-Just a note: use google translate if you really want to know what they're saying!

In all honesty, I couldn't have told you a thing. All I knew myself, was that everything here was foreign to me. I'd look up and see the kind of buildings I'd find in my history textbook. I couldn't even tell you from what century though, I just knew it looked familiar. I was also wearing much different clothes to the people around me; I'd gotten used to actually fitting in at my high school, and admittedly yes, we did have a school uniform, as bland as it was, but there was still a certain way to wear your skirt, a certain way to have your hair, a certain way to do everything, in order to fit in.

Here, was kind of like being in a room full of jesters. The men I saw walking past me, wore… a very flamboyant taste in apparel, I thought. Though I'd never been to the circus, I'd imagine this is what it'd look like, only, don't clowns wear it for humour? These people look very serious, as they stare at me, like I'm the odd one out.

The third problem I had, was that people spoke in tongues. When I looked out onto the street, people were speaking in another language. It was like French and Spanish combined. I think it's Italian. I think.

I really didn't know what to do, I didn't know where I was, how I got here, why. All I could tell you is that my name is Abigail. I was born in 1996, I go to the local high in my area code. I have a Nokia brick phone, I like to play videogames, though not a wide range of them. I enjoy puzzles, and I haven't spelt a word wrong since I was nine.

I consider myself tough; I've never backed down from a fight… regardless of whether I've actually been in one. I'm intelligent, though I'm hopeless with a Rubik's cube. Also too, I think a lot. That's why it caught me off guard—mind the pun—when a burly man in those odd red clothes covered in grimy silver armor, a sword strapped to his waist, had stopped in his tracks when he saw me. He completely blocked the mouth of the alleyway, and shouted at me in a foreign language, with a few of his friends dawdling along behind him. Don't get me wrong, he looked very threatening, but all the same, he wasn't looking at me like I was an enemy; he seemed merely curious. Suspicious, even.

He took a couple steps toward me, and I hesitated to take one back. He was talking, I assume to me, and I yelled back at him.

"Help!"

He looked utterly shell-shocked, before taking a step back and talking to one of his friends in a low voice. The slightly scrawnier man he spoke to crept forward, his expression completely unreadable. I think the whole concept of reading facial expressions was a huge downplay on fiction anyway; how the hell were people able to tell how a person was feeling just from looking in their eyeball?

"Parlez-vous français?" he asked, and my jaw almost dropped completely to the floor. What were the chances.

"Oui, mais limité." He nodded, and turned back to the other three, translating, I assume.

"Qu'est-ce que votre entreprise à Florence?" I didn't catch all of that. What the hell is entreprise? I shrugged, and we continued to converse, finally understanding what he was saying, even though his accent seemed ridiculously thick for him to even consider knowing more than one language. I noticed the sun had fallen from its position at the highest point in the sky, to low on the horizon, drawing long shadows of the buildings across the street.

Again, I couldn't have told you anything. I asked him where I was, a whole list of questions, but he continued to barrel on, questioning me almost endlessly. At one point, I could tell they made a decision, but I didn't know what. We had to communicate with our hands a lot, making gestures to my clothes, hair.

Talking to this middle-aged man upset me more and more as the sun sank lower into the horizon. It felt like about 5pm, maybe 6, before they took me somewhere. An office, that was about the size of my bedroom back home, with a single large desk in the center of the room, and a chair behind it. Within a single motion, the man who spoke to me in French told me to stay and wait in this room, and they stood outside it. For a moment the idea crossed my mind that I was a treasure to be guarded, until I considered the stares I'd received for my clothing on the short walk here.

Not gonna lie, I was scared out of my wits. I sat on the floor in the corner, so I didn't have to turn my head to look at the door. Something must've happened while I was out, because I was awoken from my place on the floor well after dark. No one spared a few moments to explain to me what was going on, before I was marched mercilessly through the torch-lit street. I picked up on certain details about the landscape.

Firstly, there were glass windows, yes, but they weren't glass like I knew it. It was foggy and looked like it was in a permanent state of uncleanliness. The buildings were made of a mixture of stone, wood, and small parts of iron. The road wasn't paved asphalt, just a mix of stone and dirt that had been walked on for such a long time it'd been compressed to a flat road. I quickly lost track of the way we'd walked, though it only took a short distance, maybe ten minutes. I caught sight of a house that we seemed to be making a beeline for.

One of the guards knocked on the door, which I noticed had an ornately carved angel. A few loud raps on the door, followed by yelling, and then silence. He knocked again, and this time, the silence was shortened by a faint shuffling sound, before the door swung wide open. A gangly man, maybe in his early twenties, with wavy brown hair to his shoulders, who looked particularly bright with life, considering the hour.

A very quick conversation took place, and then I was ushered inside. One of the guards hovered for a moment in the doorway, and then looked down at me.

"Tu vas rester ici." I was going to stay here. And he left me with this man, closing the door behind him. I immediately took to looking around, however there was only the one candle he'd lit and placed on the table, which caused a series of long shadows all around me. There was stuff anywhere; not necessarily a lush foyer that led to a mansion or anything, but stacks of things on shelves. Large pieces of paper rolled up, a huge number of canvases stacked together. I meant stuff, cause there was no real category for all these things.

The man and I sort of just stared at each other for a moment, without making eye contact. He looked like he wanted to go to bed, torn between leaving me standing here, or talking things down. He spoke to me in a quiet voice, and it took me a moment to realize he was speaking english. Accented heavily, though still english. He appeared weary, even though his eyes were wide with curiosity, eyeing my clothing while he spoke.

"My name is Leonardo Di Ser Piero Da Vinci. What is your name, miss?" he spoke slowly, not quite fluent, however he seemed to know enough to get by.

"My name is Abigail Reina Du Muerta. I am lost." I put it simply. His eyes seemed to bulge with curiosity, and he looked me over a fair few times. Yes, my surname is spanish, but my grandfather-my Abuelo- moved from Spain to Australia in the early sixties. My mother had insisted on calling me Abigail after her sister's twin, and for months before my birth my father's parents were positively enraged at the lack of tradition. They probably would've been happier with something like Carlina or Felipa. I don't know, I think my grandmother-my Abuela-had a sister or auntie or something they wanted to name me after. I wasn't listening to the story when it was last told to me.

Anyway, he rubbed his eyes and signalled for me to follow him to a small back room,kind of like an antechamber, only the chamber came first, which led around to a narrow row of stairs running up along the inside of the building. The stairs opened out to a small living room, only it appeared to be missing what I thought were the essentials-a television, remotes scattered all around the room, some form of entertainment system, but it was all just bare. There wasn't even a couch, just a single four-legged chair pushed underneath a simple desk, pointed toward the window, and an easel made out of a dark, and expensive-looking wood. I couldn't see much metal holding it together, and at that, it wasn't shiny and polished like I was used to.

The whole room seemed to have a very introverted feel to it. I bet he didn't like outside much.

He ushered me into a small room, probably the size of the bathroom in my house. A small, decrepit bed sat in the corner, no taller than a bath. He assessed the room for a moment before ushering me in, and smoothing out a few blankets in the candlelight.

"I am sorry for this mess. I was not warned." I smiled at him and offered a thankyou. He lit a candle beside my bed and left, somehow making the doorway more obsolete. It took me a few minutes to catch up with myself, and that's when I started to freak out.

I said I was tough, but even tough girls have their bad days, and so far this was just downright scary. I didn't know where I was, I didn't know how I got here, I didn't know why. I don't remember anything-I was walking down Lonsdale street and turned into an alleyway, and there was a man there. Just your regular homeless man, sitting down against the wall with a lack of possessions and a lack of hope.

And then, when I turned the corner, I was here. No unusual occurrence, no flash of white light that blinds me, no crazy hologram of an alien with a funny hat. Nothing. Not even some kind of souvenir I could take to get myself back to where I was. And I can tell you now, that there's no way I'm in the same time period as when I was born. There was no way. There was an alarming lack of television antennae out on the rooves. Everything just seemed wrong, like I'd imagined the past to be, only insanely more surreal.

And this wasn't the past past. This was way before that. This was like, the things we read about in our history text book. Before World War one, but after the crusades. And then it occurred to me, the man's name, which caused me to truly flip. Seated on the bed, a jolt racked through me, sending my skull into the wall. Leonardo Di Ser Piero Da Vinci.

I had no idea what the middle part meant, but, Leonardo Da Vinci. Leonardo Da-fucking-Vinci. This meant I was in Italy. How the hell did I get to Italy? And Leonardo Da Vinci… that made this, what, the 1500s? This was the Renaissance: Renaissance Italy. I found myself short of breath as I merely thought the words. I ran it through my brain again and again, and each time it seemed more and more impossible. And amongst it all, I found myself scared.

And alone.

And afraid.