Nora hit the ground hard. Wave after wave of nausea rolled over her. This was wrong. What was so wrong? She hadn't been hit, so why was she in so much pain? Why couldn't she breathe? Where was she? She didn't know.
That was it. She didn't know. She was, at least, cognizant that a spatial distortion had occurred. That was a sensation that she was more than familiar with, but Nora always knew where she was. Her acute sense of spatial awareness was not something that could be tampered with. More importantly, it was not something she had ever gone without. It's absence left her unbalanced, like she had suddenly lost her vision. It was crippling, and it left her in a state of fear that she had never experienced. Everything was dark. Everything was foreign.
The noise from her classmates grounded Nora back in her body as they reminded her that she had other senses to rely on. Cracking open her eyelids, she peered through thick, dark, lashes at the world around her. As expected, her classmates had not been as harshly affected by the lack of spatial energy as she had been. She was the only one on the floor. While most of her classmates had thankfully been distracted by the changes in their surroundings, Adam was watching her with a mixture of confusion and concern, running his fingers through his dark hair and looking around wildly as he tried to make sense of the situation. Nora pulled herself into a somewhat more dignified kneeling position and began her analysis.
The floor was composed of chunky grey flagstones. That put first and fifth out. No sounds of heavy machinery, so third was probably out as well. The room was circular. Runes covered the walls, extending past their edges and trailing into complex patterns in the floor and ceiling. It was a magical formation for sure, but she had no idea what kind. The runes weren't from an alphabet Nora recognized, and she’d seen a lot of alphabets. Nora glanced about beneath her classmates’ ankles and caught a glimpse of several finely embroidered robes. She was willing to bet money that this was a second stage realm.
Worlds were graded on a scale of one through five based on how advanced the knowledge and structure of their civilizations was. A first stage civilization would be something like a stone age with primarily nomadic tribes. Fifth stage would be a completely digital society where the population had begun migrating to computers. A second stage realm, like this most likely was, would be somewhere in the middle ages. Normally this wouldn't be a problem. Plenty of lovely worlds were second stage. One of Nora’s primaries was even second stage. Nora had absolutely nothing against second stage realms, but something was out of place.
Spatial distortions could only be caused by three things. The first was chance. Random fluctuations in the membrane of space could cause tears to form. These tears tended to cause all sorts of trouble. If one were to wander into such a tear, they would find themselves dumped into a random world and left to fend for themselves. A large portion of Nora’s job was to locate people who had wandered into tears, return them home, and seal the tears. The welcome party Nora had spotted effectively ruled out a tear. In addition, if there was a tear, Nora would have seen it by now.
The second phenomenon responsible for spatial distortions was technology. Advanced machinery was occasionally capable of producing random distortions. A machine of this grade, however, would absolutely not be found in a second stage realm. That would require at least a high fourth stage realm. A technological distortion was 100% impossible under these conditions
This left only one possibility: magic. The runes surrounding the chamber almost guaranteed that this was the case. The problem with that was simple. Spatial magic was rare. Really rare. Like, one user per realm per century rare. Formulas this large would be even rarer. That alone was hardly enough to rule it out, but when you took the Wardens into consideration, it was absolutely enough.
The Wardens was the name given to the order of spatial mages. Its reach spanned the entire multiverse. There wasn't a realm they didn't know about. The Wardens considered themselves responsible for a number of things. They controlled the borders between dimensions. They stopped bad things from leaking. They patched holes. They reunited the lost. They kept the multiverse from collapsing in on itself. They even had a branch responsible for seeding promising worlds with intelligent, humanoid life.
Their control was complete, and one of the programs they took most seriously was recruitment. Agents were constantly surveying the realms under their protection for spatial distortions, and if they discovered any distortions related to human activity, they acted. If it was a machine responsible, the machine was destroyed. If a long lost formula was responsible, it was collected and then destroyed, but if it was a person responsible, they were given an offer they couldn't refuse and brought into the ranks. It was in this exact manner that Nora had been made a Junior Warden after the accident.
Even with all of their efforts, there weren't enough Wardens to go around. Each agent had between one and eight realms under their control, depending on the size, stage, and difficulty of the realm, and the experience and skill of the agent. Although there wasn't always a Warden physically present in each realm, there was always a Warden watching for distortions. A distortion that displaced an entire class would be accompanied by a massive burst of spatial energy. If this realm was under surveillance, there was no way that the Wardens wouldn't know about this.
Bringing humans into foreign realms went against the Wardens’ creed. There was no way a Warden had caused this, and yet, nobody had appeared to stop it. The class had been there almost five minutes at this point and nobody had arrived to send them back. Something was wrong, and Nora had a decent idea of what it was.
The space here was thin. It was what had caused Nora’s panic upon arriving. The thick spatial energy that was present in any other realm was all but absent here. It would be difficult to gather the necessary spatial energy to make a jump. Forget about making a tear to send everyone home, she wasn't sure she'd even be able to transport herself.
This kind of an energy void was something that Nora had never heard of. It went against the laws of nature and she was certain that it was not a common occurrence. She had no idea how such a thing would be accomplished. It was an abomination, and if there were any Wardens governing this realm, there's no way they would allow it. It was almost as if the Wardens had forsaken this place. It was unsettling.
The energy required wasn't the only problem though. Nora could faintly sense a handful of nearby realms, but none of their signatures were familiar to her. She was well and truly lost, and there was a very good chance that nobody would be able find her.
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These circumstances left Nora with a very uncomfortable feeling and very few options. She could either play along, or gather as much energy as she could and jump realms until she returned to familiar territory, or visit a few of the nearby realms and look for help. The first and third options, were the most reasonable, but Nora wasn't really sure how long she wanted to stick around. There were plenty of dangers associated with staying and the ones who presumably brought them here hadn't even addressed them yet. Unwilling to act before acquiring some information about why they were here, Nora waited until there weren't any eyes on her and slipped into a personal dimension.
Personal dimensions were a kind of alternate reality bent to the rules of the creator. Nora created her dimension with their current realm as the base, but on a different dimensional level. From within this space, Nora could still observe the happenings of the room without being present, but she could not interact with it. Her surroundings now appeared in the form of a translucent, grey membrane. Anything that she touched, she passed straight through. The runes that had been carved into the walls and floor burned with a vibrant, golden light. Fog gathered in the distance, preventing her from being able to see too far.
The biggest changes, however were to the people in the room. They now resembled faceless, grey specters. Each one had a little candle-like light in their stomachs, representing how much energy they held at the moment. Across the room, the robed men's flames absolutely dwarfed those of her classmates. It just went to show how big of a difference practice could make. Their bodies also lit up in places where tiny runes, glowing various colors, had been etched or sewn into their garments and jewelry.
Nora meandered through the phantasmal room and took a place with a good view of the ones in the robes. These were the ones who had brought them here, and they would be the ones to provide them with answers. She eyed the runes adorning them, looking for any formulas that she might recognize. She found a couple of extremely common protection formulas that either absorbed or deflected damage, but the only surprise came from a simple gold ring on the hand of the man who appeared to be their leader. It was a formula that had been tattooed on the back of Nora's scalp since she was seven years old. It wasn't long until he began to speak.
“Welcome, travelers!” the middle-aged man in the center of the robed crowd proclaimed. Fanciest robe gets to talk first, Nora supposed as she observed the man's gaudy gold and blue attire. It took Nora a second to realise that the man was speaking English. It was a little broken and clumsy, but it was unmistakable.
This was the first red flag for Nora. English was an Earth language. The multiverse uses a surprisingly small pool of six main languages. Miraculously, they can all be found in some form on Earth. Most realms only use one or two of the six, but Earth happens to be a hub with many bordering realms. As such, all six managed to find a place to manifest. Their closest equivalents would be Norse, Latin, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and Mayan. No English. English is an anomaly created via the forced integration of Old Norse and Latin and it's resulting evolution. There is absolutely no reason for it to be present in another realm, especially one that it shares no borders with. Now, Nora was even more interested in what the gaudy man had to say. The crowd of distressed students quieted down and offered him their attention.
“I'm sure you all must be very shocked. I hope that I will be able to clear up a few things for you!” he said with a smile. “I am sorry, but it is my fault that you are here. My country has great need of your help.”
Not a surprising start. The man seemed to be stumbling over his words and searching to find the correct ones. His grasp of English was shallow at best. Nora listened intently as he continued.
“Many years past, my people captured the demon king. The demon king had terrible powers, but God came to us and taught us how to trap him. Now the trap grows weak. We must fix it, but we have not the power. God spoke to us once more. He taught us to bring strong ones over from world with no magic. He say those from world with no magic made better for it. Those we bring over could fix trap and save our people.”
Alarms were going off all over the place in Nora’s head. She had never been one to believe in deities. She had traveled to countless realms and bent the fabric of space and nothing had appeared. Not to mention demons. There were many worlds with more… abstract looking humanoids, but none that she knew of were strong enough to be called a demon. That wasn't what worried her though.
The bit about magic, while confusing, was just outright lies. What she understood from his speech was that they believed that a human who had been born into a world without magic would be better suited to use magic once exposed to it. All intelligent life was equally suited to use magic. The only thing that mattered was their personal proclivities to different types and whether or not they were exposed to suitable spells. In worlds that had historically shunned magic, these conditions were simply harder to meet due to the lack of availability of decent spells. If she was to assume that there was some sort of higher being that spoke to this realm, taught them English, and helped them seal a demon, then why would it lie about this?
“My people would like you to learn magic and help us fix the seal. Will you help us please?” the man concluded.
The class stared silently at each other. They had no idea what to make of the situation. Meanwhile, a very confused Adam was frantically searching for his missing classmate. He had only turned his back for a second before she vanished. He couldn't spot her anywhere amongst his classmates and was beginning to think that she had disappeared completely. So immersed was he in his search, that he failed to notice the hand that materialized behind him and slipped a scrap of paper into his pocket. Nora had seen enough. She took a deep breath and focused her mind, searching for any realms close enough that she could hit them even with only the meager energy she had left over in her body to work with. Finding one that fit her needs, she closed her eyes, bid her classmates a silent farewell, and vanished.
***
Thank you to anyone who reads this! Please feel free to comment or criticize as you like. I know I said in the description that my next chapter would be tomorrow, but I was productive today, so I felt like posting early. I will still upload a new chapter tomorrow. I have a good deal of this story written, and the whole thing outlined, so updates should be extremely reliable. Thanks!