What the actual hell was wrong with this place.

  It felt like I had wandered into a soap opera, one of the badly written ones. I sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned forward, elbows on my knees, hands tangled in my hair while I stared at the floor like it might offer answers if I glared at it long enough. My thoughts were loud and fuzzy at the same time, which was a combination I had always hated.

  I took a slow breath and absently scratched at my cheek where Ephraim’s beard had brushed against my face. It itched more than it should have. I scratched again, slower, irritation blooming in a way that had very little to do with skin.

  Had I missed something? Had I been sending signals without realizing it? Some cultural mismatch where smiling too much or not pulling away fast enough meant consent. Or was this place just full of people who were lonely and catastrophically bad at boundaries.

  The thought drifted somewhere darker for a second and I pushed it away. That was unfair. They were not forcing themselves on me. Not exactly.

  Wait no. Even that thought felt slippery, and I grimaced as I realized I was rationalizing.

  The truth was simpler and more uncomfortable. They touched me in a way that would not have been okay back home. It was invasive. It was forward in a way that skipped several very important steps, even if no one here seemed to think it mattered.

  I was in no way interested, even if I had magic powers that would make a porn star green with jealousy.

  I pressed my palms together and exhaled slowly. I felt like I needed a TikTok or a YouTube breakdown titled “How To Set Personal Boundaries after an Isekai Teleportation”. Ideally with bullet points, maybe a flow chart.

  Shockingly, no one had prepared me for this.

  My eyes drifted to the bowl of water on the dresser. Okay. New plan: Clean up, then not be here.

  I did not want to address whatever was supposed to mean. I did not want to sit in this room waiting for another shoe to drop. I stood and crossed the room, splashing cool water over my hands and face. It helped. Not enough, but some.

  Yeah. I was not staying here.

  I crossed the room to the dresser and leaned over the wide bowl of water, bracing my hands on the edge for a moment before I actually started, because now that everything had slowed down my body was reminding me exactly how much of the day had involved blood that was not mine. The water was cool and faintly cloudy already, like it had been used recently, and I cupped it in my hands and brought it up to my face, scrubbing slowly and deliberately, trying not to think too hard about what exactly I was washing off.

  It took longer than I expected. There was grime ground into my palms and under my nails, dark streaks along my wrists, flecks of dried something along my sleeves that I pretended were mud until the color disagreed with me. I rinsed and wiped and rinsed again, changing the water partway through when it started to look more like soup than something meant for cleaning. I found a smear along my jawline that I must have missed earlier, and a sticky patch behind one ear that made my stomach twist a little until it finally came away on the towel.

  When I was done, I leaned back and checked myself over as best I could in the dull reflection of the water’s surface. I still looked exhausted, still looked out of place, but at least I no longer looked like I had crawled out of a butcher shop.

  Next came the bag.

  I sat down on the bed and pulled it close, opening it carefully and laying things out in a rough order that made sense to me, which mostly meant grouping items by how upset I would be if they were missing. My phone was there, thankfully, wrapped the way I had left it, screen dark as it was powered off but intact. Headphones too. The solar charger followed, scratched and unimpressive but still mine. The small pouch of money from the warrior at the cliff was still tucked where I had left it, heavier than it had any right to be and still a little surreal to think about.

  I hesitated, then dug deeper.

  The dried rations were still intact as well, hard and unappetizing and stubbornly present. I turned one over in my hand, thought about how bad it tasted, then thought about how hungry I had been the first night here and put it back. Waste felt like a bad habit to start.

  Everything else looked fine. Nothing missing. Nothing broken. No new surprises.

  I repacked slowly, more carefully than necessary, and by the time I tied the bag closed again I realized an hour had slipped by without me really noticing. I had not been resting. I had been stalling.

  With a quiet exhale, I stood, slung the bag over my shoulder, and eased toward the door. I cracked it open just enough to peek out, then widened it and stepped into the hallway on soft feet. That was when I heard voices ahead of me, low and close, coming from a room I would have to pass to get out.

  The door was open.

  I instantly felt like a five-year-old sneaking out of bed to steal cookies in the middle of the night, convinced at any second I was going to get caught and scolded by someone’s parents. I froze in the hallway and did a quick, panicked scan of my options. Behind me was the room I’d just left. Ahead was the way out. To the side was another darkened hallway that didn’t seem to lead anywhere useful. The room I’d been given did have windows, but they didn’t look like they opened, and even if they did I had zero confidence in my ability to get one open in this frontier-built house without sounding like I was breaking out of prison.

  Fantastic.

  I took a quiet breath and decided my best option was to just… walk past. Casually. Like this was normal. Like I belonged here. Like I hadn’t just been kissed out of nowhere by multiple people and then immediately decided to flee the scene.

  I crept forward, doing my best impression of someone who was absolutely not sneaking, eyes forward, posture stiff, committing fully to not making eye contact with anything or anyone. That lasted right up until I reached the open doorway and the light spilled out into the hall, because at that point curiosity and dread teamed up and turned my head for me.

  Ephraim, Mathilde, and Silas were inside.

  It took my brain a second to process what I was seeing, mostly because I hadn’t been remotely prepared for it. The room was clearly the main bedroom, dominated by a bed that was absurdly large, far bigger than a king, more like something designed for royalty or very confident people. All three of them were on it, completely unclothed, tangled together in what could only be described as a cuddle pile.

  Ephraim was in the center, relaxed and utterly unbothered, one knee bent and the other stretched out, clearly comfortable in his own skin and the situation, his manhood on show and fully erect. Mathilde was curled against him on one side, her posture somehow managing to look both intimate and confrontational at the same time, eyes locked on me with a glare that felt sharp enough to peel paint. On his other side was Silas, wrapped around him with that same distant, unfocused look he always had, but his body language was loose and calm, the posture of someone who felt safe and unthreatened.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Candles burned around the room, soft light flickering against stone and wood, and I noticed a small table near the bed with a bottle of red wine and four cups set out like this were a planned event and I had simply missed the memo.

  I realized, distantly, that I was standing fully in the doorway.

  Ephraim noticed me then and smiled like this was the most normal thing in the world.

  “Lloyd,” he said, lifting one hand in a friendly wave and motioning me closer.

  "Join us".

  Mathilde’s glare intensified. Silas just kept staring ahead, unbothered.

  I stood there, heart hammering, brain empty, staring at the scene in front of me and thinking, very clearly and very calmly, that I did not expect to see the three of them naked and tangled like spaghetti.

  I backed up.

  Not smoothly. Not with dignity. Just a few short awkward steps like my legs had forgotten how hallways worked.

  “No,” I said, holding up both hands. “No no no. Thank you. But also no thank you. I’m good. I’m fine. Really. I think I’m just going to… go outside.”

  Every word came out a little too fast, tripping over the one before it, like if I didn’t keep talking I might accidentally agree to something by standing still.

  Ephraim looked at me for a moment, then nodded like I had just declined an offer of tea.

  “That’s fine,” he said easily in his deep voice.

  That helped. A little.

  I started edging past the doorway, keeping my eyes firmly fixed on a very specific knot in the wooden wall, when Ephraim spoke again.

  “Hey,” he said. “Why don’t you sleep in the barn tonight.”

  I paused despite myself.

  “It’s probably going to get pretty loud in the house,” he added with a small knowing wink.

  Every hair on my body stood straight up.

  “Yep,” I said immediately. “Barn sounds great. Love barns.”

  Behind him, Mathilde hadn’t stopped glaring. Silas hadn’t moved at all.

  Ephraim leaned over then, casual as breathing, and pressed a brief kiss to Mathilde before shifting and doing the same to Silas, like this was a punctuation mark to the conversation and not something my brain needed to process.

  “See you in the morning,” he said.

  I did not respond.

  I just kept backing up, nodding like a malfunctioning toy, until my heel hit the threshold and I nearly tripped over my own feet. I turned without another word and walked out of the house, the cool night air hitting me like a lifeline.

  I didn’t slow down until I was well clear of the door.

  So are they a… throuple?

  I sat at the pillar where I had very recently been tied up the night before, the setting sun through the rough wood familiar in a way that felt unearned. When I came into the barn there really had not been anywhere else to sit that did not involve hay or questionable smells, and I had ended up drifting back to the exact spot where I had started all of this. It felt oddly appropriate, like the universe had a sense of humor and was committed to the bit.

  I leaned my back against the post and pulled my phone out, turning it on, and was surprised to see I still had just under twenty percent left. That felt like a small mercy. I decided to risk it and put my wireless headphones in, half expecting them to be dead too, but they paired without complaint. When I opened my streaming music app I was greeted with a warning that I could keep listening to my downloaded songs for another twenty-five days before access shut off completely.

  Huh.

  That was more than I had expected.

  I selected a 90’s punk playlist and rested my head back against the wood, closing my eyes for a moment while sound that felt like home filled my ears. For a little while I just breathed and let my shoulders drop. I held my dagger loosely in one hand and absentmindedly toyed with it, nothing dangerous, just asking it to open and close its mouth, stick out its tongue, blow a raspberry once, the kind of idle fidgeting you do when your brain refuses to shut up.

  I wasn’t judging. Really. Non-standard relationships were not a shocking concept to me. I just had not seen that particular configuration coming. Ephraim and Mathilde I had guessed at based on vibes alone, but Silas had genuinely thrown me. I had assumed he was their ward or someone they had taken in out of obligation or kindness, not… a plus one.

  Which led to another uncomfortable line of thought.

  Silas struck me as being somewhere on the spectrum, or something adjacent, and that immediately raised a thousand warning flags in my head. Was he being taken advantage of? Was I projecting my own cultural assumptions onto a situation I did not understand? He had not looked uncomfortable. If anything he had looked relaxed in a way that was hard to fake.

  I rubbed my face and sighed quietly.

  I did not know this world. I did not know their rules. I did not even know if I could have a conversation like that with him in a meaningful way. He was an adult in a strange place just like the rest of us, and assuming helplessness on his behalf felt just as wrong as ignoring the possibility altogether. Even

  God this place was exhausting.

  I sat there with the music playing in my ears until a Sum 41 song came on, which made me laugh outright at the sheer absurdity of hearing that here in another world. The contrast was so sharp it almost felt intentional. When the song was nearly over my phone chimed a warning and I saw the battery had dipped under ten percent, so I decided to call it there, shut everything down, and save what power I could so I could try charging it with the solar panel in the morning. It was getting pretty late and the sun would be setting soon I would be losing my light, I needed to wrap up soon.

  After tucking my headphones and phone away I went back to fiddling with the dagger and the [Magic Mouth] attached to it. I still could not wrap my head around the fact that people actually used something like this as a sex toy, though I imagined most of them were not slapping magical mouths onto knives or other sharp objects. I sighed and reminded myself that I had learned a long time ago never to underestimate human horniness under any circumstances.

  Ephraim had mentioned that the caster could modify the spell once it was cast, and that thought stuck with me as I realized I had not actually tried one of the most obvious things a mouth could do. I looked down at the dagger and said, “Say the word 'Mommy'."

  The mouth took a second as if preparing itself, shaping lips that did not exist a moment before, then said “Mommy” in my own voice. It was not a perfect echo. There were tiny differences, subtle shifts in tone and timing, like something else was wearing my voice rather than replaying it. It made my skin crawl.

  I told it to keep saying the word and it did, repeating mommy over and over without pause or breath, until I felt a spike of discomfort and thought that it really needed to stop. To my surprise it did, cutting off instantly.

  That made me freeze.

  It had responded to my thoughts.

  I tested it, focusing deliberately and thinking say mommy again, and I felt something click into place in my head, like a mechanism engaging. The mouth obeyed immediately, repeating the word until I told it to stop again, which it did just as easily.

  I stared down at the dagger in my hand. This world was deeply weird. I was holding a weapon made of some kind of bone or something worse, with a magical mouth that responded directly to my thoughts, and somehow that was now one of the least strange things I had encountered today.

  At least I thought, I could probably trust the dagger.

  I frowned at that thought, realizing I kept calling it the mouth dagger like that was a normal thing to do, and decided it needed a name. After running through a few options in my head, I looked down and said, “You know what. I’m just going to call you Mouthy.”

  The dagger went still. Not frozen exactly, but settled, like it had acknowledged the name. The mouth did not move, but it felt different than before, less like a paused effect and more like something resting.

  That pause felt important, though I could not have explained why.

  Oh well, I thought, and put the dagger away. The sun was already sinking and the shadows were stretching long across the barn, and I could tell I was about to lose what little light I had left, so I figured I might as well make the most of it. I went over to a pile of hay, arranged it into something vaguely comfortable, and settled in to sleep for the night.

  Lying there, staring up at the darkening rafters, I realized I was surprisingly unconcerned with the world I had left behind. I was not worried about my job as an auditor, or my boss wondering where I had disappeared to, or the clients we had been working with. I was not even worried about my family. I loved them, but the relationship had always been tenuous, strained by distance and habit more than anything else, and the uncomfortable truth was that my absence was probably not going to upend anyone’s life in any meaningful way.

  That realization sat heavily for a moment.

  Jeez, I thought, what does that say about my life. There was probably a lesson buried in there somewhere, something profound and uncomfortable, but I did not have the energy to dig it out, not after everything that had happened today and definitely not after accidentally walking in on the early stages of a pre-orgy.

  I snickered softly at that thought, rolled onto my side, and let myself drift off to sleep.