“Yes,” Tanya said slowly, after a moment of confusion. “We have clocks. Why would we not have clocks?”

“I don’t know, but your language doesn’t have a lot of timekeeping words,” Nathan explained. “So I didn’t know if you had clocks or not? Your main measure of time is… a torch, which is the amount of time it takes for a coating of lumoss on a mundane stick or rock to lose three-quarters of its glow?”

“Archaic,” the two women chorused. “New breeds of lumoss have a half-life of almost five torches. But good luck explaining that to the multi-millennial terrors whose nightmare conduits form the only efficient form of communication between different Depths,” Tanya continued. “I mean, we still count time in torches, but everyone learns the lightclock cantrip and just uses that, I don’t even think unaltered lumoss exists in the wild.”

“I suspect the claims that it exists in vaults to be puffery,” Honeydew agreed. “Of course, none dare challenge it, as all such seeds and spores are House treasures and the devaluation of them would be understood as an act of war.”

“Only for an Aligned House,” Nathan said absently and on autopilot, drawing an extensive amount of social and linguistic context instantaneously into his realm of understanding. “Those protections don’t apply to the Merchant Houses or the Houses Divine, and it’s the Aureate Guild that I’d expect runs most of the greenvaults?”

His summoner and her bodyguard, for he now knew that to be their natures and dispositions, stared at him in stupefaction. He blinked at them owlishly, not recognizing why they would do such a thing for a long moment, then realized belatedly that as someone who’d just been summoned to their world, which he had so clearly been given the fact that he’d just stepped out of a magical, still-glowing, rune-inscribed circle after something that had been described as a ritual, there was no particular reason he should know what a greenvault was at all… much less be familiar with the sociopolitical dynamics of their construction and maintenance.

Oh well, he thought to himself breezily. He was experiencing a strange mood lift, as if a genocidal monster had finally died and would do no more harm in the world, regardless of how long before that blessed moment should have come to pass. A memory of the day where his adventure had so recently started tickled at his memory, with Natasha having blown Henry Kissinger apart with her gate in order to fuel their transit into another dimension, and Nathan shrugged with a smile.

A shame I can’t ever go back to Earth to check in and read the obituaries, he thought to himself. I bet Rolling Stone had a great one. Shit, maybe The Atlantic even got into the spirit for once, though if they did you absolutely do not have to hand it to them.

And then he dismissed the thought, since he had been serial-isekai’d—drawn into a jumpchain, even!—on the thinnest of pretexts, and he had bigger things to do than to reminisce about how good it was that the man was dead.

I’ll raise a glass, he told himself solemnly, examining the geometrical runes of the ritual summoning circle from the outside. Toast to the one night in the history of social media where a million voices were raised in celebration and there was siblinghood across all left-wingers and yea even the liberals were welcome in the dance circle.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“The triangles are interesting,” he said slowly. “But the grammar is wrong, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be modifier-verb-subject-object. This reverses the verb and subject, which feels like it should, instead of keeping me pinned and distributing the noetic force of anything I try to do across the reinforcing points of the circle, it would, uh.” He scratched the top of his head.

“Apparently not constrain or contain you, stranger,” Honeydew said with a credible attempt at evenness.

“Oh shit,” Nathan realized belatedly, “is that a sacred language of some sort? I maybe should have asked. I have a language proficiency thing, and I’m actually not getting much context on it. Just, like, language stuff.”

“It’s a dead language,” Tanya said with a better mien of calm. “There isn’t a single person alive who speaks it or actually knows what it means, except for maybe you, and since we just summoned you with what’s supposed to be an extra-dimensional summoning spell are you fucking kidding me.”

“Oh, that makes sense.” Nathan smiled. “Hi! I’m Nathan, area guy who until very recently just did standard meta-formulaic arcane machinery stuff. I got sorta rescued, sorta abducted by a girl I might never see again and thrown into a million lives of dying repeatedly doing stupid shit, I guess.”

“A Millionborn!” Honeydew’s delight was palpable, flooding the room they were standing in as she practically launched herself into Nathan’s arms. “Please tell me you’re straight, or flexible, or just willing to fuck a girl who wants to hammer in the highest-scoring peg on the board. Or a boy, or neither, I’m a Liminal Priestess of the Eternal Slut, I can be whatever you want me to be?”

“I’m hard-ace, sorry,” Nathan apologized, extricating himself from the hug that would be perfectly fine if it weren’t for the sexual intentions involved. “Does every planet other than the one I’m from know what a Millionborn is?”

“You’d know better than we would,” Tanya pointed out with a voice that was palpably struggling to refrain from cackling in laughter. “Honey, really? Hammer in the peg? That’s hardly getting fucked.”

“Shut up, shut up,” the sorceress muttered, fair face flushed brilliantly red in embarrassment as she hid her expression behind a mixture of her hands and her thick blonde hair. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what came over me. I mean, I do know what came over me, I’m just mortified and so sorry, that was totally inappropriate of me.”

“It was a novel experience,” Nathan said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Also I don’t actually mind? I mean, I did literally catch you and stop you from falling on your face, and I didn’t have to. Anyway, so, what’s with the skeletons and the zombies? Why did you summon me? Not that I’m complaining, I just finished getting incarnated by accident in the middle of a star and that was a quick turnaround, lemme tell you.”

“Oh, we’re delving a new level of this Layer of the Eternal Endless Multi-Dimensional Megadungeon that our entire civilization lives in, ever since the cataclysm our many-times-great grandparents caused on the surface.” Tanya shrugged. “You know, find mana crystals and magical reagents and monster parts, teleport them back in batches to home, and then desperately hope we can find a Return Station before the ever-increasing Cadence catches up to us and we get totally swarmed with shit we can’t deal with. So, just the usual.”