I got to the office, waving my ID at the team of superhuman gentlemen in black suits manning the security desk. They waved me through and allowed me to walk through the expedited security station. Which was a much more pleasant experience than the standard station, whose deep aetheric probes left you wishing you could take a shower after.

Prospero’s DPAA offices shared space with a Cat Sithe Corporation-owned bank and insurance office. The actual DPAA was located on the top-most floors and in the basement levels. However, to get into the DPAA-controlled areas you needed to have your ID and be able to withstand an aura-scan

I’m not really sure what all the cloak and dagger was for. This was post-ENE America, the public already knew who we were, even without the help of the crackpot conspiracy theorists on social media. Our name was on the damned monolith in the building’s front plaza, and you could find our address by simply using a search engine.

I suspected the added security had something to do with the vaults of highly valuable, sometimes highly volatile, artifacts and specimens stored in the lowest levels of the office. However, yet again that was another thing that the public knew about, it’d be like the guys at Fort Knox making secret maps and riddles for how to get to Fort Knox. Everyone already knows and only a few people actually care.

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Thus far...I was enjoying what I was doing in the DPAA’s Office of Otherworld Crisis Management, or “OCM”, quite a bit. It scratched the puzzle-solving and wanderlust-having, parts of my brain just right.

I don’t know how it is I’d never considered working in such a field before. I mean I must have passed through at least a few thousand terminus worlds in my time. Maybe it was during the period where I was wary of civilization and people as a whole.

As an Administrator, I didn’t really have anyone breathing down my neck. That’s probably because most of the other administrators are either immortals like myself. Arrogant, powerful, individuals who’d never put up with the DPAA’s mostly mortal management pulling rank on us.

The DPAA also had its own specially groomed mortal admins on the job, who were being tightly managed.

However they were a minority, and eighty percent of the three thousand or so, Otherworld Crisis Administrators that worked throughout North America were lesser gods, spirits, demons, elder fae, and weirdos like me.

Making one of the immortals a manager would be an even worse idea because the shit immortals pull when trying to jockey for supremacy can quickly get out of hand and the DPAA couldn’t afford to deal with those kinds of hijinks.

As a result, besides answering to a single supervisor who watched over the whole OCM and reported to the DPAA’s Director of Extradimensional Affairs, who in turn reported to the Director of the DPAA himself, I basically just did my own thing.

While my actions were bound by a very powerful, magically and cosmically, binding geas that was folded into the employment contract, I had a very broad amount of discretion as an Otherworld Crisis Administrator. I had a lot of say on what I could do, how far I could go with it, and how much I needed to get done.

As a result, my Dark-eye network, and the FC-fleet were introduced to a number of unsuspecting universes. With the combination of the fleet, the network, and my own expansive consciousness, I ended up being able to process tens of thousands of worlds each day, when the average in the office was generally around ten to a hundred.

Looked at from a ten thousand mile view, there wasn’t much difference between my job and a doctor or mechanic. I observed each world in my care and made a diagnosis.

Even if there were a large number of symptoms and issues, there was usually only a handful of underlying causes or crisis points. Similar to how a man might come down with chills, fever, vomiting, and fluid in the lungs, all due to something he’d eaten or drink.

This ultimately meant that I generally only had to concentrate on a limited portion of a given universe. Pockets of space-time that served as the source of the rest of the universe’s ailments, similar to how this earth ultimately served as the catalyst for the rest of the universe’s transition into being a high energy world.

Often it just came down to adjusting a troublesome universal constant, or adding in some form of patch-fix into a system that had been set up for the universe, or removing some kind of troublesome element within the universe.

Normally, doing any of this would have been much harder, universes were resistant to those kinds of large scale changes. However, the powers-that-be within the House of Antipodes, and our status as a terminus world, granted us, officers of the DPAA, a certain amount of leeway, so we didn’t have to fight the universes we were trying to treat, as we did our work.

The part of my job that I enjoyed the most was when I got to get close-up and personal in the “cornerstone”-worlds. A cornerstone world was a lesser-world with having ten times as many close ties and connections to its dimensional neighbors, as other worlds.

A cornerstone world’s increased number of interdimensional ties meant that its destruction or corrosion had a bigger effect on multiverse than usual. OCM policy was to resolve a cornerstone world’s crisis whenever possible because deleting a cornerstone world would often mean having to delete a number of its neighbors as well due to how closely they were tied to get.

In the case of these cornerstone worlds, my powers grew even broader because of A) how important it was I resolve the issue so that we didn’t end up having to destroy a thousand worlds, and B)cornerstone worlds were quite valuable to the various powers within this plane and the higher planes.

If a terminus world’s fate was to become the hub of a future hyper-dimensional plane, a cornerstone world’s fate was to become the buttress that glued the plane’s more disparate parts together.

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This is my long-winded way of saying that my current voyeuristic hobby wasn’t just me goofing off, but was in fact very serious business.

Remember when I said that I’d occasionally enter a world using a proxy body? The worlds I entered were almost all cornerstone worlds. I admit that I didn’t always stay on task, but I can swear that my presence in all those worlds was generally for the greater good.

Even if I wasn’t always on the job while I was in those worlds, I generally left the worlds in better condition than I found them. Which is why it was perfectly okay for me to goof off a little, and go on a few little diversions.