He smirked to himself. V.I.P., big-wigs only. That sort of thing had never appealed to him -his time dealing with the pomp and bull of the Otherworld’s monarchies and empires, was enough to sour anyone to the incest-pool of hierarchical society. But it was convenient when he didn’t want to deal with the usual security protocols.
His access wasn’t due to wealth or status, but something far subtler. He’d been around too long, tangled in too many things, and somewhere along the way, he’d become one of the world’s ghosts that still had keys to the castle.
∞
Jack had returned to Earth lost -adrift in a place that felt familiar yet foreign. He had no idea how much time had passed since he’d left. His memories were a fragmented kaleidoscope of time dilation, dungeon anomalies, and chaotic temporal loops that had twisted the very concept of aging. He’d spent what he reconned was years – scores of decades – in places where time moved unpredictably, where the stars shifted wrong, and the sun set twice in the same day. And yet, here on Earth? Barely more than a couple generations had passed.
Which, all things considered, was fitting.
He didn’t look his age, at least not in any way that made sense. His body had been reforged through trials and tribulations, shaped by the strange physics of the Otherworld. He could pass as being in his mid-to-late twenties, maybe early thirties at worst, despite the weight of experience pressing behind his eyes. The System had made sure of that.
∞
Jack pressed his thumb against the biometric scanner, then leaned in as the retinal scan flickered across his vision. Access granted. The doors slid open with a quiet hiss, revealing the private elevator that would take him past the lobby entirely -and straight up to the corporate suite.
He hesitated.
Then, with a crooked grin, he pressed the button for the main floor. He always did love messing with Jacob.
Jacob. The changeling. His "brother." The one who had stolen his name.
∞
Jack’s first day back on Earth had been a mess. No family, no official records, no way to prove who he was. The moment he was sent to the Otherworld, Jacob Emrys Summerlee had died. At least that’s what he had thought. Until he found out that someone else had taken it in his absence.
The Changeling -Jacob. A man who wore his face, who had taken the life Jack was supposed to have, and had turned it into something entirely different.
A Silicon Valley mogul. A self-made billionaire. A legendary business magnate with his hands in every industry worth mentioning -immersion tech, medical advancements, AI development, energy solutions. Even space travel. Emrys Technologies. A name that commanded respect across the world.
And he had done it all off of Jack’s father’s seed money, and his inheritance.
The hefty sum his father had saved for him -his education, his future- had become the foundation of an empire built by someone who had never actually been his father’s son.
“You were gone,” Jacob had said when they first met, voice smooth, unreadable. “I had to become something.”
Jack had laughed. Because what else was he supposed to do?
It had been a mixed reunion -one part disbelief, one part resentment, and a whole lot of what the actual fuck? Jack hadn’t expected a warm welcome, but he also hadn’t expected outright hostility. Jacob hadn’t wanted him back. He’d earned his life -his words- clawed his way to the top with intelligence, ruthlessness, and a dangerous charisma that made people fall in line. He wasn’t about to let some ghost from the past walk in and ruin it.
Jack hadn’t pushed. It wasn’t worth it. He wasn’t here to reclaim anything. He had no stake in Jacob’s empire. But he wasn’t about to just lay down and take it, either.
So he had done his research. He had watched. He had listened. And he had learned.
Jacob had changed the world.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
∞
Emrys Technologies.
A name that didn’t belong to him. A kingdom built on his foundation -stolen, reshaped, and claimed by the man who called himself his brother. It was a reality that might have bothered Jack more if he still had a claim to this world. But the truth? This wasn’t his world anymore.
Still, it didn’t stop him from walking through the massive glass doors into the titan of a building that bore his family’s name -a hundred stories of polished steel and tempered glass, towering above the heart of Manhattan. The lobby was pure opulence, a sprawling monolith of power and precision, gleaming with the same corporate sterility as the One World Trade Center. The air hummed with the quiet efficiency of the wealthy -high-powered executives gliding across the marble floors, security positioned at key vantage points, assistants tapping away on smart devices as they moved with machine-like focus.
This was Jacob’s world. And Jack had just walked into the lion’s den.
He had been back on Earth for a while by that point, but nothing quite prepared him for the sheer number of people in this city. The density of humanity was staggering. A tide of bodies moving through the streets, thousands of lives intersecting, oblivious to the man who had once been one of them.
And that -that- was what struck him as strange.
The Otherworld had never been like this.
Sure, there had been cities, sprawling kingdoms -marketplaces teeming with life- but the sheer monoculture of humanity in New York City felt alien to him now. In the Otherworld, the streets had been shared by so many other races. Elves, beastkin, the scaled, feathered and fanged. Creatures that defied simple descriptions. Every city had been a mosaic of species, of different languages, different ways of moving, of existing. This? This was too much of one thing. A sea of sameness.
Not for the first time since coming back to Earth, Jack realized he felt like the outsider.
He pushed the thought aside as he moved through the city, weaving between crowds with the practiced ease of someone who had spent years on foot. In the beginning he had no car, no accounts, and no identity to speak of -just the weight of his past pressing against him like a second skin.
He enjoyed walking. Walking was easy. Walking had always been easy. He could map a city through its alleyways, measure its pulse by the people on the streets. He took public transit when he needed to, slipping through turnstiles and pressing himself into packed subway cars, letting the rhythm of the city guide him. It was an old instinct, one that had kept him alive in places far deadlier than this.
As for cash? He had none.
Not in any way that mattered. He had already reclaimed what he had left behind.
His father’s stash. A time capsule buried decades ago, before Jack had vanished, before everything had changed.
And then, as if on cue, the truth whispered through his mind. The Blue Fairy. The Green Goblin.
He let out a dry chuckle, shaking his head. His disappearance from this world hadn’t been a kidnapping.
No, what had happened to him wasn’t some tragic abduction. It had been something else entirely.
It had been a wish granted. His wish.
He thought back to the moment he uncovered his father’s stash. Their time capsule. He sighed, a pang of regret shifting through him.
∞
Jack dug through the soil, fingers biting into the damp earth as he unearthed the time capsule. Their farm -his farm- was gone, nothing left but an expanse of scorched land that had long since been swallowed by nature. The official story was a fire, some inexplicable blaze that reduced everything to ash. Except his parents hadn’t died in it.
He had learned, after weeks of digging through old records and chasing paper trails, that they had moved away, down to Florida, where they’d retired and lived out their last years in peace. A good life. A quiet one. He should have been relieved to know they hadn’t suffered, but instead, there was only a hollow weight in his chest. They had died without him. Without knowing what had happened to their son.
His brothers hadn’t been as lucky.
One had fallen overseas in a classified engagement. Or at least, that’s what the government claimed. No body. No details. Just a flag and a folded letter. The kind of thing that never sat right with Jack, because he knew what that usually meant. A soldier disappears, and the official narrative wraps him in a convenient bow. MIA, presumed KIA. But Jack had spent too many years in places where men like that weren’t dead. They were just… somewhere else.
The other brother? A different kind of ghost. Fell in with the wrong people, bad debts, worse decisions. The family lost track of him years ago. Last known whereabouts? Vegas. Which tracked.
Jack exhaled, shaking off the melancholy thoughts. He’d deal with all that later.
For now, he focused on the capsule.
He hadn’t been sure what to think when he dug it up. Old bills. Coins. A few faded photographs.
He wasn’t expecting much. But whatever it was, it was his. The only proof that he had existed in this world before it had moved on without him.
He cracked it open, having easily remembered the code they had set on the lock. The Golden Ratio.
Inside, he found an assortment of items, not all were expected. A stash of money -some gold and silver- small valuables that his father had left behind. A lifeline for a lost son. But what really made him pause was the deck of collector’s cards.
His father’s. And his own.
Jack flipped through them, the plastic sleeves worn and familiar beneath his fingers. Memories, frozen in cardboard and ink. Ghosts of the past -from his childhood, before everything changed. He added them to the ones he had brought with him from the Otherworld.
They didn’t have any power here. He’d checked. The deal had been simple and straight forward. He hadn’t been allowed to bring anything of significance -no weapons, no artifacts, no enchanted gear. Just personal effects. Trinkets. Nothing really, besides what he had originally arrived with. He had negotiated that part of the agreement very carefully.
Taking care of the minor treasure he had recovered, Jack focused on the future.
Because in the end, he hadn’t come back for a fortune.
He had come back to see what was left.
And following that track-
-he had one lead left. Jacob. The changeling. The man who had taken his name, his life, and built a kingdom with it.
So Jack used what little he had, tracked his brother down, and finally found himself standing in front of the gleaming monolith of Emrys Technologies
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