by M. Spreckelmeyer
A truck ends Marius Schreiber's lunch break, his career, and technically his life, in that order, on an unremarkable Tuesday. He wakes up in a cow pasture roughly seven hundred years too early, with no phone, no plan, and no magic, and reacts to all of it with the same flat, faintly irritated competence he used to bring to a customer screaming about a billing error — not amazed, not shaken, already calculating what needs documenting before someone decides this is his fault. He is blunt, honest to a fault, and deeply attached to knowing exactly who did what. None of this makes him colleague of the year. All of it makes it difficult to blame him for anything, which, in a world with no employment tribunal and considerably higher stakes for offending the wrong people, turns out to matter rather a lot. Feudal Europe was not built for a man who insists on getting to the root of the problem. It's about to get one anyway. He didn't come here to be a hero. Heroism has terrible hours and worse job security. He came here to find out who approved this, and why nobody wrote it down — and if that means auditing an entire medieval bureaucracy one petty dispute at a time, so be it.
