Another year went by. What’s that you say? What’s with all these time skips? If that’s your question, I’m not quite sure what you mean. This isn’t a time skip. I just didn’t bother recording the last year because there was nothing that I found personally significant about it.

Feel free to complain if I drop a “and then a thousand years passed” on you, but till then just take me at my word that the year 2203 was a relatively dull one. At least for me, it was boring...I mean there was only one attempted alien invasion that year, and that ended pretty quickly when they realized how much interstellar traffic, and interdimensional attention, the earth was getting these days.

I spent most of that time getting used to married life and getting accustomed to my new job as a servant of the state.

I suppose you could make a big deal out of the fact that we ended up moving, but honestly, it wasn’t so much us moving, as it was that we’d just stopped pretending to live in the apartment building.

Cass had figured out that there were days where neither of us would go up to the higher floors, where we supposedly lived.

We’d been “living” in the apartment rent-free for quite some time, so it really wasn’t factored into our budget anymore. Modifications Cassandra had made to the diner on the first floor had made it less awkward to just pop in there for coffee and conversation.

I might have accidentally forgotten a couple of times and teleported Cass and Ashley to our place while our home was orbiting planets outside the solar system. All these factors together made it seem silly to keep pretending.

The only difficult part was stopping Cassandra from bequeathing us a huge chunk of her life savings once she realized that she hadn’t actually paid for the so-called favors I’d done for her and her niece. She was weirdly very old fashioned when it came to “honor-debts” and the like.

We eventually calmed Cass down by asking her to convert the promise of free rent into her letting us keep our mailbox at the apartment building because I don’t trust PO boxes.

Ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, not much had changed in my world since my last entry. At least nothing you didn’t already know about.

I was now a married man, with a beautiful and talented wife. I had a more regimented, nine-to-five job, in the city of Prospero’s Administrative District. I drank coffee in the mornings, beer in the afternoon, and blood in the evenings.

Against all odds, I, Montgomery Kaylan had somehow managed to fall ass-backward into functional adulthood after eons of being anything but. If that wasn’t a miracle, I don’t know what was.

Speaking of my job, as to the reason I didn’t bother writing about the first days, well, that was because there was nothing particularly interesting about those first days. Unsurprisingly being a government employee meant you were a…-wait for it-...employee of the government.

If you’ve ever had an office job, it was basically what you’d expect. Except due to the sensitivity and importance of my position, the experience was somehow even dryer. The job made duller because the good folks at US’ branch of the North American Branch of the United Nations Department of Paranormal Administration didn’t trust me to actually do my job till that first year lapsed.

I spent those years either shadowing other people, going through training, filing paperwork and being low-key stalked by obvious observers till the people at the DPAA got over themselves, and their foreign allies and rivals were told to stop trying to tempt me to see if I’d bite.

I almost quit, but then finally, they were forced to accept that I wasn’t planning something insidious, and wasn’t going to go rogue. At which point, they finally let me do the job that they’d hired me for. That changed everything.

As to what my job actually was, I was currently an officer in the DPAA’s Office of Otherworld Crisis Management.

I probably should have been a “junior” officer, instead of just an officer but I had a few hard words with the department heads and the Director of the DPAA himself after they wasted all that time. Even if a year wasn’t a big deal for a being like myself, that didn’t mean I was going to let some random so-and-so's waste my time as they pleased.

A broad explanation of what my duties were, requires a bit of background knowledge. First, you needed to know that ENE was actually an even bigger deal than I, and the people of this particular iteration of Earth made it out to be.

Simply said, all universes eventually go from being low energy to being high energy. Something always happened, worlds were always constantly nearly ending. Eventually, the inevitable took place and if the world survived it would often result in growth. An evolution.

However, the way this universe experienced that growth was like the difference between a little boy becoming a teenager, and a little boy turning into a fifteen-foot tall, roided out, man-beast.

The fact that the universe didn’t just...cease...is a statistical anomaly on the level of the average person’s odds of being struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark, and then having that shark spontaneously turn into a birthday cake, while the person got superpowers from the lightning. There’s a non-zero chance of it happening, but the slimmest borders on absurdity.

The fact that earth survived this meant that what should have ended up being a calamity turned into a fortune. Yes, a lot of people died, but on a cosmic scale, this universe managed to leap through the dragon’s gate. Going from a humble carp to being a legendary beast of yore.

As a result, the powers-that-be that resided within the higher planes, and the esoteric House of Antipodes that served as their arms and legs within the lower realms had dubbed this universe a “Terminus” or prime universe.

One of an infinitely small percentage of universes within each multiverse, that stood above all others within this plane of existence.

That meant two things. One, this universe would keep expanding and evolving, until it eventually became a unique plane of existence all on its own. Two, this universe held authority and responsibility for all its… “less significant” siblings, the lesser-worlds.

That was where the “Authority” in the name of the Department of Paranormal Authority and Administration came from. We weren’t just an authority over paranormal affairs, we were the governing body for a whole slice of the multiverse

Returning to the subject matter of my job, I was an Otherworld Crisis Administrator. My duties basically lay in observing worlds that were going through or had gone through their own growth periods, and stepping in before they were derailed and destroyed.

If that sounds heroic or epic, that’s because most public service positions did when you talked about them in terms of end-game rather than speaking to the hours and days of dullness that the job actually entailed.

In real terms, that meant that I sat on a console and observed the worlds within my case log. I’d interface with the console using my psychic powers and nigh-omniscience. If necessary, or if I just wanted a change of pace, I’d take a more hands-on approach and send an avatar, or proxy-body, down into a world to observe up close.

I took readings and made notes and generally tried to figure out what exactly was wrong with a world that was in crisis and then I’d course correct, if I could manage it.

If I couldn’t fix whatever was wrong with a particular world, I then had to assess whether A) the problematic universe could be preserved somehow, and B)the problematic universe’s continued existence would have a negative effect on its neighbors within the multiverse.

Unless a world in crisis’ issue was universe-wide and the issue had a chance of ballooning into something...worse...it was usually fine to just mark a world as problematic and kick it over to another of the DPAA’s departments for careful rehabilitation and further monitoring.

If it was the case that a particular world’s problems might cause problems for its neighbors, then I was the one who had to make the call for recommending the world for deletion.

In other words, it was a perfect job for a former ender of worlds.

I wasn’t working with Margot this time. We’d decided that at this stage of our relationship, it probably wouldn’t be healthy if we added being co-workers to the long list of everything else that we did together.

I’d been in enough failed relationships to know that becoming the worm in your significant other’s belly, and running out of things to say to one another, wasn’t a good thing.

Margot worked in another office of the DPAA. The position she’d been offered had been based on her magical background, her experience with complex thaumaturgical engineering, and her computer programing skills.

I already said that most worlds didn’t get as raw a deal as this version of Earth almost did. The reason this was the case, was because of people like Margot.

Margot was currently a Programmer, Tester and Moderator of the DPAA’s Office of Reality Refinement and Reorientation. Officially, she was an Officer of System Quality Maintenance, last I checked.

If you’ve ever read a web novel where the character suddenly wakes up one day and finds that their world has been gamified, then you know pretty much all you need to know about the office of Reality Refinement and Reorientation, or “RRR” on the “end-user” level.

Basically, a long time ago, the powers-that-be, the gods, devils, spirits, etcetera, of the higher planes, all realized that having the energy levels of a universe rise in a more “systematic” fashion was preferable to simply letting things happen and hoping reality didn’t explode.

The Office of Reality Refinement and Reorientation were the ones who built and managed the systems and environmental augmentations for the lesser worlds within our multiverse that were going through the transition from low energy to high energy.

They were the ones who fiddled with and adjusted the internal logic of evolving universes before putting the control back in the hands of the sovereign entities and gods of those universes. The department of RRR was entrusted with the task because those sovereign entities and gods often didn’t know how to do the job right without breaking something.

Meaning my wife had become a pretty big deal in the past year or so, even if she was just part of a team of thousands. I was almost jealous, but being an otherworld crisis management admin had its own charms.