Once I’d resolved the matter of the two young scavengers, I logged out of Andern.

I bid the two youths good day after casting a high-level cantrip that would make Sevastion and Cathrine all but impossible to find, search for, or even remember, if one was bearing ill-intent.

Then I had my shop/ship prepare some quarters for them to stay in while I was gone. The shipped lifted off. The astral vessel rising up into the air above the sleepy settlement of Rothley, with nary a soul aware of its presence.

Finally, I had the ship fly itself towards Alban’s nearest neighbor, Espinosa, because I still had some business there even if this Mazon fellow was currently no longer an issue.

Logging out of Andern, was an uncanny experience. If there were any witnesses present, they’d see the light drain out of my eyes, and my body crumbling into nothing. It reminded me of the few rare times that someone had managed to kill me, back when I could still actually die.

It was a jarring experience on my end as well, like waking up from one dream to find yourself in another dream. The experience was made even more jarring when the sliver of consciousness that had been housed inside that proxy body returned to the greater whole and then was bounced back into the thread that connected my true-body to the body I had on earth.

I opened my eyes in the body that sat waiting in the recliner I’d replaced my office-chair with and it took me a second to remember where I was exactly.

I sat up and stretched. My mouth tasted like death warmed over, but that was nothing that couldn’t be fixed with magic and a bottle of cranberry-apple juice.

I leaned forward and quickly typed up a report on Andern’s situation. I noted the number of similar reports that I’d sent regarding the worlds that I hadn’t had to visit in person and whistled in satisfaction as I saw that I’d beat my record by almost two-thousand, finally hitting the landmark number of Sixty-two thousand worlds. Meaning sixty-two thousand crises had been resolved in a single day.

Since I’d technically resolved Andern’s main issue I marked the world resolved as well. Which made the number Sixty-two thousand and one. I also marked Andern as a world that I’d continue keeping an eye on. Using up one of the slots that the console had for logging the time-space addresses of ascending lesser worlds.

Something big was happening in that world. I wasn’t sure why, but I got the sense that Andern was a keeper. I got a feeling Andern was a world I’d continue working with, even after its ascent was complete.

If my actions seem shady, that’s because they are. Good on you for figuring that out. Feel free to treat yourself to a favorite snack. This kind of shadiness was part of the perks of working for the DPAA and the US government and the House of Antipodes were well aware of it.

Mere money was far from enough to staff an organization with immortal personnel. One needed to offer fringe benefits. Benefits of a kind that couldn’t easily be had anywhere else. Thus the contracts that the DPAA had its personnel sign had very large, very obvious, gaps in what we could and could not do.

Not quite condoning, but absolutely NOT forbidding, the kind of side-hustles, opportunity taking, and self-dealing, that’d lead to litigation and possible prosecution in nearly any other occupation. Especially other government occupations.

I looked at the time in the corner of my console’s screen. It was almost seven. Quitting time. I closed the console. It ceased to exist. Fading into nothing because the physical machine was just the product of alien nanotech, and the real hardware existed as a construct of tech and magic, that was tied to the contract I’d signed.

In other words, the real console, like one’s real home, lay inside the user’s heart. The only reason us DPAA officers had to come to the office to make use of it, was to avoid certain abuses of the system.

The entire building had some very powerful, very complex, ever-shifting, cosmic wards that needed to be present if one wished to make use of the consoles.

This was an intentional decision, a feature, not a flaw. It was a sign that they didn’t entirely trust us not to misuse the power and access we’d been given. Which was fair, I suppose even if they gave us a long leash to run with, they couldn’t just let us run wild, there had to be limits.

I left my office. I stepped into the hallway, hands in my pockets and whistled a slightly doleful tune as I made my way to the employee lounge. I figured I’d snag another juice before leaving for the day.

The lounge was empty at first. I used my interface to interact with the vending machine and paid for my drink electronically. As I picked up my juice someone else walked into the lounge. It was a familiar face, pale, and cold, and impassive, but the red hair had been allowed to grow much longer.

“Evening, Maci,” I said.

“Evening…” said the stern fairy

Maci Redgrave was the bastard child of a lustful and blood-crazed fae queen and a fallen angel. The aforementioned fae queen had many children with many men of various species but Maci and her sister, Darla, were the only ones who’d managed to resist their mother’s madness long enough to survive to this day.

Maci Redgrave had once been the queen of the Winter Courts that presided over central Asia and a portion Eastern Europe, back when the ENE made sure an expanse burdensome for one court to rule.

She had also been a participant in the war between the Angels and the Dragons. Despite her slightly sinister appearance, she’d actually fought on the side of the angels, which is part of why reptiles weren’t the dominant species on this particular earth. As was apparently the case for many other worlds on this branch of the multiverse.

Maci Redgrave, like many immortals, had been many different things, at many different times. Now at this time, Maci had apparently taken up a post working for the DPAA. She’d actually been coming straight from a day at the office, during our big game. Which explained the suit, though with her personality, I kind of doubt that she’d have been dressed as casually as her sister.

She didn’t work in the Office of Crisis Management as I did, but she worked in the office of Extradimensional, Observation, and Research, or EOR whose jobs were exactly what it said on the tin. The observation and research of worlds beyond our dimension, specifically and particularly those worlds that were ascending.

As such, her segment of the DPAA worked closely with mine. EOR’s connection to the OCM connection was honestly closer than the RRR’s connection to the OCM because the EOR were the ones who recommended a world for intervention and Crisis management.

It was to the extent that the two offices shared a floor together, with quite a lot of overlap when it came to who was supervising what. In the case of Maci and I, we were literally across the hall from each other, thus we often ran into each other.

“So...how’ve things been in your neck of the woods, Maci?” I said.

The red-eyed beauty just stared at me over the mug of coffee she’d just brewed. Then after taking a sip, she said,

“...Tumultuous.”

Then she turned around and walked away without another word. Overall, Maci was an odd duck, but she was strangely peaceful, and quite amiable when you got used to her, so I considered her my office buddy.

I have an office buddy, and I also have an office wife. Three guesses as to who my office wife was...Wrong, medium? Still? Fine. I met my office wife as I rode up the elevator. It was my actual wife. Margot. You forgot she worked here too, didn’t you?

No worries. I sometimes forgot as well, due to the difference in our schedules, and the cognitive distance that came with being on an alien world for multiple subjective decades. The DPAA’s office of Reality Refinement and Reorientation had a floor to themselves. Their office was located one floor below the OCMs and EORs.

“Hey…” said Margot.

“Hi, beautiful,” I said. Smiling. Feeling I was home just saying her face, even though we hadn’t gotten to our actual home yet.

Margot’s cheeks colored and she smiled, tucking a lock of orange-red hair behind her ear.

“So how’s work been?” said Margot.

“Oh, you know...I’ve been properly doing my duty as an officer of the UN, the United States, and the esoteric House of Antipodes. So I’m set. How about you?” I said in a voice of faux-seriousness.

“Well, it’s the same old, same old for me...I think we’re actually going to be working on a new project soon. A big one...”

“Nifty...Are you sure it’s alright for you to talk to me about it?”

“Mhm?... That’s...That’s actually a good question. But, we both have the same level of classification and its not like anything I’m saying is particularly sensitive so it should be fine...I think...Probably....” said Margot. Biting her bottom lip in thought.

“Alrighty…” I said. Taking her at her word.

“Also...Is it even possible for me to keep secrets from you?... With our tether and that feed to the akashic plane running through your head you probably knew about it before I did, didn’t you?” said Margot. Pressing the close-door button on the elevator panel once I’d stepped inside.

I frowned thinking about her question and realized that she was right, the data regarding her project was indeed already part of my passive memory, even if I hadn’t really been aware of it.

“Fair point,” I said, “But tell me about it anyway.”

Margot smiled.

“Okay...Well, you know how a lot of my job is basically modifying, the standard systems that the House’s people created forever ago, for the individual ascending worlds to use?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, for the first time, I...We’ll be doing a little bit more. There’s a group of universes that have needed more unique help than most. The house of Antipodes is having us and the people that work with/under them in a few other terminus-worlds, work together to overhaul one of its older, more antiquated, systems for use with those unique worlds. We’re not quite making a system from scratch but that’s basically what it comes down to.” said Margot. Sounding excited.

“Huh, that is interesting. What’s unique about these worlds?” I said.

“They’re fictive worlds. So-called 2.5D dimensions,” said Margot.

“Huh? Those are rare.” I said.

Fictive worlds were far and few between in the cosmos. Maybe less than ten percent of the universes that made up your average multiverse would be fictive. As to what being fictive meant, a fictive world was a story world.

A fictive world was literally a world in a story, game, show, painting, or dream.

They were fictional realms that for whatever reason happened to either have or attain enough “reality”, to become an actual place.

It wasn’t uncommon for creators and artists to mentally, or spiritually, tap into the goings-on of an actual universe and think it was all their own imagining. It was much rarer for a creator or artist’s imagining to take on its own life and go from being a mere flight of fancy to being a thing of fact.

From my experience, it usually only happened when the cosmos needed a reality that it could use as a band-aid for an injury, or modification, to its inner-mechanisms. Which meant the involvement of a lot of power and rare materials would leech into the world while the cosmos used it to cover up the whole its essential structure.

Then the worlds usually just faded away after serving their purpose. Returning back to being fiction, and eventually fading into oblivion. However, as you might guess, sometimes the worlds were simply back into the quantum sea where they were granted a proper spot in the multiverse

“In our case, it’s not that hard...Basically, we’ve got a couple of VRMMOs that happened to survive even when their main realities were overwhelmed with cosmic energy.”

“Yeah...that sounds about right.”

One way for a fictive world to easily survive the end of its term as a cosmic band-aid was to be host to a bunch of very “real” souls. Online games, especially VR games, were one instance where it was very easy for a fake world to get inhabited by real souls.

I still wasn’t as big of a gamer as my wife, but I’d played enough games to know that people put a lot of themselves into the characters they play. Especially when they were part of that character’s creation.

If a main, or “real” universe, suddenly goes poof and ceases to exist without warning, it isn’t unheard of for the cosmos to respond by just shifting the rest of all those displaced souls into the fictional world where the most sentient energy is already invested. Which is often the biggest online game.

Incidentally, it isn’t always fantasy games that people get dumped into. Sometimes its sports games. Sometimes, its online shooters with settings nearly identical to the real world. Sometimes its a social media game. There just has to be enough detail built into the setting to temporarily host the denizens of the main reality while the powers-that-be figure out what to do.

And sometimes, what the powers-that-be decide is to let the false world replace the real. Usually, because it also happens to be a very safe way to get rid of the toxic, world ending, cosmic residues left behind but whatever destroyed that main world.

“We’ve also got a few dating sims that happened to turn real…”

I cringed. Jerking back in revulsion.

“What?” said Margot. Noticing my strange reaction.

“Sorry...Gut response to the prospect of an eternity of high school.”

Margot rolled her eyes.

“Oh, come on...They’re not that bad and they don’t all take place in school. Plus, You beat ‘My Heart Won’t Stop Beating -Marry Me Please’, right after I did so honestly, I think the kind sir doth protest too much.”

“Ugh…That one doesn’t count because everyone was dead in it...” I said. My face still scrunched in distaste.

“Anyway…,” said Margot. Pointedly ignoring the face I was making.

“It’s really kind of fascinating. The other systems are built to digitize the physical and metaphysical phenomena of a world to make controlling the excess energy more manageable. The system that the house is having us revamp basically works in reverse, because the worlds we are working are basically completely made of data, to begin with. With very few concrete natural laws and independent energy systems.”

“I see...the worlds are already gamified or as close to it that basically all you have to do is put in or adjust their internal rules ...The hard part will be teaching those gamified worlds to be actual worlds.” I said. My brow furrowing and my expression turning to a quizzical one as I considered how I’d approach the issue.

“It’s like ...It's like…”

“It’s like it’s one thing to have to teach a man who to dance...It’s another thing to have to teach a mannequin, or worse yet, a picture of a mannequin, how to be a man.” I said.

“Exactly...At least, I think that’s kind of what this is like,” said Margot. Her brow furrowing as well.

“Well, at the very least it sounds fascinating,” I said.

“I know, right?! It’s crazy! I'm learning so much about the natural laws of the cosmos, you wouldn’t believe it...Plus, I’ve been getting the feeling that this project is just an appetizer for something bigger that’s in the works...,” said Margot. Smiling brightly again.

After that, we talked about nothing in particular. We simply recalled the banalities of our day as we made our way out of the building and out from under the space-locking wards of the DPAA’s offices, so we could teleport back home.