The man appeared to be in his late twenties or early thirties. He still had a youthful air about him, but his face had a hardened, world-weary look to it. It was difficult to tell in the darkness of the room, but his jaw-length hair was either dark brown or black. His eyes were another indiscernible shade of shadow. He shifted from his slovenly position on the couch and attempted to enter a seated position. Nora narrowed her eyes and moved to shoot.

“What are you doing?!” the man screeched, raising his hands once again and falling back onto the cushion. “Wardens can't kill each other! It's against the code!” He spoke a loose dialect of Latin. It was close enough that Nora could effectively communicate with him. His words were true, but they only applied if he was, in fact, a Warden.

“It took me two hours of hiking through a strange, sweltering land to reach here. If you are a Warden, then why did you not fetch me? Surely, you felt my appearance in this realm,” Nora asserted.

“Have you felt the energy here? I felt a faint ripple, sure, but there's no way I'd be able to find you with that little, so I went back to sleep,” the man protested.

“Then why did you not send a beacon? That way I'd at least have a proper heading instead of just wandering around and hoping to get lucky,” she demanded, eyes alight with tiny sparks of anger. At this, the man's expression fell.

“I… uh… didn't think of that,” he shrugged apologetically. “But you can't just kill me for being stupid! I've already been punished enough for that, being stuck out here,” he pouted, his expression carrying an air of injustice.

“Was this not one of your primaries?” she asked, her anger beginning to be touched with confusion.

“Who in all of the multiverse would pick this nightmarish realm all but devoid of spatial energy?” he asked pointedly in response. “I fucked up and got sent here so that I wouldn't fuck anything else up, just like everyone else out here. Where exactly do you think you are?”

Nora’s eyes widened. She was under the impression that every Warden was free to pick where they were stationed. That was the entire point of picking primaries. You chose two or three distant realms to spend time in while you are learning the ropes. You built a life on each one, and at the end of your training, you picked your favorite to become your base of operations. From there you may be assigned to various nearby realms as needed, but you almost always ended up living on the primary you selected. Nora began to realize that her situation was somehow even worse than she had feared.

“I don't know where I am,” she answered cautiously, her voice shaking. “I was somehow summoned nearby. I'm lost,” she finished, her voice all but a whisper. Her raised arms gave a small tremble and she lowered her gun. From his perch on the sofa, the man’s gaze darkened.

“You weren't sent here?” he asked incredulously. “You just wound up here by accident? They didn't give you any marks?”

“I don't think so. A group of mages used a formula and summoned a whole group of people,” she explained, “I just got caught up in it. I’m not sure what you mean by marks.”

“These!” he exclaimed, gesturing vaguely towards his back. “You don't have anything like this?” Nora’s eyes ran over the black runes covering his body. She had just changed clothes a short while ago and she was certain that she had nothing like it.

“No,” she answered. She rotated her body a bit and pulled up the back of her shirt. “I've never seen marks like those.”

The man inhaled sharply before burying his head in his hands. His thin fingers ran through his lank, dark locks, as if searching for the words within them. There was no easy way to say this. He had no idea how to tell her the truth. And she was so young too, he thought to himself.

“These are the Outer Realms,” he stated simply.

The name rang a bell. Nora had heard it once before. When she had just become a Junior Warden, she had been paired up with an older Warden. After one particularly unfortunate accident with a fire spell in a village consisting largely of wood, the woman had cried out in her frustration that if Nora caused any more disasters like that, she would send her to the Outer Realms. After that, the woman had stormed off, so Nora hadn't gotten a chance to ask her what she had meant by it, but the phrase had stuck with her, and she remembered it now.

“What are the Outer Realms?” she asked warily. The man groaned audibly as he returned his head to his hands.

“The Outer Realms,” he began, staring bitterly into his palms, “are the Wardens’ dumping ground for those considered too dangerous, or stupid, to be allowed to roam freely. They are a small collection of realms whose spatial energy had been sapped by some kind of spatial disaster in the distant past. Each prisoner is marked with a seal that forbids them from moving their body through space. No jumping, not even any short-range teleportation. The scarcity of spatial energy, combined with the seals, basically ensures that none of us ever becomes strong enough to escape. We're left here to govern the trash realms that the rest of the Wardens have practically forsaken.”

Nora’s arms hung limply at her side. Her face showed no expression as she stared at the man, processing his words. It wasn't really so bad, once you thought about it. Nora didn't have any marks, which meant that she could still move freely, which meant that she could escape.

“Can't I just leave then?” she asked plainly.

“Does it feel like you can leave?” the man asked back, a slight smirk on his face. He was right. It would take some time to regain her energy, but it should still be possible eventually.

“Not yet, but I'll recover within the week,” she answered.

“Maybe this will clear things up,” he grinned as he walked over to an ornate, brass cabinet in the corner of the room. The top of the cabinet contained a large pale blue, translucent disk, and a couple of smaller brass buttons. The man pressed a button in the center and the disk began to glow. Hovering over the apparatus, appeared a cloud of dots the size of pin pricks glowing the same blue as the disk. The dots were connected here and there by tiny blue threads, forming a wild abstract web. Some threads connected close clusters of dots together, while others spread across the entire cloud. The cloud’s blue light illuminated the two’s faces as the man began, once again, to speak.

“This is a map of the multiverse,” he explained. Of course it was. It looked like an ancient version of the holographic map kiosks in the newer Warden’s Offices. Nora bit her tongue though, and continued to listen. “This area right here is the main body of the multiverse,” he declared, gesturing to the cloud, “and these,” he continued, his hands deftly rotating the base of the hologram, then finally one of the brass knobs to zoom in, “are the Outer Realms,” he finished, indicating a small ring of worlds near the bottom of the mass, and at least three inches away from any of the others. It looked like a small stellar galaxy that had its core punched out. Several, spidery thin, glowing threads connected the ring to the rest of the mass, but there was no string shorter than about five inches.

A single point, glowing red, indicated the realm where they were currently located. The threads, of course, represented which realms could access each other. Even realms right next to each other could not travel between each other, unless there was a path connecting them. Nora’s eyes honed in on a point of light nearby the red point in the ring. A single thread shot out of this point and disappeared somewhere in the center of the cloud. She knew that this was the thread that had brought her and her classmates here. The thread was at least seven inches long. Possibly longer.

Nora’s brows furrowed. Judging by the scale, her maximum jump distance was only a little over an inch, and that was at full power. She wouldn't be able to leave the Outer Realms, the way she was now, much less make it home. This was a serious problem. Nora took a second to marvel at how much energy must have been required to bring so many people over such a long distance. It was extraordinary.

It was also extraordinarily frustrating, thinking about having to recreate the feat. Restoring her energy pool would take time, but she had no idea how to go about expanding the size of the pool itself. It too would grow over time, but even the most experienced Wardens she knew wouldn't be able to manage more than four inches. Nora quickly wrote off the concept of jumping everyone home herself and began planning how she would reverse that formula. If it had brought them here, it could take them back. To her side, the grimy man in the nightgown smirked.

“There is a way, you know,” he taunted. His comment snapped Nora right out of her plotting.

“Of course there is,” Nora scoffed. “I'll reverse the formula. It shouldn't be that hard.”

“And how long will that take?” he asked with a pitying grin, “Months? Now, I haven't seen this formula, but if it can do what you claim, it'll probably be more like years. You'll be able to make it home in just enough time to see everybody you love forgetting about you. That's how it works, isn't it.” His expression was dark. Nora could tell just by looking that the man had personally experienced this. She couldn't bring herself to feel sorry for him though.

“You're wrong,” she stated, smiling bitterly back at him. “There's nobody waiting there to forget me. Nobody will even notice that I'm gone. The others have people waiting though. That much is true. I just want to do my job and get people home. If you have a way to get them back quicker, I'll hear it. I'm Nora, by the way.” she offered, extending a hand.

“I'm Kurt,” he replied, grasping her outstretched palm. “Welcome to the Outer Realms!” he announced, smiling broadly.

***

Been productive today, so I'm posting another chapter. Thanks again for reading, and let me know what you think!