The bus rocked back and forth as it veered off the two-lane dirt road and onto a narrower path that could only generously be called a road. Dust puffed up in its wake, curling through the pines and completely obscuring the road behind them.

  Alex looked out the dirty window and tried to remember when he had last been on a dirt road, but he kept getting thrown against the bus's inner wall, which broke his train of thought.

  Instead, he pressed his hand against the cool glass and just watched the spruce and jack pine blur past in tall green walls. Between them, granite boulders broke the forest into clumps – the Canadian Shield, scarred and ancient, its gray face crusted with moss and streaked by bold veins of quartz.

  For a moment, the nervous static in his chest eased. There was something about this landscape that always spoke to him. These bald rocks and the sudden cliffs that rose up out of nowhere were the vestiges of the oldest mountains on the continent. An ancient, weathered mountain range that was scraped down to its bones during the last few ice ages.

  The view was quiet, serene, and peaceful. This far north, the forests stretched out practically forever. Just a bus in a sea of green and gray.

  And blue. Above, the sky was thin and blue and looked like it had never even seen a cloud. Alex sighed. The land here felt raw, untouched, as if the modern world had given up after a few half-hearted roads and said: good enough.

  He wondered what his own hometown would have looked like 150 years ago, before Europeans had moved in.

  Danny, fidgeting with the trim along the seat in front of him, broke the silence that had dominated the past half hour. “Uh, where exactly are we going?”

  The question dropped into the quiet of the bus like a stone thrown into a still pond. Mel looked up from her iced coffee cup, empty now, and perked her eyebrows. Jay leaned into the aisle and looked back. Even Ravenna slid one earbud half-free, though her hood still shadowed most of her face.

  But Valentina just smiled and kept looking forward.

  Alex knew where they were in general terms though, so he answered after a moment. “We just left the Armstrong Road.” He gestured toward the window, to the endless green. “It leads up to the little town of Armstrong. Pretty much one of the furthest-north places you can drive in Ontario. After that it’s just train tracks and wilderness. Hunters. Trappers. Tourists on the way to fishing camps. That’s about it.”

  Mel blinked. “So… we’re basically going to Narnia?”

  “No idea,” Alex said with a smile. “I think Armstrong is still hours north of us. I don’t know what’s in this area.”

  After another 20 minutes of jarring road and endless trees, the bus curved around the bottom of a tall rock cliff and began to slow. Ahead, a chain-link fence loomed out from the trees and a large steel gate spanned the road with a little hut of a guardhouse on one side. Men in fatigues, not military, but clearly some kind of heavy-duty security, stepped out as the bus slowed, rifles slung across their chests.

  “Whoa,” Jay said, low. His usual grin faltered. “This is not your average TV studio.”

  Danny shifted in his seat. “Are we sure we’re not being, like, abducted?”

  Even Mel’s smile flickered.

  Only Ravenna seemed unimpressed. “Figures,” she muttered, sliding her earbud back in.

  The bus hissed to a stop. Dust curled around the tires. The driver killed the engine, and for a moment all Alex could hear was the creak of cooling metal. His stomach tightened, and he removed the black stones from his pocket, rolling them between his fingers.

  This was… off. The whole thing. Sure, security made sense – thousands of fans, intellectual property, big investments – but the drastic remoteness? The fence? The guns? He had a hard time lining it all up with the glossy idea of the massive TV-brand studio he was expecting.

  Valentina stood, her crisp blazer somehow untouched by the bus ride. “Eyes front, everyone.” Her voice carried that producer’s rhythm – bright, practiced, just theatrical enough.

  When she had everyone's attention she continued, “I can see some of you are a little surprised. Don’t be. Security is part of the business when you’re dealing with something the entire world wants a piece of. Our job is to keep you safe. Their job–” she gestured gracefully toward the guards, “–is to keep us safe. Smile and wave and we’ll be through in just a moment.”

  The bus dipped and swayed as one of the guards entered. He spoke quietly with the driver, nodded at everyone once and then got off again. The other man swung the gate wide and the bus lurched forward again.

  Jay leaned back, exhaling. “Well, that was… interesting?”

  Danny didn’t look like he agreed.

  Mel had pulled out a notebook and was scribbling down song lyrics, quietly singing about the Ballad of the Bus Ride North.

  Alex just kept staring out the window. If the show wasn’t actually filmed on a natural set, which had to be the case because this was not the terrain that appeared in the show, then why the secrecy? Why not set up in a Toronto warehouse with a giant LED volume, like every other studio doing greenscreen type work? This whole day hadn’t made much sense yet.

  The road narrowed further, winding between blasted rock cuts and stretches of swampy lowland where cattails crowded the ditches. Finally, the trees broke to reveal another fence – taller than the first and heavier. Inside sprawled a cluster of prefab buildings and tin-roofed sheds. A long warehouse squatted where the bedrock had been blasted flat. Beyond it, the rusted skeletons of conveyor belts and half-collapsed towers marked the bones of an old mining operation.

  The bus rolled through a second checkpoint and into the yard. The place smelled of oil and wet pine needles. Generators thrummed somewhere. Two larger buses and a few white vans sat lined up against the fence, their logos painted over.

  “This is it?” Mel wrinkled her nose. “Doesn’t exactly scream Hollywood.”

  Danny frowned. “Looks like a work camp.”

  “I used to go to a band camp every summer.” Mel sighed. “It was much nicer than this.”

  “Old mine,” Alex said quietly. He recognized the giant piles of waste rock and slag. Northern Ontario had dozens like it. Last year he had visited an Amethyst mine that was still in operation.

  Valentina turned in the aisle, smile still perfectly in place. “Everyone grab your bags. This is where the magic begins.”

  Alex wasn’t feeling ‘the magic’ though, in fact he was starting to feel like they had all been scammed somehow. But he waited his turn, slid his backpack from the rack, and followed the others out into the gravel yard – what else was he going to do? Run away into the wilderness? This didn’t look like a real set, but the forest was full of real bears.

  “Excuse me,” Danny called. “So… what is this place? I thought we’d be at a studio lot or something.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Jay gestured at the prefab trailers. “Yeah, this looks more Discovery Channel than Netflix.”

  Valentina just laughed lightly, a sound too polished, too practiced, to be real. “Patience. All will be revealed soon. I promise.” She paused for a moment and looked back at them before continuing. “We make great TV here. And one of the things you should understand, if you want to be stars, is that, in story telling, the size of the impact of a big reveal is in direct proportion to the hill people have to climb to get there!”

  Mel squinted at her. “Right… but you’re not gonna, like, sell our kidneys, right?”

  “Only on the black market,” Valentina quipped without missing a beat. Mel giggled. Ravenna snorted, but at the joke or at Mel, Alex couldn’t tell.

  Everyone filed towards the main mine building but Alex couldn’t shake his prickling unease. Cutesy storytelling metaphors aside, this felt like a con. There was no way this was a studio. But then – why the guards? Why the fences and infrastructure? He paused and looked around. He didn’t see any other people at all. Wouldn’t a studio be jammed with makeup trucks and food trucks and… people?

  Valentina motioned, and a pair of uniformed men swung open the wide metal doors of the old mine building. Darkness yawned inside.

  “Right this way,” she said and, reaching inside the door, activated a switch. The overhead lights flickered for a few seconds and then finally came on: bare fluorescents strung along a concrete hall.

  The group hesitated, but one by one they filed in after Valentina. Alex stepped across the threshold and felt the air shift. It was cooler here, and damp, carrying the tang of wet stone. He looked around, beyond the short hallway lay a cavernous room, the floor stained with decades-old oil.

  At the far end of the room, stood a freight elevator, its steel cage wide enough for a truck. Two more guards flanked it, their expressions flat.

  Danny whispered, “Why would a studio need an elevator like that? And are all these guards really necessary?”

  Alex didn’t answer. He was wondering the same thing.

  They crowded into the center of the elevator together. There was plenty of room to spread out, but nobody did. The gates clanged shut and with a shudder and too much squealing, the platform began to drop. Concrete walls slid past them as they descended. Down. And down. The ride stretched on longer than Alex expected and was only slightly less bumpy than the bus ride had been.

  “Feels like a Bond villain lair,” Jay said, smiling while Mel hummed the Mission: Impossible theme under her breath. Alex decided that Jay smiled entirely too much.

  Finally, with a final grinding squeal, the elevator slowed, stopped and the doors rattled open.

  Alex blinked. The rough stone walls were gone. In their place stretched gleaming corridors of white panels and recessed lights. The floors were polished to the point where they reflected their shoes as they walked. Doors lined the halls, some marked with hazard signs, others with long strings of numbers. Men and women in lab coats passed by further down the hall, clipboards or tablets in hand, barely glancing at the newcomers.

  It still looked nothing like a studio. But it also looked nothing like they’d seen so far.

  “Damn!” Jay whistled. “We just stepped into the world of Fallout. I think we went to the wrong set, Ma’am – this is too sci-fi for Dungeons Inc!”

  Valentina laughed and turned to face the group. “Welcome everyone,” she said brightly. “This is our home away from home. The project has been running here for several years now. Many of our scientists live full-time on site.” She turned and started walking again, tapping on her phone rapidly, sending messages as she walked.

  “Scientists?” Alex said, but there was no answer, so he followed with everyone else, his senses buzzing. He caught glimpses through open doors: racks of servers, humming machines, what looked like a cleanroom filled with strange equipment. Scientists hunched over consoles. This wasn’t set dressing. This was very, very real.

  They wound through the corridors until Valentina finally ushered them into what looked like a small conference room. Long table. Leather chairs. One wall taken up entirely by frosted glass, opaque from this side. There was a table setup with fruits and donuts and cases of water.

  “Help yourselves everyone, it was a long ride up here after all!”

  For the next few minutes everyone milled about, grabbing snacks and finding chairs. Jay had a stack of donuts that made Alex raise an eyebrow, but Jay just shrugged his shoulders and grinned.

  A man in a gray suit stood patiently at the front of the room, waiting for them to settle. He was middle-aged with thinning hair, but his eyes were sharp behind wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Everyone, this is Dr. Kessler, head of research at this facility.” The students exchanged uncertain greetings with the otherwise pleasant man.

  Valentina clapped her hands lightly. “Now, before Dr. Kessler overwhelms you with the details, I’d like to give you the big picture. The Hollywood version, if you will.” She grinned. “Because trust me – the science will put you to sleep.” She laughed and earned a few uncertain chuckles from the room.

  Alex took the moment to look around at everyone. They seemed to be mostly content to sit and listen to whatever was coming. But what was going on? Scientists? He wouldn’t have batted an eye if Dr. Kessler was an historian, craftsman, or weapons trainer even. But why would Dungeons inc need scientists on staff? This whole thing still didn’t make any sense.

  Valentina began to pace across the front of the room – the consummate producer. “And you’ve been waiting long enough for the short version, so I will get straight to it. Several years ago, our company made a breakthrough in this lab. It was a way to fold space. To open doors where none existed before. Doors to other worlds.”

  Danny laughed nervously. “Like… stargates?”

  “Like stargates,” Valentina agreed smoothly, pointing a finger back at Danny. “Exactly! Only real. At first the executives thought they would send teams to cross over and plunder the rich resources of this new world. But their plans were thwarted by the appearance of crazy monsters pulled right out of story books!

  "They didn’t know what to do for a time, but fortunately I caught wind of what they were up to. I noticed that the world they had found bore an uncanny resemblance to our own! But a mythical ‘through the looking glass’ version; complete with knights and castles and yes, goblins and ogres.

  After a number of discussions, we realized there was something truly unique here - greater than access to resources even. It was an opportunity. A chance to share the ultimate adventure with an audience. To build the world’s first true reality fantasy show!”

  Jay whistled low. Mel scribbled furiously in her book.

  But Alex froze. His stones stopped turning. For a heartbeat he thought he must have misheard.

  “Wait. You’re saying…” He searched for the right words. Then he searched for any words… “You’re saying you’ve actually built technology that can send us to another world? Like… a real other world? That we can go to? With magic and dragons?”

  Valentina laughed, warm and dismissive all at once. “I haven’t heard of any dragons yet. But goblins? Oh yes. They’re real. And very, very ugly.”

  She crossed to the frosted glass wall and hovered one hand over a small control panel. With a flick the frosting began to fade and then cleared entirely.

  Beyond the glass stood a lab that looked like something ripped straight out of Stranger Things, or Stargate as Danny had said, but on a much larger scale. It stretched out below them, cavernous and alive with motion.

  Banks of computers hummed. Cables snaked across the floor. And at the opposite end of the room stood rings of impossible machinery: One human-sized portal and a larger oblong version big enough for a truck.

  Alex didn’t remember getting up, but found himself pressed against the glass, forehead resting against the cool surface. His heart thundered in his chest. All the anxiety, all the static – burned away in the face of wonder.

  The impossible was real.

  He had never felt so alive.

  Ryan was never going to believe this shit!

  Dr. Elaine Kwon:

  We need to be realistic about exposure. The original grant may be closed, but DARPA does not release their hooks easily. If they determine this is merely a continuation of the same research under a different framing, they will reassert control. You know that.

  Dr. Marcus Hale:

  No. They won’t. And more importantly, they can’t.

  DARPA funded a battlefield logistics program: point-to-point terrestrial transit under deterministic coordinates. We failed at that. Repeatedly. The math never stabilized. The energy tolerances were catastrophic. That program is dead, on paper and in practice.

  What we’re doing now is not a weapons platform. It’s not even transportation in the conventional sense. It’s applied materials science, probabilistic spatial modeling, and interface biology operating outside any single-use doctrine. The destination is not even Earth. Besides the fact that the 3 head scientists on that program are no longer with us, so this is a whole new team.

  Also, jurisdiction matters. Oversight followed the original grant structure provided to a university research program, which no longer applies. Any claim or attempt to exert authority would require inter-agency alignment that simply does not exist—especially now that post-national corporate charters allow private entities to assume stewardship over infrastructure beyond state reach.

  DARPA didn’t lose this. They let go of it.

  And they won’t come back for something they can’t deploy, can’t regulate, and can’t admit they no longer understand. Especially if we continue to keep it a secret.

  Recovered Correspondence — Research Division Archive

  Classification: Internal / Legacy Program

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  Dungeon Inc. // RECRUIT DIV.

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  ? ━━━? THE STORY CONTINUES… ?━━━ ?