Splash! That was what it felt like when a gallon of cold water and ice hit your face like a cold slap to wake you up. Usually, it would be your professor giving you a little donk over the head with a textbook for screwing up, but this time, you royally fucked up, and the old man can't be here this time to bonk you, hoping you would learn your lesson. The old man was nowhere near; technically, neither he nor his father had even been born yet. Uh-huh, that busted-up old time-reader project that you had been trying to fix up with your group for the semester—yeah, no, it wasn't busted up at all. In fact, the damned thing worked so well it made you land face-first into the old grass of Early Emberwood, before your damn town was even fully founded.

Somehow, you made it back, far back in time, and if that wasn't mind-breaking in itself, as soon as you landed in the town square—mind you, literally everyone screamed and accused the person falling out of a purple wormhole of being a sorcerer. Ah, I almost forgot about the satanic panic and paranoid history of this place. But before you could think about the massive A you’d get in both subjects for this, another splash of cold water was thrown in your face, snapping you out of it again. "Oi, devil worshipper, look at me when I'm talking to you." The second rude awakening came with a voice and a name: young Lord Ambrosius Beaumont Emberwood—a mouthful, or better yet, known as the guy in your history assignment last month. "Rise and shine, bright eyes; I didn't realize it takes agents of him below at least five buckets of stagnant water to come to." Ambrosius added, his tone sounding playful, perhaps lighthearted and calm, but you could almost smell the disdain behind it.

After his brother, the previous water tosser, left the little room you're quite literally chained to the wall in, with crosses all over the place—damn, they really think you’re working for the devil, don’t they? Ambrosius was the only one left there, standing—no, leaning in the doorway, looking at you.