“Next!” the woman bleated.

He shambled over, shedding slivers of bark and flakes of dry lichen. The woman nodded at a blue thing: some kind of chair? He sat.

“Planet, species, gender.”

“What?”

She sighed. “Where are you from, what are you, do you have a sex?”

“The woods? Mossman? Male?”

“Produce your chip for scanning.”

He picked off a scab of wood and offered it hopefully.

“God help me,” she said. “You’re an illegal alien alien. I’m going to have to call Bruce. Bruce! Podback!”

He was mystified. By the time he understood the place he’d awakened was now called “Michigan” and what he’d thought was a magic tower was really the Detroit Unemployment Office, he’d already been deported to a planet orbiting Epsilon Indi: one inhabited by bipeds with scaly photosynthetic skin and an external gill system.

Actually, they looked nothing like the Mossman, but it was close enough for Earth INS .

And yet the spirits work in mysterious ways: Epsilon Indi III needed a hero. They got one from 4th Century BCE Earth.