Most days when Evren gets home from this shift, she goes into her room and flops onto the mattress. Her room is minimalist (at best) but it's dark and quiet (especially with a sleep mask), and the door locks. While she lies there she'll put on videos to half-watch; she chooses Youtubers who have nice voices and background music. Youtube recommends her a lot of something called ASMR; she'll hit "not interested" and sometimes blacklist channels to avoid it, but those videos slip through sometimes. Crafting and aquaculture work better for sleep. She'll wake up at 7pm, stumble into the kitchen for a post-nap glass of sink water, then explore the fridge for a carb and a protein ("dinner").
Tonight, though, she's on hour ??? of ??? hours of failing to sleep. You aren't supposed to look at screens before bed, she definitely read that somewhere, so she can't look at her phone to determine exactly how badly she fucked up at falling asleep on time. On nights like these she'll listen for the sound of the front door shutting; sometimes the dread of that sound actually keeps her awake, because once Erika gets home from bartending you know you've given up on going to bed at a reasonable time.
She doesn't have work tomorrow, so the situation could be worse, but she's had enough time alone with her thoughts tonight, and it's also weirdly cold, even under the blanket. There's melatonin in the bathroom cabinet, but you're supposed to not "overuse" it. Unclear what that means (take too many at once? take too many in one week?), and she can't Google that now either. She tries to remember what happens to you if you take too many, doesn't remember anything that freaks her out, and decides it's probably fine.
She yanks her sleep mask off. There's a big hole in the wall of her bedroom opposite to her. The edges of the hole appear to be breathing.
Evren's never seen one before, but she'd have to be stupid (or lying to herself) to not recognize a portal. Her backpack is sitting not two feet from her, and she just needs to grab the carton of chalk that she still keeps in there. She pictures the sigil in her mind; she's pretty sure she should use the one that contains elements of "seal" and "door". How did the stroke order even work for that? Whenever stuff like this happens, it reminds her how stupid she's been, moving out here to rely only on her decaying memory of lessons she was too sleep-deprived to benefit from the first time around. As if her family hadn't told her a thousand times how dangerous it was on your own, how "low-activity" areas aren't safe. She'd be killed, or enslaved by demons. They could take you to a world that didn't appear on human maps.
The portal pulses; Evren thinks of a neurotoxic jellyfish. Which is a little silly-- if she remembers right, while you shouldn't touch it with your bare hands or anything, the portal itself isn't likely to hurt you. You mostly don't want to give anyone or anything a chance to exit.
Evren reaches into her backpack for a chalk carton-ish object. The sigil definitely has five strokes. She selects a stick of chalk at random, grabs the whole backpack just in case, and stands up. She's about to begin when she remembers, prep the chalk. She grips it in her hand, imagines the right sigil ("top" and "write"), wait no this one has the downwards thing with two little legs. Okay, again-- and there's the mental click that she associates with a spell that worked. She takes her phone, pauses a video from some guy showing off his terrarium, and turns on the flashlight.
She begins drawing the first stroke, aiming for a sigil across the whole portal. Up close, she can feel that it's extremely cold, like standing in front of an industrial freezer. She wonders if the world on the other side is cold, though it's probably best to not think too much about that. Alright, two strokes down. At this point it just says "door".
She gets two more strokes down, and then the final stroke, feels the click. She's done a reasonably good penmanship job for how unsteady her hands feel. You can thank her parents for that. Ha. That's "door" and then "seal"-- no wait, that's not "seal"; she's going to have to start over. She reaches over to smudge out the chalk dust--
There's a blinding light from the portal, and it sucks Evren through.
On the other side, she finds that it's a chilly autumn day. She's standing on a black asphalt road with a pair of closely-spaced steel tracks laid within, running from a city with buildings reaching far into the sky and placed amid fields stretching into the horizon.
Wow, 10/10, even her parents didn't think she was stupid enough to portal herself to a demon world. This doesn't look like any place she's heard about-- actually it looks basically like Earth-- but humans don't know much about demon worlds because 1) demons lie and 2) humans don't tend to come back from places like this, at least not in a shape to to give straight answers to questions.
This place looks about as dangerous as the scene from a default Windows wallpaper. But maybe it's blandly pretty for the humans who wind up here, just so the demons can see their faces when they realize they're cornered. Well, that won't work on her, sorry.
She mentally rummages through her backpack. There's the last bits of a bag of trail mix, a metal water bottle of the same brand as 75% of her coworkers (with "quirky" stickers she selected so they stop taking it by accident), the chalk, a stake, and a spiral notebook from one of her last classes, which she happened to have in her backpack when she decided to fuck off. For the past couple years it's been her sole reference text for magic. She thinks of her mom saying, "Where exactly do you think you'll learn what you need if you can't discipline yourself enough to pay attention? The Internet?", diverts her focus to checking her phone as quickly as possible. No coverage, as she expected.
She could trying writing the same sigil she just used on the asphalt, but creating a portal requires knowing the "address" of your destination, and she just confused "enter/exit" and "seal", so she's not making a "close enough" guess and sending herself to die on one of Jupiter's moons. Well, unless the demons get close enough to capture her.
There aren't a lot of places to hide out here, but at least she'll be able to see anyone coming in her direction, unless they portal in. Or if they're invisible. She can't remember if demons do that. She forces herself to take a sip of water. Having a conniption fit (as her mom would say) on an unknown world is just vaguely pathetic and pointless.
Hints of movement and life can be seen in the city: vehicles moving about, people looking like dots walking around, and some hint of activity visible through windows. The buildings are almost invariably colored white, as well as being boxy and utilitarian.
From this vantage point everyone looks human. It's weird to see demons just... hanging around together, in an assuming way, because from what she's heard things tend to be either super backstabby and disorganized or super hierarchical. Maybe these demons are all serfs or slaves? She needs a closer look (preferably without getting closer, because even if demons have trouble getting along, the numbers are on their side). With a stick of the chalk (pink this time) she writes "see" and "city" on the road.
There's no ping of feedback. She looks at the sigil again. It's fine? But she's used writing "see" a lot more than "city", so maybe that was slightly off. She opens up the notebook, and after some flipping, there's the "city" element in a different sigil, identical to "city" on the asphalt. Did she just learn this wrong in the first place? How many of these elements does she even know, for real? She's too tired to think about it.
She gets the urge to lie down on the asphalt. But then the demons would capture her. She's done a lot of stupid and undignified shit to survive, but she draws the line at swearing fealty to an embodiment of evil.
She takes another sip of her water, looks back at the city. Does anyone there seem to have taken interest in her, or are they still going about their business?
Do any of the demons seem to be obviously in charge of other demons?
Not that either. There are also a few groups of kids showing up every once in a while, walking around with an adult.
Shit, those look like human kids. They could also be demons trying to lure her in, but like, demons have been known to kidnap kids. And if these are kids and she just leaves them, fucks off into the fields and lives on demonic corn?
As if she hasn't literally done that. She fully admits that this reaction makes no fucking sense. If she had stayed in school and not dozed off in the middle of lessons, she could have killed hundreds of demons by now, and saved hundreds of human beings from some of the worst shit that can happen to them. Her parents told her so; her teachers told her so; literally everyone who was qualified to have an opinion told her that this was where she was supposed to be.
But she left them, because (as literally everyone who was qualified also told her) she's a bad person. Specifically, the kind of person who cares about being "left the fuck alone" more than she cares about being "good". The real number of demons she's killed remains still something like 30. And every single time she's killed a demon since she left, it's been a chance encounter-- if she hadn't run into that homeless guy on the way home from the late shift, he'd be dead or enslaved now. There's no responsibility to it. No sacrifice. She just acts.
She can just check for a second. Human children aren't that good at disguising their misery, but it's hard to tell from here.
She slips the stake and chalk into her pocket, and starts towards the city.
The human children are very cheerful and energetic! Coming a bit closer, Evren can see them wear bright clothes of all kinds, with the most common being a dark blue skirt worn with leggings for the weather, by girls and boys alike.
This is beyond the acting ability of children probably, especially based on what she's heard about how demons treat kids. (Her parents would tell her all about it whenever she'd misbehave.)
People say demons often have an "unnatural" vibe when taking human form. Maybe being unusually cheerful counts?
Now that she's looked into this matter she can go. But she finds herself watching the kids for a bit.
They're following the adult, a woman, as she takes them to a park where they immediately start climbing the trees and playing tag. They have lots of branches that make them easy to climb up. There are also a few kids laying down a towel and reading a book lying down on the soft ground.
If this is some elaborate plot by demons they're really good at pretending they haven't noticed her. Like, nobody has even glanced at her, so much as tried to lure her over. It's not really like the stories she's heard of demons pretending to need help carrying a package or that they've fallen and gotten hurt, then attacking someone. These people are just... hanging out, in fact more harmoniously than a lot of humans.
There are a lot of worlds other than Earth that technically aren't controlled by demons, but most worlds are just unfriendly to and incomprehensible to humans. And as everyone knows, there are no worlds "nicer" than Earth. (Evren doesn't think of Earth as particularly "nice", but she's a bad person and doesn't trust herself to have an emotional understanding of what is bad or good.) That's one of the reasons demons come here (uh, there)-- it angers them how nice Earth is, and they want to make it just as terrible as worlds controlled by demons!
At least, that's what her parents and family and school taught her, what they were taught in weekend meetings. Everything she knows about how the world really works (not the version society gives you) comes through them. But like, it's obvious that they're smarter than most people, because most people don't know about magic, or demons, or worlds other than Earth, or what the most objectively good way to spend your life is. They're therefore too stupid to do anything real. She's wanted to hide before, and pretend her family were wrong, but that doesn't come from the place inside that honestly wants to know. In general... disagreeing with them kind of feels like that.
She'd rather just leave all of that in place, and live her life like it isn't true. She knows thousands of people have died because of demons in the past few years, and that she could have saved some of them, and that makes her objectively bad. She still shows up to work every day and makes latte art and, somehow, her performance reviews are fine.
It's not like she can check if her family were wrong about anything. Unless this nice non-Earth(?) world with no obvious demons... is kind of a place to do that? And maybe this is Earth and she just doesn't recognize it, though all the portals she's heard of were between different worlds so that would be really confusing? Portals are the thing that demons open so they can go terrorize humans, in her experience.
It's not like she's going to be able to survive here on a handful of trail mix, and if demons are super interested in her enough to pretend to be wholesome humans for a while... they're not going to let her escape into the fields (and who knows if their food is edible?). She knows that, but like, part of her still wanted to try.
If these are demons, she's going to portal out to a random place or get enslaved, whether she checks or not. If these aren't demons... maybe they are just a bunch of kids in a pretty okay-looking city? Even considering the possibility feels like lulling herself into a false sense of things being okay, when in fact the universe sucks and people who use words like "catastrophizing" don't know the half of it.
She starts walking towards the kids, because both possible decisions sound pretty bad, but she's dealt with that before.