There are days you wake up with the alarm clock’s sound turned up all the way to eleven and are tired for the rest of the day. There are others when you wake up before the alarm even rings and feel strangely refreshed despite having slept less than usual.

And then, there were days like today. Mary hadn’t set her alarm clock, and Bromman didn’t bang on her door early in the morning. She had all the time she wanted, perfect peace and quiet.

And she failed to rest anyway.

She groaned as she rose from the bed. She didn’t know that her back hated her so much. When she went to the bathroom, her legs explained to her in great details everything they thought about running madly without proper stretching afterwards, just like she did yesterday.

While brushing her teeth, she once more appreciated Bromman’s preparedness - he had a spare toothbrush and toothpaste in his car. Did he meet damsels in baggage-deprivation distress every Thursday? Well… she was actually hoping he didn’t, as that would slightly tip the scales on the side of this being some trafficking/organ sale organisation...

Once she collected herself into a more presentable state, she left the room to find her mentor already waiting, with his eyes darting quickly from one end of the corridor to the other. There wasn’t much to admire here - old, tarnished rugs, rusted lamps, with half the of the bulbs missing or burned out, a few paintings which content Mary couldn’t make out for the life of her.

“Slept well?” Bromman joked.

Mary just looked at him tiredly. After a while, she asked, “could you tell me what is really going on here?”

He smirked at her. “So, you want to tell me that you went through all that without demanding an explanation from this ‘Adam’ guy first?” Mary’s face reddened, but he didn’t leave her enough time to reply and earn another fine from the SJW flying over her shoulder. “Don’t worry, I know how you must feel. I’ve been through the same, and you’re not the first one I guide through it either.”

That sent her thinking. How old was this man? He looked to be in his thirties or forties, but Mary wasn’t so sure of her skill in age judging. She may or may not have misestimated twice or thrice in the past.

“You’re doing rather well, by the way,” he added. It may have been the books she read - when she was young and naive (that is, two days ago), she did hope to go on an adventure to one Magical Wonderland or the other Valley of Mildly Annoying Doom herself. Suffice to say, it wasn’t going the way she imagined it.

“You’re a hero of the prophecy now. In the good, old times, long before you and me, prophecies were rare. Extremely rare, in fact. Entire generations lived and died without a single hero of importance. But recently, a few decades ago, something changed. Oracles of all multiverses and planes started spitting out one prophecy after another as if it was a contest, and each of them wanted that plush elephant from the top shelf. And then, someone high above us decided that it wouldn’t do just to let the lot of you running around willy-nilly, with teenagers wrecking cities and bringing the world to the verge of destruction every other week.”

He sighed. “I can’t really blame the old Merlin. He was probably right that something had to be done. But he could have had a little more foresight and claimed absolute power himself rather than bringing it up to our brilliant Government’s attention. Still, what’s done is done, and we’re stuck with this.” He spread his arms.

“A pile of useless papers to fill instead of any real help for those like me,” Mary muttered, at which her SJW buzzed and flew in front of her face, shining its reflectors straight at her eyes. They weren’t too bright, but they were definitely enough to be annoying.

“Bip! Fifty dollars penalty, bip! The papers are very important, and definitely not useless! Bip!” A paper flew in her direction out of the device’s spinning roller jaws, and this one stroke her square in the forehead just like yesterday.

“Oh, come on! I haven’t said it had no sense, only that it didn’t help me!”

“Bip! Do not question me, bip! Five hundred dollars penalty, bip!” The infernal saucer whizzed and spun around her, making her dizzy. The next sheet of paper came at a weird angle and almost gave her a nasty papercut on the neck. Who the heck thought that was a good idea?

“You’ll get used to it,” Bromman said calmly as she tried hard not to earn another fine. “It is an art of sorts to learn how to speak so that this brilliant device of tremendous importance doesn’t trigger, yet everyone will know what you mean. The key factor is that every SJW keeps its logs for possible appeals, and its purely textual form doesn’t include italics.”

The UFO whizzed towards Bromman’s face, and a small, robotic arm popped out from its bottom to show a rude gesture with a tiny little hand. The man didn’t flinch, and flicked the overgrown fly away. The SJW flew for a couple of meters before stabilising its flight again, buzzing indignantly.

“Another useful thing to know is that although he can punish you for any infractions, others can do whatever they want without any threat.”

The SJW sprouted two of the metal arms this time and made the same gesture with each of them, adding a fluttering sheet of paper hanging from its mouth for emphasis. Despite her situation, Mary found the exchange hilarious. She hoped that laughing didn’t count as an infraction.

“And… what does the word veich mean?” she asked.

Bromman face twisted slightly at the question. “Oh, so you heard that one… Well, I guess you’d hear it sooner or later anyway. Ok, probably sooner. It’s an acronym, less official name for the type C heroes. V.A.H, Vague As Hell.”

Mary sighed. She couldn’t argue with that feature of her prophecy, or at least the second part - the first was rather detailed and specific, if extremely unhelpful. She wondered how much was lost in the recording accident...

“So what now? Can we go get my bag back?” she asked.

“That’s the plan,” Bromman said. “Once we do that, we’ll see to it that you have all the necessary equipment, and I’ll drop you off at the academy.”

Mary blinked. “The academy?”

“Yes, the Brutus Saint’s Academy. You’re a type C hero with no indication of sci-fi versus fantasy implication, but Delphina is far on the magical side of the spectrum. With the fact that you come from a technology inclined world, that places you there.”

“Wait a moment, you mean… how many worlds are there?”

“More than we could count, probably. It’s one of the things that are better kept hidden in the back of your mind until you need it - overthinking every possible combination of planes, dimensions, alternate and parallel universes is a highway to a psych ward.”

“I feel like I’m already on it and speeding,” Mary said and cursed softly as she was awarded a hundred dollars fine. It seemed that curses were more acceptable, at least. However, she saw a single glimmer of hope for herself in this pile of delicately smelling flowers she found herself in. “Does the Academy’s library have all the multiverse’s fantasy books?”

Bromman snorted at that, and this time it was an honest smile that went all the way up to his eyes. “You bet it does. Although you probably know quite a few of them already - take a history book of one world, and you can earn quite a fame for your ‘wonderful imagination’ in another. Selling one’s story rights is one of the most common means of earning a living for many heroes once their story is complete. But for it to work well enough, I’m afraid that you must think about it in advance and make your life unnecessarily difficult and utterly ridiculous.”

And just like that, the stories she had been reading all her life made so much more sense.