A peasant? It sort of made sense. After all, the vast majority of people in any fantasy world would probably be average, lower-class people going about their lives and not daring adventurers. But the latter were definitely more interesting, and Jeff had wanted to be among their number. He tried to reach out for the computer to stop the change, but just as he grabbed at the keyboard it faded through his fingers.
At the same time, his clothes faded away, his chair disappeared, and he fell down, through the roof of the cottage he had been hovering atop. The thatch didn't break, he just passed through it like a ghost, and when he landed on the ground he didn't feel the impact. He had been bracing for one, but when it didn't come he lowered his arms from their protective position in front of his face to see that he was inside the cottage, which was highly unimpressive. It was just one room, with no real floor, just packed dirt. The walls were made of wood, except for a shoddily constructed stone hearth off to one side that had a cauldron inside (the fire below it was unlit, so the nude teen was a little chilly), and there were various pieces of plain wooden furniture scattered around inside, including a few cots. Great, Jeff thought, this is probably where I'm going to be living now. At least no one was there to see his nakedness.
The tingling feeling that he had started to ignore suddenly intensified. Jeff felt his shoulders broaden and his chest and arms began to swell with the muscle of a life of labor, and his skin darkened a little and thickened a little, callouses growing on his hands. It was a sore feeling but it felt good, like a good workout. Maybe this isn't so bad, he thought, but then fat began to fade away from his body, and not in a good way. Jeff began to feel a little hungry as he lost some body hair and some muscle definition, though he was still a lot bulkier than he used to be. The tingling spread to his penis, which grew slightly as his foreskin regenerated. His short hair grew down to the middle of his neck and became shaggy and unkempt, and peach fuzz grew on his face, which subtly changed, becoming a little less refined and more common. His teeth grew crookeder, like he had never had braces. Wool clothes that were a little tight materialized on his body.
Jeff recalled that the clothes were tight because his mother had made them a couple of years ago and hadn't been able to spare the wool for new clothes since, and then wondered how he knew that. He became aware of a stream of memories entering his brain, and then his head felt strange, like it was thicker, and his thoughts were a little slower. He wasn't dumb, exactly, but a peasant like him didn't need to think quickly or cleverly, just like he didn't need to know how to read or write or count to big numbers, skills that he had a little trouble comprehending now. He did need to know how to work on a farm, and he remembered reaping, sowing, working a plow, dealing with animals... of course he did, he had been working on farms all his life, just like his parents. They lived inside the town for safety, rather than living on the farm just outside of town. Unfortunately, this meant that they weren't there to protect the farm when it was destroyed by gnolls a few years back. They had got it back up and running but it was smaller now, so small that his parents and siblings didn't always need Geff on the farm, so most of the time he worked as a farmhand for others or did odd jobs around town in exchange for the coppers that let his family buy what they couldn't make on the farm.
It was a dull life, and Geff longed for some sort of adventure. In the back of his head he remembered that he was really a modern boy who used a Chronivac and not a medieval peasant in a fantasy world, but he had fallen into the peasant mindset and it didn't occur to him to do anything about it. He had stopped noticing his hunger or the tightness of his clothes because those feelings had become normal, and he even had trouble thinking of the world he was in as a fantasy, since it was the only world he could remember clearly. He still wanted adventure, because he wanted to get his money's worth out of the Chronivac, but it felt more like a part of Geff's personality, he had always been a dreamer and he could remember his friends mocking him for having fantasies of glory that a poor farmboy like him would never be able to reach. He sighed, barely remembering that things were different, and not knowing that they were about to change.