John Robert Crichton, Jr.

John's seen a lot of strange things since he went through that wormhole, and he's come close to death more times than he'd like to tally up. But even if he is starting to get used to it, it doesn't mean he has to like it. So it's not a surprise, when he finds himself outside in the middle of the bitter storm, with no recollection of how he got here and no idea of how he's going to get himself out of this newest mess.

At first he thought the fairies and the strange woman were no more than a hallucination; his mind shutting down from the cold. Particularly when she teleports him to a neat, cozy little place that looks more achingly familiar to him than anything he's seen in months. That would be just the kind of place his mind would conjure up, if he were dying: all those little comforts from home. Earth things.

He tries not to let it distract him, tries to keep his attention on the woman as she's speaking. When she mentions him being under her protection, his focus snaps fully back to what she's saying. He doesn't trust that. Sure, he's as happy as the next person to have someone looking out for him, but there's no such thing as a free lunch. She's gotta have some agenda, some angle. Why else would she come and snatch him from the cold and bring him to what sounds like her own little district? (When the warmth starts to seep into his limbs, to make his skin prickle painfully as it warms, he starts to believe that he really is out of the cold, that he's safe here, temporarily, even if some aspects of the place are illusions).

"Mark?" he asks, as she's walking away, but she doesn't seem to hear him, or if she did, she doesn't have any interest in answering. Sure, don't let the mark become visible. That wasn't ominous or anything.

John spends the next hour or so looking around this place carefully, watching for inconsistencies. It can't be what it appears on the surface. If there's one thing he's learned since he was taken away from his home, is that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. This isn't Earth, he thinks. So how can this house have artifacts from Earth? It has to be some kind of trick, and he's going to get to the bottom of it, sooner or later. He can't let himself lose sight of the fact that this isn't home: not really. He has to keep his wits about him, find out how he ended up here, who wants him here, and what happened to his friends.