Rupert wakes up and his mouth tastes like blood and soil and absolutely bloody everything, but especially his head, hurts. Rupert has woken up with worse tastes in his mouth after a night off-base, and the headache is not exactly unexpected either, however this level of pain everywhere else is not a normal occurrence.

Neither is waking up on the ground outside. And this sure as hell is not Fife, or even Tayside. Or even sodding Kansas. They'd only been out in Dundee for a few.

"Oh fucking fuck." He croaks and pushes himself slowly up to sitting before collapsing against a handy tree.

Being upright improves very little about his situation but is a slightly more sensible position for a self-assessment. He starts at his toes and works his way up.

Everything works, but...

He is wearing someone else's clothes. Rupert does not own anything like this. And whoever they actually belong to, they are not going to want them back because they are shredded and covered with blood. Rupert's legs are also shredded and covered in blood.

So, it appears, is the rest of him. At least the back side of him. The front is just grazed and bruised.

He doesn't recognize his hands. They look old, but that could be the concussion he has almost certainly got from the bang to the head.

The bang to the head that has mysteriously left him bald as a billiard ball. And with seriously crap vision.

The weirdness factor is steadily climbing.

He was out with the lads. That is the last thing he remembers. Being blind drunk and ending up with a shaved head is not in any way unheard of but... No one would dump him, at his best guess, based on the monkeys watching him, in the sodding Tropics. No one hates him that much.

He doubts he is here voluntarily. He is Scottish, wet and cold is fine, wet and humid is horrible.

And from a career point of view... He doesn't have one anymore. He is looking at being disciplined for desertion.

Shit. He'll have to pay back all the RAF bursaries for his studies because he'll be in breach of contract if he's in jail.

Rupert leans against the tree and wonders whether he could learn to love the Tropics, given the alternative...

No. And he isn't coward enough to run away from the consequences of whatever this is. He would really like to know what 'this' is though.

Rupert pushes himself to his feet and points himself in the direction he thinks is North, on the perfectly logical grounds that anywhere this hot is South of Scotland, which is where he is supposed to be. He puts one foot in front of the other until he finds a road and then he follows the road, because it has to go Somewhere, and Somewhere is closer to Scotland than he will get if he has nothing to help him get there but monkeys.

Eventually, Rupert reaches a village.

He is enough of a mess that, although the children are curious, he scares them and they keep their distance.

He stops in the middle of the street, attempts to look non-threatening and waits until an adult approaches. It is quicker than knocking randomly on doors and involves less effort on his part. Rupert doesn't really know how he is still standing at this point, he definitely doesn't have the energy left to be expending effort unnecessarily. Any adult that approaches him will be someone who feels they have a duty to do so, and are therefore most likely to be of some help.

This is how he meets the doctor.

Meeting the doctor turns out to be useful in more ways than one. Not only does he let Rupert use his supplies, he treats the bits of Rupert that Rupert can't reach himself and he also speaks French. Sort of.

So Rupert discovers he is in Cambodia and that he was probably running away from an explosion, and lucky to have been outside of the radius for blast wounds.

Once he is cleaned up, he also discovers it is not just his hands that look old. All of him is suddenly approximately 30 years older than he expects.

What has happened to those 30ish years of his life? The options are a) alien abduction b) time travel c) a body swap or most likely d) he really is an old fart now and the knock to the bonce has given him some sort of amnesia.

The only reason option d is positive is that something can likely be done about it, at least to some degree, sooner or later. And he likely doesn't have to worry too much about being late back to base. And for a man over 50, he really doesn't look in bad shape.

Over the 30 years, he has also developed some 'new' tattoos. He is particularly intrigued by the design over his heart that looks like a 'K' on its side in a circle. The letters JT and HRH are written under it.

AN4 - Short I know, but I know nothing about Cambodia that I haven't read on Wikipedia. Sorry about that.

Why does Kingsman cloth protect you from bullets but not cuts? I have asked myself this question and concluded the answer is 'Magic Merlin SCIENCE!'. Cloth you can't cut would be shite for tailoring, so clearly it protects you from impacts... Which is why Merlin is not suffering blast wounds, just pesky cuts from debris. Yeah for 'Magic Merlin SCIENCE!'.