She wondered exactly how long she’d been walking.

Inside this empty palace with walls running for miles in every direction, and windows that showed a scene absolutely contrary and different to the one she’d passed before.

The earthen floor of an unknown forest. A fantastical city in a faraway world with the ground dropping half a mile below. The street life of what looked like Tokyo in the 2000’s, in an odd corner of said street. A humanoid cat in clothing doing laundry under a bright green-blue sky, oblivious to her. A chariot race in ancient Egypt or Sumer or some place that impressed heat against the skin, all too familiar.

While nearly every window she’d passed for half a mile of walking had shown some form of vibrancy in life and bloom, in materials and scenarios, the inside of the palace had not, all smooth Permian limestone, full of golden light and cool shadow that seemed to come from no particular source.

Until she found the handheld on the pedestal.

It was the only thing she’d seen, in however long she had been ambling along, trying to find anyone or anything.

She hadn’t really been afraid, regardless of it. Regardless of having come across geometric “black light” simply hovering by a window half an hour ago, cast by some entity some galaxies apart. They couldn’t see her. She wasn’t certain how she knew all this.

Somehow, in particular, she knew the handheld. Its nicks and scratches…some childhood thing, not hers, but a friend’s, someone whose name she could barely remember but whose face was strangely clear, and kind—it would let her choose one of the windows.

There wasn’t any instruction to it. It reminded her of how magical girls in animations had always seemed to know just what to say to bring out some kind of power in them. It wasn’t as if she was unfamiliar with such situations, by now.

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She had the sense that she could pick a window herself, but too many had unknown atmospheres, and some had a thousand-foot drop to them, when she’d peered, discreetly—say, let her face get close enough to one window to feel the frigidity, and see how far down an alien world’s mountain of dark blue ice might go.

Atmospheres and heights, she might be able to handle, as the person she was now. But to unsuspecting beings who might care across their galaxy and many more, it could be too much. Then there were the planets barren of any life, millions of lightyears away from those that had any.

Upon the screen of the handheld, worlds glided by, almost lazily, as if a screensaver for some old-school computer.

Golden, glittering, sliding sand dunes, as if someone had just surfed through them. A beach with shells that seemed carefully collected and footsteps leading away, and the sea rushing in and out, far off.

Flying denizens she’d never seen, swooping, soaring, sailing. Swimming denizens just the same, under seas of different colors, shadows, lighting.

Beings of all sorts of shapes and sizes. Conversations, lights, wordless and sightless communications. Cities across a hundred worlds. Places the handheld might know that she could want to go to.

She picked it up, and without needing any kind of prompting, the handheld suddenly and resolutely chose one place.

It hit her then—that for all that time she’d been away, for all that she might have yearned for adventures she could never have brought herself to imagine across a hundred thousand worlds in what felt like so long ago, this was a location she would’ve chosen a million million times.

Across lifetimes, her selves might affirm that.

Back to her.

Back to the grown up and college-bound kids of theirs. Back to that life of hers. Back to holding a warm brew in her hand, and a not-so-adventurous, yet so very adventurous life.

Even if she forgot all that she had learned on this journey, for what might have been an unfathomable eon, there.

Even if it meant only keeping the memories of that short, human time for a dozen, two dozen, three dozen more years, if she were lucky. Even if it meant that one day, they’d have to part, whether through death or through separation.

She wanted to go back.

Back home.

So, the handheld brought her to the window of her life, surrounded by illimitable places, sceneries, beings and eras.

But knowing that, and knowing that all this vast power and knowledge and capability in that stupid, silly, simple human life would become a passing, maybe unremembered dream—

She leapt.