Following Rika’s guidance throughout the facility, Lars was informed about the resources made available to the team. The structure of the building was similar to a small military base and had mostly everything a person could want for; in terms of day to day living, every need was covered. There was the cafeteria with diverse options to select from, training halls, an indoor gym, an outdoor gym, a track for running, a convenience store, a swimming pool, showers separated by gender, leisure rooms… and that wasn’t all of it.
When they finally reached the end of the brief tour, and had changed locations towards the outside, confusion set in as he was given a glimpse at where they were—or where they weren’t. Surprisingly, there was an absence of anything; what met his eyes was a vast, empty plane in the middle of nowhere. There was tall grass, mountainous hills, rivers, but not a trace of civilization.
“Huh…” Lars huffed.
Rika cast a sidelong glance at him, then responded, “This… kind of reaction is expected.”
“Where are we?” he asked.
Standing next to him and staring off into the distance, Rika explained: “Far from any cities. It’s a security measure, since the team members are at risk if this location is made public. Uhm… It’s mostly for the civilian staff, though—since a lot of us would be fine even in the case of an attack on the base.”
Lars nodded, but the complexities in his expression showed through. “Uh, yeah, that makes sense. But there’s a problem…” He gestured towards those empty planes. “How do we leave? I’m not seeing any roads or anything.”
“Ah, there’s no leaving,” she said with a surprising amount of assurance.
Lars looked at her directly.
“What?”
“Oh, uhm, what I mean is… you can’t leave on foot. It’s forbidden, actually, because that leaves traces to be tracked back through. Everyone on the facility must stay within its grounds.”
“Then…?” Lars brought them back to his initial worry: leaving.
“For those of us with abnormalities, there’s another way. Has Lady Rhys spoken to you about the tether yet?”
“Uhm, briefly…” Recalling an earlier conversation, he remembered Rhys talking about a connection between those who cross over worlds and the singularity; otherwise known as the ‘tether’. It was thanks to this invisible bond between it and himself that he could return.
“Great! Less to explain,” she smiled. “Do you remember how it felt when you returned through the tether? Try that again, now, and I’ll do it too. Ah, actually, I can probably help you…”
Rika approached Lars and placed her hand over his heart. At the same time, she held her own heart with an air of solemnity. Speaking with the greatest calm she had so far, she muttered, “Focus on the other side. Earnestly, in your heart, wish to go back there.”
“Alright…” he furrowed his brows, slightly confused by this new exercise, but doing it nonetheless. Consequently, he felt a strange sensation beckoning him. He felt a connection between himself, the world, Rika, everyone who was ever touched by the singularity, and the singularity itself; grasping that, he wished to go back to the other side. He wished to return to the place where Vanessa rested—and where his children resided, somewhere out there.
Without realising it, he had closed his eyes at some point. Opening them again, the place around them was slightly different. They were still in a facility that looked mostly the same as before. However, the key difference was the atmosphere, the sky, the heat, the dirt and soil… slight changes that, together, amounted to something impossible to ignore.
He saw Rika’s face close to him still. Lars took a deep breath, and asked hesitantly, “Are we on the other side?”
She, too, opened her eyes and met Lars’ strange expression. A sense of understanding seemed to dawn on her face, as if realising how returning again may cause secondary emotions to surface. Rika answered normally, “We are. It’s a facility nearly identical to the other; the only difference is that it’s on the other side. Other than that, if you turn your gaze towards the outside…”
Lars turned at her mention. To his surprise, the mountainous wilderness that was previously there had been replaced by a lively city. Beyond the gates bordering the facility was a busy street full of pedestrians and carriages running about. Plenty of buildings, with a western-looking architectural style, traced the sides of the streets with glass windows showing off various goods or opening up to barber shops and a variety of other services.
“So, to explain a bit more…” Rika started, “Over here, we’re a government establishment with considerable influence. You’ll learn more about Lady Rhys’ various involvements in both worlds over time. But what that means is we don’t hide over here.
“As you’ve just seen, we’re able to cross over at any moment by concentrating. You’ll always arrive at the coordinates correspondent to your location. Knowing and mapping these coordinates is how we get ‘the network’, which is a confidential web of travel routes and locations for reaching places we need to be. If we ever want to leave and go somewhere from the overworld base, we have to cross over to the other side, and then take a travel route to one of our coordinates.”
“Wow… It’s sort of like Rhys’ teleportation, only a lot less convenient…” Although Lars said this, he didn’t mean that as a snide remark in the slightest. The ability to mimic her power to the slightest degree as an innate ability of theirs was immensely useful. However, something else came to mind.
“You said there are civilians working on the other side, on Earth… right? We’re fine but what about them?”
“Oh, we have a system for that,” Rika assured. “They’re reliant on Rhys to leave, but their contracts are based on long terms, so they live inside the facility for that period of time. It’s usually on for a couple months and off for a couple months; scheduled so that we’re never without working staff members, of course. But, basically, there’s never a moment when every employee is working at the same time.”
“That doesn’t sound bad…” Lars admitted. It seemed reasonable, perhaps preferable to his own conditions as an employed soldier before this.
“Mhm, most of them are happy with it. I hope,” she chuckled. “We’re always looking to see how we can improve quality of life for the civilian staff… and our team members, too, of course. Uhm… That’s all I needed to show. Shall we head back? I need to talk about your assignment now.”
“No objections here. Let’s go,” Lars said. Once again, since he wasn’t overly familiar with it, they assumed the position from before and crossed back over.
When they returned, Lars was surprised to find that Rhys was standing there waiting for them. Her position was only a few metres away as if she was expecting them to be back soon. Meanwhile, Rika turned and approached her, seemingly not taken aback. Lars guessed that this meeting wasn’t unplanned.
Rhys asked, “Have you told him about the network?”
“I have,” Rika nodded, gesturing towards Lars. “Everything’s sorted now, so we can move on.”
Lars walked over and simply said, “I heard there’s an assignment for me?”
Rhys turned her gaze towards him. “Rika will explain the details, but I’ll tell you briefly now. I have a speech tomorrow. Your job is to be there, on standby, acting as an ordinary soldier until further intervention is needed.”
“Further intervention…” Lars repeated.
Rhys asserted, “You’ll most likely be fighting.”
“Huh, really? Against what? How?”
“Ask Rika that.”
Rhys did not elaborate further, delegating the task to the team’s manager before disappearing. Her presence really was transient. Without much else to go on, his attention turned back to the aforementioned woman.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
She attempted to smile, albeit struggling, and said, “There’s some banking stuff that needs doing. You’ve got your new card to pick up, some identification documents, and ID, and we can talk about the assignment while we discuss pay…?”
“Yeah… That sounds fine.”
Later on, Lars was sitting in his room without a lot to do. He had received a set of identification documents and a Tirynn ID, as well as a debit card and a bank account for use within the country. The proposed payment was in a completely different league than his time as a soldier. However, the dangers were magnified compared to before. Fates worse than death… that sort of thing.
He was interested to learn that many of the team members actually don’t have this job as their main profession. Although they technically work full-time, many of them have work on the other side of the singularity which serves as a secondary income. For some of them, it far surpasses this already plentiful pay, meaning that the team has a few bigwigs in it; with lots of spending money and influence on their own right.
Obviously his main interests involved the first assignment, which interestingly enough, had him behaving as a soldier doing standard guard duty for what was essentially a politician. Rhys’ role in her speech the next day was being a representative for a certain party. He knew nothing about it, however, and didn’t care so much to ask. The words that Rhys had left him were far more concerning: ‘You’ll most likely be fighting’.
His suspicions for a likely threat in such an event would be resisting rioters or terrorist activity. But this time wasn’t standard, since regular soldiers, like himself in the past, were sufficient for that; and as he expected, his role surpassed normal standards. It actually had to do with the recently learnt fact that the tethers could be used to switch back and forth between worlds.
Lars spent the rest of the day getting used to his new dietary needs. A considerable amount of time was put into the gyms, trying out the state-of-art equipment and catching up on fitness. He used it to experiment with calorie burning and refueling, which both turned out to be massively accelerated, with the use of abyss walker using up a lot of energy and requiring a large quantity of food to restore what was lost.
The next day came around. With Rika knocking on his door once again, and telling him where he needs to be and when, Lars readied himself for his first day of work. Rhys appeared at some point and collected him as he was told would happen. Before long, he was behind a stage and given to a uniformed officer to boss around.
Of course, he wasn’t an actual soldier from their regiment, but the Officer-in-Charge bossed him around like he was. Lars soon found himself somewhere nearby the stage in military uniform and equipped with a rifle. For now, his role was to stand here and look menacing.
Standing beside a metal barricade, Lars busied himself with looking around. A large crowd was gathered behind the barricades and seemed to be waiting for the speech to start. Meanwhile, he noticed that a young child, who was at the front of the crowd and near him, was staring a hole into the back of his head.
He heard a woman’s hushed voice exclaim, “Evan, stop staring–!”
“His hair is yellow and he’s really tall… Why?” the child, presumably ‘Evan’, asked.
The woman sighed and pulled him back, quietly answering, “That man’s a foreigner.”
Lars briefly glanced back, only to lock eyes with a random man leaning against the barricade. The Tirynn man looked shocked to suddenly have attention drawn to him, his eyes widening as he backed up, not wanting to be seen longer than necessary.
This inadvertently reminded him of his recent first visit here. Along with many others, his squad members were sent over as foreign aid. Roles such as the one he was fulfilling now was the kind of thing he was supposed to be doing. Troels and Jensen—those names came to mind. They were people abusing their leverage as foreign soldiers, inciting fear to get their way and to commit atrocious acts. Likewise, looks of fear and curiosity mostly met Lars’ eyes.
There’s nothing I can do about it… Lars resigned himself to it, continuing his feigned duties.
The speech started soon enough. Only in incremental amounts did he listen, hearing bits of it here and then.
“Eastern European countries are suffering from war, experiencing mass famine and poverty [...] while the ruling classes continue to fatten their pockets with blood money [...] If the people remain ignorant, we will be led off a cliff with blindfolds around our heads [...] There’s been issues in recent times surrounding foreigners being let into the country. Fear and anxiety is spreading, because this is a monumental time in our history. But there have been huge benefits to both public safety and national security from this [...] Imports and exports, international trade, exchange programs in schools; these are underdeveloped areas that show great promise, with results already appearing [...] Not only will it improve the economy, but it will expand work opportunities for low to medium income households to capitalise on [...] Spread and preserve our culture—to show our pride as Tirynn people to the nations of the world!”
There was a mix of expressions in the crowd. Some seemed to agree, seeing genuine opportunities for change that could benefit the people. Others were on the fence, and plenty showed their explicit disapproval, hesitant to interact with the rest of the world at such a time. War and poverty was a world-wide epidemic at this point; of course, many of them were worried about how mingling with these affairs could bring ruin to their own country.
If it wasn’t broken, why attempt to fix it? There was potential to further increase living standards, yes, but compared to everywhere else in the world, they had it very good. It was better to remain in solitude as they always had. That had preserved them while other countries collapsed.
Lars listened to a few voices of the crowd. He realised that many were hesitant to agree with Rhys’ suggestions, favouring to not change the way they had lived since centuries prior. As a foreigner, and a soldier who had travelled the world, he understood their points. But at the same time, he found another perspective.
Is she referencing the other side as well…? Of course, knowledge on that wasn’t made public. But the singularity itself was far too difficult to hide. After two decades, information would leak and people would begin to discuss rumours surrounding it. Even the existence of abnormalities might not be concealed completely. If his sergeant was informed somewhat, then what would natives know?
If the singularity and the other side was made public, and Tirynn started to put more workpower around trading with the other side, then it would be possible to create an even greater resource monopoly, strengthening the country even more. Rhys mentioned imports and exports… could she be looking to do such a thing between the worlds? The idea didn’t seem that far-fetched to him.
As Rika said, Rhys had considerable influence on the other side; enough to register as a government body. If more freedoms were granted by making the other side known and available to the public, then her influence would only grow, bolstered by the other world’s significance in politics and the economy. Perhaps that was why she was recruiting people like himself to attain abnormalities and work between the worlds.
At the same time, he remembered the proposed threat. His reason for standing here today was because of the tether. It was very easy for a hostile person, with an abnormality, to stage an attack by waiting on the other side. Rhys herself could evade it easily enough, but it would be disastrous if the crowd were to be involved, especially when she was responsible for them.
Either way, it would be a loss. If she evaded the attack, then people would die and blame would fall on her. Meanwhile, staying behind would make her vulnerable, opening up an opportunity to inflict harm upon her directly. Lars' presence was a countermeasure to that.
While he was mulling this over, he saw the Officer-in-Charge from before walking by. This person gave him a discreet look to signify it was time for him to move. As such, Lars left his post and went behind the stage, out of sight from the crowd. He then focused his concentration on crossing over.
His job was simple: find and eliminate the person lying in wait.