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In retrospect, given the sort of world he lived in, it should have been obvious that high school was not going to end with him walking across a stage and collecting a diploma, but instead with him falling into a mad scientist's portal and being transported to an alternate dimension.
It's the sort of thing that happens to mutants.
There's a bright flash of light, and a roar of sound, and then Lev lands on a cold linoleum floor in front of a very tall, somewhat Japanese woman eating a sandwich.
"...what."
"Yes – mad scientist portal?"
She puts down her sandwich and reaches for the radio on her hip.
"Uh. I forget what the politically correct term is-- the genius scientists who instead of using their powers to win Nobel Prizes use them to rob banks and turn people into dinosaurs? Earth-2853 has a lot of them."
She presses the button on her radio.
"Spatial-temporal anomaly in mess, class unknown, ostensibly artificial. One apparent human. No immediate threat. Come immediately."
Oh, good, he didn't land on a world totally free ot weird shit. That would be hard to explain.
"Universes are numbered by people who do a lot of interdimensional traveling. I don't think there's any particular system for which universe gets which number, it's just the order in which they were discovered."
"You've discovered 2853 separate dimensions? –how are you classifying these? Are you counting microdimensional planar shifting? Cryptogeographical features with properties that–"
An even taller, slightly more Japanese man emerges from a hatch in the floor.
"What."
"I don't know what those words mean. The highest number I've ever heard was 600,026, but I think that's more a fact about which universes the interdimensional travellers bother to talk to our Earth about rather than how many Earths there are per se. Nearly all universes have an Earth and the most common differences are things like-- uh, 92202 is a universe where the dictator of a particular country is instead a pediatrician, 522 is a universe where a particular alien brings life to planets instead of eating them, in 21050 the universe where everyone is zombies went to war with the universe where everyone is apes--"
"You know, in retrospect, the Avengers really should have trained me in making interdimensional first contact, I have no idea what I'm doing."
Whatever she says isn't in any language Lev will be familiar with, but it is very audibly a curse.
"Nope! I was kidnapped for reasons too complicated to explain in a sentence and then I fell into it because I'm clumsy."
"...then you're under our care for the next five months, until the next shift."
"Who is 'us' and why does it matter whether it was my mad scientist portal?"
"Formally, Oceanic Research Team Ares. Practically, the two of us, and our support team."
"It matters because unless you can transport yourself again, you're stuck here."
"Cool. That's very cool. I don't actually know what Oceanic Research Team Ares is either."
"I didn't expect you to."
She leans back in her seat.
"We're here for cryptoanthropological field work. 'Here' is a microdimension intermittently contiguous with the South Pacific ocean. It is currently not."
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