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. 

This man is definitely treating him too much like a foreign visitor from the same planet.

"I...doubt our qualification systems are directly comparable?

Uh, late apprenticeship, but I don't know what your medical apprenticeships look like and that might mean something pretty different in practice."

"So you haven't even managed to cast cantrips, then?" 

...it sure does mean something pretty different in practice.

"...do you have magic learnable by humans here?

I am, uh, not a medical mage, because we don't have those. I mean, like, in theory you can use magic to tell whether a comatose body still has a soul in it or not, if you can find a spirit and convince them to check for you? But that's not very feasible these days, they're pretty reclusive, so we pretty much just have to make our best guess; and sometimes care for bodies we're mostly sure are empty, just in case."

did his heart stop in the night, or did they find his empty vessel when they noticed he'd dropped out of contact, and how long did it take them to give up on him still being in there

If humans have magic here, with a broader variety of effects, it's possible they have exorcism methods that work but don't kill the host. Maybe, just maybe, he will not get anyone else killed if this goes badly, just get kicked out of this world as if he'd happened not to land here.

(On the other hand, maybe he can become a medical mage, if he survives.)

Should he--

--probably he should not ask yet what they are planning to do to him? He desperately does not want to come across as hostile if he can possibly avoid it, and he's not sure there even is a way to ask that question that doesn't make it sound like he's trying to formulate a plan for how to fight back, given the likely expectations of people who have this prearranged distress-call system.

He will just have to wait and see what happens when the...witch, who is almost certainly very literal, arrives.

(He wonders for a moment if he should be fronting less hard right now, see if he can avoid rudely inflicting the somatic effects of nervousness onto his host-- no, he'd be shocked if his host isn't also nervous, it won't help.)

Marcus would be very good at suppressing visible signs of his fear thank you very much. 

"So you're saying in your world you have no mages? So you're trained to do what, sheep medicine to people, because there isn't any alternative? Heh, not often we hear about people worse off than we are." 

"...I mean, I don't know what your sheep medicine looks like, but maybe.

We have pretty good tools, though. Like, we can do surgeries without it being a desperate last resort, because we've figured out medicines that can keep people unconscious for a few hours fairly safely so they don't feel the pain, and how to keep the operating theatre clean enough that they reliably don't get sepsis. Things like that."

It is probably not the time to give a full tutoring session on medical-tech bootstrapping. He doesn't have a good sense of what they do and don't have already though the sheep dung in the house seems like a bad sign, nor what gaps they're already filling with magic. And you'd really want people to be able to take notes.

...also they think he's a demon and probably won't listen to him.

Marcus's father sure does look like he's a man who is taking mental notes to the effect of 'demon thinks drugging people and cutting them open is sound ethical practice'. 

"I'm glad we don't need any of that sort of thing around here." 

He reserves judgement on whether they need any of that sort of thing around here!

He nods, going along with it for now.

Marcus's father is going to allow the conversation to lapse into silence. It's not like he can make a judgement call here. 

The gawkers are mostly going to head back inside. It's freezing out here, after all. 

Elsewhere, a witch has been awakened from his slumber. It's urgent, so he casts Longstrider, and about halfway there, he also decides on a Bear's Endurance as well, and between them manages to get down a forest path in nearly the same time as it would have taken the nice young lady who ran to get him. He dresses lightly, as though snow and thorns and cold winds and tripping roots were problems that happened to other people, and his cane is green with fresh shoots and green leaves otherwise unseen in a stark landscape of snowfields, dead grass, and conifers. 

Nonetheless when he gets to the house where the problem is happening, he has the immediate urge to lean against the wall of their great hall (a great conical building of thatch and wood and wax, large enough to hold 27 humans, as well as all their bees and sheep.) and slump to the ground. He's not the man he was, and running is not something he has in him these days. Presumably one of these nice young people will be along soon to get him something to sit on, but for now the ground is fine. 

"What's all this then? I've been told there's some kind of urgent enchantment situation?"

"Yes, honoured one." starts Marcus's father. "Marcus appears to have been possessed by - well it claims to be a well-meaning spirit that's gotten lost on the way to heaven. Some kind of student doctor from a land without magic. I don't know what it is." 

Marcus would like to force his way to the front here. 

"I would like to clarify that I appear to be capable of over-ruling the spirit on its control over me. At least sometimes." 

He wonders if the specific form of magical appearance for the cane carries meaning, to someone familiar with the types of mage around here. It could just be personal taste in decoration, but he does feel a little like he is looking at a sign in a language he can't read.

Oh, they are willing to tell him his host's name (or some sort of handle, anyway?). He hadn't dared ask for anyone's name, in case they thought name-magic was real and that he was trying to obtain weapons against them.

(...or, uh, come to think of it name-magic could be real for all he knows, though the name is now providing some evidence against this.)

Minaiyu will get out of the way when he feels Marcus try to say something.

...Marcus's phrasing suggests that he does not think Minaiyu has been deliberately getting out of the way. Minaiyu is not going to clarify, because Marcus will definitely take 'you can move because I allow you to' as a threat.

(Also, like, Minaiyu does not actually know who would win in a battle over control. But he has no intention of finding out!)

"Um, hello," he says. "I'm Minaiyu, I'm the spirit. I'm sorry about all this: I wouldn't have done it, if I'd had a choice.

I wouldn't say 'lost': I think we just don't have a heaven, where I come from."

(Wait, hang on, is their soul-catching system going to catch him now that he's here?

He hopes it's nice in heaven.

(Well, also for their sakes, but right now for his.))

"...forgive my ignorance, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to call you 'honoured one' or not."

"Well, that depends on if you intend to offer me honour and respect, doesn't it?" says the witch, with a voice that seems to indicate sarcasm and good humour. 

This person probably gets to decide if he lives or dies or possibly enters "Foundation's grasp"! He is hardly going to ignore or spurn the power dynamic!

"...yes, honoured one?

But we don't have honourifics in my native language, so I don't have good instincts for where to include them. I apologise in advance for any errors."

"Very fair, very fair. Who can truly expect honour and respect from heathens and strangers? But making the effort is much of the matter." He nods firmly. 

"Since we're showing each other respect." He pauses. 

"Oh ancient ghost, who visits us from beyond the veil of death, what is your desire? What wrong keeps you from sleeping the long sleep of ages with your ancestors?" 

"Uh, I...did sleep the long sleep of ages?

And then I-- well, I wasn't conscious for this part, of course, but presumably-- my soul happened to bump into Marcus's brain as I drifted through the worlds, and it was compatible enough for me to lodge here. I think the body was asleep, when that happened: when it woke up, so did I."

Was there supposed to be an honourific in there somewhere. He does not know.

"But there isn't something in particular that's got you up in arms here. No murder to avenge? No buried treasure to report to your loved ones? Not even a little annoyance that your grandchildren aren't leaving flowers on your grave and resetting the traps anymore?" 

"...no, honoured one?

I...wouldn't expect to be able to avenge my death or report to my loved ones from a distant world, in any case. And I don't have any children."

How would he even know whether people are still performing remembrance rituals at his grave?

(They're probably not. It's very rare to get enough information to even hazard a guess at how long you were in the sleep-between-lives, but it's not completely unheard of to land in the same world you left, or meet people from your world who landed faster (and are thus from later in the timeline) and can provide a lower bound. From what data points they've managed to get...centuries at least, millennia, maybe longer.)

"Hmm. Well, for the benefit of everyone here, let me lay out a few possibilities. You could be some kind of mad restless dead. Ghosts are often not entirely clear themselves on their own nature." (someone in the background gasps - "Wait, ghosts are real!?") "You could be an evil demon possessing the body for some nefarious purpose and lying to us about that so we'll let our guard down about it. You could be an evil wizard* acting out some esoteric plan which I cannot help but summarise as 'fucking with us'. Marcus here could have just gone entirely mad. It's hardly without precedent. Lastly, he could be telling us the truth, and will presumably tell us the truth about how to get rid of him."

"Now, let's leave aside the possibility of possession by ghost or demon for a moment. If you are an evil wizard, why are you doing this? Possession is no mean feat, and the sort of wizard who is good at deception is not the sort who is good at possession. So to suppose that a wizard is possessing Marcus, and carrying out some elaborate and convincing bluff, we have to suppose a very particular wizard - perhaps the only such mage alive in all the west - has decided against all common sense, to use their unusual and valuable skill-set to come to this little hive in the middle of nowhere, and achieve nothing more productive than making us all doubt our own sanity. I'm sure in the full breadth of history wizards have done such things, and felt they were acting rationally at the time, but it stretches plausibility, to me, without any additional evidence to that effect." 

"The possibility of madness is of course, difficult to disprove, unless you have spells or abilities of your own to - " 

*for those following along at home, the word here translated as wizard connotes "mage whose power far exceeds their sense" without implying membership in a specific spell-casting class

At this point Marcus' father interrupts. "When it was talking about its ... profession, it used words I hadn't heard before. If you know those to be real words, which Marcus hadn't known, that would prove my son was sane, yes?" 

"I rather suppose it would, yes. Oh dead one - what did you have to say about your profession, that you practice so far from our home?" 

Minaiyu feels much more respected by the witch using person pronouns for him than by the "oh dead one" thing. The "oh dead one" thing seems kind of sarcastic, or at least insincere; the noun class seems candid, a signal the witch maybe hadn't noticed he was sending.

...well, that's not going to work to prove Marcus isn't...delirious? Is that what that word means? It feels stronger than that: did setting up the soul-catching magic accidentally strengthen people's brain-soul connections and make them capable of remaining in delirium for longer?

Anyway. Minaiyu only speaks this language as well as Marcus does, since he's getting it from Marcus's brain. Maybe his housemate--father, apparently--hasn't happened to hear some of these words, but Marcus clearly knows them.

(Maybe it would be for the best if Marcus gets declared delirious? They can pretend to "recover" in a couple days, and Minaiyu can remain closeted thereafter. Maybe later they can move somewhere nobody knows them and pretend to be twin-souled, if this is one of the demon-world cultures that accepts twin-souled--

--no, that isn't going to work. Marcus won't go for it. Maybe if he were the sort of person who would rather attempt to quietly tolerate being possessed by a demon than suffer the consequences of being outed as a host, but he clearly isn't: if he were, he wouldn't have made the distress call, at least not right away (before trying to figure out whether Minaiyu was the lesser of the two evils).

(And Minaiyu definitely isn't going to hide his continued existence from Marcus: he could maybe deal with being a secret voice in someone's head and fronting only when no one could see them (or perhaps, eventually, in circumstances where he was confident he could fake being Marcus), but--even if you ignore the frankly horrifying ethical issues with spying on someone all the time--being a silent passenger for decades sounds sufficiently torturous that he'd rather they killed him.))

The note of distaste on "profession" suggests the man is thinking of the part about surgery, which he seemed rather put off by.

"Uh, it doesn't work like that, I get my ability to speak the language from him, but--

--I talked about how we've compensated for not having magic by developing good non-magical medical tools? And how we can do surgeries now without it having to be a desperate last resort, because we've invented medicines to keep people unconscious during it so they don't feel the pain, and we can keep the operating theatre clean enough that they don't get sepsis?"

Sepsis? Is that what Marcus's father hadn't heard of?