Thresholder

You know, I’ve gotta say it, this world kind of sucks.

From what I’ve seen, you have maybe five cities, if I’m being generous, and they’re all tiny. It’s a change of pace from the last world I was on, but that’s about all I can say for it. For true luxury, you need millions of people, and billions is even better. You want theater? Nine thousand people on the Natrix, that’s enough for some piddly local theater shit, which’ll do two amateur shows a year if you’re lucky. Sports? You need to be pulling from thousands of hopefuls, millions if possible, and then you need to put them on teams with a huge amount of funding, and then you need to grind them against each other for ages. Comedy? A good comedian is going to have to put in the hours, they’re going to have to hone their material, and it’s a bad example anyway, because comedy is so specific to a given time and place that most of it makes no sense to someone off-world. Food? You want someone who has made it their life to make good dishes, someone building off a canon of other people who have also made it their life to make good dishes, a mix of traditional and experimental, people growing and getting better with disagreement.

But the real problem is, what makes a place great is exceptional people, and there’s just no way for there to be enough of them here. Take away the needs of survival, assume for a sec that you could have every single person here pushing themselves as hard as they could at their chosen profession, so you’d have chefs and dancers and actors and whatnot. You’d still end up with a lot of middle-of-the-pack blandness. The very best people here wouldn’t be that much above average. It’s like throwing dice, you don’t get the weird results unless you throw a lot of them, and nine thousand? That’s a recipe for a sea of mediocrity. A puddle, really.

Last world was great. It was a whole planet just absolutely blanketed by a city. I don’t think it was a real planet, not like this, there was magic and shit so maybe there was a gravity golem holding everything to the ground, I don’t know. But there wasn’t just a theater, or a theater district, there was this wide swath of city that was devoted to the performing arts.

I know I don’t look it, but I love the theater, so long as there’s something new. I mean there’s that same thing as comedy, right, some of it is just too steeped in some specific time and place, there are jokes that don’t land for me, references that get lost, and sometimes you have idiotic plot points that are really just there as a response to a response to a different famous play that everyone but me knows about. But mostly that’s stuff for insiders, and it’s easy enough to steer clear of if you know how to read a poster. Music isn’t as prone to the same problems, maybe because it’s harder to disguise irony as art.

You know, I know you’re trying to get information out of me. I don’t need any special powers to know that, it’s just painfully obvious and kind of boring, not even deft enough to make a game out of. But you know what, it doesn’t need to be a game. You’re recording all this, you’ll share it with Perry, or report back to him, and that’s fine, I beat the shit out of him and could have killed him, so if he gets a little extra edge, whatever. But ask me questions because you want to know the answer, not because you want to give him a sword to stab me with. I’ll answer. I like talking about it, and I’m not going to be a tight-lipped asshole just because of some obsession with pragmatism. If I cared about that, I’d have killed Perry, and probably wouldn’t be here with you. I mean, you shot me with your biggest gun the moment I asked for dinner, which is hilarious, but if I were a different sort of guy, I’d have ripped off some heads over it.

Alright, so how it works is that once I’ve looked at someone, I can see into their past. That’s it, really, postcognition it’s called, got it in my first world and thought it was a bit shit, but it’s come in handy more often than I’d thought it would. Works through armor, even a lot of armor. Doesn’t work through video or pictures. Only works on a single person at a time, but once I’ve got a person locked in, I stay locked in even if they’re on the other side of the world. Right now, I’ve got a lock on Perry. I can see everything that he’s ever done, even the stuff that he probably doesn’t remember. It takes a bit to search back and forth, and most of it is pretty boring, but it’s not that hard to find the good bits. Anything where someone stays in one place for a month is probably not a good bit.

So you can see why that doesn’t help with watching a play. I can look at an actor and unroll their life like a scroll, but I can’t see what they’re thinking, I can only watch rehearsals and listen to random conversations. It might take days to find the context of a single line. Never works, not that I actually tried, not in the moment.

Oh, I know all about Perry. I watched the good bits already. There are probably a few more to find, but the big battles always stand out. I know about the wolf thing, and the mechawolf thing, and his little visit to the space station, and Marchand, and the nanites, and everything else.

He didn’t tell you about the nanites? Heh. I guess he likes playing it close to the vest, though woof, two years here, that’s a long time to stay quiet. I bet he’s glad I showed up. He jumped at the chance for a fight, anyway.

Tell me, do you have any meat?

~~~~

So, last world, the giant city, kind of a fruity place in a lot of ways, all totally vegan, plants everywhere as a matter of course, none of the belching industry that I’d seen in other places. The rivers were clean enough to bathe in, which people did. No war, very little crime, very idyllic.

The woman I was going against was Marjut. She was a crazy bitch who wanted to tear everything down, wanted nature to reclaim everything, wanted the last human to die if she could swing it. Honestly, I kind of think that world was for her, not for me, even if it had a lot to offer me. It was like the portals were saying to her, ‘this is everything you ever wanted from humanity’, just so she could say to the portals, ‘it was never about that, it was about the feeling of righteous murder’. Which I can respect.

I took my time and saw what the world had to offer. That’s one of the special things about being a thresholder, you get to roll in and experience the very tip top of the obelisk of quality and see what’s worth seeing. You get to go into a bookstore and say, ‘What’s considered by your people to be the very best book ever written?’ You get to sit down at a table and order the famous dish that everyone knows how to make, the one that’s been perfected by millions of grandmothers and passed down through generations with all kinds of specialized tweaks, the thing that everyone is bored of, and it’s new to you, brand new, so even if there’s no meat, it’s its own kind of experience.

Right, so the world was a city, and they were basically everything that Marjut had ever asked for, but she was way too far gone. Watching some of her early worlds, she was always an extremist, even for her starting world, where she’d grown up, but she was an extremist who pointed herself at the extremes, the torture factories and blood geysers. I won’t go on too much about her, but she was crazy. At least she was crazy in an interesting way.

Eventually she unleashed a plague, and I didn’t act fast enough to stop her.

Oh, I definitely could have, I just didn’t.

I thought it would be interesting, novel, exciting. I also thought it would help me steal some stuff. In my second world I had picked up a storage space, and I had been busy filling it. Plus I wanted some time to learn some magic. Marjut had learned a forbidden magic and then killed the man who taught her, but I could watch over her shoulder and learn some too. I’m not a big fan of learning, generally speaking, it takes too much time and is too boring compared to just stealing a trident or eating a dragon’s heart.

Yeah, you’re right, I should start at the beginning. Very conventional, but I guess it’s for a reason.

No, I tell the truth. Why wouldn’t I? You’re planning on killing me at the first opportunity anyway. Nothing here is going to help you with that. You don’t have the tools to make it happen, though that gun was better than I’d thought it would be.

Just listen, I guess, if you want to. I’m in the mood to refine my patter.

~~~~

Most world hoppers — thresholders — don’t think much of their starting world, and I’m no exception.

There’s a typology that one of the threshies used, which I kind of liked, little axes of figuring out what a world was, at its core. Does it have magic or tech? Is the power held collectively or by a few? Urban or rural? Hostile or welcoming? Insular or open? There’s some overlap there, and I never liked pinning things down as much as he did, but sure, let’s roll with it.

My homeworld was smack dab in the middle. Mid-tech, mid-magic, power held by the few, big urban centers with wide rural areas, not particularly hostile or welcoming, not too insular or open. I mean, it’s different for thresholders, isn’t it? A place you grew up is going to feel welcoming and open even if it’s a shit pit for outsiders. But I think that’s more or less it. I’ve been to five worlds, six if you count this one, but maybe we can count the base world a half world, if you’re interested in it.

I was born into a big farming family, but shipped off to the city to live with my uncle because they thought I was clever, which I was by the standards of the farm. I got an apprenticeship as an accountant and ended up working with one of the big shipping companies, and if I have to say any more about that, I’m going to die of boredom. I didn’t even get the pleasure of going out on the ships and sailing the seas, I was stuck cataloging what we were importing and exporting, trying to make sure the accounts were paid in full. It was miserable.

When I say mid-tech, I mean we had electricity and indoor plumbing but no computers. I never really understood computers all that well, still don’t, so that’s high-tech to me, but someone like Perry probably thinks his own world, Earth, was mid-tech. It’s a bad system, really.

When I say mid-magic, I mean we didn’t really have it in our day-to-day life. Magic isn’t magic everywhere, there’s not always a spark, sometimes it’s just a branch of science, which is sort of how it was in my last world, the big city. In my homeworld? Magic was the domain of the legates. They were hugely powerful, kept in check only by each other, usually not more than two or three in a city, but most cities only had one. In our city — I mean, you don’t care about his name, but it was Algernon, and he was a local god. He could run on water and launch himself into the air by jamming his spear against the ground. He could make a man bow down just by staring at him hard enough. He was fair and just, as far as legates went, which wasn’t really saying all that much, since they were known for their brutality and caprice.

I made decent money doing my work, and went to see plays whenever I could. They were an escape from the dull tedium. One time, Algernon was there at the largest theater in the city, sitting at a place of prominence at the front of the audience, watching closely. It was a tragedy, and when it got to its climax, Algernon stood up and said, ‘no’. He liked the woman who’d been about to kill herself, and preferred that she live, so he said that they had to change it, and these actors, masters of their craft, who’d performed the play hundreds of times before, had to change the ending on the fly to suit Algernon’s whims.

When I was eighteen years old, I got word from the farm that Algernon had killed my father and brothers and added my mother and sisters to his harem. My family was known locally for their beauty, which wasn’t considered such a good thing, because being exceptional meant that you might draw the eye of a legate.

I was telling this story to someone, just setting the scene like this, and they thought that it was the setup for some kind of revenge fantasy, like I heard the news, broke down, then resolved to do whatever it took to exact my revenge. I found that laughable. Every story I had heard of people going against the legates had them smeared into a fine paste. No, it was just a thing that happened. I understood it, and had accepted since I was young that it might happen to my family.

What I really felt was a desperate wish to be in that position someday, to be able to do what I wanted, to take what I wanted, to have the whole world open up for me.

Legates came up from the people, usually coming into their power very young, selected by who-knew-what, and when I was old enough, I accepted that the fantasy wasn’t going to happen for me. Knowing that, I tried for the other path, getting wealthy, insulating myself from danger, having the coin to purchase women, getting good enough at the sly social stuff to cozy up to a legate. They needed accountants, after all. They taxed the people of their city to fund their habits, and couldn’t just skate by on making people do things.

I wasn’t the only one with that idea though, and I was always at the periphery, trying to hustle, to wedge open doors, to cheat and steal when I could get away with it, to lie my way into social circles that were out of my reach, to spend money to puff myself up. It was pathetic, honestly. I scrubbed my ink-stained fingers until they looked like a dilettante's.

When that portal appeared, I didn’t give it two seconds of thought. The only thing I did was to grab a sack of gold, a ceremonial sword, and a spare change of clothes, all of which was about five minutes of pure motion.

That first world, I bumbled through. I think most people do, with their first. It’s like losing your virginity, you’re running on instinct and it gets messy fast, but if you’re lucky, you survive.

That was a joke, come on, you can laugh a little.

If most worlds are shaped like a plate, or at least a big globe that’s a plate shape when you’re up close to it, then this one was a tall drinking glass, one that was filled with all kinds of vegetation. There weren’t sides to it, I don’t know why people always think that it has sides, it was just thousand mile tall trees supporting all the other stuff. I don’t know how it worked, but there was a bit of float to the wood, enough that you could build a boat to putter around through the air with. Magic, probably.

There were fuck-huge leaves and beds of moss, soil collecting in nooks, pitcher plants so big you could swim in them, and all kinds of berries and mushrooms growing all over the place. I had no idea what was good to eat, so I ate sparingly and got the runs, figuring out as I went along. That was a one-way ticket to getting poisoned, which was exactly what happened a week in. I was laying there on a giant leaf I’d climbed down to, lips blue, feeling my organs shut down.

I got rescued by a man cloaked in silk. He took a gourd from inside his pouch and poured a sticky white milk into my mouth, and I began to vomit harder than I had ever vomited before, breaking a record I’d set only two days prior. He stayed with me, nursed me back to health, and told me all kinds of things, almost all of which I forgot in my delirium. He was from another world, a traveler like me, and he was very curious about who I was and where I had come from.

He had a command over silk, had gained that power in his last world, and could shoot jets of the stuff out to wrap around branches and move himself up and down the jungle. I was envious, but there didn’t seem to be a way to steal the power from him. He carried me, often, which made me sick to my stomach from the sudden jerking motion, but he’d been living in this vertical world for months, and knew his way around. I was new, and needed educating.

The place was a paradise to him. He’d been a botanist before hopping worlds, and now he was locomoting up and down the world, seeing the variations in adaptations, adding sketches to his books. He’d made a little home for himself, using a small hollow in one of the trees that had been created by some larger beast, and he had all kinds of shit in there, a little lab where he made medicines and inks, a bed, all kinds of silk clothes that he wore for different occasions and environments, a little garden, and a ‘dignified’ bathroom.

He made clothes of silk for me, outfitted me as well as he could, and then sat me down to talk for what felt like it was going to be my entire life. He really liked to talk. Now, I’m a talker, a schmoozer, a guy who likes his stories, but this guy, he was a boring talker. Loved to hear himself speak, but me, I’m mythologizing, I’m entertaining, I’m getting something from it. With him it was all just words, science that I didn’t understand and didn’t match up with what I knew, because we came from different base worlds.

Eventually, he told me about the man he’d killed in the last world.

I saw it right away, of course. You kill the other guy, you get a portal. Easy, right? A sensible way of doing things, where one guy comes out on top. A nice little mirror to life, probably how things are in every world when you drill down deep enough.

Now you might be thinking that I’m the sort of guy that would slit this kind stranger’s throat in his sleep to get a portal out of there, and possibly get some silk powers in return. Well, that’s because you don’t have the measure of me, not as I am now, not as I was then. I thought about it, sure, but it was actually him that came after me.

See, we weren’t alone in the trees, but we were the only humans. There were small colonies of spindly little people with long tails, tribes of maybe a hundred, two hundred at the most, living at all levels. They were maybe four feet tall with pinched faces, not human but human-like. We didn’t understand their language. They had loincloths, spears, and nets, gourds and bowls and crude tools, but not much else. Aside from their size, there wasn’t much reason to think they weren’t just as smart as we were.

This guy hated them. Detested them. He would talk about them like they were plague-ridden vermin that didn’t deserve the forest. I didn’t pay him much mind. Like I said, he was the boring kind of talker. Even his seething made me yawn.

Anyway, one day he gets it into his head to go fifty miles down the forest in pursuit of a plant with some mystical properties or whatever. It was something he had learned from them, actually, painted on a wall, no words to go with it. He gave me a choice whether to come with him or sit back in the little house, but I couldn’t move around as well without him. I was afraid of falling to my death either way, since there were places where the vegetation got sparse enough you couldn’t count on anything to break your fall before the fall broke you.

I went with.

Fifty miles hadn’t seemed like that long when he’d drawn the plan up, but it was fifty vertical miles, and it took us ages. Worse, we quickly got outside the range of the plants and animals we knew all about, and were in uncharted territory as far as food went, since we hadn’t packed enough dried things.

It was fucking miserable, but I’ll spare you all the details, because I wasn’t quite as cool then, and if I listed out everything that happened, I’d start to bore myself.

Anyway, we found the mystical plant, ate some of its oh-so-wonderful fruit, and gained the ability to see into each other’s pasts.

I saw a man who had been fastidious his whole life, a guy who liked to catalog and categorize, stick little labels on things, and present papers at meetings with other fastidious little men who cared about differences in the varieties of nettles or whatever horseshit they’d got into their heads was important. He paid attention to appearances. I had already seen a lot of that in the silks he’d made for himself, but I guess I hadn’t seen just how deep it went. Looking over his shoulder through the whole time he’d been in this forest world, it was shocking how much of it he spent preening in front of the mirror. He shaved every day, which I hadn’t even known about. I thought he was just naturally without hair on his chin, but no, he’d fashioned himself a blade and shaved like it was a tenet of his religion.

At the same time I was skimming his past, he was skimming mine. I cannot stress how much he hated what he saw.

We came from similar worlds, in some ways, but there were a few big differences. Mine was permissive, and his was not. I had been a drinker, a gambler, a womanizer, and sometimes, a layabout. I had cheated, stolen, and once killed a man I owed some money to in a back alley, though it would have been hard for him to chance upon that when delving my past. But I’m not even really sure that he got that far, because what really offended him was what I’d been getting up to in the world we’d been sharing.

See, I’d been fucking the locals.

We didn’t speak the same language, but I had never let that stop me in my base world. Women understand when a man is after them even if they don’t share a single word, and I’d had some flings where not more than a sentence passed between us. It’s just not necessary, if you’re both using your bodies to talk.

There were four different women I’d been having regularly. I was a giant to their eyes, a mammoth of a man with a ready smile, and they didn’t seem to mind that they were sharing me. I never learned whether their people had husbands or anything like that, but it wouldn’t have been the first time I’d made a man a cuckold.

My traveling companion went apoplectic, maybe because he was directly seeing some of these engagements with his own eyes.

He didn’t start with his knife out. He started with a tirade, just a stream of words about what a cretin I was, how I had defied god and the natural order — a point of confusion for me, since my world didn’t have the idea of gods, and every time we’d talked about gods hadn’t really clarified anything. He called the local creatures vermin, rats, squirrels — do you have those here? It’s one of the things that varies a lot between worlds. Sometimes there are the same words, sometimes not. Words for things he found disgusting, I guess. He used the phrase ‘rat-like hands’ so many times I thought maybe he had something wrong in his brain. I guess when he said it, I could see the resemblance, the way they had long fingers with tiny sharp nails on the end. It hadn’t bothered me.

I let him have it right back. Most of what I said was just graphic descriptions of all the stuff I’d done with those women, and sometimes things I hadn’t done. I was sick of his shit and wanted to offend him as much as I could. If this was the thing that got to him, then I wanted to drive the spear in as deep as I could.

I saw something change in his eyes, the decision being made. I went at him, stopping mid-sentence, and when he brought up the knife that never left his side, I was there to catch his wrist. I beat the shit out of him, got cut deep across the arm, and had the upper hand until he started strangling me with the silks that we were both still wearing. He could have killed me, easily, but instead he just choked me out and wrapped me up like he was some kind of demented spider.

He gave more rants to me as we stayed there. His argument was that I was fundamentally inhuman, that I deserved to die, that he had been placed here to make me answer for my transgressions, all that kind of thing.

While that was happening, one of the women was cutting me free.

She’d been following us since the very start, deftly staying out of our way and silently helping us where she could. All that shit I skipped over? If I was telling you the long version, there would be a bunch of places where you’d say ‘oh, now that makes sense, I thought it was just blind luck twenty times in a row’. It was her, unknown to us.

Once I was out of the silks, I murdered him, drove that knife of his straight into his chest, making it my knife.

And you know what? No portal.

I was left scratching my head and wondering what the fuck I was going to do. He had been my main way of getting around, as unpleasant as I’d found that. Our house was fifty miles straight up, which might as well have been on the moon so far as I was concerned. We had a small boat made of the floating wood, but it was hell to move.

I took what I could from the body, then dumped it. The woman chittered at me, had some of the same fruit, looked at my past for what felt like a long time, then left without so much as a courtesy lay or a bite of food from her pouch. Either she saw something she didn’t like in my past, or she had been more interested in the fruit the whole time.

Not three days later, a man in armor shows up. He’s got portals, but little teal-rimmed ones that take him over distances of a few yards, not world hopping ones. I lured him close to me then held on tight, counting myself lucky that he only had armor and not a sword. With me on him, he couldn’t really use the portals for much but flinging us through the air. I grappled him, then pinned him, and bashed his head against the wood until his face was mush inside his helmet.

I never so much as got his name.

The portal opened up, I was on the next world.

~~~~

You know, other world hoppers think that’s hilarious when I tell them. This whole thing with the silk guy, months of my life, and maybe we were meant to be allies the whole time. Or they were meant to be allies against me, though from what I know, that wouldn’t make all that much sense.

I was really thinking to myself, ‘you know what, I could get behind this, going from world to world, getting magic powers, fighting guys’.

I ended up in a toxic wasteland, and nearly died. There were heavy winds and spores in the air, lightning strikes and more exotic dangers. A pulsing green rock stripped my skin off a layer at a time until I ran from it. I saw a huge, many-limbed beast on the horizon and ran from that too. I had only a single skill, which was reading a person’s past, and let me tell you, this was exactly the kind of situation where that wouldn’t do a damn bit of good.

Eventually I found a thick door set in the side of a hill, and I banged on it twice before realizing there was no lock. I found myself in a warehouse, protected from the dangers outside. I’d been in a lot of warehouses in my time, but this one was by far the most disorganized. The only reason I was thinking it was a warehouse was that things were bundled up tight for transport. If not for that, it might have been someone’s barn.

The walls were made of burnished earth, packed tight, the same stuff I’d been walking over. There weren’t support beams or anything like them, which was at first worrying, and then impressive. Small polished rocks gave off light, and were studded in at various points. I was happy that there were people, honestly, because as much as I’d enjoyed the company of the squirrel people, they weren’t really what I had hoped for when I found out that I’d be moving from world to world.

I was wrong though, there weren’t people, there was a person, just one, who I’d end up spending almost two weeks with.

The warehouse was hers, and the tunnels leading deeper into the earth led me to her home and workshop. She was beautiful, with stunning pink hair and a dress that made her look like a shiny beetle. I was surprised that she was human, but I’d later learn that she wasn’t quite human, just a close cousin or something like that. She was absolutely adorned from head to toe in accessories, five earrings on every ear, six necklaces overlapping each other, bangles on her wrists and a cluster of rings on her fingers. She had a small, slightly pouty mouth, chubby cheeks, and small teeth. Vizentia, her name was, though she was slow to give it.

I had known it already, of course, because from the first moment I looked at her, I was looking through her past.

Vizentia offered me tea, and I sat down with her. She was cautious of me in my torn silks, but with every moment that passed, I was learning more about her.

The way she lived, dug down in a hole, all alone, with all sorts of riches, was how all her people lived. They were tinkers and craftsmen, and that was how she spent the vast majority of her very very long life. There were other holes like hers, with other women like her, but they didn’t speak with one another, and there were no social visits. Young men would come from across the wastes, trying to find a hole like hers, and if she accepted them, she would mate with them, then kill them. They didn’t seem to know that was the fate that awaited them.

Like I said, they weren’t human. For humans, it wouldn’t make sense, and I’m not even sure that it made sense for them, but I never looked too far into it.

That hole had been her entire life since she’d crawled from another hole very much like it with only the bare minimum to survive. She’d run far away, dug and tunneled, then established herself, growing her own food, digging her own deep well to get at the pure water far below her home, and then she set to specialization.

It was all incredibly strange, but as I was watching her past and our present, I realized one thing: she wanted me.

To her, I looked a bit like the other men that had come to her hole, young and bedraggled. They had crossed the wastes with almost nothing, sent forward by their mothers in this strange, brutal way. Most of them died, but a few made it past all the dangers and the unknown, unmapped landscape. You had to be special to make it to one of those holes, which the women found attractive. Doing it healthy and uninjured made you more attractive, and for all the wear I’d suffered, I looked like a prime choice.

We had our tea, which I guess was her idea of foreplay, then fucked like animals.

I figured I had about a week before she tried to kill me. That was how it had been for the others. I enjoyed the food she cooked for me, and got drunk on the wine she’d been brewing, and we fucked some more, up against every surface. They only got laid once every few decades, these witches of the wastes, and made the most of it, filling their bellies with seed to have a clutch of babies, eggs laid in piles.

I learned a lot about them and their society, such as it was. That giant creature with a dozen limbs I had seen out in the wastes, that was something of a delivery man, a symbiotic species that moved from hole to hole, or maybe what a man sometimes turned into under certain conditions. All the holes had their warehouse set there at the entrance for the beasts, who would reach in with incredibly long limbs, plucking up whatever they wanted, leaving behind something of greater value from the stores they held on their backs. I’d get to see it later on. The witches didn’t like or trust the delivery men, but it was the only way to get certain things, and the only way to send word across the wastes.

She had no idea who she was dealing with. I let her believe I was one of the poor, naive saps who’d been cast out to cross the wastes, if an exceptional specimen by their standards.

When she tried to kill me, I was ready for it. She was no match for me. I guess the men never saw it coming, but I was prepared, and it didn’t take much to subdue her and grab the knife from her clutches. I choked her out and tied her up, then tried to decide what to do with myself.

It was a world with two magics, alchemy and crafting, neither of which were accessible to me. Each of the witches had their own speciality, usually decided by what the delivery men would take and leave, but they all dabbled in a bit of everything. Vizentia had specialized in magical rings, which she’d been making for the last five hundred years.

Her hole was filled with baubles and tools from the other witches. I never got the hang of the alchemy stuff, and it might have been barred from men in general for all I knew, or reserved for their own version of human, but I could direct Vizentia to use it. There were cycles to the alchemy, ways to turn things into other things, sometimes getting a bit more in the process. Mud got turned to stone, which got turned to crystal, which gave the light to grow the plants, whose fibers were turned into water to keep the plants going and some extra for drinking, and so on and so forth, a complex balance that meant they could set to the work of crafting things. She made everything she needed with these huge cycles, one thing always leading to three or four others. There were huge ledgers describing the transformations and their sequences, and a room full of clay urns to hold things in.

I stole everything that wasn’t nailed down, and I did it by virtue of a bauble that let me store things away elsewhere. I tried to get her to make me a weapon, which she had none of, and she tried to make a cursed thing that would have killed me if I weren’t crafty. Once that happened, I beheaded her and plotted my next move.

In the end, I waited for the delivery man to come. I had clothes that would help me to survive the wastes, but the delivery man would lumber along and show me the way to the next hole, which was what I was really after. I was trying to stock up on what I could, food that would keep and skins full of water, and I’d have loved a bauble that could keep a place for me to live within it.

The delivery man reached into the warehouse with his absurdly long arms, which seemed to keep unfolding. They reached over all the packages and boxes and racks of goods, feeling with long fingertips touching everything, because he couldn’t see, you know? It took him days, longer than I had thought, since he seemed to want to catalog everything to his own satisfaction before doing any of the taking or leaving.

When he was done, having taken a few things and left a few others, the arms retracted, and I followed after them.

I named my companion Aldous, after a kid I knew growing up, big, tall, but a bit dim. Aldous was a thinking creature, since I’d seen the way he was feeling up the goods and making his selections, but he never spoke, and didn’t seem to have a mouth. I tried to see his past, and it didn’t work, just as it didn’t work on animals. He’d been intimidating when I’d first seen one of his kind on the horizon with the toxic wastes all around me, but when we traveled together, I got a sense of just how gentle he was. I guess I thought of us as two friends, moving down the road together, but I knew in my heart that wasn’t true.

The first hole he went to, I raced ahead of him. I did as I’d done with Vizentia, and it was easier, because I knew what was expected of me and didn’t have to comb through this new one’s past while also trying to have the customary tea.

This one was a specialist in potions, and I gathered as many as I could from her, lining the shelves of my internal space. After the seduction, before she could murder me, I tied her up and made her explain all of the potions to me, then had her make a few batches of what I most wanted. If I hadn’t had the past to go off of, she might have had an easier time killing me, but if I was patient I could find all the times she’d ever made potions before.

I left without killing her, because there was really no reason to put her down. The witches never left their holes, and the landscape outside was inhospitable, virtually devoid of life except for the delivery men.

I guess my plan had been to just keep up with that, going from hole to hole, fucking the witches and then stealing whatever I could. But that third hole, that was where I met Chrissy, the other threshie, and we took an instant dislike to each other.

Chrissy hated pretty much everything about that world. She hated the witches, the delivery men, the holes, the wastes, and most of all, what was happening with the kids.

“It’s unfair!” she would shout. “It’s unjust!”

I would shrug and say ‘sure’.

“We have to do something about it!” she’d say. She had this kind of nasal whine to her, especially when she got worked up, and she was worked up a lot.

You know, back then, I might have gone along with her if she’d have had any way of actually accomplishing anything. Not because I thought it was necessary or good or whatever, but because it seemed like a bit of a lark. I’d never been a crusader, but why not? Problem was, she was just bouncing from place to place, trying to find a foothold, and it was boring before I ever even saw it in action. When I met her, she was arguing with the witch in that third hole, and doing it at gunpoint.

It was actually my first time seeing a gun, if you can believe that. My world didn’t have them, and the endless vertical jungle didn’t either, so I was a bit confused by it.

I talked with Chrissy, and saw into her past. This was her second world, not counting her base world. In her first, she’d been a sidekick to a threshie with ten wins under his belt. He’d kitted her out and they went flying across the stars together, fighting a guy whose plan was genocide of some kind or another. She’d fallen in love with her mentor, they had sex on a starry moonlit night, and then he’d gotten his head blown off. She hadn’t even really done anything in that final fight, but it had been how a battle happens sometimes, two people clashing and both dying because they each had more blades than armor.

Anyway, she was fucking annoying, and I took up a fight against her mostly for the laughs. At first, it was just me needling her, telling her that she was fighting against a whole society of witches that didn’t even like each other. They hadn’t decided that this was how it was going to be, it was instinct for them, and even if she could enlighten a single one of them, did she think that was going to do anything? Honestly I didn’t believe half of what I was saying, but it was just fun to see her squirm. And she didn’t know that I knew about her last world, so I’d make all these references to, I don’t know, people getting their heads blown off or whatever.

Honestly, it was good I ran into her early on, because she’d been read in by her mentor. When we had some time apart, I was able to scan back and find the conversation where he’d explained everything to her. It helped me understand a little better: I was a world hopper, and I was special because of it, and if I could keep winning, which I was confident I could, I would swell up with power.

I played around with her a little bit before things came to a head. We went from hole to hole, together because it was what I wanted rather than because she enjoyed my company. I undermined her with the witches, and slept with most of them, which Chrissy hated. She kept asking me about the bastards I was presumably creating, and I told her that I’d always thought that was the mother’s issue to deal with. Here, the witches killed the fathers not long after insemination, so what was the problem? But I’d left plenty of bastards behind in my base world, and I expect I’ll leave a few behind here when it comes time to crush Perry.

We had two fights, Chrissy and I, if I’m just counting the ones that were fought with fists and weapons. There were lots of fights with just words, because I liked to take the piss out of her, but it wasn’t until the end that it came to blows. One of the fights was in the hole of an ancient witch — and the witches were ancient as a rule, so you have to understand that this one was an absolute crone, several millennia old, her hole a sprawling thing. Chrissy had uncovered a bit of history, evidence of some ancient Grand Spell, which was apparently a recurring theme across the worlds. She wanted to undo it, or discover its nature, and asked for my help in looking into the crone’s deep past, since Chrissy had figured out I had some kind of ability. I looked, and then refused to tell her, and that finally set her off down the path of violence.

This was the largest of the holes, and while they’d all been packed with knick-knacks and fripperies, this one was exceptional. Shelves coated every wall, the doodads piled deep, strange instruments and ingredients hanging from the ceiling. We wrecked the place, absolutely destroyed it, throwing each other up against these elaborate displays. Chrissy tried to shoot me, which really pissed me off, and I tried to stab her with a spear, which she wasn’t too much of a fan of. We raged our way through the many different rooms, throwing things at each other, cursing, screaming, all while the crone howled at us to stop.

The fight after that was in the wastes, spores clinging to us, both of us coughing. That first fight, we were like cats — I guess you don’t have cats, but they’re small, furry critters that explode into barely contained rage. The second, we were more like duelists, seeking to end things.

I got the better of her in the end, and I have to thank Aldous, the delivery man for that. He had more of a brain than I thought, and more affection for me and our time together than I could ever have expected. Without him, I might have died, because she’d shot me in the chest and I was dripping blood all over the wasteland. Aldous used his many long arms to pull her apart, depriving her of her arm, and I used the gun she’d dropped to blast her in her head. It was poetic, I thought, given how her mentor had bit it.

I healed up as best I could, my eyes never leaving the portal. I’d had enough of that world and its witches. I knew, by then, that I would never stop taking the portals. It was just a matter of what I would find on the other end.

Unfortunately, what I found was a prison.