...so, on the one hand, he has absolutely had a bunch of fever dreams this five-day. But this doesn't feel like the fever dreams did. Those felt like believing something while also, simultaneously, knowing it to be false (something which is, if anything, even more unpleasant than it sounds); this feels straightforwardly real.

Just in case, he reaches blindly for the place where the emergency call button would be if this is secretly his convalescing bed, and presses down. If he's fully lost in delirium, his family can send in an appropriately-hazmatted tripsitter to keep an eye on him and determine whether to call an ambulance.

Is there enough space to turn around, or is he going to have to shimmy out feet-first if he wants to get a better look at things?

His hand lands on some kind of wooden object that is certainly not a button of any sort. 

He has just barely enough space to turn around. 

He wonders what the wooden thing is, but he will start by cautiously poking his head out of the capsule.

His capsule appears to be a few meters off the ground, and open into a roughly circular room made of wood and daub construction, the walls of which are lined with similar capsules. The central volume of the room appears to be filled with several enormous honeycombs, swarming with bees. Many of the bees appear to be about the size of a sheep or large dog, but not all of them; there are regular sized bees around, as well as at least one enormous bee larger than a horse. As well as the bees, beneath the honeycomb a number of sheep are sleeping on a pile of hay. 

The only source of light is a vent in the ceiling through which the morning light streams, the comb parting in places to allow it through, and even that vent seems to be largely clogged with bees.

Marcus appears to have woken up and started to get out of bed without noticing it, which is hardly unprecedented, but he appears to have done it wrong, which certainly is something he hasn't done since he was maybe six. He goes to reset his position to one where his feet will be able to reach the footholds in the wall properly, and it doesn't quite work. 

Almost reflexively, he pulls his head and torso back and away from the possible attention of the giant bees what the fuck, and ends up lying in the capsule like a dog, with his arms out in front of him.

His arms are now visible in the light, and...those...aren't his hands. That's not what his hands look like.

...oh. He didn't make it.

His leg tries to move, and he instinctively halts it, then realises that wait no that's a terrible idea actually.

He flails around a bit mentally, and manages to get himself into a position where he is, not not fronting exactly, but not actively interfering with his host's motor control.

What the fuck. Why did he flinch back from the bees, like they were spiders or something. 

Oh. There's something in his head that's not him.

It's not, at this second, controlling his voice. 

"Hey, I think I've been enchanted!*" He shouts. 

*This is a single syllable and extremely shoutable word. 

What a concerning thing to have a one-syllable word for!

This is a fucking demon world, isn't it. Fuck.

(Or, you know, a world that believes it's a demon world. He suspects that demons per se aren't actually real and are just mangled rumours of malicious walk-ins, but right this moment what matters is what his host society parses him as being.)

At least he can understand what the guy is saying.

"I-- I promise I don't mean you any harm," he says hurriedly.

He doesn't fully take command of the body (and he'll get out of the way if his host tries to move something he's using), but talking does bleed over into making facial expressions. He looks scared.

Yeah right. Fortunately whatever the thing is doesn't seem to be controlling him very well, so he's going to flip himself around and get out of his cell, because if he's going to be tied up or something, he'd rather not have to be literally dragged out of bed to make that happen. There's a trick to getting down to ground level elegantly, but he can manage it in his sleep. 

He thinks for a moment, and leaves his belt knife and bow here. Not worth the risk. 

Marcus's father and one of his cousins will meet him as he gets down. 

"What's all this about then?" 

"It can speak with my voice. I don't know what it is." 

That's the most important thing to communicate. 

Well, he knows what he is.

As for how to convince them of the truth, he has no idea, but he can at least give them his side of the story.

(He really hopes he isn't going to get his host killed.)

"...uh, hi?" he says tentatively. "My name's Minaiyu. I'm a--" he is disappointed but not surprised that his host doesn't have a specific word for this, and he is definitely not calling himself a demon or a god "--dead soul from another world.

I'm very sorry about all the trouble, I don't get to decide who I possess, it just happens."

He is sufficiently embodied at the moment that he not-quite-consciously puts their hands up in what is hopefully recognisable as a placating gesture.

"All right whatever this is I want to deal with it outside." says Marcus's father. 

"Volta! Run and fetch the witch! Tell him it's urgent!" 

He will gesture for Marcus to move towards the smaller of two doors out of this room. A gaggle of concerned looking people and bees are going to follow them out. 

Minaiyu might at this point notice that the crowd, while generally appearing to consist of human people dressed primarily in wool and sheepskin, have a bit more variety in their appearances than you'd expect. Most people have normal human colours, but there are two people with neon pink hair (a father and a daughter, possibly) and one person whose skin is the pale green of new shoots. 

Marcus is going to gesture for his bees to stop following him. It would be terrible if they decided to follow Minaiyu's orders instead of his in a fight, and also he just generally doesn't like the idea of trying to interact with them in this state. 

That gets them out into the cold only with the bees which aren't his following the crowd, where he gets to have the fun experience of being interrogated in freezing weather. Well, at least it didn't snow anymore during the night. 

"How, exactly, does a dead soul come to escape Foundation's grasp and start possessing someone?" 

"Ghosts are a thing, I think." Says his father. "An intangible sort of resentful dead." 

The hair could be dye, but he does not know how you would end up with skin that colour. It's less weird than the giant bees, though.

"Uh, if you have a system here that 'grasps' souls and prevents them from ending up in otherworlders' bodies, that would help explain why possessions are comparatively rare when death is so common? If you're not, like, contributing to the pool of potential souls.

We don't have a system like that at home, though."

"And where exactly is home?" asks Marcus's father. 

("Is that what happened to people who died before Foundation ascended?" asks someone in the gaggle of onlookers. "No clue. Maybe?" says another. Several people start petting giant bees with various degrees of nervousness.) 

"We call it Rekka, in my language. I don't, uh, have a multiversal coordinate system, or anything.

We only have small bees there.

I live..." he makes a face "...lived...in--" he does have a coordinate system for this, but he refrains from using it: it won't mean anything to them "--a town in the grey area between temperate and subtropical, on the east coast of Tashay. Bluecoral Bay, it's called."

(He translates the name of the town. Place names are usually concepts: it's not like they get accustomed to being called by a particular string of phonemes.)

Minaiyu has not touched anyone in six days. Minaiyu did not know, when he hugged his kith-uncle goodnight seven days ago, that it would even be the last time he hugged anyone that five-day, let alone the last time he ever hugged anyone he'd ever known.

He is having some sort of emotion about the people petting their giant bees, which it really does not seem like the time to unpack.

The father makes a face. "Some kind of heathen then. I don't know what I expected. What sort of place was this Bluecoral Bay? A trade port? A fishing village?" 

Marcus is keeping quiet. He's grown up on the same adventuring stories as his father, and understands what he's doing: when confronted by something strange and powerful, keep it talking. It might reveal its nature by accident, or even if it lies with every breath you're still getting evidence with which to disprove those lies, and either way we stall it on killing us all for a little bit longer. It's not like they can make a decision until the witch gets here. 

He hopes the witch gets here fast.

He sure is a foreigner who doesn't have whatever relations with spirits this culture considers proper.

(Are the bees spirits? Are they beloved of spirits?)

"It's not a great harbour: usually you'd want to go three hops north to Greenport if you want to ship something by sea.

We're not very specialised, though we export more than our fair share of fish and amaranth--" he breaks off, and looks thoughtful for a moment.

("Amaranth" is a suspiciously long word. They've heard of amaranth, but it sounds like it isn't their staple crop.

He wonders what the foodways here are like. He wonders if he'll live long enough to find out.)

"--um, it's not a great location to put a thing that people would come from hops around to visit, since there's nobody to the east. Like, we have a small medical centre for routine things, but the big hospital I--" slight pause as he catches himself on the tense "--worked at is two hops west."

It feels like a slightly odd question for the man to ask, at this stage of getting to know each other. Like...like it's a question he would ask a foreign visitor from his own world, underestimating how alien Minaiyu's world might be. Or like...it's a proxy for something else? Alien subtext?

Maybe the man is trying to get at what sort of role Minaiyu played in his society?

"I worked in emergency medicine," he clarifies.

"Oh? What circle were you?" He's not quite managing to sound unsuspicious.