“Come on, Kai! It’s not as bad as it sounds!” pouted Sheila as she led the young man down the winding hallways of TOAL headquarters to their dreaded destination.

He’d returned to his guest room to shower and put on a fresh change of clothes that looked and felt like something he’d find back home. The modern cotton weave of his T-shirt felt like high quality bed sheets against his skin and his blue denim jeans were anything but stiff. However, the comforting surprise was followed up with a less than comforting demand.

“I don’t care, this is not what I signed up for!” Kai pouted even harder.

“Well you’re not going to be able to do anything unless you do go. And everyone else does it too!”

“Yeah, but they get to go on their adventures first, and I just got here!”

“You got here yesterday, and you didn’t complain about it then. You know you don’t really have a choice in this, right? Like back on Earth, we’re going to make sure you go to school, whether you like it or not. And you will like it! That’s not a demand, by the way, I think you really will like it.”

“But I don’t want to! I was at school when I got portalled over here, and you’re making me go back!”

“Trust me, Kai. It’s nowhere near as bad as back home. The others and I made sure of that.”

The two finally arrived at a sizable room. Past the wooden door was a carpeted space with about a dozen desks and chairs laid out in a grid-like pattern, with a whiteboard attached to the wall they faced. The other walls were plastered with several laminated posters that displayed all sorts of information in colorful, child-friendly formats.

Several larger chairs at the back housed a trio of armed and armored guards, looking around the room with incredibly bored expressions. The desks likewise housed a trio of young children, much younger than Kai in fact. They appeared to all be in middle school.

At the front of the room next to the white board was a lady who looked to be in her late 20s or early 30s, with long, brown hair and an air of authority despite her apparent youth and stature compared to the much more intimidating guards.

The woman looked away from the children she’d been glaring at and brightened when she saw the two standing in the doorway. “There’s my favorite student! Come on in and grab a chair, we’re just about to start.”

The other kids looked at the young man with a bored sneer at the compliment. Kai already knew what they were thinking, just like with his classmates back home. That he was the teacher’s pet. And the worst part was, he didn’t even remember what he did to get that title in the first place!

“Have fun, Kai!” exclaimed Sheila as she turned to leave. “I’ll be back to pick you up once class is over, or have someone else do it if I’m too busy. And there’s no printed schedule for you yet, I’ll have to write it down for you the next time we meet.”

Kai waved at Sheila as she turned the corner and closed the door behind her. He still felt somewhat frustrated by his predicament, but being called the teacher’s “favorite student” did help soothe his bitterness at least somewhat.

He slowly shuffled across the soft carpeted floor towards an open seat in the center-right of the arrangement, and plopped himself down in the colorful chair. Looking around him, he regarded his fellow students; literally a bunch of children who looked like they belonged in middle school. Maybe someone made a mistake putting him in the same class as them? Maybe he’d been the one to make it by coming here in the first place?

“Alright everyone, welcome to TOAL and the Multiverse 101,” began the woman in a firm voice as she looked over her pupils. “My name is Hannah Neal, and you’ll call me Ms. Neal. I’d show you a video, but it’s still being edited so you’ll all have to settle for me teaching it to you directly. Any questions?”

“Yeah, I have one,” replied Kai, throwing his hand halfway into the air.

“Shoot.”

“Sheila didn’t really fill me in on what ‘school’ here entails, so are you just going to be talking about TOAL here, or anything else?”

“Good question!” replied Hannah. “I’d hand you the syllabus right now, but I wasn’t able to print them out.”

“You too?” asked Kai. “Sheila couldn’t get me a schedule for my day either. Something wrong with the printers here?”

“Yeah,” replied the teacher with a sigh. “Apparently someone had enough and smashed every last one in the printer room with a baseball bat! They even left the murder weapon at the scene of the crime. It was covered in toner and everything.”

“Honestly, I don’t blame them,” shrugged Kai, remembering his own experiences with the infernal device from back home. “Wait, how did you even get printers here? Do you scavenge them from Earth or something?”

“Nah, we build them. We’ve got a ton of engineers who just knock these things out with the help of magic to fill in the gaps.”

“And they still chose to make them just as badly?”

“Apparently,” the teacher replied with a shrug of her own. “But hopefully this’ll motivate them to make some that are actually decent. Now, about the syllabus. This includes you three, so listen up.”

The three kids lazily looked up at Hannah, gracing their teacher with just enough attention to take in her next few sentences.

“Today is going to be about getting you caught up with what’s going on around here,” Ms. Neal began. “That means showing you what everyone here’s spent years figuring out for themselves and how headquarters as a whole operates.”

Everyone nodded along, satisfied with her explanation so far. But something deep down, some primal instinct, told them they should be afraid.

“And after that, we’re going to get you up to speed on any academics you missed out on from back on Earth. That means math, reading, a bit of history, well the relevant parts of it at least, and whatever else you might be interested in!”

And there it was. Every child in the room groaned out loud, including Kai. Seriously, his first… ish day here, and it was as if he’d never left home to begin with! Maybe he should’ve stuck around with king Reggie?

“Come on, why do we have to go back to school?!” whined one of the younger kids. He had medium black hair and a plain blue T-shirt on, the generic look highlighting his apparent lack of physical or emotional maturity. “Seriously, we’re all heroes here! We don’t need to learn this stuff!”

“But you’ve gotta learn what I’m teaching now,” retorted his teacher. “Otherwise you’re gonna walk into a chemical testing site and have your skin be melted off because you couldn’t read any of the warnings. Or maybe you’ll walk into the wrong portal because you didn’t understand the World Ranking System and end up in hell?”

“There’s no actual hell! That’s just what our parents told us to make us come to church! Right?” asked the second kid. He had blond hair all the way down to his lower neck and sported a green linen shirt and cargo shorts. He looked towards the soldiers at the back of the room before asking again. “Right?”

“With how so many religions seem to be real out there, there very well could be,” answered his teacher. "But I guarantee that we’ve seen Worlds even worse than that. And you could end up in one if you don’t shut up and listen today.”

“She’s right,” replied one of the soldiers in a gruff voice. He sounded like he ate a pack of cigarettes with black coffee every morning. Didn’t even bother smoking them, just stuffed them into his mouth and swallowed them whole. “I’ve been to hell personally and came back to tell the tale. And that was only because of the rest of TOAL having my back. Trust me, on your own, you won’t be.”

The children froze, the probably hyperbolic threats doing their job in cowing the unruly students.

Kai simply chuckled at how everyone here handled things, and began to feel grateful for having already obtained the teacher’s favor. He’d love to see them deal with the kids from his school, though they would just respond by not showing up. Oh well.

The soldiers seated in the back of the room simply chuckled to themselves as well.

“Alrighty, then! Let’s get started.” Hanna Neal cleared her throat and put on her best teacherly smile. “So this is TOAL, The Terran Otherworldly Advocacy League. Here, we’re committed to securing the wellbeing of any Earther who might have the misfortune to… you know what? The spiel Gus gave me sucks. Fuck this.”

Everyone else in the room chuckled at her sudden outburst, including Kai who was curious what she would follow it up with.

“Pretty much TOAL finds people from Earth who get summoned by assholes who don’t give a shit about them and only want to use them as cannon fodder, right? And then they rescue them. It’s pretty simple.”

Everyone nodded along. It really did sound simple.

“But doing that with the clothes on your back isn’t exactly easy, and there are a lot of Earthers out there, as well as a whole lot of places to look for them. So they built this headquarters as a place to gather together, get stronger, and house any of those Earthers they rescue.”

“Stronger? Like training, right?” asked the third child. He also had short black hair, but with a pudgier face along with a red polo shirt and faded blue jeans. “What level are all of the soldiers here, anyway? I bet it’s not as high as us!”

“Zero,” replied Ms. Neal in a total deadpan.

“Hold on, levels? Like an RPG or video game?” interjected Kai.

The teacher looked and nodded at him in response. “The same exact kind.”

“Wait, zero?” asked the blond second kid. “Don’t they train and fight all the time? Those guys in the back definitely don’t look like they’re level zero!”

“Well, we are,” replied another of those soldiers. “In fact, y’all are too!”

“What the hell are you talking about?!” exclaimed the first kid, sounding like his pride was wounded with an elephant gun. “I’m level 63! And these two are about the same!”

The other two nodded vigorously in agreement, sporting deep frowns as they did.

“Well, it was probably that high where you started out,” began Ms. Neal. “But levels don’t carry over when you travel between Worlds. And at headquarters here, there is no System, so that means we’re all level 0.”

The childrens’ faces paled as they processed the reality of their weakness, and the true importance of the lesson they were being taught.

“We earned those levels!” whined the second kid.

“Technically, it was the summoning ritual that won you most of those,” replied the teacher. “Earthers have a tendency to gain levels faster than the natives of a World. Why else would you all get to your 60s in only a few years when it takes most people an entire lifetime to get that strong?”

“But after everything we did, all of our adventures…” said the first kid.

“Adventures?” asked Kai out of curiosity. “What kind of adventures did you go on?”

“Oh, plenty!” beamed the first child. “We went on this huge quest after the three of us were summoned by the Ralen Kingdom to fight against the dread Lich Threobane. Ok, so he was defeated like a thousand years before, but he got away and went to sleep to get back his power. So after he woke up and was destroying the whole place, they brought us to beat him for good!”

“For real?” asked Kai, incredulously. He felt a green sensation begin to bubble in his gut.

“Oh yeah!” chimed in the second kid. “We travelled all over the place and saved a ton of people! There were even a bunch of girls who all fell in love with us, but we all thought girls were icky back then, so we told them we didn’t want to be their boyfriends.”

“Speak for yourself,” replied the third child. “I still think girls are icky!”

“Because you like boys instead?” teasingly asked the first.

“Nah, they’re icky like that too, but they’re cool as friends.”

The three of them chuckled as Kai looked on bewildered. His wide eyes began to narrow as his bafflement at their adventure slowly morphed into envy. Here he was, having been dragged away from home to be some asshole’s throwaway soldier and then once again be denied a real adventure! While these little kids got to experience everything he’d ever wanted. Adoration, heroics, success, and Kai was so close to tasting it for himself, only to be sent to school instead!

“How about you?” asked the first child. “What kind of adventure did you go on?”

“Nphmn…” mumbled Kai.

“Huh, what did you say?”

“Nothing,” said Kai with a painful sigh. “I didn’t go on an adventure, I just got here from Earth.”

“Oh… well that’s too bad. Anyway, we all eventually killed that Lich for good! So no 1000 year slumber for him again!”

The young man took a long, drawn out deep breath, soothing his racing mind enough to be able to listen to the teacher again. Was this really going to be a thing? Was he ever going to get his day in the sun?

For now, the only road he saw towards finding his own adventure was the long one, through a sea of envy and disappointment. In other words, just like back home. But the teen still held out hope that the journey would at least be a little more fun. But for all the frustration he felt, he could argue that it already was.