Just a Commoner

It was the same damn copy store. Again. Me, the machine, and my growing sense of existential dread…just like last week and the countless weeks before that.

By now, I could probably give tours of the place. “And here we have the paper jam that haunts my dreams. Over there? That’s where I accidentally stapled my sleeve to a cover letter.”

Right now I was churning out resumes like it was my part-time job and sadly, the only one I had. Frustration simmered beneath my skin; I had probably made more copies than there were jobs in the entire city.

The market was a graveyard, the economy a mess, and my inbox a steady stream of rejections or, worse, silence. The copy store was my silent witness, and with every slap of the copy button, I was reminded just how much it all sucked.

I walked out clutching my freshly printed desperation, feeling hollow. Maybe it was time to give up on landing something permanent and just…disappear. Hit the road, live off granola bars and chaos, take odd jobs in dusty towns and pretend it was freedom.

But that was terrifying too. I wasn’t after riches; I just wanted enough money to pay rent without texting my parents a sad emoji. Was that so much to ask? Was it?

Lost in the chaos of my own thoughts; mostly centered on whether my résumé font screamed “Hire me” or “Please ignore me forever”—I didn’t notice the giant, murky puddle until it was too late. My heel hit the edge, and gravity, my best frenemy, yanked me down like a drama queen in a soap opera.

I landed knees-first in cold, gooey mud, papers flying, pride dissolving. The sludge soaked through my skirt, streaked up my arms, and probably tattooed itself onto my soul.

For a long second, I just knelt there, dripping and stunned, holding what remained of my résumé stack like a crumpled bouquet of failure. Then, as the ridiculousness of it all hit me, I actually laughed. One of those half-horrified, half-hysterical laughs that comes out when you’re one step away from a meltdown.

I glanced up, fully expecting to meet the horrified; or worse, pitying; eyes of some judgmental pedestrian. But no one was there.

And nothing looked familiar.

The coffee shop I’d just passed? Gone. The glass building? Gone. The street, the cars, the angry cyclist who almost ran me over just a minute ago? Poof. Vanished.

Instead, I was surrounded by crumbling buildings that looked like they’d failed several safety inspections... in the 900s. The sleek, modern city had been replaced by something grimy, crooked, and aggressively medieval.

The sidewalk had vanished, replaced by a narrow dirt road lined with hunched figures coughing into ragged sleeves. There were no cars, no neon signs; just creaking wooden doors, soot-smudged windows, and the distinct feeling that antibiotics had never been invented here.

It didn’t feel like the wrong side of town. It felt like the wrong century.

I glanced up, half-expecting to see God, or at least a sky that looked a little more judgmental. Maybe this was death, and the afterlife came with mud stains and a very confusing dress code. But nope. No angels. No heavenly choirs. Just the same bright blue sky and a sun that clearly didn’t care about my little crisis.

Everything around me shimmered like heat off asphalt, the world blurring at the edges like someone had smeared Vaseline across my eyeballs. I knelt there, frozen, heart jackhammering in my chest. My brain was doing its best impression of a loading screen, complete with that spinning wheel when it’s loading.

What. Had. Just. Happened.

What I was seeing made no sense. One second, I was in the land of overpriced lattes and unpaid internships. The next? Ye olde coughing village. I blinked hard. Once, twice. Still here. Still medieval. Still a human résumé disaster in a skirt.

I pinched myself. Hard. It hurt. Which meant, unfortunately, this wasn’t a hallucination brought on by toner fumes or burnout. This was real. Or real-adjacent.

And somehow, I’d been plopped into a different time… or a different world? Or maybe this was one of those weird immersive escape rooms and I’d missed the waiver?

I didn’t know. All I knew was that sitting here on my butt wasn’t going to help. If there was a reason I’d landed here, I needed to figure it out, and preferably before someone decided I was a witch or a tax collector.

So. I stood up. Shaky, soggy, mud-streaked, and trying to channel the kind of confidence I definitely didn’t feel. Act natural. Go with the flow. Blend in.

I looked around. The hunched, coughing figures paid me zero attention, which was somehow worse than being noticed. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, sending a clear message: Do not engage. Whatever medieval plague was floating around here, I wanted no part of it.

I stood up, wiped off what I could of the medieval street grime from my business casual dress, and stuffed my résumé confetti into my shoulder bag. I reached for my phone, pure reflex, then remembered it was charging in my car.

Only… I didn’t even know where my car was.

I muttered a curse under my breath. That phone would’ve been really useful right about now, Google Maps, emergency contacts, an embarrassing number of bookmarked dog videos. Anything.

I rifled through my bag, hoping for a miracle. Instead, I found:

– My wallet (useless for directions)

– My car keys (double useless)

– A hairbrush (mildly comforting)

– A stack of resumes now resembling damp tragedy

– And my mother’s “lucky” bracelet, which she’d made me carry “to attract abundance and success.” In return, she’d taken my favorite scrunchie, claiming it would pass my luck onto her, and we’d trade lucks. Clearly, her bracelet had been defective.

So... nothing remotely helpful. Unless I needed to bribe a horse with a hairbrush.

I glanced around the soot-stained alleyway, trying not to breathe too deeply. I needed to move. I looked up and spotted it: a castle. A full-on, spire-and-stone, Disney-who? castle in the distance.

Castles meant royalty. Or at least smart people. Or… people with access to answers. And possibly indoor plumbing. On the downside, castles also sometimes meant torches, pitchforks, or being thrown in a dungeon for looking “suspiciously different.”

Still, staying here in Plague Alley wasn’t an option. I had to take a chance. I squared my shoulders, adjusted my mud-streaked bag like it gave me a shred of dignity, and picked a direction. Time to walk toward the castle. And hopefully not into a beheading.

As I made my way toward the heart of the city, the castle’s towering spires rose majestically that made my heart race. The closer I got, the more people I saw; some bartering, some shouting, most of them looking like they hadn’t discovered deodorant yet. My excitement started to build… right alongside a very real, very urgent need for a restroom.

I spotted a small group that looked vaguely approachable and put on my best I’m-not-a-threat smile. “Excuse me, is there a public restroom nearby?”

They didn’t respond with words. Just a series of vague gestures toward the sketchier edge of town. Like a human game of charades that ended in disappointment.

I followed their pointing fingers, and… behold: a tiny wooden outhouse. It looked like it had lost a fight with time and hygiene. A literal hole in the ground, surrounded by a swarm of flies that had unionized and taken over. The smell alone was a war crime.

My heart sank. This was not the kind of restroom I could cry in while pretending to fix my makeup. Still, silver lining: they understood me. Which meant we shared a language. That felt promising… or at least less terrifying.

After my little bathroom adventure, I pressed on toward the castle, but my stomach had other plans. It growled loudly, like a dying animal. I hadn’t eaten since yesterday, thanks to my brilliant decision to skip breakfast and sprint through five versions of my cover letter instead.

Up ahead, a food stall caught my attention. Something sizzling, something delicious. I nearly wept at the smell. I rushed over, pulled out the last of my cash, crumpled bills, and held them out like a peace offering.

The vendor wrinkled his nose like I’d handed him a dead rat. “Why are you offering me paper?” he said, like I was the village idiot.

I stared at my twenty-dollar bill. He stared at me. I stared at his meat-on-a-stick. This day was going great.

A crowd gathering at a street caught my attention, circling a street performer like moths to a flame. Curious (and desperate for a distraction from my public food failure), I edged closer.

The performer, dressed in what looked like wizard-chic thrift wear, was levitating plants. Actual full-grown plants, root ball and all, spinning lazily above his head like they weighed nothing. Giant ferns doing air ballet. This was not normal. This was… not Kansas.

My stomach twisted. “How is he doing that?” I asked the woman next to me, my voice shaking.

She looked like she’d lost a few arguments with both time and laundry, but she grinned proudly. “That’s just magic. Anyone can do that.”

“Real magic? No way. There’s no such thing,” I said, because denial was still working for me.

She scoffed, snapped her fingers, and mumbled something that sounded like a cassette tape being chewed. A second later—bam! She was holding a leafy plant the size of an office chair, casually tossing it up and letting it hover in the air like she was juggling gravity.

I gawked. “What?!”

She flashed me a toothy grin. “Don’t you know how to do it too?”

“Umm—” Bad answer.

“Wait a second… are you one of tose outlaws who can’t do magic?”

“An outlaw? What are you—?”

Her eyes narrowed, the smile melting into something sharp. “You’re an acommon!”

“A w-what?”

Her grin stretched wider, like she’d just found a winning lottery ticket. “I can get a bounty out of you!”

“Bounty?! Wait a minute—what do you mean, acommon?!”

But she was already reaching into her tattered cloak, and that was my cue. Some survival instinct buried deep inside me screamed RUN, and I obeyed without hesitation.

I took off like my dignity depended on it (because it kind of did.) My dress flapped around my knees, my bag smacked against my side, and my lungs burned with every gasping breath. I sprinted through the crooked streets, dodging carts, people, and one very judgmental chicken.

My only thought?

Don’t stop.

Don’t get caught.

Don’t die in medieval cosplay hell.

With every pounding stride, I widened the distance between me and that bounty-happy psychopath, but the sheer terror of her grin was still chasing me down. Adrenaline surged through my veins like I was trying to outrun a bear; only worse, because this bear knew magic and had economic incentives.

As I tore through the streets, it became painfully obvious: everyone here could do magic.

Merchants floated glowing signs above their stalls, advertising pictures of bread and clothes. Kids were giggling as they shaped fog into strange, hissing animals, one of which may or may not have winked at me. A woman floated her screaming baby three feet in the air like it was a calming mobile. And the baby actually liked it. I was mildly offended.

I pushed my legs harder, my mind spiraling into full panic mode.

Was I really an outlaw? Just because I couldn’t poof a fern into the air like everyone else? What was this place—Hogwarts meets Hunger Games? Was there a beginner spell I could YouTube? Oh wait, no phone.

Finally, when my legs gave up and filed for early retirement, I collapsed into the first dark alley I could find. My lungs were on fire, my dress was sticking to me like a polyester prison, and I was sweating like a fraud at a magic convention.