The universe had ended a long, long time ago.

Humanity hadn't.

They survived in a single city, the culmination of a desperate attempt to hold off the collapse of reality itself. It was the single largest project that humanity had ever undertaken, with all the best and brightest coming together to make it work. Mages and scientists worked together in ways they'd never managed to before, and even then...

Even then, all they'd managed was one city. One city that could support a population of about a thousand.

The Bastion.

The final hope of humanity.

The idea was that within the shelter of the city, the best of the best could continue to work, to find a way to reverse the destruction that was unwinding the fabric of reality.

That was the hope, anyway. In practice... things were very, very different. Because as hard as those scientists and mages tried, they never found any more of a solution than the Bastion itself. The shield around the city, known to all as the Boundary, was the largest they could hope to make it. It didn't matter how much magic or power they had — they were running up against some kind of hard, existential limit; it would take exponentially greater amounts of power to increase the size of the Boundary by even a fraction, and an infinite amount to increase the radius by one meter.

Humanity was stuck.

And Layla was very, very angry about it.

"This thing's a piece of shit," she muttered, glaring at the Boundary and kicking at the side of the building she sat on; her foot bounced off the metal with a clang, and Gerard glanced at her tiredly.

"I've heard this before," he said.

"It is," she insisted.

"It's the only thing that's keeping this city together," Gerard said, his tone patient and practiced. They'd had this conversation a dozen times over.

"It made us lazy," Layla argued, but there was no real heat in her voice. Not anymore. When she'd first heard about it, maybe, but now it was just... routine. "It made us think we were safe."

"We are," Gerard said, but his voice was quiet.

They weren't. Not really.

They were safe from the End, sure. But the transition for the Bastion hadn't been easy — when the Boundary had turned on, half the systems they'd built to keep them supplied with food and water had been thrashed.

"We're not," Layla said bitterly, and this time Gerard didn't argue. "This Venture thing is only going to last another century at most. It's a stopgap. We don't have a solution, the people in charge don't have a solution, we're just... waiting to die."

"That's kind of harsh," Gerard sighed. "Everyone's working on it."

"It's true, though," Layla said.

For a moment, Gerard was silent. The two of them sat on the rooftop of one of the buildings on the outer edges of the Bastion. What was once bright copper was now tarnished a dull green — nothing in the outer edges was really maintained anymore. They just didn't have enough people left to occupy all those buildings.

In front of them, not very far away at all, was the Boundary.

No one really wanted to live too close to the Boundary. It hurt to look at it — was dangerous to look at it, even, if you stared for too long. It was a shimmering barrier of light that held off the end of the world, and every so often there would be flickers; glimpses into the beyond. Unreality would peek through, and even that smallest peek, filtered by the Boundary, was deadly.

It was an odd phenomenon, really. It was only dangerous when filtered by the Boundary. Not if you were on either side of it.

The Boundary was safe enough to look at it briefly, too, or out of the corner of your eye. It appeared as a shimmering prismatic curtain, extending all the way around the Bastion in a dome-like shape; the upper edges extended far enough away that the visual filters kicked in, replacing the view of the Boundary with a view of Earth's sky.

Or what Layla had been told was Earth's sky, at any rate. She'd never seen it for herself, having been born long after the Bastion had been established and the rest of reality had fractured into nothing.

"You're nervous, aren't you?" Gerard asked, and Layla sighed.

"...Yes," she admitted. "They're recruiting everyone now. I don't really have a good reason to opt out."

"You can," Gerard said.

"I don't want to," Layla said after a moment. She stared out at the Boundary, and then closed her eyes, listening instead to the faint hum of that prismatic curtain. "I want to try. I want to find something that'll fix all this. I'm not a scientist or a mage-scholar. I can't try to fix this with research."

"You could learn," Gerard said. Layla shot him a flat look, and he chuckled lightly. "Yeah, I know. You're not a fan."

"The only thing you've ever gotten me to read is the Venturing pamphlet and that's not going to change any time soon."

"Did you ever manage to finish that, by the way?"

"It's an endless pamphlet, Gerard. No, I have not 'finished it'." Layla rolled her eyes, but managed a light grin at her friend, who grinned right back at her.

"It's not technically endless," Gerard said, teasing.

"It's functionally endless!" Layla threw her hands up into the air, exasperated. "Every time I finish a page they add like, three more at the back! It's like a book that never ends!"

Pointedly, Layla held out the pamphlet. It was a small, folded piece of paper, that looked like it could unfold into about three or four separate pages — but she held it out over the edge of the building and let it fall, and it just... kept unfolding.

And unfolding.

Aaaand unfolding.

A few folds of laminated paper hit the metallic streets below, kicking up a barely-visible cloud of dust. Gerard peered over the edge of the building, impressed.

"Wow," he said. "They've added a lot of pages."

"I told you," Layla said. "Endless pamphlet."

"You think we can use this thing to get down?"

"Don't you have those fancy boots you made?" Layla raised an eyebrow. Gerard scowled.

"Don't remind me," he grumbled. He reached down to fiddle with the levers on his boots — they were thick, unwieldy things, fixed to half a dozen golden gears that clicked and spun as the levers were adjusted. A red-green light flickered at the heel of the boot, and small vials of water decorated the back. Every so often, a puff of steam would escape from the vents.

It did its job well, considering Gerard had used it to climb up the side of the building in the first place.

Then he'd leaned over the corner of the building and vomited.

Trying to walk sideways up a building, as it turned out, wasn't great for his constitution. The blood flow to his head 'felt weird', according to him. Layla just called him out for not having enough ab strength.

"Steamtech," Layla said with a dramatic sigh, but she did flick a bit of her personal magic over the pamphlet. Simple, reinforcing magic, the kind she'd learned to use over a decade ago; the pamphlet lit up purple, and Gerard gave her a grateful smile.

"See you down there," he said, grabbing on to the pamphlet with a grin. Layla didn't miss the way he kept his boots on, though she didn't begrudge him for it — he could be clumsy at times.

She watched, wincing, as he slipped, stuck his leg out, and banged into the side of the building as the steamtech boots stuck him to the wall.

Clumsy.

Still her best friend, though.

On the plus side, it didn't take her nearly as long to get down from the building — gravity magic handled the fall quite easily.

It took her much longer to re-fold the damn pamphlet back together, even with Gerard helping. Whoops.

"Ready to sign up?" she said, once they were done, and Gerard grinned at her.

"Yup. Let's go."

The trip to the office of the Venturers was a shorter one than Layla would have liked. The outer edges of the Bastion were made of old copper and rusted steel; the streets were dusty with disuse, and the lights flickered weakly at the best of times. The inner city, though, was still full of life, maintained by the still-dwindling population of cleaner nanobots that kept a large portion of the city running. The buildings here gleamed like they were made of gold — even the plants were adorned in cages of that gold-like metal, with pretty lines of filigree traced over every leaf.

It wasn't actually gold, Gerard had explained to her once. Or it was, but it was also something adjacent to gold; the proton number was still 79, but it was a magic-isotope because it contained an extra 50 particles of some magic-particle Layla couldn't be bothered to remember the name of.

Gerard knew a lot more about magic than she did, even if she was the mage between the two of them. She was vaguely certain he'd have an aneurysm if she told him that every time he explained something new to her, she would just put the word magic in front of the thing and call it a day.

Point was, the inner city was fancy. It was where Gerard lived — where almost everyone still lived, except for Layla, who had stubbornly refused to move on from her section of the city when the number of nanobots had dwindled and most people had been forced to move deeper into the city.

Right now, though, the streets were quiet. No one was around. The majority of people were out past the Boundary, searching for food or water or solutions, and the rest were doing research or had locked themselves up in their homes to rest. There wasn't really anything to do in the streets — it was only busy when it was time to distribute food.

The building they were looking for was one of the largest and most ostentatious, sitting directly in the city square. It was a building of glittering geometric shapes, of dizzying angles and impossible slopes. It was also the source of the Boundary.

Right at the top, a beam of light poured into the sky, creating the barrier that was keeping all of them safe. This close to the source, the humming sound of the Boundary's engines had to be blocked by numerous sound enchantments; every light source in the city had a sound dampener attached to it.

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Ignoring all of this — he'd probably seen it every day, after all — Gerard pushed open the large, golden doors to the so-called office, and Layla stepped in after him.

"Welcome to the Venturers," the receptionist said, a little tiredly. He closed the book he was reading and put it gently to the side. "How may I help you?"

"Wynn!" Layla said cheerfully. "Today's our sign-up day, so, you know. We're here to do the thing."

"Of course," Wynn said, and then he glanced at Gerard, as if to make sure Layla was telling the truth. Gerard gave him a conspiratorial nod, and Wynn reached under the desk—

"Hey!" Layla complained.

"Gerard plays pranks less than you do," Wynn said dryly, pulling out two forms and placing them on the desk in front of him. "Alright, fill these out, and then follow me into the back."

It only took a scant few seconds for Layla and Gerard to fill out the forms they were given — they were nothing but a formality these days, considering everyone was required to become a Venturer. It was possible to opt out, like Gerard had said, but in practice it was rare that anyone did.

Opting out was a formality, too. An illusion of choice, offered because they felt it would be cruel not to offer it. But not being a Venturer meant only getting what scraps of food were left over, because the majority of it was distributed amongst Venturers for trips past the Boundary. Not being a Venturer meant looks of scorn or pity, or questions about the why and the how.

She knew, because her own father had opted not to be a Venturer, after her mother died out past the Boundary. She knew because he'd eventually caved and signed up to become one. She knew because she was at the celebratory party, and saw the way he smiled when he was finally accepted.

She knew because he never came back from that first trip past the Boundary.

"Done?" Wynn asked her quietly, almost as if he knew her thoughts, and she sighed and gave him the slip of paper she'd finished filling up a minute ago.

"Yeah," she said.

Gerard took a moment longer than she did — he had a lot more to fill out in the next-of-kin section, for obvious reasons — and then gave the completed form to Wynn, who slid both forms into a drawer without looking at them. "Follow me," he said, walking past them and into the wall.

Through the wall.

Layla blinked. "Did you know that door was there?" she whispered to Gerard, and he shrugged at her. He stuck a hand into that section of the wall, and the metal wavered and vanished around his hand, like it was never there.

"Weird," he said noncommittally, and stepped on through. Layla followed after him indignantly.

"You can't just call it weird and then walk through like it's no big deal!" she hissed at him.

"Is it a big deal?" Gerard blinked at her. "We've seen holograms before."

"But I didn't know the wall was one!" Layla complained. "I could've pulled so many pranks."

"I feel like you need to talk to someone about your compulsive need to prank people," Gerard said with a grin.

"I do talk to someone. I talk to you. And then you talk me out of it, so I stopped talking to you about it." Layla stuck her tongue out at him.

She was being childish, she knew. She was avoiding thinking about becoming a Venturer, and she was avoiding thinking about what had happened to her parents. But it helped, a little bit, and she was grateful that Gerard was playing along—

"This way!" Wynn called to them, and Layla started.

They went through what was practically a maze of golden corridors, each one decorated with more complicated bullshit than the last, in Layla's estimation. The first one just had a bunch of gears in panels along the walls; the next one had complicated runic frameworks, and the third had a dizzying array of circuits that she decided not to look at. The room Wynn led them into would have been plain in comparison, if not for the dazzling array of inventions and the massive shelf of identical-looking backpacks.

"Okay," Wynn said, hauling down two of the backpacks from the shelf. "I presume you're familiar with Venturer equipment?"

"Yes," Gerard said.

"No," Layla said, almost at the exact same time. Gerard glanced at her.

"That's like page one of the pamphlet."

"I skipped the first page," Layla said with a shrug. "It's like a prologue. Who reads the prologues? I want to read about the cool stuff."

"Layla, it's not a prologue. It's literally everything important we need to bring past the Boundary to, you know, stay alive."

"Like I said. Prologue."

"If you'll excuse me," Wynn cut in, a twinkle in his eyes the only thing betraying his amusement. "Asking that question was more of a formality. I have to explain how it all works anyway. Part of the job, and you'd be surprised how many people forget the basics by the time they get here."

Wynn hefted a bag. "Venturer's backpack. Standard issue. They're bigger on the inside, and more importantly, they're spatially partitioned. There's a dial at the top you can adjust to access different compartments. You have five different liquid partitions, five different partitions for anything edible, and then various miscellaneous partitions for your equipment and any artifacts you might find. Organize them to be easy to access yourself."

"Cool," Layla whistled, and Gerard elbowed her. Wynn chuckled.

"This is your Lifeline," Wynn said, pulling out an odd fishing-hook looking talisman set on a necklace. Small runes were carved into the surface, and if Layla squinted she could see that those runes were made of smaller runes, too. "It is literally your lifeline. Don't take this off no matter what happens. Don't let anything steal it from you. It extends the protections of the Boundary to you, and more importantly, it lets you find your way back. If you lose it, your chances of getting back are less than one in a trillion, so I repeat, do not lose it."

"One in a trillion?" Layla asked skeptically. She reached out for the Lifeline, and put it around her head; it settled comfortably around her neck, the chain automatically tightening to fit snugly without being too tight. "How'd you get that number?"

"We have a lot of mathematical models on how reality drifts when you're out there," Wynn said dryly. "Speaking of which. Here's your compass."

The next thing Wynn pulled out from the backpack was, quite literally, a mundane-looking compass — except that the inner mechanism was a glowing arrow instead of a magnetic needle, and there were no directions labelled on the backplate. Instead, the whole thing shone green.

"This points back to the Bastion, and requires your Lifeline to work," Wynn explained. "The color of the backplate tells you how stable the reality fragment you're in is. Green is relatively safe, and we have most Green Zones mapped out. You can consult the map, which I'll show you in a second, and they'll tell you what the probable rules of your Green Zone are. If you're in a Yellow Zone, all bets are off — the rules can change at any time. Red..."

Wynn grimaced. "If you find yourself in a Red Zone, try to follow your compass back towards the Bastion. The Boundary keeps things around it relatively stable, so that's the best bet you have of getting somewhere safer quickly. But don't expect to come back the same. I don't advise staying in a Yellow Zone for long either, frankly. There's a secondary function of the compass that links all the Venturer compasses together and functions as the live map I mentioned earlier. You can use it to track the direction of the closest Green, Yellow, and Red Zones. I recommend you keep an eye on it at all times. Do not trust your directional instincts when you're out past the Boundary."

"And if the way back to the Bastion is through a Red Zone?" Layla asked with a frown.

"Unlikely," Wynn said. "If that happens, double check your Lifeline. It's possible it's picking up on the wrong signal and grabbed on to one of the Bastion-alternates instead."

"Bastion... alternates?" Layla asked, blinking.

"Echoes of this city," Wynn said. "They're not real, and neither are the people in them. Don't go looking for them, and leave as soon as you can if you find them. Your reality isn't going to play well with its echo."

"That's ominous," Layla muttered. "You can't explain in more detail?"

"It's the same thing that happens if you stay in a Red Zone for too long," Wynn said with a sigh. "You get Changed. And Changing isn't a death sentence, but..."

"I mean," Gerard said. "I think the Changed are really cool."

"Your crush on Royce doesn't count, Gerard," Layla said.

"I don't have a crush on him!" Gerard protested. "I just think he's cool!"

"Riiight," Layla said, entirely unconvinced.

"Changing isn't a death sentence," Wynn repeated, interrupting their byplay with a glare, though there wasn't really any heat to it. "But it's still incredibly dangerous, and a lot of people Change without surviving the process. Or they Change, but there's so much unreality in their bodies that they can't survive transitioning back past the Boundary, and they have to stay outside."

"I know," Gerard muttered, looking down.

A good portion of the Changed population stayed in camps around the Bastion. A couple of them could still move in and out of the Boundary, and they did, to try to supply the Bastion with food and whatever artifacts they could find that might lend some insight into what was happening and how to fix it — but there were a few of the Changed that tried to step through and just... disintegrated.

It wasn't a risk that many of them wanted to take, anymore.

"Anyway. Back to the compass," Wynn said after a moment. He seemed to shake off whatever he was remembering — and there were memories there, certainly, Layla could see that in the way his brows furrowed and the slightly distant look in his eyes. "You'll need mana to power it. If you don't have mana," he gave Gerard a significant look, "you'll have to use the mana converter. That comes as standard, too."

"We get a mana converter?" Gerard asked, suddenly intrigued.

"Don't get excited," Wynn said. "It's not one of the fancy ones. It's one of the steamtech ones that turn your blood into mana. It's not the best solution in the world, but it's what we can afford to spare."

"Ah," Gerard said, grimacing. He brightened again. "Still, I've never gotten to work with a mana converter before! Am I allowed to modify it? What if I break it?"

"We'll issue you another one," Wynn said, but he made a face. "Please try not to break it. We don't have that many of those, either."

"We'll probably find more of them out past the Boundary," Layla said, trying to assure Gerard. She glanced back to Wynn, bouncing on her feet to try to work off some of that nervous energy she could feel building. "We've got a Compass, a Lifeline, and a mana converter. Anything else?"

"Basic rations," Wynn said. "We give you one set to start with, but make sure you get more before every trip. Time doesn't work right out there, too, so you might find that yourselves full one second and starving the next. Keep an eye out for anything — and I mean anything — that seems like it's changing on the fly. If at any point your equipment seems like it's malfunctioning, come back immediately. Store anything you find and think might be useful in individual partitions inside the pack; you don't want them to start merging."

"Merging?" Layla asked, raising an eyebrow skeptically. "And what about weapons?"

"It's happened once," Wynn said. "It wasn't very pretty and we couldn't use anything afterwards, so we make sure to include that warning now. As for weapons, you get a standard-issue fireblade and mana pistol, but don't rely on them too much. Your best bet if you meet something is usually to just run."

Wynn paused. "Don't assume something is hostile just because they look scary, either. I shouldn't have to say this with the Changed around, but apparently it still happens, so."

Layla just nodded, and Wynn re-packed all the gear he'd taken out into one of the packs, save for the Lifeline she still wore around her neck — she made Gerard grab his, too. She grabbed pack and Gerard grabbed the other, both of them slinging them over their shoulders.

"Are you actually in charge of everything?" Layla asked after a moment, looking around. "Isn't there like... a head Venturer or something? When do we get to meet the others?"

Wynn snorted. "Most Venturers are either out there beyond the Boundary or recuperating in their rooms. You get your own room here, by the way. And an office. You can keep anything you find that we deem not useful for the city."

"Isn't everything useful for the city?" Gerard asked. Wynn shrugged.

"Believe it or not, no. A lot of personal equipment is stuff you get to keep. We need anything that can generate food or water — or actual food and water, if you manage to come back with more than you left with — mana converters, repair spells, mana batteries and actual batteries to keep the Boundary running. Be on the lookout for those."

"Huh." Gerard looked oddly excited now — no doubt intrigued by the prospect of being able to keep his finds and doing science on them.

"I want to get going," Layla said, bouncing impatiently. "Can we get going now?"

"You're on your own schedules," Wynn said with a shrug. He consulted a checklist, ticking off a few items, and then nodded at them. "We're pretty much done with the briefing. The only thing left is to introduce you to the other Venturers, but we can just do that when they're around. You'll meet our researchers and magi when you come back with your first haul, and they can take you through what they do if you like."

Gerard's eyes went wide. "Really? Layla, we gotta go. Like right now."

Layla stifled a laugh. "Are you sure about that? Don't you want to question Wynn a bit more first?"

"Nope." Gerard tugged on her arm. "Come on, you wanted to leave just a second ago!"

"Yeah, yeah," Layla said. "We're off, then."

"Stay safe," Wynn told them seriously. He seemed genuinely concerned, at least. "Try to get a guide to go with you for your first trip. There's always Changed that are up for the job."

Layla nodded, gave him a wave as Gerard practically dragged her out of the room — and what a change that was, to have Gerard be the one dragging her around this time. Not that she minded. To think all he'd really needed was the allure of... getting to talk to scientists?

"You're a nerd, you know that?" she said conversationally, and Gerard huffed.

"That's an old Earth term. Where did you even learn that?"

"I read," Layla said.

"You absolutely do not."

"You can't prove anything."

And — still arguing good-naturedly — they made their way to the Boundary.

Neither of them took the time to stop and stare. Neither of them wanted to spend too much time thinking about it, really. That prismatic curtain shimmered in front of them, a symbol of everything that was keeping the Bastion safe, but also everything that was keeping the Bastion stagnant.

Layla knew what she had was a thin hope. Every Venturer went out there, hoping they'd find a solution to all of this; hoping they'd find something to fix the slow death their city was surely headed towards. Not a single one of them had succeeded so far, and she and Gerard?

They were just another drop in the bucket.

But hope, foolish as it might be, spurred humanity ever forward.

Both of them made sure they had Lifelines on their necks and their compasses on the belt; Gerard had to take the extra step of clipping the mana converter to his arm, wincing a little as a small needle pierced into his bloodstream.

"Ready?" Layla asked.

"Nope," Gerard admitted.

They stepped forward anyway. The Boundary enveloped them, a white static pushing away all known reality as they pushed through —

— and then reality came back, wrong and twisted and wholly incorrect. Layla staggered, and Gerard outright tripped, stumbling onto his knees before he caught himself.

Above them, the sky twisted and turned, an endless fractal of impossible light.

Behind them, the Boundary hummed, stable as ever.

In front of them?

Endless possibility.

And the smallest chance at a miracle.