As we made our way through the upside down and rightside up buildings, my mind raced. If that other guard put together—or even suspected—that I was Regina’s lover and Bke was the ex, that big meathead might do something like put my face through the back of my head. I had no doubt that big dumb bastard could do it, too.

  Regina took us directly to a travel ptform, presented her papers, and we got astride a freakin’ pterodactyl with coruscating stripes of energy running down its body and wings. Tiny pulses of light traveled down its stripes and fizzled out where the creature ended. I focused on that, rather than on my questions or Regina’s fury.

  Tweedle Dee clearly didn’t like the creature, or didn’t like the idea of flying. He had to be coaxed up onto her p. He curled around Regina’s waist and whined pitifully the whole time. She calmed him with soft strokes of the fur.

  Once on the leather double saddle, the creature unched itself off the ground with powerful fps of its wings, and brought us to the lower levels of the rightside up portion of the mirror castle. We ended up on a docking ptform specifically for flying creatures, since this portion of the castle was hovering over a hundred feet in the air. I found the situation surreal, watching as upside down means of flight swooped down towards the ptforms directly below ours.

  Regina leaned back and slipped a hand onto my thigh. “Ugh, I’m really sorry about what happened. And I wish there was another chance for us to have a little alone time.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. I hadn’t even really bmed Bke. He was just the test in a long line of assholes. And she was really pcing her hand on the middle of my thigh… and sliding it higher. My body did the thing all twenty year olds did: it reacted.

  “You don’t quite understand… violence isn’t allowed here.”

  “Violence… isn’t allowed?” I really didn’t understand.

  She shook her head and slid her hand up my thigh. “Not allowed. The natives don’t do it. Aren’t even capable of doing it.”

  This rendered me speechless. Here we had Bke, super strongman and glowing super saiyan douche canoe with his intimidation shriek and his acting like a fucking toddler, and the natives… couldn’t even defend themselves? Or rather… why were there guards if violence wasn’t allowed?

  We nded the pterodactyl creature with a head shaped more like a tyrannosaur, and in my periphery I noted that the number of Nakamamon I’d encountered had risen to two. This one, the system notified me, was called ???. Which was unhelpful. I chuckled at it, and tried to get my body back under my control. I was going to meet with officials who would decide my fate here in this new world, and I needed to make a good impression on them.

  Tweedle Dee was more than happy to take his leave of the creature, leaping free and bounding all around the nding ptform with his tongue lolling. I watched him with fondness, hoping to see as much of Regina and Tweedle Dee as possible.

  Regina had gone stiff, her expression thunderous. “I’m going to leave you off at intake,” Regina said curtly. She was clearly still upset about how the situation with Bke had gone.

  “Oh!” he said. “Is this goodbye then?”

  She pulled up short in the middle of leaving, and turned back to me. She went to reach for me, but stopped herself, which caused me to glow warmly in the middle of his chest.

  “I’m… not sure. I may be on the team to escort you to your assignment. We’ll see.” She gnced around before finally mustering up the courage to reach out and squeeze my hand, right where a flowery shape had been indelibly etched. “Hopefully I’ll see you again, Christopher.”

  “Call me Fletcher,” I told her, and she grinned. “I’ll see you ter!”

  With that, she was off.

  The attendant responsible for the flying creature smiled down at me. He was a giant of a man, easily six and a half feet. “First day, huh?”

  I nodded. “You got that right… this pce… it’s amazing.”

  The corner of his mouth quirked up, and he gazed around. From up here it was easy to see a lot further than before, and the vista was still just as glorious as it had been before: imposing mountains stabbing up at a sky full of coruscating colors, gigantic mushrooms looking like they could feed thousands, and trees that didn’t seem to give a shit where the sun was. Off in one direction, for the first time, I saw the shoreline stretching off in both directions for ages.

  “Get used to it, son,” the older man said.

  “Could I ask you a question?” I asked, and he just chuckled. “I guess I already have. What’s your Nakamamon called?”

  “I named her Iris,” he said. “Goddess of rainbows. She’s a Glimmerdactyl.”

  “So clearly we’ve been naming all these creatures, huh?”

  He nodded. “Come on, I’ll show you the way. Welcome to intake, by the way. I’m Rus, and you’re Christopher Fletcher. Odd to have a cohort of one, but we’re used to odd here.”

  I shook the hulking man’s hand and asked him to call me Chris, or Fletcher. He had an absolutely crushing grip, but the warmth coming off him told me it was accidental. He ate up the distance leading me down the well-lit hallways to the office, and only betedly realized I wasn’t keeping up. He chuckled.

  “I gotta tell you, Fletcher, I feel like a younger man in here. Would you believe when I got in here, I was sixty-seven years old and basically retired?”

  “You don’t look a day over sixty-five,” I told him, grinning. He actually looked maybe forty, though I was twenty and everybody over forty looked just pin old.

  He threw back his head and guffawed loudly, instantly getting my fairly me joke. “Sixty-five! Hell, I used to be almost completely bald. Had one of those horrible strips of hair that runs from ear to ear. Shudder to think, eh?” He ran a hand through his hair. Despite having a receding hairline, he had a full head of salt and pepper hair. “Hell, it was all white, too. And I couldn’t keep this godawful paunch off…” He went to grab onto a gut that wasn’t there, and grinned at me. “And the energy I got back, just setting foot here. I tell you what… if they don’t kick me out, I’m never going back.”

  “That’s great,” I said, and gave him the most sincere smile I could muster.

  He shook his head and continued chuckling. “Sixty-five. Son, I get why Dick got you in here so fast. I like you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You can call me Rus,” he said. “After all, I feel like you look. I may look like a ‘sir’ but I don’t feel it.”

  I grinned. “Well, Rus, just tell me where to go and who to talk to, and I’ll get out of your very thick hair.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m intake.”

  “Intake Rus, that’s what they call him. Good old Intake Rus, with his invisible fb and full head of hair on his bald head,” I said, and he guffawed again.

  There was some paperwork, or rather, there was some stonework. He had me sign a wet sb of cy, after reading through the fine print carefully. This was identical to the contract I’d already signed on earth, which included a spot for my parents’ names as beneficiaries in case I ended up ended.

  Like having my life sucked out by a corrupted god.

  I signed with a stylus, and he brought the tablet out to his glimmerdactyl, who dutifully breathed fire on it until the tablet was totally baked through.

  “What’s next?” I asked, though by now I was hoping to get a bit of shuteye. The day had been long, hard, and I was spent.

  “Let’s get you to the academy, get some grub in you for dinner, and get you a pce to sleep. Then academy begins in the morning.” He rummaged in his desk and brought out a small vial of bright yellow liquid with a stopper. The liquid was opaque, so it definitely wasn’t that I thought it might be. “In the meantime, take this if you please.”

  I cast a worried gnce at it, but the system stuff, the burst of invigoration from the Physicality Tokens and the existence of magic all helped to clear my mind. This was just a magic potion of some kind. I popped the stopper off and drank quickly.

  The fvor was so, so weird. Like seventeen different fvors, all shifting in and out of each other. It went from one to the next rapidly, almost faster than my tongue could process.

  You have imbibed Stamina Potion! the huge blue window told me in that same blocky 8-bit font. Your stamina has been restored to full. Your stamina has been restored beyond full. The excess will be kept in reserve until you wake.

  A new thing I hadn’t noticed before appeared: a yellow green bar at the top of my periphery, near a very short red and an even shorter blue bar. The yellow bar was easily three times longer than the red one, and filled with glowing yellow light as I watched. It then hit the end of the bar, and an even stronger glow erupted as the bar extended past where it had before. I saw the demarcation line, where the bar typically ended. It kept going until it was maybe 50% of the original.

  And here’s the thing: I felt amazing. Not jittery and on edge like I’d just had a coffee, but fully awake and alert, like I’d just had the best sleep of my life and woke up on a thick mattress and a down pillow. I gaped at Rus, who was bent over, hands on knees and ughing until he couldn’t make even tiny wheezes of ughter.

  “Are you… okay?”

  He held a hand out and shook his head, then fell back on his butt, ughing.

  “You shoulda… seen your… face…” He sent himself off into another fit of ughter.

  I had to ugh too, wondering what I looked like. Once he was done with his paroxysm, I helped him off the floor and listened to him periodically burst out ughing.

  “Whoooo,” he said. “I can’t even… heeee. Every time we get a newbie.”

  “I’m gd, I think,” I said, unsure. He didn’t seem to be making fun of me. This was a very different experience than every interaction I’d had with people, ever since the accident.

  No pity, no overprotective mothering, and certainly no sneering barbs of cruelty. Obviously I liked it here, but now I liked Rus. A lot.

  “Oh, you are, and so am I. Just keep that childlike feeling of wonder and awe, son. Don’t lose that. You’ll be better for it.”

  “All right,” I told him.

  Now that I had a pep in my step, it was quick going to reach the academy. This was across the whole length of the castle, and then below… into the upside down.

  At one point, we were headed down the stairs, and then Rus had us take a strange sideways step here, and then we were just upside down. People passed us, and it was mind-boggling to watch them flip around on the stairwell, then be subject to the other gravity after passing us.

  “Just ignore it,” I told myself. “It’ll be fine.”

  “Can’t handle a little Escher-esque backwards gravity, can we?” Rus cackled again, then shook his head, holding his sides. “I have… the best job.”

  The academy wasn’t big. It was no Frogwarts School of Magic & Whatnot, that’s for sure. We approached rge double doors, and that felt pretty simir, but upon opening them, it was basically one big hall with four rooms, arranged two on either side. Three were cssrooms, and one was the office. The end.

  “Expect to be sorted into a house?” Rus asked.

  “Kind of?”

  “Well you can be a Flufflehump,” he said. “We all are. Though I guess some of us are Wiseowls.”

  I thought about Bke.

  “I’ve got a question for you, Rus. Unreted.”

  “Hm?”

  “What’s with the rule on violence?”

  He stopped short. “Huh? What makes you bring that up?”

  “There are guards all over the pce, but no violence allowed? If there’s no violence, then why have guards in the first pce?”

  He squinted off into the corner of the academy. “It’s a chicken or egg situation, see? If we’ve got no protection and something dangerous happens, we’re toast.”

  I nodded. “But if you have protectors you’re more likely to end up with a warlord.”

  “You’re not wrong. It’s part of the reason why the guards here only serve for a maximum of three weeks before getting rest and rexation back on earth, for weeks at a time. They’re not allowed to have jobs back on earth, and especially not jobs like security or bouncer, or professional fighters. And anybody who ends up with a criminal record is uninvited.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “There’s no violence here,” he said, “period. The creatures here didn’t even know what it was until we showed up. They still don’t, and that’s the way we’re aiming to keep it. Catch me?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “Anyone with enough power could do some serious damage if they wanted to,” Rus said.

  That made a lot of sense.

  Rus and I entered the academy section of the upside down part of the castle. He turned and entered the first of the rooms he came across, where a middle aged woman was writing with a quill onto paper. On her shoulder, a winged snake was perched, with scales that seemed blue at first. Those scales flipped over on themselves as we approached, and became a brilliant striped pattern in red, white and yellow, like the fmes from Rus’s Nakamamon. It regarded us with intelligent eyes.

  The woman, frowning, scrunched the paper up into a ball and threw it into a metal wastebasket.

  “I guess we really are using cuneiform, as it turns out,” she said, not looking up. “Every single official communication is going to have to be baked into the bloody cy like it’s three thousand bloody years ago.

  “Russell? What brings you… oh, you have someone, don’t you?”

  She finally seemed to recognize that I was there.

  “Headmistress,” Rus said, with a little too much inflection, “this is Christopher Fletcher, who prefers to be called Fletcher. Fletcher, this is Headmistress Alexandra Jenkins, but she likes to be called Allie. You know, she’ll find help you figure out the type of job that’s up your alley.”

  The woman stood. She was very, very tall. Taller than Rus, and far taller than me. “You are aware that joke sounds very much like an innuendo, do you not? Several, in fact.”

  Rus shrugged. “And yet you don’t stop me from making it. Let’s get young Fletcher here a pce to store his things for the night, a meal, and then we’ll let him bathe in the sights for a day or two before we put him to work.”

  “Christopher Fletcher, that’s right,” she said, nodding. “I received the notification from Dick Johnson about you st week.” At Rus’s snort, she turned a sharp gre his way. “That is no way to treat our hiring department, Russell.”

  “Oh come on Allie, he’s not here. We can slip in a little fun at him, can’t we?” He leaned toward me and poked an elbow into my ribs. “Ain’t that right, Fletcher? Dick Johnson can get the shaft just so long as we know we’re joking and we’re polite when he’s around. Just the tip, ya might say.”

  I grinned. “Dick Johnson? I like the guy. I think he’s got quite a good head on his shoulders.”

  Rus chuckled. “He’s a bit of a stiff though.”

  “He did seem quite excited,” I replied. “Ejacuted his job offer before I could really understand what was happening.”

  “That is quite enough of that,” Allie said.

  “The man goes hard, he does,” Rus said, and chortled, then spped a hand on my shoulder and nearly bowled me over. “All right, all right. I’ll hand ya off ta Allie. When she’s done with ya, I’ll be right outside and ready to take ya to the mess.”

  And it was in the moment after Rus left that I realized I was now in Allie’s care, and I probably should’ve been kinder to Dick Johnson.

  This is Christopher burning with embarrassment but grinning like a fool anyhow.