REINCARNATION AU [11fam AU]

Chapter 4 - Italy (year 18XX)

Water.
Fresh, shiny, enveloping, almost suffocating.
Or maybe she was drowning.

She waved her arms forcefully, trying to get out of the abyss where she ended up.
The bitter feeling that the boy's flame had simply dragged the girl towards the depths of the sea and, once her head would come out of the water, she could again look her friends in the eyes and exclaim a loud "... it didn't work."

With this awareness she managed to rise to the surface, breathing the fresh morning air, swimming and dragging herself towards the beach with the sole goal of lying on the sand and catching her breath.
After a few interminable seconds, the girl slowly got up, looking for Luca and their friend with her eyes, but not finding them.
Had they already gone away? Yet a minute or two had passed.
In the distance, however, there were some fishermen. They were attentive to their work and had not noticed the girl.
Puzzled, Nozomi turned again and two children watched her from a short distance away.
The girl had a long but discolored and wrinkled dress, absolutely unusual. The boy wore a white shirt with brown vest and trousers, but the interesting thing was the flat cap on the head, typical headdress for a Japanese boy of the new millennium, right?

The neighing of horses in the distance, the sound of some bells. That was definitely not Japan.

Meanwhile she was trying to understand what was happening, her curiosity for the girl child now disappeared with her brother, soon turned into terror.
The girl looked down and realized with horror that she had made her first big mistake: she hadn't thought about the clothing, in fact she was still wearing a tartan miniskirt, a shirt with a tie and the usual sweatshirt. The shoes, by the way, were gone, probably swallowed by the force of the water during the ritual of her friend.

Without even time to think, she got up and started looking around, looking for anything she could put on and that would certainly have been less problematic than that clothing. She didn't want to be burned at the stake as a witch on her first day in the 19th century.
A sheet of white cloth was right for her, the girl stole it without remorse and managed to get a sort of tunic that at least could cover her shameful legs from prying eyes. Years of Survival Games had been worth something, however Haname's sewing skills would actually have been more useful.

She spent a few minutes thinking about where exactly she was. Before ending up there, she was on Namimori beach, near the lighthouse. However, now she could only be in Italy.
While slowly advancing on the sand, the fishermen screamed in Sicilian dialect phrases that she couldn't understand very well, not being used to speaking in dialect. The rocks and the shape of the beach, however, led her to understand that she was in Palermo, exactly on the beach of Sferracavallo.

Therefore she advanced towards the inhabited center and couldn't do anything else. Some people looked at her, but they didn't seem to be that terrified, despite the fact that she looked like a little mermaid who, just out of the water, had tied a casual towel to her body. Perhaps, rather than a little mermaid, she looked like a poor homeless woman looking for charity.
Which, in fact, could also be true.
The problem was serious enough, she had to get decent clothing and even footwear, she couldn't go barefoot.

The next thirty minutes were filled with confusion, fear and amazement. She had never stopped looking around and her attention traveled fast on everything around her.
From passers-by who chatted, but dressed like in a historical film, the old-fashioned shops, the smell of fish from the market and the screams of the sellers, the carriages that occasionally passed and the incredible stench of the horses.
During that time, the girl had done nothing but observe every little detail, movement, event; listen to every word, every sound, every vibration; perceive every smell and stench.
She also wanted to touch, but she kept her hands in their place, even the vendors seemed reluctant to want that poor woman dressed in a sheet to touch the goods on display.