Some portal rides were different from others.

The best Matt could describe his latest ride was that it was like being an egg in a half-full jar of marbles being violently shaken by a toddler. He could have sworn that he cracked somewhere in the chaos.

And yet, somehow, he was now out on the other side of the trip, laying on the cool ground as still as he could manage and silently bemoaning his life choices.

“It’s been five minutes, Matt. Five minutes is the limit.”

Matt cracked his eye open and took in Lucy’s foot a few inches from his face. She was a tiny holograph girl, and thus couldn’t kick him. Even so, her tiny little survivor’s boots carried a certain amount of authority, even if he couldn’t bring himself to care that much about it in his current state.

“Five minutes was before I was an egg in there.”

“A what?”

“An egg. I was an egg. It was a weird trip for me. Just give me a few days to rest. A week, tops.”

“No. Because this place is trippy, and I’m not sitting around here and waiting for you to get better before I can talk about it. Now get up.”

Matt groaned as he got his arms underneath his chest and levered himself into a sitting position. He kept his eyes closed until he was able to slowly and carefully stand up, pleased to find that his balance wasn’t as screwed up from the Gaia-to-wherever portal as he had thought it would be. The various scientists and geniuses who had survived the Gaian Apocalypse were more than happy to screw with the portal, spending weeks of overtime realigning crystals and defrabbulating circuit boards, or whatever they could do to link the portal to new destinations.

When they had announced that they connected portal to some other planet that probably had breathable air, both Matt and Lucy had jumped at the chance of a trip. They would have never admitted it to the perfectly pleasant Gaians, but they were both bored. It had been a calm couple of months in between saving planets from demon overlord threats, but they were both now so conditioned to rapid-fire adrenaline surges that good food and company could only keep them happy for so long.

Well, it’s good that they didn’t overpromise on the planet, Matt thought. Because that’s not a whole lot of anything.

“It reminds you of old Gaia, right? If it were bluish, I mean. There’s just nothing at all,” Lucy said.

“Yeah.” The planet on which Matt and Lucy stood was barren. Beyond barren, really. The sky above them was filled with stars, but the ground below them was rock, dust, and absolutely nothing else. It was like the first time that Matt had ever seen Gaia. These days, the Gaians had terraformed the planet, and it was now was increasingly green-on-red, with acres and acres of gardens, young groves, and houses dotting the landscape.

“It’s better than nothing. But maybe we should go back. I doubt there will be much in the way of things to do here,” Lucy said.

“Well, maybe not. We’ve only seen this one neighborhood. Do you care to take a stroll?”

She did. They walked for hours. Matt had never really thought that staying sane through large amounts of travel-boredom was a learnable, improvable skill before he had died back on Earth. But after a lot of time on Gaia, he was pretty good at holding his boredom at bay and letting his mind wander. And when the boredom finally did start to kick in, he just started running, sprinting in set intervals on the universe’s most empty running track. He was pretty fast now, all things considered, somewhere in the “doesn’t really need a car anymore” range of personal speed. But even that got boring quickly. After another couple of hours of nothing, he figured it was probably just about time to turn around.

“Wait.” Lucy peered off into the distance. “What is that? It’s so… structurey. Structural. It has things in common with structures, Matt.”

And it did. Matt kicked on the afterburners, streaking towards the little rectangle in the distance. It could be anything, really. A building. A vehicle. And as he got close, he saw those possibilities extended even further than he had thought.

“It’s another portal, Matt?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s the same one. I think we… got lost? We must have gone in a circle somehow.”

“Hold on. I’m not a very good guide in the traditional sense, but I’m pretty good at directions, and I don’t think we spun around.” Lucy regarded the portal for a few moments, thoughtfully, then snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it. We did a lap. An entire lap of this planet.”

“Can’t be. It would have to be tiny. Hundreds of miles tiny.”

“I mean, it could be. We’ve been going up and down hills here and there, right? I don’t think there’s any rule about minimum world size. We made it all the way around.”

“Circumnavigated the world?”

“Sure, in a crappy way.” Lucy’s eyes lit up in a way Matt recognized as heralding the coming of a sick burn. “You’ve done it. I dub thee Turdinand Magellan.”

Matt tried to block out Lucy’s ongoing attempt to make Sir Francis Fake work as a joke while he considered their next moves. The scientists had worked really hard on this project. They didn’t say so, but they were hoping their work would help the people back on Gaia in some way. If he and Lucy strolled back in a few hours later with nothing in hand, it would hurt their feelings. Was there going to be anything on this planet worth seeing? No, probably not. Were they able to give up yet without being rude? Definitely not. And he wasn’t going to be rude to those nice people.

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“Okay, the way I see it, we need to do at least three more loops.” Matt unstrapped his doom-shovel and marked a notch in the soil on either side of the portal, indicating the direction they already had covered. “First, we do a lap that’s 90 degrees from the last lap, then two diagonal ones. It gives us the most chance to find something, if there’s anything to find.”

“And if we don’t?”

“We go home and explain we tried our best, but there wasn’t anything here. But we can at least say we tried.”

The next walk was just as long as the last. Whatever this world was or wasn’t, it appeared to be round instead of oval. By the time they got done with the third lap, they were good and tired of the whole affair, beyond annoyed and almost enraged at the planet’s refusal to man up and be anything beyond just blue nothingness.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m even more bored than I was on Gaia, Matt. I didn’t even think it was possible. We live on a planet with an economy based around turnip processing and it’s absolutely riveting compared to this.”

“Agreed. Want to just go home? I’m not going to make you stay here if it’s that bad.”

Lucy looked longingly at the portal, then shook her head.

“Nope. Sorry to both of us, but I’m seeing this through. You got me with that whole ‘the scientists will cry’ stuff before. It’s just a couple of hours. We’ll survive.”

An hour later, they were not surviving. The boredom went beyond the planet’s mere lack of physical aspects. It was almost as if the world put off some sort of spiritually potent field of blasé that was seeping into their very souls.

“I’m going to sprint the last hour or so. I don’t care if it kills me.”

“Do it. I don’t care if it kills you either,” Lucy sighed. “I’m just glad we didn’t bring Derek. I felt bad, at first, with him out on dungeon patrol with the Gaians. Like he would miss out. He was the lucky one all along, and I just didn’t know it.”

“Yeah, he’d be going crazy…” Before Matt could finish the thought, his pocket buzzed. And he had only one object that was capable of buzzing in that exact way. “Lucy, the treasure-finder thing is going off.”

“Liar. You can’t trick me.”

“No, really. Look,” Matt said as he dug into his pocket.

In his hand, the little treasure detector was moving the very slightest amount, indicating something was hiding beneath the uniformly banal soil and waiting to be found.

“Get cracking, Matt. Let’s find whatever it is.”

A quick sprint in all the cardinal directions let them triangulate the location of the object deep beneath the soil. It wasn’t small, whatever it was. This was in the very-small-building-or-very-large-car realm of objects, and it was just a few shovelfuls of dirt away.

“Well, digger, get digging. I want to see it.”

He dug. Though in some ways, digging didn’t accurately describe what Matt did. An uncoordinated kid’s fastball had more in common with the best pitchers in the world than the average person with a shovel compared to Matt. Dirt flew hundreds of feet away with the lightest touch and he began to uncover what looked an awful lot like a log cabin.

“Is that building made of wood?”

“I mean, it looks like it. Like it’s made out of logs, right?” Matt walked up to the side of the structure and hit it lightly with the broadside of his shovel. It clanked.

“Fake. It’s metal, painted to look like wood.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“No idea, unless this is the grave of Space Abraham Lincoln, or something. Want to check out the interior?”

“Sure. Why the hell not? Just be careful, I guess. Open the door then back the hell up.”

Matt did, placing his hand on the very conventional doorknob, cranking it down, and then kicking the door inward hard enough to break the bonds of the hard-packed dirt that had worked their way into the frame and glued the door shut. Rather than space-wolves or death-plants, the inside of the building was filled with what looked like nothing at all.

“Well, that tears it. This is the most boring planet that has ever existed. We found an underground building, and it’s somehow completely empty. How is that possible?” Lucy was so annoyed she was pacing. “Matt, how can that even be?”

“I don’t know.” Matt walked into the building, confirming it was truly empty. The walls were lined with a dull metal, as were the floor and ceiling. Besides that, there was nothing. It was like an alien garden shed, minus all the cobwebs and spiders that helped add to the excitement of regular sheds.

It was a tremendous disappointment in all ways, right up until Lucy also stepped inside. Then, the building kicked into absolute chaos by the standards of this world as the walls began to radiate a soft, glowing light.

“Oh, neat. It’s like the thing they sell old people’s for their toilets so the men can pee at night,” Matt said as he touched the wall.

“That’s a thing?”

“It’s a thing. LED’s for peeing. Look it up. But I think the light is still getting brighter.”

“Yeah. I’m going to be honest here, Matt. This planet is so boring that these lights are almost enough to hold my attention.”

“Almost.”

The building suddenly beeped so loudly it hurt even Matt’s vitality-enhanced ears. In the context of the weird, all-encompassing silence of the planet, what would normally just be annoying was a pretty effective jump scare. Startled, Lucy shot towards Matt, banging into him hard as she did. Matt started to laugh at her before both of them froze.

“Holy shit.”

“Holy shit. Matt, I’m real.” She punched him, hard in the stomach. “Look at that! I’m actually real!”

And then the building shut off completely. The walls made faint sizzling sounds and the room was filled with the smell of ozone. With the bright lights gone, it was hard for Matt to actually see Lucy in the dark.

“Do you feel that?”

“No.”

“Dammit.” Lucy’s voice left no question that she was crying. “Damn stupid building. Turn back on.”

“Building activate!” Matt yelled. Nothing happened. The entered and exited a few times. No lights came back on. It was dead.

“Well, I guess…” Lucy had managed to stop crying over the last minute or so. “Easy come, easy go, I guess.”

“No. Absolutely not, Lucy.” Matt wasn’t going to stand for that. Lucy had put up with a lot since they had met. Most of the time, she had been in a worse kind of danger than him. Any threat that might get him would get her as well, and she had been both imprisoned and threatened by the system in ways that Matt was immune to. She had put up with all of it. And as much as she rarely brought it up, being fake bothered her. She wanted to be real. She wanted to play. All those things. “We are taking this damn building home.”

“Matt, it must weigh a ton.”

“At least.”

“And we’re miles and miles from the portal. If it will even fit through, which is an open question,” Lucy said.

“Sure.”

“And the scientists probably can’t fix whatever this is. Most of them thought it would be impossible to make me solid, right?”

“That’s what they said.”

“So we should just go home.”

“No.” Matt walked outside with his shovel and started the task of building a long, shallow ramp to drag the thing out of the hole. “We’re taking it with us. I don’t care if they can’t fix it or if I’m going to have to drag it across the entire world. We’re taking it.”

“At least go home and get a dolly or something.”

“Not a chance. The scientists had no idea if we could get back here again. We aren’t risking it.”

“Dammit, Matt, just…”

“No. It’s coming with. Just shut up and deal with it, okay? I’m Matt, you’re Lucy, and this shed is getting hauled halfway across the most boring world in the universe to get shoved through a portal. End of story.”

Lucy opened her mouth to argue, then slammed it shut. “Fine. Whatever. You know it’s going to take forever, right? And we’re stuck in this hellhole until it’s done?”

“So it will take a few hours. We’ll be fine.”

It ended up taking a week. Matt did it anyway.