Aiak has made it to Vaxilal.

At least, he's pretty sure. No one he passes on the street seems to be aware that he's actually from Baubli, a decaying stopover shipping town three hundred miles southwest, along what Earthlings know as the Chilean coast, and isn't of this respectable place at all.

Aiak has, in his hand, a loosely sketched overnight study guide for his first day at Kaureiss, a middling-to-respectable manufacturer of large lithium-ion batteries. Mostly for evtols, but not only for evtols or something. Even six-years-younger!Aiak have recognized a claimed market niche that specific as a screaming signal that your company is making a metastable bid at monopoly, and all non-fools should bail its stock and payroll before the inevitable blow-up.

No, Kaureiss makes batteries to order, for anyone who needs a battery for something, no sweat, like respectable people.

But that . . . isn't a high bar? 

There are many high bars Kaureiss doesn't clear, and Aiak knows it. At least one co-cultist back home, in the paleontology cult, had dared to tell him that moving to Vaxilal on an iffy high-paying Kaureiss offer alone was a suicidally tenuous bid for someone his age, with no other reputation in the city. Aiak had smashed the found trilobite he'd been going to give the co-cultist as a parting gift with a rock, and burned his number.

Aiak can't remember numbers.

He runs his finger down the laser printing on the study guide, walking and squinting. It's evening. The light is low but uniform, in the Shadering's ascending shadow.

Aiak is clumsy in the Vaxilal'e dialect, but even so . . . The study guide makes it an unavoidable conclusion. His task requires the use of too many precise figures, having too many possible values. He won't be able to get away with eyeballing it, this time.

He trips over a pipe.

Aiak can't judge 3D distances, either.

At least, he thinks crazily, his shin smarting, as he reslings his backpack and rushes to pick up the ominously soiled paper, the other adults in the street aren't rushing to help him like he's an infant or something. At least there aren't high-speed landcars taller than people hurtling through the pedestrian streets.

No, Aiak, Vaxilal isn't literally the stuff of nightmares. It'll chew you up and spit you out just like anywhere else.

He thinks of a smashed trilobite. His blood runs cold. He scowls.

He distracts himself by observing the way the people in this neighborhood dress. Lots of green, and heavy cotton, but they show so much skin. It's hot but seems racy . . . chat, does everything he thinks have to sound like a stereotype of a bumpkin who's Never Been This Far North?

He distracts himself by observing the way the people in this neighborhood dress. He walks home.

In Aiak's one-room fifth-floor apartment, candlelight flickers over the study guide. He speaks its text into his recorder, crash-coursing Vaxilal'e pronunciation.

"one half ounce of silver - no, silver -

. . . no, I'm sorry, why are they even paying me in silver?"

Aiak shakes his head, shakes out the disgusted tone of his emotions. 

I'm night stupid. I'm getting pretentious.

He is.

"one half ounce of silver per day plus one and - one and a half per - percent - per . . . cent -

of daily revenue from sales downstream of -

- yawn -

- your department, to be tracked . . . "

The image of his supervisor, who he'd met and from whom he'd received this paper just earlier today, impresses itself on his mind. Young, sandy-blond, green-eyed, disconcertingly unreadable . . . and young. Young. Almost as young as Aiak - maybe twenty? and Aiak is very young for his job. 

Betchu was his name. Aiak is better with names than with numbers, but he's written it down everywhere, in ink of every color, to be sure [all the paper being now in his locked diary-scrap safe, to be shredded; Aiak is an amnesiac, not an exhibitionist].

Betchu Kaureiss Vaxilal.

He'd seemed . . . disinterested, in Aiak. Austere? Professional?

Inxeyr, one of Aiak's fathers, had always told him that all else equal you should move toward disinterested people. It was counterintuitive, but it did, in fact, in Aiak's shrewd judgment, seem to work for Inxeyr, who'd gotten out of Baubli years before Aiak had, and was now technically in the semiconductor industry.

He squints and shivers, sitting back on his bed. He brought a blanket, but a thin one, and it's gotten colder with the sunset than he counted on. 

He glances around instinctively, draws the blanket around him, and snuggles into it like a child. He knows, on some level, that it's a bad habit to get into, even in private, acting like a child, for someone so young he's actually at risk of looking like one, if seen.

"To be tracked by tagging . . . "

You wouldn't know the sun was up, in here.

"There are three important things in architecture: ventilation, ventilation, and ventilation", of course.

You can breathe just as easily as outside; you won't start yawning of CO2 toxicity after a few minutes. It's not that horrible decade from last century.

The light isn't the anti-human bright-white-blue of fluorescents, or LED. It's soft and warm and undistracting, and on dimmer switches. It's not that other horrible decade, either.

Each bedroom-sized soundproof capsule workshop [ventilated, near as possible, with pieces of Outside itself] has its own private thermostat.

"We live", here.

Just, it's a workhouse authored by someone who had a point to score, on the sun.

Aiak will note this, as its square opening bronchus, for the second time, engulfs him.

You also wouldn't know anyone was around, in Kaureiss, unless you knew where to look, and looked carefully. But that doesn't distinguish it from any other workhouse.

An Earthling would perceive Bywayean architecture as having both too much space, and too little; to be laid out with both too little organization, and, possibly, too terrifyingly much purpose. 

There are too-narrow hallways [from an Earthling perspective], that narrow, curving at sharp but idiosyncratic angles to accomodate too-spacious individual windowless offices.

The building is composed of N such offices, such that N would be far too many individual offices for an Earth corporate building that was small enough for offices to differ from each other, and far too few to tile any 3D grid of office-cuboids that Earth would consider vast enough to exist.

The hallways aren't third spaces in themselves; they exist so workers can walk to their offices.

There are certainly no harried janitors pushing unwieldy chest-height trash cans or mop-buckets through them.

The floor of the office of one of Aiak's most immediate colleagues, Kret, is currently 2/5 covered in equipment, under that, 1/3 covered in trash, and under that, half covered in oil.

And, of course, *completely* covered in sanitizer and dry pesticide from the company vending machine.

It's marked, on the map in his study guide, where Reyyks's office is - the person he's free to shadow for his first week.

Kaureiss has 6-day weeks, 5 on-days, 1 off-day.

Which, like 12-day weeks, are pretty usual, for the same reason base-6 and base-12 are.

Not that they match up with anybody else's 6-day weeks. Why would they?

He still gets it wrong.

(Which really isn't usual for him.)

There's a moderate hum, and then a loud clatter, inside, when he presses the doorbell. The sound doesn't get outside, of course, so Aiak doesn't hear it.

"Yes?"

He's still wearing his hearing protection.

Bywayeans don't grow beards,

but he has a quality of "disheveled" similar to "has skipped a few days of shaving without really meaning to, but also without noticing."

There's no one there.

He steps entirely outside, into the long hall. It's bright enough that -- oh, to hell with it, he sprints, the short way, to catch someone who'd tried to duck out of sight. He's pretty fast.

Hell, Hades, The Mines. There's not much difference.

This is obviously some kind of fetish thing. He blushes and turns away before thinking "wait, what the phlegm, I'm in a factory, why is this here?"

Whatever. The purple lights are still pulsing, inside, the voices still sussurrating, hissing out like heavy steam. He didn't see who opened the door, but seemingly out of distraction no one has shut it. He hastens to do the job himself

A scaly hand grabs him and pulls him in.

"Sorry," says the anthropoid dragon as the door shuts behind the human. "You looked like one of the callers this place has been getting from sucky worlds." It sounds hopeful. "I couldn't bear to let you miss a chance to try something else."

Actually, something in the human's face is giving Corvid second thoughts. He internally cringes and stamps it down. Might as well give it a go anyway.

"What's this?"

"Aaaah!"

He blushes. The bigass winged deer creature is clearly sentient. Byway does have those tropes.

"Sorry."

He gestures vaguely at the human. Tiny, flightless-looking wings twitch. "He was going to close the door before even looking in, and he looked sad, kind of like you, or that "refugee" from "Golarion" the other day, or like I felt."

Glance at human.

"Sorry, you are a he, right?"

"He doesn't look sad to me."

"What else would I be? Other than a he, I mean."

"Indeed."

He squints at the human. "Let's get this out of the way, can you eat plants?"

"- like, just any plants? I . . . can't . . . digest cellulose. I mean, I can try -"

"Will you die if you stop eating things with a nervous system."

"No? I'm sorry, but where am I? Do you guys work here? Kaureiss. The battery factory?"

"How many of these worlds have plants? It doesn't make any sense."

"- oh, this is all one large - uh, porn, thing."

Aiak does not know the word "ero-LARP" out of Byway's sheer "having more productive things to do".

"Impressive fursuits!" He sees a lot of them around, actually. In the lighting even dimmer than the building he left behind, they easily pass for real-real fantasy creatures. Not that he would know what real-real fantasy creatures looked like. "But I, like, am not a participant, sorry, just, must have gotten turned around and accidentally opened the wrong door, I literally do not even know what this kind of room is called", he keeps having to dart his eyes away from the people drinking and eating at the uncomfortable little tiny counter, but his ears keep unwelcomely reminding him that it's there, "I've never seen anything like this before in my life." Well, that sounded awkwardly like he was trying to plead purity. He'd just been hoping to get across how little he could be expected to play along with whatever the correct exit procedure was.

"Finally, someone normal! It's called a bar. They -" he sticks out a long tongue with a fin at the end and waves it in the direction of the people sitting at the little counter- "are recreationally anesthetizing themselves. Most of them see this as the prototypical third space, even though this is an interdimensional vagrant trap."

"- Porn? How?" His bad feeling grows.

He rushes for the door handle behind him and throws the door open. Footsteps pound hard and fast in the hallway. He panics and shuts it again.

"What was that? Are you on the run from the cops? You can stay here, I have money if you don't, Fenrir and I -" nod at the winged deer "- are looking for a good universe."

Dazed.

"What are cops?"

"It should be taking you back to your home universe. Is it not?"

Gingerly, he tests it again. Normal Kaureiss hallway. Quiet, now.

"No, it is."

He almost Just Goes Back -

They won't believe me. They'll think I'm making it up.

What's "crazy"? "Unconventional-belief-espousing-person-requiring-paternalistic-treatment"? Dear God.

They'll keep thinking it's a bit I'm taking too far, no matter how serious I am. Byway will never explore the implications for metaphysics. I'll spend forever

Longevity escape velocity is not hard to reach if you are not populated by idiots, sorry.

wondering what the ass this place is, and what might have happened if I'd stayed.

Much like "the hand that feeds", "the call to adventure" is real, as far as Byway can tell. Like jerks, or phytoplankton. That's why it goes in fiction.

"You say," [to the dragon] [glance at dragon and deer] "you're looking for a good universe. What do you mean? Are you immortal?"

Aiak hasn't gotten all the gene therapies he could have, yet, mostly not because he can't afford them if push came to shove but because he's been saving up. If this door will stay, it may still be possible for him to go home, get as aging-proofed as he can, and come back in time to follow the fantasy creatures to do whatever they're going to do.

And if he's counting on the new door sticking around for that, he may as well try to aid his new boss into stumbling upon the door so Byway can incorporate the metaphysical revelation without Aiak having to do it all himself. Which would genuinely be preferable; ultimately he has a life to live at home. But somehow he's not expecting that to work.

"Like eighty percent. I'm going to do the rest myself. Are you? Er, how mortal is your species to start, actually? Fuck, different planets, we might have to square units based on ticks of some clock somewhere in here or an hourglass or something."

"Not technically, but my species is so long-lived we hardly ever reach the point where we have to worry about aging before getting taken out by a falling rock or a racist mage or something."

"No, I'm not immortal yet. I'm thinking about heading back just to get as much of that as I can fixed, and bringing someone with me if possible. Can I do that, like even if I prop the door, or will it just eat whatever I prop it with?

Or, shit, I guess this is Reyyks's door."

He looks around. He doesn't see anyone who looks Bywayean enough to be the guy he was supposed to meet a few minutes ago for his orientation.

"It's the door to somebody's office, I was going in to meet him and he presumably opened the door, that's when the door opened up to here, but he isn't here. Should I be concerned that the door ate him? I probably can't go get gene therapized, anyway." Sigh.

"Time passes way slower outside than in, unfortunately. As in, we take hundreds of steps and on the outside they're still taking one. So even if you could rely on the door to stick around, which you probably couldn't for however long that would take . . ."

Well, it could have been worse. Could have been the other way around.

He can't believe any of this is happening. He feels ripped off. Now he has to choose between never knowing the incredible truth about metaphysics and risking death? And some probably-unknown risk of suffering reverse time dilation, somewhere in their presumed-eventual universe-hopping, and coming back and having missed out on his civilization's rise to local [apparently] supremacy.

"And you guys can't just come with me until I finish getting treated, so you don't have to wait some inordinately long time?"

Actually they would be unquestionable evidence of Something Bliving Weird going on, if other people could see them, but it feels Wrong to ask them to put themselves to work as test monkeys for his civilization's intellectual effort. And he doubts at least the deer would agree to it phrased that way anyway.

"Well, the door would probably disappear, but that's what we're looking for, eventually. To lock ourselves in a different universe, a good universe, since - as far as we know - we have to choose, if we don't want to stay in this weird den of iniquity forever.

Where are you from? What is it like?"

He wants to say that giving one of them, and not the rest, the home-court advantage seems like an extremely unwise move given that they barely know each other, and then remembers he just yanked this guy into Milliways a few minutes ago on impulse.

He looks around.

"I want to ask if there's somewhere, less . . ." gesture toward the cacophonous 'bar' "we can go, if you want to have that conversation, but - all these people, doors opened from their universes, right? I don't see that many doors. It must change pretty regularly!"

"It'll always open to your home, for you. Unless something really weird happens."

Of course. /s

"Huh."

"We can head to my room. This way." Through the shadowy, occasionally weird-smelling crowd, toward a hallway-mouth.

"AIAK?!"

?

Patrons murmur and yell in response, asking what the stranger wants.

- wait, how are they all speaking perfect Vaxilal'e, he can't even - actually, they're speaking his home dialect! Huh?!

To the caller.

???

Shrug!!!

"Are you Aiak."

"Yes.

The door didn't start warping space and setting matter on fire -?"

"It doesn't -"

"That doesn't happen."

He looks around.

To Aiak. "Is it your door?"

"No!!!! I literally just opened it and got yanked in by the dragon like five minutes ago!!!! I was just getting used to the prospect of maybe not talking to another Bywayean again for decades, because I didn't want to just abandon" gesticulates "and apparently the door doesn't tend to stick around and I didn't think other people would be able to see it!! Just on genre savvy!! Are you Reyyks?"

"Mmhm.

Right guess, wrong reason. You got the wrong door. That was Kret's office. He said he heard the doorbell but no one was there, and I figured you got lost since it was pretty close to time."