The fluorescent lights buzzed like angry hornets above Kenji's cluttered apartment. At 25, he'd imagined himself drowning in spreadsheets, not in his own sweat as dengue fever cooked him alive. *Typical,* he thought, glaring at the half-finished Batman fanfic on his laptop. *I get isekai'd by a mosquito. No truck-kun, no epic death—just a damn bug.*
His vision blurred.
The last thing he saw was Monett's name on the screen—the chubby bookstore owner he'd created as a throwaway character.
Kenji woke to the smell of mildew and ink. His head throbbed as if someone had driven a railroad spike through his temple. The room spun—wrong, all wrong—as he struggled to sit up. His hands, thick and unfamiliar, groped at a waistcoat stretched taut over a round belly.
"What the hell?" he croaked, voice deeper, older.
A cracked mirror hung on the wall. The face staring back was Monett's: jowly, soft, with eyes that flickered faintly crimson in the predawn gloom.
Memories that weren't his slithered into his mind—Monett's *memories.* Running this crumbling bookstore. The Monett family's fall from grace. The way Gotham's shadows seemed to breathe at night.
Gas lamps sputtered as dawn crept over Gotham's jagged skyline. Monett pressed his forehead to the bookstore's grimy window, watching horse-drawn carriages rattle past shiny new automobiles—a city caught between eras. A newspaper on the desk screamed the date in bold ink: *April 15, 1925.*
Monett blinked at the headline: *Thomas Wayne Expands Free Clinics Across Gotham.* He remembered writing about Thomas Wayne—the brilliant surgeon and philanthropist married to Martha Kane, heir to the Kane fortune. They were Gotham's golden couple, their names synonymous with hope in a city teetering on the edge of darkness.
"Nineteen twenty-five," Monett muttered with a bitter laugh. "Bruce Wayne isn't even born yet."
---
**Far Beyond Gotham**
In a prison forged from dying suns and guarded by emerald light, two figures slithered through a crack in the walls. Their bloodline had been stripped, their power shackled—but desperation had made them cunning. They'd whispered lies of love to a lonely guard, and in his moment of weakness, he'd erased their existence from the logs. The guard, trembling with guilt, smuggled them aboard his patrol vessel—a skiff designed to navigate the cosmic currents between prison cells.
---
The skiff crash-landed in Gotham's northern forests, its hull splintering against ancient oaks. The vampires emerged, ravenous, their fangs glinting in the moonlight. They fed on the first humans they found—a pair of trappers skinning rabbits near a campfire. As blood dripped from their chins, they turned toward Gotham's skyline. Through the trees, the city's heart pulsed with an unnatural glow—its gas lamps burning brighter than any flame should.
Monett flipped the shop's sign to CLOSED. The day had blurred into a haze of muscle memory—he'd somehow known how to haggle with scholars over rare books, how to brew tea the way Monett liked it. *His* tea now.
The door creaked open behind him.
**They were already inside.**
Two figures materialized between the shelves, pale as corpses, their eyes glowing like dying embers. The scent of burnt parchment clung to their tattered coats.
"You'll do," one hissed.
Monett barely had time to raise his arms before they were upon him. Fangs pierced his neck, a white-hot agony that sent him crashing into a bookshelf. Leather-bound volumes rained down as he collapsed, the vampires' breath rattling like dry leaves in his ears. Darkness swallowed him whole.
---
**Consciousness returned in fragments.**
Monett found himself sprawled on the floor, neck throbbing. The shop reeked of sulfur and old blood. Two piles of black dust smoldered nearby, their outlines vaguely human.
His body felt alien—too large, too strong. Energy crackled beneath his skin, and memories not his own slithered through his mind:
- The taste of centuries, blood from a hundred worlds pooling on his tongue.
- The art of compulsion, how to twist a mind with whispers and touch.
- The weakness of sunlight, not fatal but scalding, like boiling oil on bare flesh.
Yet beneath these stolen instincts pulsed something deeper. A presence, vast and dormant, coiled in his marrow. The vampires' blood had tried to claim him, but this hidden force had burned them to ash instead.
Then he saw it.
A silver ring glinted on the floor near the counter, its surface etched with symbols of winged serpents. When he touched it, the air shimmered, revealing glimpses of a ship, stacks of leather-bound books, and vials of black blood suspended in glass.
"So," he muttered, loading a rusted revolver from under the counter. "Vampires, alien tech, and Gotham before Batman." Somewhere outside, a church bell tolled.