Tau, here. It’s me, again. I was in this black room, just sort of bouncing around. Floating from wall to wall, like I was the sole graphic in an old computer screensaver. I’d arrived in the universe known as “Gigantas.”

Imagine texas if it were an entire universe. The big, part liberal, part conservative, culturally and ideological diverse texas, that was born when the ENE inflated regular texas to roughly fifty times its original size. Then times that mental image by infinity. Have you done it? Cool, now you have a rough idea of the scale and culture of Gigantas.

I can’t really speak to every single culture for every single species and the myriad species-variations, because of course, I can’t.

Get thirty people in a room and they will likely have wide variances in personality, culture, and way of thinking, never mind an infinite amount of people in an entire universe. However speaking in the very broadest of strokes, Gigantes was this odd, sometimes very religious, sometimes not so religious, place filled with big personalities, and this larger than life mythos and history that was partially self-fulfilling.

I’m not gonna go all “planet of the hats” with this. I’m just trying to give you an idea of the place my new job had put me in. For the most part, the limited contact I’d had with the locals hadn’t been too bad.

They were polite, even friendly. They were also a bit guarded and some of their people had held little to no compunction about letting me know that they weren’t afraid of throwing down if this was some kind of ruse and I was thinking of taking them over.

An admirable, respectable, and just a tad adorable attitude to have when even my scrub lord self could kick their planet in half and keep on kicking until a few solar systems were reduced to rubble.

If that sounds a bit salty, I’m not a fan of being threatened, and I especially don’t like having my family be threatened as some of these people ventured to do. Going far beyond the point of simply letting me know that they weren’t to be taken advantage of and entering into a little town I call asshole-burg.

I’m pretty sure there’s at least one group that I’m probably going to be butting heads with, right off the bat. Naturally, they also happened to be one of the most influential groups in the universe, with multiple galaxies under their control, so that’s absolutely going to be a problem in the future.

Now here I was a few days after arriving and setting up. I’d already had my orientation and an explanation of my duties back on Terminus-Earth. So I already knew what to do and how to do it. The only issue was waiting until the appropriate time to actually start doing the job. Bureaucracy is in everything, even this...especially this. Meaning there was a set time for me to work and there were set downtimes where I and the world were left at our leisure.

I’d start work tomorrow. Besides making introductions with the mortal and immortal leadership of Gigantas, I’d also been moving into my new home. I had a whole planet all to myself...sort of. The planet was mine, serving as the main hub, the main anchor for the Grand Dungeon, and the Palace of Balance and Judgement.

The planet was a creation of the Division of Cosmic Artifice and served as the linkage point between this universe and the Division’s artificial reality. Come tomorrow billions of people would fly and teleport here from the countless worlds. Trillions more would enter my dungeon via the auxiliary doorways to the grand dungeon that were set in the majority of the worlds in the universe.

After going to several dinner parties, and meeting with several secretive shadow cabals, I was kind of exhausted. Which was why I was currently in the depths of my own inner-realm, a thing all us Kaylan kids inherited from dear old dad.

I was too wired to sleep, so I had basically cleared out my world leaving nothing, so I could float free of gravity in a place with absolutely nothing for my senses to grab onto. This was a terrible moment to realize that my senses were so acute that even “nothingness” had a presence in my mind.

With nothing around to distract me, I could even hear the clink and hum of the physical interactions of the minute particles that made up existence. Imagine an enormous bag of round, magnetic marbles. That’s what nothingness sounded like to me at this moment. I had no clue if this was my imagination or not. I just knew what I was hearing. It was actually pretty neat.

Something inside my head went click and I found myself slowly recreating my inner-world, except this time my understanding of reality now enjoyed a subtle but noticeable improvement, so everything was just a few notches more well-made than it had been before I emptied my inner-world out.

The last thing I made was a bed. I floated down onto the fluffy mattress like feathers in the wind. I conjured a sheet above my body, then I turned to my side, and immediately fell asleep.

*************************************************************************************************************

Back in the Universe of Terminus-Earth, a certain uneasy father watched his son drift off to sleep. Monty’s mouth wriggled as he vacillated between being proud that his son wasn’t worrying as much as Monty had expected Tau to worry, and worrying that Tau wasn’t taking his new position seriously.

Two hands fell upon the man’s shoulders. One hand belonged to his wife, Maci, and the other hand belonged to his other wife, Primrose.

Maci rubbed Monty’s shoulder comfortingly. The normally blank-faced redhead gave her husband a sympathetic smile.

“He’ll be fine, hon. Tau’s a smart boy. Just like the rest of our kids,” said Maci.

“And even if he screws up we’ll be there to catch the sky for him...So we really should give him this opportunity to learn,” said Primrose. Patting Monty on the back and then moving on the other things that she’d been doing before she noticed Monty staring out the window and fretting.

Monty chewed the side of his cheek for a moment before nodding and relenting. His wives were right. Their kids had grown up to be capable adults. Seren and Dana were taking on more and more responsibility as they worked as members of the Division. Even managing to climb up the ranks to leadership positions.

Flannery was wheeling and dealing through the cosmos like the fae-trader that she’d always been born to be. With her younger sister Juno at her side. Juno, herself was strongly influenced by her big sister/mother and was really going for it as a mage and explorer.

Blair was assisting her mother Henrietta and together they’d made great breakthroughs in the fields of science and magical technology. Enough so, that there was talk about the earth and its allies formally recognizing their talents and granting them several publicly known awards.

Harold had taken the reins of Doorknocker Solutions and was aggressively working to increase the family larder.

Finally, there was Tau, who’d sort of been adrift, which was part of why Monty had chosen this particular “punishment” for him. Even though Tau might still end up leaving the Division after “serving his time,” Monty hoped that this would make his son give some serious thought to his future.