I write an Isekai about communist revolution until an anime is made out of it

The Elgean Exchange

Rays of sunlight shone through the glassless window as a sour welling in my gut jarred me awake. My memory of last night dissolved from my thoughts like a dream as the primal sensation of infectious disease lashed my stomach. Instinct yanked me up from my bed, out of my room, down a flight of stairs, past the unflinching zombie of the man who had served me a beer just a few hours ago, and out the door just in time for the pressure crawling up my digestive tract to hurtle my dinner out onto the street.

In another half-hour, I had staggered to the inner city and found myself a doctor who didn't look like he had sewn-together monsters in his basement.

"I'm afraid I must ask you some questions, in order to best treat what ails you. Naturally, I offer a discount to my services for answering them."

"Uh, okay? Go ahead, what do you need to know?"

"Well then, have you engaged in any - sexual activity - recently?"

That brought a fit of laughter past my lips that took a good ten seconds to subside even after it descended into coughing.

"Ah, no, no haven't been up to anything like that."

"Hmh. It doesn't take much, have you had any intimate contact whatsoever?"

The word "intimate contact" yanked my thoughts back to yesterday, when - when I had that kiss.

Yahweh spare my rotten soul, that bitch gave me an STD! Of course she did. I should have known it was too good to be true. And I still haven't even confirmed whether or not she's a catgirl.

Well, all things considered, if exchange of disease is possible then I should at least be glad that I only have to deal with this and not some microscopic godzilla that wipes out most of the continent.

yeah, I guess it's good to stay positive.

As my meeting with the doctor continued, I began to piece together that I had some distinguishably fast-acting disease common among foreigners visiting Valkhiem, until it fell and the ensuing tide of refugees carried it here. I attempted to explain my high-school knowledge of how diseases worked until I made out the doctor's offense at me telling him how to do his job, and I left with instructions to rest for the forty-odd days it should take for the symptoms to subside.

So, that was me stuck in another city for another month.

The first thing I noticed during my stay wasn't how the inhabitants of the slums spoke, acted, and ever-so-slightly looked different from the Elgeans I'd met so far, nor how dilapidated and smelly my lodgings and those that I'd visited were compared to where I'd slept so far, let alone my cosy room back home, nor even that mildly-unsettling sensation in my lower spine that must have been caused by the hookshot I was struck with not too long ago, but how nigh-creepily popular I was. I could hardly make it down the stairs of the inn without being snagged into explaining something about home, or being shown something, or whatever else the flock engulfing me could come up with. To their credit, I could hardly consider anything I did out there to be a waste of time, even if I rarely managed the energy to leave my room for more than a few hours a day. During the earlier days, I'd hardly get the chance for even that before being strangled by positive attention from the flock surrounding me. If nothing else, having my social incompetence laid out before me like that distracted me from existential dread while I waited and recovered in my room.

It came as a blessing when, for a few days, my mouth swelled enough to distort my face and make speech difficult.

The only downside of my downtime was when some stray synapse or another occasionally stumbled upon the buried memory of my previous stay in Morgenheim. Looking back on it, I was lucky to have managed a whole month of that without being murdered; I may as well have showed the inner workings of a Gatling gun to a roomful of samurai. Actually that's hardly a metaphor for what I did, if only because my little stunt in Morgenheim was most certainly worse. How I was ever able to carry on with that complete ignorance for a month is a question which I can comfortably answer with the word apathy. It sort of sapped the very concept of anything mattering in my life, when one day, for no particular reason, everything I thought I knew and cared about vanished on a truck bumper.

By now that denial had left me, faced with a living demonstration of what it's like for your input to be appreciated in Elgea. I was visited by no less than seventy-eight hunters, thanking me for enabling them to bring in big game by "inventing" the guns that they used. The majority also gave me money: "a share of the spoils" they called it, and one guy even handed me a trophy: a tusk, one handle away from being called a longsword, which I debated selling with Hadlon for a good hour before finally giving away. I often lent my tommy-gun to these sorts, until one day about three weeks in when it came back disabled from firing so much poorly-formulated ammunition. I did have more peaceful interactions as well; once, when scrolling through my phone in search of a relevant image I swore I had saved somewhere, someone caught a glimpse of one of my memes, and I spent the following few days attempting to explain it and the context behind it. 

Occasionally, some RPG protagonist or messenger from the inner city would part the crowd to lecture me on the many heinous evils I was committing, often amid a chorus of boos. These grim reminders of my situation were enough of a headache to drive me out past the slums to the Valkgrine company's encampment, a mess of tents in a field just outside earshot of the city, as soon as I'd recovered enough to make the walk without vomiting. It was during one such visit when my bouts of yelling at grizzled veterans about firearm safety were interrupted by a call of alarm spreading through the camp mere seconds before Honse galloped out from behind a tent, letting the bloody-cloaked figure mounted on her bare back collapse at my feet.