POV: the-stranger
Summary
The stranger, crouched outside the wooden meeting hall, lets the realization settle. He owns this place — England, the planet, the entire universe attached to it — at least as far as a bill of sale is concerned. The arrangement, as he half-remembers it, is the standard dimensional-travel one: not a deed but exclusive access, locked behind a quantum passcode only he can open, with whatever local jurisdictions exist on Earth declining to follow buyers across the dimensional boundary. Inside the bubble, the laws of physics need not behave; the UN's writ certainly doesn't.
The discovery generates more questions than it answers. What kind of person buys a planet? Why would such a person wake up in a charred field rather than in the kind of pre-prepared stronghold or science compound that "recuperation" implied in the marketing copy? And what futuristic edge over the locals does he actually possess? An honest inventory turns up medical nanites — which mostly make him hard to poison and easy to patch up, and which would be a poor demonstration of godhood without a snakebite and a willing audience — plus a small store of half-remembered movie quotes and the general knowledge that computers will, eventually, involve circuits and processors. Walking in to announce his ownership of the village, he concludes, will probably end with him bleeding on the rug while the lord explains that the sword in his gut does not care for paperwork.
He works his way around the back of the hall to listen. He catches only a fragment: the lord, audibly reluctant, telling his visitors that there is a skop in town and beginning to suggest some role for her, before a quieter, more threatening voice from one of the messengers overrides him. Footsteps, and the whole party leaves the building, the stranger still trying to catch the gist. Slipping around the side, he hears the lord, distinctly annoyed, telling them that if the man they are looking for is nearby, the village will find him — though by the look of the burn-circle, the man may already have been struck down by a god. The visitors say nothing in reply and stride out through the open gates.
They are looking for him. The relief is immediate. Something went wrong with the transfer; the people who run his dimension have noticed and sent rescuers, and he has only to flag them down. He starts to raise a hand —
— and his body spins on its own. Two villagers have been creeping up behind him through the shadows of the hall: a young man with a knife in front, a young woman a step behind. The youth swings and the stranger blocks the strike on his forearm by pure reflex. It does not hurt. The blade does not nick him. He has time to register that he has more augments than he knew — that he is, apparently, a fighter — when memory ambushes him. Shouts. Flashes of light. Shame deep enough to feel like a vine wound around his lungs. He stops fighting and puts a hand to his head, trying to hold the fragments still while also trying to push them away.
The youth swings again. This time the stranger is too slow to react, and only the unseen plating saves him: the blade strikes his exposed wrist and skips off. The young man backs up a step, wide-eyed. The woman, who has gone looking for something more reliable than a knife, has come back with a wooden board. The stranger registers, dimly, that his arm plating should also cover the impact from a — and then the board hits him in the face. His nanites cut the pain receptors before he reaches the ground, which means the buried memories cut out too. Whatever else medieval England has to offer him, he leaves the chapter unconscious.