I was trekking one day in deep woods, and while exploring some clump of old Oak/Maple/Redwood/Birch trees, felt myself yanked away and found myself inserted and disoriented in Stannis Baratheon's body. Due to the shock I fell down dazed, unable to move because of sensory confusion, and spent a few days in the woods assimilating all of Stannis's memories. It was a good thing that I had read parts of ASOIAF and watched some of GoT on YouTube.

Let me step back a bit and fill in the backstory.

Software writing is a hard and intense job consuming many hours. I was burned out, and lost my job. Personal circumstances required a move back to my parents place, a picturesque site among mountains, albeit far away from all civilization. They were old and starting to be infirm, especially my mother, who was starting to get bedridden from an undiagnosed disease. Taking care of parents in their old age is a difficult chore in our times, when their children are always on the move for search for opportunities. It so happened that my loving older siblings were all married and settled in other places and could not get involved that much, due to inescapable "family obligations", whatever that meant. Yours truly, newly unemployed, was in the unenviable position of having to be around to make sure of mother's health.

It was difficult to get good jobs in that outback. A few occasional contract jobs for far less pay than I was accustomed to were available through internet. This was the life for three years, with exhausting dealing with my immediate family who might politely be called rednecks, needling me for this or that or various other things. Still, unpleasant it may be, duty is duty, and it had to be done. So with the occasional help of a sister who lived some distance apart, and a maiden aunt a little further away, and my father and a local live-in helper, we did take care of an increasingly weak mother. The expenses were unmanageable and it needs to be said that the my absent siblings did help. This was a mixed blessing though; I had to eat a lot of crow whenever I needed help and I festered a lot of resentment towards my older brothers for this.

In hindsight, this similarity in disposition to Stannis may have been the reason the Old Gods of this earth's Godswood which I had accidentally passed through, or Alien Space Bats of , whatever, inserted my mind on to Stannis's body. This is not to say that I believed in Gods. A few months ago I had to helplessly witness my mother passing away and just like Stannis, I swore I will never pray to any God in future.

It so happened that I was in the Godswood in King's Landing, a place few people visit. Fortunately a search party found me in a few days, dehydrated and exhausted and faint, and carried me back to King's Landing. I feigned ignorance as to the circumstances of how I ended up unconscious in the woods and the investigating Gold Cloaks and the Maesters concluded that I was probably attacked and poisoned and lost the memory of the last few days.

After coming to, I ascertained that the year was 290 AC, a year after the failed Greyjoy Rebellion, and I was myself the lord of Dragonstone and Master of Ships and together with Jon Arryn cleaning up after Robert Baratheon's incompetence and apathy in governing the kingdom (there is no other description for what his reign was like), with little funds, and Stormlands being given to my younger brother Renly with all its funds, at the tender age of 8. I also had the unenviable task of facing up to the future cataclysmic events in Westeros and Essos.

I also had a bright darling daughter with a scarred face, not of the original me, but still mine, and a most unpleasant wife for now, with who the not sharing bed part will be fortunate happenstance, and in future a psycho Fire Witch to deal with. Lots of problems, lots of questions, and it is easy to take a wrong step or get paralyzed by analysis.

What should I do? It was time to think.