The year is 2020, and you're just going about your day, when SUDDENLY, you get isekai’d.
The place you land initially seems devoid of life, but you soon discover humans there, speaking a language you don’t understand but which is at least vaguely familiar to you.
These people are very primitive, foragers using only rudimentary tools.
You find out you don’t need to eat or drink, and are immune to all forms of harm, and as time passes, you realize you're not aging anymore.
As you look to the night sky and observe weather patterns, it's not QUITE the night sky and weather you were used to in your daily life, but it looks ALMOST identical, day and night.
You begin to try and bridge the language gap between you and the humans you encounter, mostly you learning theirs.
You do teach them some English phrases, but mostly, you learn their culture and what little oral history they have. They have family stories and myths which seem vaguely familiar to you, but don't quite match anything you studied in school.
And with time, something happens.
You begin to tell stories of your own, relaying to the best of your ability what you remember about various subjects. You have only a basic high school and rudimentary college general education, not an expert in any subject which really matters much in this primitive world.
But even though your high school education was years ago and you forgot more than you remember, you passively discover that you actually know a whole lot more than you give yourself credit for. You might not know much about any subject, but you know a little about just about every subject.
These people don't have an alphabet, or algebra-level math, or wheels, or tools beyond bows and arrows, knives, and spears. You bring knowledge of the existence of things they can't even really fathom the existence of. Computers, roads, cars, guns, airplanes, you name it.
You might not know how those things work, but your very tales of their existence leave an impression on the people, who begin to try and put some of your ideas into practice. And to your shock, they're actually really good at figuring out how to turn your ideas into reality.
Soon, these people worship you as a God-Ruler, despite your protests. You insist you're just as human as them, but your inability to be harmed, lack of human needs, no aging, and advanced knowledge all make them insist otherwise.
Even if they're the ones doing the work, you bring ideas.
Domesticated animals and farming took thousands of years to develop, but just you knowing they're possible and encouraging the people to try and experiment gets a lot done in a few generations. You have the beginnings of a people who have a strong continuous identity and remain stationary.
Writing, agriculture, more advanced tools, wheeled transportation, aqueducts, buildings with engineering, currency, all begin to form, based loosely on your understanding of them and pragmatically implemented by the hundreds, thousands of people now listening to your directions.
You embrace this role, figuring as long as you’re here, you might as well give the people the best lives you can manage. So, you do your best to direct them, and take on a name. Jokingly, you decide to name yourself after a historical figure, deciding to channel their brilliance.
As you study the passage of time, and train others to do the same, they improve upon your rudimentary understanding of astronomy to effectively reinvent it, and through these master astronomers, you figure out you weren’t sent to a different planet; you're still on earth...
...In fact, you didn’t even change location. You just changed time, being sent approximately 7,000 years into the past upon arrival. But by now, that was generations ago. Time tends to blur unless you're really paying attention, so you make sure to establish a calendar to mark where you are.
You develop a theory that maybe your immortality is because you can't age or die until 2020, but there’s only one way to test that; the slow, gradual passage of time.
And you decide while you're at it, why not leave your mark on this new history? You have entire cities, banded together now.
You're creating maps of the world, from where your people are, and sending them out to explore further and further the ancient earth.
You encounter other tribes, of course. Some join willingly, others try to fight your people. You easily defeat and assimilate them.
By now, you essentially have an empire. You promise yourself to be benevolent, not inflicting any horrors upon those who are assimilated. You dream of rebuilding the modern world, just better, with more peace, more unity, more focus on all the good in humanity.
As you tell stories about religions and of great historical wonders of the world, your people decide to recreate these things for you.
And through endless trial and error, progress is rapidly made. The more people who listen to you, the faster they can experiment with modern concepts.
Modern concepts you might not fully have grasped, but which they can flawlessly recreate with enough time and manpower. You might not know how to build a computer, but with enough infrastructure and trial and error, it would eventually be possible.
Better forges, better resources.
You basically speedrun a Kickstart to humanity forming a network.
And then, on the fringes of your empire, your people make a discovery:
Other people, using technology akin to yours, thousands of years before it should be around.
And while they speak a different language, they recognize English.
You arrange a meeting with their leader, on a hunch, and discover you actually weren’t alone in being a transplant from 2020 earth. And you and this leader of another people decide to essentially remain neutral. "You do your thing while I do mine, just don't invade our territory."
You form some trade, of course, and even exchange ideas your people have had on recreating modern earth life thousands of years in advance. Your people were able to implement some ideas theirs hadn’t yet, and vice-versa.
And you continue to expand your empires, cautiously with the passage of time.
...then, you discover another empire with similar advancements. You meet their leader, who is ALSO a transplant from 2020s earth. When you talk to the first 2020 transplant, they inform you that they have made contact with yet ANOTHER.
As all of these various empires and their immortal leaders talk,
...You begin to grow suspicious, when SUDDENLY, it dawns on you all.
You didn’t get isekai’d to earth 7,000 years in the past.
...All of you have been isekai’d into the roles of immortal leaders in a game of Civilization.
(I hope you enjoyed reading this. <3)
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