Tyler Swift
In isekai stories, there were two types of protagonists in broad strokes.
The first kind was the lunatic one. For some reason, they weren't perturbed by getting transferred to another world in the least, if they weren't outright ecstatic about it. It could be due to a myriad of reasons. Maybe they ended up in a world that was full of flowers and sunshines, maybe things where so dire in their previous world that departing one world for another was a blessing, or maybe they were just fucked in the head, plain and simple.
Then there was the other kind of protagonist: the lamenter. They could go anywhere from a slightly distressed 'what the fuck' to obscenely hysterical 'OH GOD, OH GOD! WHY AM I HERE?! WHY THE FUCK DID THIS HAPPEN TO ME?! I DIDN'T WANT THIS! GET ME THE FUCK OUTA' HERE! GET ME THE FUCK OUT! WHAAA! WHAAAAA!' And they could have all sorts of reasons to act out that way; like they were a well-adjusted person so they found the concept of reincarnation -or whatever the method they were transferred with- soul-crushing, or maybe they had something good going on over yonder, family, friends, a cushy job, you name it, and they weren't pleased with leaving all ot that behind.
So here came in me, expecting myself to belong to the latter category. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to think I was more mentally robust than the average man, but I'd also like to think I was someone who knew his own limits, and finding myself transferred over into a veritable grimderp death-world should have been way above the stress threshold I could handle.
It should have been.
Should. HAVE. Been.
But I wasn't. As I was sitting on a bench, somewhere around… I guessed I was at something of an intersection among the Docks, Downtown, and the Boardwalk. I was close to the coast.
Anyway.
As I was sitting here, all alone, in the middle of the night, in another universe which I had thought to be fictional, in a city so much of a shithole that you'd think the world had diarrhea and this was where its anus where… I didn't feel a single ounce of fear.
There was no jittering, no whimpering; nothing. My heart was beating steadily, my breath was even. I was just… calm. Like, supremely calm. Cool as a cucumber.
You might have been thinking my calmness came from this golden finger…
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It would have been not a bad guess. But you'd be wrong. If anything, this might have overwhelmed me even further. No, the reason wasn't nearly as mystical as this. The reason I was steady as a rock was this guy…
Who was 'this guy', you might ask? The guy I had been transmigrated into: Tyler Swift!
First of all, before anything else… What the fuck was that name? Was this some kind of cosmic joke, perhaps literally? Like, c'mon! I hadn't been a Swiftie. This guy hadn't been a Swiftie. Hell, there wasn't even a Taylor Swift in this universe! What gives?!
Now that it is out of the way…
Now, this guy, this Tyler fellow… He was… different. He was- how would I put this?
…
Yeah, this guy was fearless. Not brave, not mentally tough-as-nails, no. This guy was simply incapable of feeling fear, period. And now that I had memories of both feeling fear -from my past life- and not feeling fear -from Tyler-, his differences from normal human beings were even more stark.
It wasn't just the case of not being scared either. He didn't get anxious. He didn't worry. He didn't feel disgust. He didn't feel shame. He didn't hesitate. He didn't feel stress.
It was bonkers. This guy was devoid of any kind of emotions and feelings that was even remotely adjacent to fear and its related responses.
And it wasn't like Tyler was some kind of a psychopath or an unfeeling monster. He could get happy, sad, upset. He could get proud, affectionate, passionate. He could feel hatred, though this one was rare. You didn't realize how much of hatred was born out of fear until you had the experiences of a fearless person and someone who had been capable of feeling it, in the same skull space. He was quite capable of empathy too. I could even go as far as to say that Tyler was a more empathetic person than me… Yeah, I had my own problems…
Moving on…
Here was the clincher: I felt like myself rather than Tyler. Yeah, I knew this was virtually impossible. Our memories were what made us, us. So the fact that I had Tyler's memories in the first place meant that I was a fundamentally different person than who I had been before transmigration. But for all intents and purposes, I felt like I was myself with Tyler's memories, not the other way around, nor did I feel like I was a new person created by the melding of two sets of memories and personalities.
That should have meant I should have had the emotional baseline of past me; and I felt like myself in that regard, too. I was all up here, every kind of emotions and feelings I should have expected myself to have in this kind of situation, I had them all.
I had them all… as long as they had nothing to do with fear.
So this led me to a theory. If I was still incapable of feeling fear despite all the stuff I've just explained, that meant whatever made Tyler the way he was had not been psychological, but instead physiological.
Yeah, I could think of no other feasible reason for why I was still not freaking out despite giving myself revelations after revelations that should have been mind-shattering.
However…
As I sat here past midnight, all alone, in probably the most dangerous city in the whole continent, and feeling completely relaxed… I wasn't bothered by it.
Now granted, it was hard to feel that kind of thing anymore due to my new emotional status, but apart from that… I was fine with it in intellectual capacity as well.
Let us start from the most basic: Tyler's knots in muscles, or more specifically, a complete lack of them. This guy had been in roads for the past two years. Two whole fucking years. It hadn't been an easy living. It had been especially demanding on the body. And this guy, throughout all his journey, hadn't gotten a massage even a single time. His muscles should have been riddled with knots, but they weren't.
As I sat here and felt how my body felt relaxed more than it had ever felt in my past life, and I had the experience of sleeping in cashmere mattresses, mind you… Yeah, no matter how many times I had slept in the softest beds, no matter how many hot springs I had been to, no matter how many other kind of relaxing treatments I had gotten; it would never compare to relaxation derived from not clenching and contracting muscles due to stress ever, and making them move purely for movement purposes and nothing else.
And this was just the most obvious, most visceral difference. As I compared my memories of a highly-sought gigolo who'd had obscene amount of wealth, who'd had slept with countless women -many of which had been high-class ladies in body, riches, and demeanor-, who'd had virtually no worries in life; to that of a neurodivergent drifter youth who had been living in a world where monsters both in human skin and in not-so-human skin been roaming about, that the shit was so fucked that in another universe -where this world was thought to be fictional-, the stories transpiring from here were considered grimdark; guess who had been living the more fulfilling life?
It hadn't been the guy who had everything in life, no. It had been the guy who didn't have the things he didn't need in life. It hadn't been the guy who could bog himself down with the weight of uncountable riches. It had been the guy whose inner world made him as light as a feather. It hadn't been the guy that -despite having so much in life- couldn't help but have his own worries and demons.
No, it had been the guy who was pathologically incapable of feeling those emotions, incapable of having those problems.
It had been Tyler Swift.
I was Tyler Swift.
And as this world tried its damn hardest to make Tyler Swift flinch, I found the attempt wanting.
I was ready for this new adventure, for this new journey, for this new world. Whether the world was ready for Tyler Swift though… That remained to be seen.
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