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The stranger, crouched at the treeline above the field, talks himself out of marching down to the village and demanding answers. Something in his gut insists that the locals are not actors in a Renaissance attraction and that his interests are better served by staying invisible. He listens to his gut — partly because, in the absence of anything else about himself, his gut is all he has — and settles in to watch the settlement from cover until the sun goes down. He spends part of the wait silently composing a star-rated review of the tree he is hiding behind, and is unsettled to notice this is the second time he has done so; somewhere in his old life he was apparently in the habit of recording his impressions.

Twilight bleeds into a thicker dark than he has ever stood inside. The clouds smother any moon, and the village shows not a single torch or bonfire — not the night he was expecting. When he finally moves, his sneaking is conspicuously good: he covers the rows of young grain in near-silence, slips onto the dirt road, and walks into a village of perhaps twenty wood-and-thatch houses without raising any noise. The instinctive competence of it bothers him at least as much as the dark does.

A river runs along the far side of the houses. He kneels, scoops up water, and is halfway through reassuring himself that his medical nanites will neutralize anything in it when the thought itself snags. He has just remembered something concrete about his own body. Tiny machines, installed in him, that clean up toxins and pathogens, break down whatever he eats into nutrition and calories — anything organic, in a pinch — and in an emergency can pull off accelerated wound-healing. He once took a bullet and was back on his feet within an hour; the nanites were exhausted for two days afterward. He files away the half-discovered fact that he is likely to need more food than an ordinary man, and the louder, unwelcome implication that the kind of person who knows what his nanites do after a gunshot is not the kind of person whose past will turn out to be reassuring.

Beyond the river, across a wooden bridge, stands a pointed-log palisade ringed by a pit and equipped with a watchtower, enclosing only a handful of structures. It is the obvious seat of whoever was speaking in the deep voice that morning. He circles the wall, finds the gate shut, and tucks himself behind another tree to wait for it to open. Two riders eventually come up the road at a pace he considers unsafe in the dark, are admitted at the gate after a brief exchange, and draw every villager — guards included — out of position to crowd around them. He slips through the unattended gate behind them.

Inside the courtyard he takes inventory from cover behind a row of barrels. A jagged black standing stone, taller than it is wide, dominates the center of the compound — vaguely reminiscent, to him, of a broken obelisk. Across the yard, a small stable receives the two riders' horses; one of the two larger buildings is plainly stone-built and finer than the others — probably the lord's hall — and the other is wooden, more in keeping with the rest of the village. Set out in front of the stone building, at the base of the standing stone, is a careful arrangement: dishes of fruit, saucers of cream, lit candles — and, conspicuously, a single singed page of his own handbook, laid out among the other offerings. The boy who fetched the lord from the stone hall conducts the two riders into the wooden meeting hall instead, the stranger catching the word "refreshment" as they pass inside.

He waits until the lord himself emerges from the stone hall to join the visitors, accompanied by two men in plain clothes carrying single-handed axes and round wooden shields — an escort with, to his eye, a vaguely Viking look. The lord shouts up to the watchtower for someone called Oswald to close the gate, and a young soldier scrambles down to do it, grinning and bowing a beat too eagerly. While the lord and his guards step into the wooden hall and Oswald wrestles the gate closed, the stranger walks — does not sprint — across the yard, past the standing stone and the dishes, snatches the singed page, and reaches cover beside the meeting hall before he has had time to think about it. His hand drifts again toward a sidearm that isn't there.

Around the side of the hall he finds a shuttered, lit window and reads the page by the seeping light. It is headed YOUR OWN DIMENSION, and it is house copy from Frugal Wizard Inc.: an airy promise that the intricacies of dimensional travel need not concern the customer, since the company has done the hard work — the customer picks a package and receives, delivered to them, one pristine Earth-lite dimension of their own. The line lands. The medieval village, the burned circle, the strangers speaking modern English in a thatched hamlet that has no lights at night — it is not a theme park, not a social experiment, not a game. It is another dimension, and per the marketing, he is the customer who bought it.