Hector’s soul sat at full capacity. A sliver more energy and he’d advance to level five. Unless he decided to dey his trip by a month, he should not do that. Though maybe he should. Volithur’s first journeys, some of which were exciting in a bad way, were done at level six. Trying the same feat at level four was crazy ambitious.

  He went to the gym for a final workout, being sure to hit every muscle group. His membership would pse at the end of the month, but that would hardly matter since he wouldn’t be on the pnet. Or even in the same universe. If things went poorly, he wouldn’t be anywhere.

  Hector showered, changed, and ate a rge final meal. He inventoried everything in the hiking pack he’d prepared the day before one st time. There was a change of clothes, lots of protein and grano bars, a life straw to purify suspicious water sources he encountered, and a bag of toiletries. He even had some valuable items packed away in case he needed to trade for local currencies.

  That done, he went through the checklist for everything he was leaving behind. All the financial assets were transferred. All the legal things were handled. He was just deying the big moment. Hector pulled out his cell phone and checked for any messages.

  There was only one. A response from Evelyn. ‘Good luck, big man.’

  He typed out a message. ‘Here’s hoping I don’t die.’ His finger hovered over the send button a moment. Then Hector deleted the joke. Gallows humor seemed a lot less funny when the moment of truth was so close. “I should have asked Evelyn if she ever saw me come back. Oh well. Monsters are invading at some point soon. Better to die like this than after watching the world burn.”

  Hector chose the tiny back yard as his departure point. He’d never done much with the space. It served mostly as an annoyance. Something requiring mowing for half the year during his scant free time. The dogs seemed to like the space, though. Jasmine watched through the sliding gss door of the kitchen as Hector prepared to leave his world behind. A movement of the blinds above the kitchen sink let him know Jen watched as well.

  At least there would be witnesses.

  He’d long since mashed his externality into a hyper-sphere shape using his otherworldly knowledge. Now he lifted it into normal space, causing a microscopic three-dimensional sphere to form. The sphere grew rapidly as he shuffled the interior of the hyper-sphere around, moving more of it into the real world and reducing its footprint in the extra dimensions.

  At full size, his transit sphere only rose hip high on him. Hector studied it a few moments, wondering how he was supposed to fit inside. Finally, he came to a conclusion. Using his domain, Hector pushed down on the top portion of the sphere, turning it into a cup that he was able to step inside. He put the backpack below his body and hunched down over it. Then he grew his externality once more, pushing it closed along the geometry inherent to its nature.

  A mighty effort sealed the weld shut and Hector paused to ascertain his energy reserves. He’d used more than the recommended ten percent for the task of creating the sphere. Not as much as twenty percent, though. He decided to call it fifteen. Still too much for this to be safe.

  Not letting himself worry overmuch, Hector shifted the sphere into chaos. As he detached from the world he’d been born into, the wild environment underlying common reality pressed from all sides. The weld of his transit sphere held tight.

  Next, Hector cast about for another world. He didn’t have the fine-tuned senses of Volithur, but he didn’t have a particur destination to find, either. Within seconds, Hector found something. The sphere, dark and cramped, had begun to grow uncomfortably warm. He worried about his oxygen supply as he pulled closer to the other world.

  The new universe yawned nearby like an isnd of stability among the ruthless waves. Hector let himself drift into its wake, conserving his rapidly dwindling energy reserves. As he came into contact with the smooth region, a magnetic pull drew him steadily towards a specific region. Hector inverted his orientation to bring his transit sphere back to normal space.

  He’d just begun to release the weld when his externality vanished entirely, dropping him two feet to nd hard on his knees. The backpack took a portion of the impact from his upper body. Hector swore under his breath as he rolled to sit on his butt and rub his aching kneecaps. His soul was bone dry, so hopefully he didn’t have any urgent need to defend himself.

  His eyes darted about to assess his surroundings. He sat in a narrow, winding alley between rows of buildings. The ones he faced were dug into a sheer rock face, the brick cunningly shaped to seamlessly meld into the surrounding stone of the cliff. Were it not for the crisp bcktop of the alley and the presence of electric meters in front of every house, he would assume he’d found himself in a medieval vilge.

  In the other direction, he saw that the houses not adjoining the cliff were not historically preserved. They had detached garages, rge bay windows, and rooftop decks. Hector climbed to his feet, rubbing at his knees.

  The movement attracted attention from a man drinking beers from a wn chair inside his garage. “Hey, you! What you think you’re doing? Take a damn picture and get gone. We don’t want no tourists loitering about.”

  Hector threw the backpack over one shoulder and walked down the alley to appease the local. The interaction, while mildly unpleasant, did provide some positive feedback. These people spoke a nguage indistinguishable from English. Score one for resonance.

  The alley curved along the face of the cliff, split between the entrenched historical houses and the rger, more modern houses. He caught sight of an elderly couple in the distance using a rge film camera to snap photos. They noticed his approach and paused in pce.

  “Hello,” the woman greeted him. “Could you take our picture? We found the house they show in all the pamphlets. It’s so exciting!”

  Hector accepted the camera thrust in his direction, asked a few questions about how to work the device, and then dutifully captured them posing in front of the house. He saw why it might be featured in advertisements for this city. The building had been built tall enough to have a balcony on the second floor, whose railing looked to have been carved from the cliff.

  The woman accepted the camera back. “I can’t wait to show these to my sister.”

  Her husband looked Hector over. “Are you one of them backpackers? One of them fellers who goes about on the cheap?”

  “I guess I am,” Hector said.

  “Awful risky if you ask me. Do you panhandle for spare change? Stay in hostels? Eat out of dumpsters?” The old man appeared more fascinated by what he imagined of Hector’s lifestyle than he was of the architecture around them.

  “I get by however I can,” Hector said. “Do you know of a public park around here?”

  “Public park! You’re sleeping outside, I bet. There ain’t no such around these parts that we saw. Some open nd along the river if you head down the incline. Stinks to high heaven, it does. Sewage runs directly into the water. No wonder they don’t hardly have anything docked. I’d not eat a fish from there if you paid me a hundred silver.”

  “No one is paying you to eat, dear,” the wife commented.

  “You ever been through Azure Reach? Water so clear you can see to the bottom of the bay. Chartered a boat and caught the legal limit in two hours. They have a service where they clean and cook your catch on the beach. Wonderful pce.”

  “Wonderful pce,” the wife echoed. “Almost as nice as Hot Rock.”

  “You ever been to Hot Rock?” The husband looked to be in his glory remembering past vacations. “Snow everywhere around, but the hot springs keep it tropical. Year round you can walk around town in shorts. Take a walk outside the wind break and you better wear your mittens. Very picturesque pce.”

  “You make it sound like this whole world is a tourist’s dream,” Hector said.

  “If only that were true. For every Hot Rock, Azure Reach, and Cave Town, there are a hundred sleepy towns with only a mine or mill to break up endless farmnd. I sold all my nd to afford the lifestyle. We lost our boy in the war. The girls moved to the city for jobs in a clothing factory. The one is married with children but she never visits. The other had an accident and lives on disability now, the poor thing. Stuck in tenement housing for life.”

  “Such a shame,” the wife said. “It all went bad after the war.”

  “All of it,” the husband agreed.

  Hector bobbed his head as if in agreement and walked on before they could drag him further into their reminiscences. Though he found himself moderately curious about the references to historical events and exotic locales, he wouldn’t be staying in this world long enough to py tourist. So far, he’d neither seen nor sensed evidence of any power on this world.

  His feet brought him down the terraced levels of the town towards the muddy stretch of water nguishing past the town. There were clear lines on the lowest houses indicating how high the river rose during inclement weather, which expined the under-utilization of the strip of nd along the water’s edge better than any compints of unpleasant odors.

  A rusting cast iron bench sat next to the sign for a bus stop. Hector settled in to rest there. While replenishing his cosmic energy levels, he brought out a grano bar and munched on it. Pns assembled themselves in his mind. He needed a library to research this world a tiny bit. Just enough to determine if any forces from the big three had been here. Xian, Jinn, or Arahant. Any of them could fight off a monster invasion far better than the people of his world.

  When a bus pulled up, Hector waved the driver on. The man opened the door, however, and shouted at him. “Last bus of the night, buddy!”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “What do I care? Hop on.”

  Which got Hector out of the quaint tourist town and into the nearby city. Much as he’d been led to expect from the elderly couple, the urban area proved to be an absolute mess in pces. There were entire blocks of the city that were nothing but rubble. Hector wandered a bit and asked vague questions about ‘what happened here during the war’ to get a sense of recent history.

  The answers proved depressing. Air raids were the answer for most of the damage. Though the government building’s cosmetic damage came about due to a car bomb. Apparently the youth of this world were not pleased with the post-war economic depression. After getting his bearings, he didn’t feel any need to bother with a library. He had enough of a read on the world to feel confident nothing supernatural ever happened here.

  With night approaching, Hector settled beneath the awning of a condemned building’s entryway. “Sleeping bag,” he muttered to himself, adding an item to his packing list too te for it to matter. It took about twelve days for him to reach the peak of level four in his energy reserves. Realistically, he would pn to use some cosmic energy to survive as a homeless person. That meant two weeks of recharging on each world before traveling again.

  Hector sighed as he made himself comfortable on the doorstep. He would cultivate until exhaustion, sleep, then cultivate again. What a life.