Fingal Ainsley was starting to wonder what was up with this city. Not long ago, when he was on his way home from the university, a cloud of oversized bats has swarmed through the city, attacking everyone in sight. He’d had to bolt for his apartment building, and barely got inside before they reached they reached the area. Stranger still, in a scant few minutes they were gone, and life seemed to continue as if it had never happened. When he went to class the next day, nobody seemed phased by the occurrence. So a few days after the incident, Finn decided to see if there was more going on. And since nobody at the university seemed to be talking about it, he turned to the news.

Finn made himself a mug of coffee, then sat down at his computer. He figured it was best to start with a more general search, so he pulled up some local news outlets and started browsing the stories from the past few days. Sure enough, there were articles about the bats and their aftermath. He sipped his coffee as he read, finding that the bats had come from some abandoned tunnels that had been uncovered during some construction. And it turned out he was lucky to have escaped the bats, because people who’d been bitten were coming down with a strange illness people were calling the “Vampire Sickness.”

For a while, it seemed that was all the articles had to say, just reworded and with different pictures or witness testimonials. He started skimming, looking for anything different, then paused when something caught his eye. One person being interviewed made an offhand comment about the bats being “the latest monster attack” in the city. Latest? There were more? Finn set his coffee aside and began pursuing this new line of inquiry.

It turned out to take more digging than the news of the recent bat attacks, and his coffee was forgotten as he probed every possible source of information. While the subject was not widely covered on major news outlets, there were occasional mentions of monster sightings, terrorist attacks, and unexplained deaths. However, there were more details on blogs and less notable news sources, some with pictures or shaky videos. He almost wished this were some elaborate prank, that the blurry photos of unnatural creatures were just another Bigfoot or Loch Ness Monster; props set up to lend credence to a hoax. But each time he found a new story, he found it harder and harder to tell himself it was fake.

Well then, if even some of the stories were real, Finn would have to conclude that this city was a very dangerous place to live, far beyond the usual level of crime one would expect in a large city. He wished he’d known about it before he moved here for college, at the start of the school year. Finn sighed and leaned back from the computer, rubbing his eyes. How was someone supposed to stay safe in a place like this?

He finally remembered his coffee, and even though it was probably ice cold by now, he reached for the mug. But he stopped when he saw something unexpected next to his mug. Sitting on the desk was a small gold pocket watch with a thin chain curled up beside it. Finn could only stare at the object for a moment. It was not something he’d ever seen before, and he knew it wasn’t there when he put his mug down. What was it doing here?

Curious he reached over and picked it up. As soon as it was in his hand, a faint surge of something ran through him. He reflexively closed his eyes and shook his head to try and dispel the strange feeling. After blinking a few times he looked at the watch again to try and examine it more closely, but yet another unexpected thing caught his attention. Something was odd about his clothing. Instead of the sweater he had been wearing moments before, his sleeve now ended in a leather bracer of some sort. His gaze traveled down the length of his arm, then up and down the rest of him as he realizes his entire outfit had changed.

‘What is this all about?’ he wondered to himself. As if in reply, a single word came to mind: Kithairon.

Finn’s brow furrowed pensively as he considered the word. It sounded like a name, but not one he’d ever heard before. He was unable to guess what it might mean, so he decided to turn back to research. Since all he had was one word, he typed it into a search engine with no context. He typed in one spelling without thinking, and soon found it was an alternate spelling of Cithaeron, a mountain in Greece. He considered whether he should use the other spelling, but found it didn’t feel right. Why? He sighed, decided it wasn’t the most pressing question, and kept reading. He found a few Greek myths associated with the mountain, but nothing that might explain the outfit or why the name came to mind. Aside form myths and basic geographical data, there didn’t seem to be much of interest.

When that line of inquiry dried up, he cast around for a new angle to pursue. Since the only thing literally at hand was the watch, he started examining it. It seemed to be a perfectly normal pocket watch; the time was set correctly, the hands advanced as they should, the cover snapped open and closed easily. The only anomaly was a symbol etched on the cover, which seemed to be a combination of the letters P and L. Was that symbol perhaps Greek as well?

A very quick search found it wasn’t in the Greek alphabet, but by chance the page he looked at also showed a list of astronomical symbols. That chart identified the marking as one of the two symbols used for the former planet Pluto. When he tried to research that, he found the opposite problem from Kithairon; there was plenty of information on Pluto. He could research that for days, but was beginning to doubt any of it would explain why the symbol was on the pocket watch that had appeared out of thin air.

Finally he decided to give it a rest and sat back, turning the watch idly in his hands. He still wondered what was going on, but he was out of things to research for answers. He turned his focus away from the computer and instead wondered where his usual clothes had gone. How could he get them back? As soon as he focused on them, the watch disappeared from his grasp. He glanced down to see if he’d dropped it somehow, and instead found the strange outfit had been replaced by his familiar one.

He checked his pockets briefly to make sure his keys and wallet were still there, then sat in silence for a moment. Letting out a sigh, he picked up his mug and went to make a fresh cup of coffee. Right now he just wanted to stare at his fish tank and think about things.