'The Watcher', like many that came before, was not a name he chose. It was a name thrust onto him with expectations, hopes, and to a certain extent, destiny. Destiny was what he felt was dragging him as he ran behind the green haired elf, jogging through a long, pipes-lined copper hallway. It had been a long time since he ran with the main cast of a story, and the feeling of being back in the thick of the action was exhilarating. For centuries, he had just been standing at the sidelines, watching events unfold.

He let out an, “Oh...”

Adelaide stopped at a junction and asked in hushed tones, “What?”

“I just figured out why I'm called 'The Watcher',” he replied with a chuckle, catching up to her.

“Is it important right now?”

He seriously considered the question, with Adelaide glancing back, looking progressively annoyed by the second.

Finally, he replied, “Nope.”

“Then shut the gear up.” She peeked out of the corner to scout ahead.

The level smelled of despair and alcohol. Hot steam wheezed out from the pipes at random intervals, though cooled quickly into mist so that he had no need to dodge them. Despite having just stepped out of prison, they had not run into a single guard throughout the entire floor, and aside from one of the cells they've passed being occupied by a single man, there were no signs of life.

The Watcher asked, “Where is everyone?”

“We're on the top floor of a thirty stories metal tower. It's a special prison for 'unique' individuals. Political prisoners, powerful mages, and beings with unique abilities,” she explained. She held up her axes at the ready. “The walls here are thicker than a Titan, nothing gets through. Not even my teleportation.”

He interrupted, “I'm sure you could if you tried.”

She ignored him and continued, “So there's no need for guards in the cell area. They're all out at the entrance. It's easier to funnel prisoners out of one pathway than to chase around an open area.”

“How do you know so much?”

She sighed and, knowing the coast was clear, stepped out of the corner boisterously. Axes still drawn, she walked down the last corridor that ended with a steel vault door.

Her tone raised with confidence. “When you live a life like mine, you need to learn of the places you might end up at. Preparation is the key to survival.”

“Huh. You're smarter than you look.”

“I will put an axe in your face.”

The Watcher had a set idea of what elves were like. From all the movies he had watched and books he had read across all of time, they had almost always been depicted as wispy, eloquent, intellectual creatures. But Adelaide Wiltkins was rough, vulgar, and in the half an hour that they had spent navigating the prison labyrinth, she had told him to 'gear off' over a dozen times, which he assumed was the equivalent of being told to 'fuck off'.

They reached the door and Adelaide leaned against it with her ears. The Watcher asked, “What now?”

She turned her back to the door and twirled her axes. “Wait here,” she commanded sternly.

Like before, she took a step backwards. But just before her feet touched the ground, her body seemed to vibrate, leaving clear after-images of three, before soundlessly disappearing in a thin puff of brown smoke.

He was mystified by the act. It had been hundreds of years since he had seen another person capable of teleportation, and the fact that the process seemed so vastly different than any he had witnessed before had his curiosity lighting up in joy. Wafting his hand through the smoke left behind, he determined it to not be aether. He brought his palm up and sniffed. Rust. The metallic tang touched his tongue and he made a face.

Just as he was deducing where the rust could have come from, the steel door swung outwards, opening up to a large, wide lobby. Wooden floor, copper walls, and two security cages made up the layout of the large, mostly empty room. An opening in the wall opposite led to a balcony. Another door to the far left marked the exit. Eight security guards, wearing leather armour, bowler hats, and carrying maces, made up the obstacles of the room. Or they would have, were they not slumped against the walls and collapsed on the ground, bleeding from the open wounds in their back. Adelaide's axes dripping with blood told him all he needed of what happened.

The Watcher ran up to the nearest victim on the ground and exclaimed, “You killed them?”

“Yeah. Either that or we stay stuck here. Lucky for us, they were mostly out for lunch. Well, I did wait for lunch time to escape, so there wasn't much luck there, I guess. Except for Nads coming with the axes. Didn't know he was going to do that.” Her reply was nonchalant, as if mass murder was the most daily of her routine.

He turned back to the security. He could staunch the blood, maybe even reverse the cut and restart the heart. He put his hands over the wound, preparing to use his powers, but the image of Akaras flying across the room stopped him in his tracks. It was one thing to teleport out of the jail cell. That was easy. Just a state of chronological suppression and phasing while the world rotated for a fraction of a millisecond. He didn't have to interact with gravity or even hold in atmosphere.

But without proper control of his powers, if he misjudged the gravitational strength of this new world he was in, or failed to properly keep in the atmosphere, the victim could end up spontaneously combusting, or worst, have the spine ripped away from the body at terminal velocity.

He paused for what seemed like an eternity in his endless life, before pulling back his hands in defeat. “I'm sorry,” he said to the lifeless body. “I'm so sorry.” He got to his feet and turned to Adelaide with a fierce glare.

She stepped back, a flash of fear in her eyes, as she stammered out, “W-what?”

“No more killing.”

Regaining some confidence, she replied, “As if. If you haven't noticed, human,” she punctuated with the same disdain given to cockroaches that starts flying. “We're in the most heavily defended building in Everwind. I don't know what magical world you live in, but if we want to survive, we're going to have to fight our way out.”

He clicked his tongue and looked out towards the balcony. An idea formed in his head and he jogged towards the light. A stupid idea, sure, but all of his ideas were stupid until he tried, and continued to be stupid until he succeeded.

“Where are you going?” Adelaide called out, her footsteps following closely behind.

He ignored her, overtaken by the plan that ran through his head, drowning out all other coherent thoughts. He neared the balcony, the light outside blinding. He stepped into the shining gateway, feeling as if he had stepped into the afterlife. But what he stepped on was not a fluffy cloud or molten lava, but the hard and jagged steel grated platform. His hands reached out instinctively to stop himself just as his body hit the rails.

“No way.” The words left him like air out of a balloon.

He was a time traveller, and he had lived a life longer than anyone physically should. He had seen civilizations fall. Looked on as mass extinction happened before his eyes. He had participated in end of the world scenarios, not once, but six times. Still, he was both surprised and relieved that he could continue to be amazed by the universe.

The world unfolded before him as if he was in a video game and it needed time to load. But more likely was that his brain just needed time to take in just how foreign the new world was to him.

Towers around ten stories high stood across the entire city of Everwind, numbering like blades of grass in a field. Bricked, wooded, chimneyed, and coppered, the metal frames glimmered in the afternoon light, the stone spouts spitting out fluffs of smoke. A wall of stone surrounded the edge of the city, and beyond that, a wide grassland extended into the mountains after, tiny settlements dotting across the stretching landscape. A copper blimp floated past his view. But above all of that, shining light down onto them, were two Suns that hung overhead, one the size of the Sun back on Earth, and the other, just half that.

“You have two S—” he was about to say 'Sun', but realized that they were in a different solar system, in a different universe, and Sun was probably not their names. “Stars. You have two stars.”

Having caught up to him, Adelaide took the tone of an annoyed teacher and replied, “You mean Rykka and Cirus? How old are you? Have you never seen the Twins before?”

“No,” he replied blankly. “I haven't.” The sound of stampeding feet came from the corridor beyond the entrance. It pulled him back to the situation at hand. He would have time to marvel at the new planet he had arrived on later, but for now, he needed to focus. He eyed the blimp and gauged the distance. A little far and somewhat difficult, but not impossible.

Adelaide turned to the door and spun her axes in her hands. “If you don't have a plan, I'm going to go take care of this.”

He grabbed her wrist before she could step away and warned, “Hang on.”

“What are you—! Waaaah!”

He wrapped themselves in a time bubble like he did with Akaras. From any other point of view, it would seem as if they had launched away from the balcony like they were fired from a catapult. But he had instead stopped time within their space, retaining just the momentum and gravitational pull of the galaxy and the universe but not the planet. As the planet continued to spin and orbit around the Twin stars, they were left behind. They were not moving. Everything else was. The city grew distant beneath their feet, the time bubble prevented wind from reaching them, making their flight silent save for Adelaide's heavy breathing as they flew through the sky.

But he knew something was wrong the moment the process started. His confidence shrunk, not due to the lack of it, but because he started blacking out. The blimp closed in on them, but he knew he did not have enough power to reach it. His arm burned as his magic circuit fought to give him the energy needed to complete the task. But he was running on fumes. The process stopped, the time bubble dispersed. They slowed down in the air, arched, and began to fall to the pull of gravity.

Adelaide shouted, “Watcher!”

He did not reply. Could not. His eyes slowly closed shut as the ground grew before him. Then, silence. Followed by darkness.

His eyes flew open to the sight of trees and chirps of birds.