Chapter 5: Leaving

Gianna and I rode the horse out to our pond. We decided we would spend the night there, then decide in the morning where we wanted to go. She wanted to be nowhere near the remains of the house she had lived her entire young life in, which I completely understood.

Neither of us slept a whole lot that night. We laid out under the stars, with me holding her. She laid her head on my chest. We talked some, but not much. When morning came around, I asked her if she wanted breakfast, but she said she really wasn't hungry. Neither was I, to tell the truth. The images of Kathia's violated body kept coming back to me.

"Where should we go?" Gianna asked me.

"I don't know," I admitted. "I'm not from around here."

She took my hand and gently squeezed it. "I know almost nothing about you," she told me, "except for what I feel for you."

"Alright," I said quietly. "I'll tell you. Gianna, I'm not from this world. I come from a planet named Earth, which is... well, I don't know where it is in relation to here. But I know this isn't Earth. I live, or lived, in Washington state, which is in the United States of America. Everything you have in this world either doesn't exist in mine, or is like a relic of the past on my world. We don't have dragons and hobgoblins and zombies. Swords were used in our ancient past. My home is much more... futuristic, more advanced, than here."

She simply stared at me. "Well, if you don't want to tell me, you can just say so."

"I'm telling the truth, Gianna. Think about the clothes I was wearing. Have you ever seen anyone else dressed in such cloth? Or my backpouch that you said you never seen the likes of before. Or my watch."

She looked at me, still not entirely sure what to believe. I started telling her about the tunnel and how I got to this world. It was then that I recalled that electric tingle I felt when I was exploring.

"Oh my God," I said. "This is going to sound like something out of one of my comic books, but I wonder if I crossed through some sort of... dimensional portal."

I stood up and began pacing around, my mind thinking. "That must be it," I said aloud, more to myself than her. She stayed sitting on the ground, just watching me. "And if there's one portal, than there has to be others! I just have to find them!"

"You are either telling the truth," Gianna said, "or you are ill in the head."

"Maybe I'm a little bit of both," I smiled, sitting back down beside her.

"Your story does explain a lot," she admitted. "It's like everything my mother and I thought was peculiar about you suddenly makes perfect sense."

"So now you know why I don't know where we should go."

She nodded. "I think we should go to Burcel first. We can stay at the Lazy Horse Inn, then decide where to go from there."

"Sounds good to me. Let's start getting ready to go."

We were ready very quickly. The horse, Leon, started taking us in the direction of the village of Burcel. Gianna rode behind me, arms wrapped around my stomach. She had her head against the back of my shoulders.

We rode south from the farm, quickly hooking up with a dirt road that Gianna said led to Burcel. After a while, the plains around us became woods, the dirt road snaking through it. Gianna and I spent the ride talking. Now that she knew where I had come from, she was an unending source of questions about what my world was like. I told her about my life back home. She asked me about my family and friends. I told her about my parents, but the rest of my family all lived far away and I never got to see them. And I told her I didn't really have any friends.

"But you said you went to school with many people our age," Gianna said. "How is it you never became friends with any of them?"

"I never really fit in," I told her. "My interests were just not what most of the kids at my school were into. The other kids who liked the same things I do, I thought were total pricks."

She giggled. She had never heard that term before.

"I didn't mind being alone, really."

"What about girls?" she asked. "You're so smart and handsome, you must have had many girls begging to marry you."

"In my world, I'm too young to get married." She gasped in astonishment at that, and I continued. "And no, I didn't have a whole lot of girls knocking down my door to be with me. Actually, I had none."

She was silent for a moment, then she got up the nerve to ask, "What we did yesterday, was I..."
"My first?" I said, looking over my shoulder at her. "Yes."