“So I’m guessing that you’d want to start at the beginning, then? The Integration and the war following it?” Sarah asked.

“If that’s the beginning, then yes,” Sam said. “I got a sort of summary from the commander at the base back where I woke up. But I didn’t really get anything out of that besides Earth being destroyed in a war with demons.”

“They weren’t demons. The term ‘demons’ carries with it a religious connotation that the Harots simply don’t have.”

“How about a simple fantasy connotation, as in a world where magic is real?”

“Fair enough. But they were more like alien beings than anything.”

“Were? Aren’t you guys still fighting them?”

“What? No. Of course not. What makes you say that?”

“So who, or what, are you fighting the ‘war’ with?”

“Oh… I see how you might have thought that. But, no, our current enemy is completely different. They’re—Never mind, we’ll get to them later. Right now we’re talking about the Integration, right?”

“If you say so. I just want to know what happened to Earth.”

Sarah nodded. “Then that’s where we should begin. But first, I should explain what the Integration actually was, or is because it’s not a onetime event but a recurring phenomenon.”

“OK… but if you start speaking German, I’m jumping out the window.”

“So I’m guessing that you already realized it by now, but New Terra is not the only world in existence. Rather, it’s one of many. All of which, are connected to each other through portals like the ones back where you woke up. This system of portals, or even just the system of worlds that exist in the same… conceptual frame, is called the Web. What the Web is… it’s hard to grasp when you don’t have intuitive knowledge of it, but there’s probably one very important thing that you should know that will go a great way towards beginning to understand it. You see, all the worlds in the Web can greatly differ from each other, in both major and minor ways. So for example: in size; eco-systems; landscapes; even gravity. But even with all that difference, they all have the same thing, the most important thing perhaps, in common. Time.

“Time?” he asked. Sarah nodded and got up to stand next to the windows, gesturing him to follow her.

“See anything unusual?” She pointed to the outside world.

“How would I know? I’ve never been here before. What am I looking at?”

“Look up.”

“Up? What that you can see the skies clearly? Yeah, I guess that’s different. Normally, with this amount of light pollution, you wouldn’t be able to see any stars. So what does that mean? That we’re in a star system with a lot of planets, maybe? Or that there’s other star systems really close by? I don’t know, I’m not an astronomer. Although… that wouldn’t explain why the moon is so bright, right? And is it just me our does it look really similar to Earth’s? Wait, what does that even have to do with—“

“It’s the same moon.”

“Come again?”

“The moon, it’s made to look like the same us ours, like the Moon.”

“Made by who?”

Sarah shrugged her shoulders. “The Web? The worlds themselves? No one really knows. What we do know, is that the skies are fake. Made to look as they are by the collective conceptions of all the people living in the world below them. Before we Terrans came here, the skies looked completely different, a fact that you can still discern in the minute differences between New Terra’s skies and Earth’s. The fact of the matters is, the worlds in the Web don’t exist in space as we’re familiar with it; planets; stars and so on. In fact, if you were strong enough—a Ruler—to be able to fly up there beyond the skies and out of the world, you’ll find yourself in a void where the only thing you could see is the world you came from and maybe the other worlds close by to it.

“And so, the skies are synchronized across the entire world. It’s the same time, and even season here in New Alexandria as it is halfway across the world in Kenna, for example. And it’s the same not just in the world but across all the worlds in the Web. The other worlds’ skies, and thus seasons and stuff like dawn and sunset, might be different. But the time, down to the same second in the same in the same twenty-four hours clocks, the time is always the same.

“And what does that void look like?” Sam gulped, his mind racing back to a couple of hours ago.

Sarah shrugged her shoulders. “Not really sure. Like I said, only Rulers—and Chosen too, I guess—can go up there. But it’s not anything like space, that you and I know, from before. And you should still be able to seek the world you came from, in someway or another. So the ‘void’ you told Maurice about, probably wasn’t the same one that’s out there.”

“Shit… that’s a lot to… it’s really weird. Fake skies? Same time? Why am I repeating what you just told me?”

“Because it’s a lot to take in. And it goes against everything you knew about how space works.” Sam scratched his head. Nodding absentmindedly. After almost a minute of silence, Sarah spoke up again. “So that’s pretty much it for the Web, at least for now. Can we move on back to Earth’s Integration?”

“You don’t have to ask my permission. You’re the boss. If I have a question that I must ask, I’ll simply cut you off and completely derail the conversation.”

“Sounds reasonable. So Earth: It all started with the Integration which is the process in which the Web assimilates a new world into itself. The first step is opening up portals between a world, or worlds, in the Web proper and the integrating world. In the case of Earth, we unfortunately only connected with one other world, New Terra.”

“Wow, they knew even then it was going to be New Terra?”

“No. Back then, the world was under elven control, but I couldn’t tell you what they called it. Anyway, an Integration always starts with a small number of portals that keep popping up randomly in the integrating world before disappearing after a couple of hours. So at first, the amount of people that made their way through to ‘New Terra’ was very small. Mostly military with the odd government mandated researcher, but of course plenty of random people also made their way through.

“That’s the first month or so of the Integration, as far as Earth was concerned at least. Because during that time, the portals were only a one-way street, people could go to New Terra, but not back to Earth. But the people that made their way over to this side quickly made two major discoveries. First, that magic was real and that they had it. That is to say, they had their Awakening. Of course, they couldn’t make heads or tails of what happened to them until they made their second discovery: Another sapient species on the same level as we are; the elves.

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“OK, quick question.” Sam said. “When you say elves, what kind of elves are we talking about? Tolkienesque elves? Santa-like? Or stereotypical pop-culture elves?”

“There’s a whole section on the different races, so we’re going to get to them, don’t worry. But… they’re pretty much just like us besides a couple of cosmetic difference: Sharp tipped ears, taller on average, no hair on their body besides the eyebrows and head. Stuff like that.”

“Bo-ring. Whatever, keep going.”

“So at first we and the elves obviously couldn’t understand each other and as a result there was some flare-up of violence but luckily there was death only on our side, otherwise the elves might have been much less willing to help us. They did help us, though. By forcefully installing the universal translator in the people they met when they figured out we didn’t know how to do it ourselves, having never had access to magic before. Long story short, the elves then explained to us how magic works and what the hell was going on with the Integration. That was the first month for the people who passed the portal to New Terra.”

“Second month: the portals on Earth are becoming more frequent. Some portals on New Terra start opening up, allowing access back to Earth, but only to Terrans, unfortunately. Unfortunately, because Harots invade three and a half months after the Integration started. The same day that almost all the Taken to be returned during the Integration are returned.”

“Are both of those things connected?”

“The consensus seems to be so. It was the same thing during the other races’ integrations. Remember how I said that the Integration also happening to all the other races? Well, the Harots’ invasion and the Taken are also part of that equation. Only for all the other races, most of the Taken were returned only after the Integration was over. And those that didn’t played a much more minor role in fighting back the Harots.

“But we Terrans… We didn’t have access to magic before the Integration, so not only did we not know what we were doing, but we also didn’t have any high-level combatants, not to mention Rulers. And although we did manage to beat back the Harots by the end, by that time, it was too late. Earth’s magic was too unstable, having suffered under the parasitizing bite of the invaders, and we were forced to abandon it. Relocated to New Terra. All those humans that made it through the war, at least.”

Sam gulped. “And how many were they?”

Sarah averted her eyes from his. “The numbers aren’t clear. But between two billion and three, that are speculated to have survived the war. Of those, only one point eight billion have managed to immigrate to New Terra by the time of Earth’s destruction.”

“That’s… Jesus Christ… a whole billion. That’s a huge range of possibility. Why did so many of them not manage to get to New Terra?”

“Mainly… because once the Integration was nearing its end, the portal between Earth and New Terra stabilized, which meant that it’s location was fixed. A location that was far from ideal. Unfortunately, at the time we still didn’t have any Rulers capable of changing it and couldn’t use the other races’ Rulers because Earth was still just outside of the Web.”

“Jesus Christ, that’s a lot,” Sam said, feeling torn between the instinct of seeing what Sarah had just told him as a personal event that he had luckily missed. Or the desire to preserve his sanity and see it as a historical event that, while sad, shouldn’t personally impact him. After all, it was currently a hundred years into the future. Every person he had ever known would have already been dead, with or without Earth’s destruction. And Sam’s Earth, as he knew it, would have also been destroyed as well, simply by the passage of a hundred years of irrevocable change.

But of course he should care! It was his still his world, dammit! Three and a half billion years of existence! Twelve millennia of history! Those were his family and friends who were among the billions killed during the war. Dying in pain and horror, the likes of which Earth has never known. It was the end of every spatial aspect of human culture to have ever existed.

“Fuck…” he muttered after a minute of silence, which didn’t help him digest what he had just heard at all. “I’m just now realizing what it means for fucking Earth to be destroyed. Fuck… I feel like I’ll have to read about this in my own time, later. But for now, we need to focus on the present, no? There’s still a ton of stuff that I should know about before the day ends, right?”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to take a couple of minutes to process all of this?” Sarah’s look of concern probably came from a place of intimate familiarity.

“Yeah.” He sighed. “Maybe. I’ve finally drank enough to need to go to the toilet, anyway. So I’ll go do that. Be right back.” Despite his words, his throat felt completely parched, so after finishing what remained of his glass in one gulp, he refilled it once more before head to the bathroom.

After sitting down on the toilet, he tried to take deep breaths in order to calm himself. Peeing helped. After all, it always felt good to pee. Sure, he wasn’t at the level of a full bladder like in that one Tyrion chapter that he always kept coming back to when his thoughts wandered to the wonderful sensation of that was reliving yourself. But, his first piss in this new world was still as palpable a relief as if he was filled to the bursting. The relief, he realized, was much more mental than physical.

Back outside after cleaning up, Sam witnessed Sarah devouring a rather large sandwich in lighting quick bites. “Slow down a little,” he said while sitting back down. “You can take your time with that.” She nodded back at him, but didn’t slow her pace at all. Soon enough, the last crumb of bread finished its journey inside her stomach. She was lucky that she was also a Taken, because that would surely require an antacid or two.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “I barely ate anything the entire day.”

“I already told you, it’s fine. Take your time. We have all night. Well, I have all night. I don’t know about you.”

“I’ll need to go to sleep eventually. And so should you. But it’s still early enough for now. So we can continue if you want to.”

“Like I said, I’m here all night. And since it’s not bingo night tonight, I have all the time in the world. Oh, one thing that I wanted to ask before I forget, what year did the Integration start?” Sam gave a sigh after hearing Sarah’s answer. “I see… At least, it was probably far enough in the future for One Piece to have ended..”

“The comic?”

Sam took a long pause. “Yes. No use differentiating anymore, I guess.”

“I never read it, but a friend of mine did, and I think he mentioned something about the ending. Let me just look it up to be sure.”

“Should I surmise, based on yours and Maurice’s, that phones are also the same despite the passing of time?”

“Yeah, more or less. Honestly, we’re lucky in that respect; there isn’t that much technological change that we need to get used to. In fact, Maurice had to get used to some stuff, having actually regressed. The destruction of Earth wasn’t kind to—Ah! There we go. The hospital has its own separate Wi-Fi. Yeah, so One Piece finished it’s run in—”

Sam stopped her before she could finish her sentence. “Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know, even roughly, how many chapters I have left. It’s just good to know that it managed to end in time. A small silver lining in the apocalypse as it were.”

“Do you want to look up any other famous series, or should we move on?”

“Hm… Move on. There’ll be plenty of time for that in the future. Oh wait! You said that the other races also had Taken, but something about them being different from ours?”

“Yes, most of theirs were returned after the Integration and the war with the Harots ended. The prevailing theory, for the reason behind it, goes that they had less of a need for the Taken’s help during the war. So the forces that be decided to take children and young teenagers, who were at greater risk of dying during the war, in order to save them.”

“The forces that be? So we know who is behind it all?”

“Not exactly… that’s just a theory. We don’t actually know anything about the Taken… Although…”

“Although?”

“There is a rather… common explanation—sorry explanation isn’t the right word, theory for the process of ‘taking’. The theory holds that the ones behind the Taken and their return are the Reshan.”

“The ‘Reshan?’ Is that another race?”

“In a way, although we don’t actually know… It’s the name that, and you’re going to hate me for saying this, the precursor civilization called itself in all of its ruins.”

“Precursors? Are you kidding me?”

“I know! I know how it sounds. But it’s the best name for them. There are five, or rather six, races, including us, that we know of in the Web. Of us six, only the dwarves don’t live on their homeworld and that’s because they claim to have immigrated from north of the Web more than a millennium ago. But what’s certain is that all six races came from a single world that was integrated into the Web and only spread to inhabit other worlds after that. But in some of those other—up to their arrival—uninhabited worlds, there were already ruins of a different, completely alien civilization. A civilization much more advanced than ours, so that much of what we know of magic, and many of the artifacts that we use, came from them. Some of those artifacts, we still don’t know how exactly they work, like the—“

“Don’t say it.”

“universal translator…”

“Goddammit, you just had to say it… This sucks. I hate this timeline.”