Thresholder

I hope this is what you wanted, that you get something from it. If we’re to fight, you should at least understand me.

I stepped through the portal because I had thought ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ The place that I’m from, it’s a land without magic, with only middling technology, more advanced than Teaguewater but less than some other places I’ve been to. We have cars everywhere, most of them moving through underground tunnels, and none of the polluted air that feels like it’s choking us out. It was a very structured society, compared to some others I’ve been to, crushing expectations and the weight of school always pressing down on us. Everyone agreed that the crush didn’t stop after graduation, that it became the crushing expectations of work at one of the taepin.

We had stories about portals, or things like them, and the magical lands beyond them, and it seemed like a chance to escape the grim life I’d seen in front of me. So ‘what’s the worst it could be?’ went through my head, I stepped through the portal, and then I was wet, surrounded by water, in the middle of an ocean, salty taste in my mouth. There was no land in sight, no ship, nothing. I had always been a strong swimmer, so I treaded water, hoping for rescue, knowing that if there was land over the horizon, I was never going to be able to make it. Hope faded fast.

I think I lasted about three hours before my legs and arms refused to cooperate anymore. It started with my head going under the water once, and with the first mouthful of seawater, I thrashed back to the surface, finding a last surge of strength that I hadn’t known was there. Of course, that shot of vigor only lasted for so long, and then I was more tired than I’d been before. My strength failed again. This time the random movements of my limbs didn’t help me reach the surface.

I was gulping in salty water when I felt hands on me, pulling me down deeper, and I was too panicked to have any second thoughts about that. Then a seashell was being slipped over my mouth, and suddenly I was breathing again, water this time, my lungs working harder than ever before. The seashell was a bit of magic, the hands those of mermaids, and they dragged me to their underwater city. I was too weak to protest, not that the words would have come out through the water in my throat.

It took a few days for them to find solutions for me. Three days underwater was enough that my body was starting to fall apart. My hands were too wrinkled, white, skin dying, and they released tiny fish into my enclosure to eat away at the dead skin. I’m not sure whether it helped or not. Eventually, they moved me to a room they had made for me, and it was my first time in three days I’d had actual air, the first time since coming through the portal that my skin wasn’t wet. I finally took the seashell off. It had been tied in place with strands of seaweed, which after so long formed indents in my flesh. I spat up seawater by the gallon, finally ate the raw fish they gave me after days of starving. Then, I spoke with them.

Their whole planet was covered in water, though they didn’t think of it as a planet, and I suppose it might not have been. Their entire civilization was underwater, built from seaweed and coral, sometimes with the bones of enormous sea creatures, especially in their holy buildings. They were friends to the fishes, hunter-gatherers if you know that expression, without proper farms, just taking what they needed from the world around them. They had magic, though they didn’t think of it like that, and eventually they could accommodate me, allowing me to move through the water.

I had a good time, for the first two weeks. I was different from them, not a merperson, but they accepted me as a curiosity, and showed me their village, which they called a city. I had a dalliance with one of their women, played games with their children, and swam to the depths of the ocean, getting a glimpse of the terrifying behemoths that they revered as gods.

At the end of the two weeks, I found out that they were at war, and wanted to enlist me as a soldier.

There were people on the surface, hairy creatures who lived on rafts of vegetation, mangroves that floated on the water with roots descending down to ensnare fish. Those people reminded me of otters, if you’re familiar with that kind of animal, a sleek, fast animal with slicked down hair and sharp teeth. Otters with hands that gripped better, otters with forges and spearguns. They were enemies of the merpeople due to their different environments and the way the otters would foul the waters and blot out the sun with their immense rafts.

I went to meet with them as my hosts had asked, though I had no intention of fighting. I only wanted to talk. And that, mysterious counterpart, is when I met my first other thresholder.

I wasn’t prepared, not even remotely. The otters brought us into a room together, and just as I was growing excited to see another human, he lunged across the table, hands going to my throat. I escaped only by gouging out one of his eyes, then fled while he was howling. The otters seemed uninterested in stopping me, which was good, because they had their spear guns at the ready. Maybe they thought it was business between humans, but for whatever reason, they didn’t interfere, not then.

I tried to hide in the underwater city, but a few days later the otters’ raft had moved into position, darkening the city. The merpeople used luminescent animals, but they were worried. Their attacks on the roots of the mangroves were fought off, and everyone smelled death in the water. Biological waste came down too fast and thick for the fish and plants to eat it all, and a plague soon spread. The otters must have known, must have been waiting for that, because that was when they struck. My counterpart was there among them, and as soon as he saw me, he was moving in my direction, flippers affixed to his feet, a patch over one eye. The spear gun got me through the chest, in the stomach, and he reeled me in with a rope the bolt was attached to, then started beating me about the face.

When the portal appeared, I swam away, leaving a cloud of blood in the water. He let me go. I’m not sure we exchanged more than a handful of words. I never got his name.

I came into the next world mortally wounded and passed out thinking that I was going to die. Instead, I was brought to a med bay and operated on by a robot, which applied miraculous healing technologies to me that had me fully restored within the day, including my battered fingers which hadn’t taken to the water well. I looked out the window and saw a field of stars, and below them, a planet of the sort that I had only seen drawings of before, the kind they called a jiandan, yellow rolling clouds as far as the eye could see. It was in a space station, of a sort, and they had all kinds of questions for me that I couldn’t even begin to answer. My sudden appearance on their space station was an impossibility that they couldn’t reckon with. It had been caught on video — a recording of the portal spitting me out — but that didn’t help them at all.

I spent time living among them, with more freedom after they’d had me in quarantine for a week and run all kinds of tests on me. They looked at my internal essence and found that the pieces of my paternal and maternal composition weren’t of the sort that they had ever known, not in all the vast databases of their own people. I apologize if some of the terminology is fuzzy, that part seems to vary more between worlds. There is an internal structure to people, a language of biology within each and every atomic unit of being, and it was that which offered proof.

Eventually they sent me to another space station, this one with more people. I was allowed to fly the shuttle, though limited by the thinker inside it that served as the proper pilot. The glittering rings around the planet, the plethora of moons, the silence of space, it was everything that I had hoped for when I had first stepped through the portal on my home world.

I was treated well at the large space station. They had all the comforts of home and then some, large gardens under heavy glass, places to play their strange sports and pleasure chambers that were shocking compared to the strict modesty of the place I’d come from. I was an oddity to them, appearing from outside the context of their world, but I was afforded all the rights of a citizen. I could have refused the testing and scans they did, but they had welcomed me so much that I would never have dared.

And then, again, there was a counterpart. It wasn’t like the last time, where we appeared on opposite sides of some conflict. Instead, he came into the world as I had done, howling in pain, dumped out in the gardens not a hundred feet away from me. He was rushed to the med bay, and the space folk were growing worried, because a second mysterious visitor heralded a third, at least in their estimation. They kept us apart for a time, but eventually put us together, hoping that I could fix his malaise.

The world that I found a utopia, he despised. Like me, he’d been brutalized by a stranger in the world before, and I’m sure that explained part of it, but much of his issue was simply the problem of his culture. He found the pleasure chambers abhorrent, and the men around him abhorrent for using them. When he learned that the women didn’t carry their children in their wombs, using a growing vat instead, he came to hate them as well. He was a curious man, colored so much by his culture, and while our hosts engaged him in debate (as was their manner), it didn’t seem to do much good.

Eventually, he tried to take his own life, or perhaps simply do enough damage to his body that a portal would appear. This didn’t work, and afterward, they began monitoring him more closely, though he gave up easily, perhaps because he had no desire to die, only to move on.

I didn’t realize that he had his sights set on me until well after his plot to kill me was already in motion.

I was duped. It doesn’t paint me in a good light, though there are worse things to be than trusting and naive. I found myself on a ship with him, far out from the station, with only a single scientist as our minder. My counterpart got himself into a suit and took a trip out from the ship, to be as close to the glory of the universe as he could be, encased only in their thick fabrics and a helmet. When it was my turn, I went more out of a sense of solidarity than any real desire, but that was a part of his plan. While I was out there, he incapacitated the scientist, hitting her over the head, then locked the doors behind me. We were far away from any help. I think that his plan was for me to suffocate. I was tethered to the ship, but he said that he would kill the scientist if I didn’t unclip, so I complied, thinking that I wouldn’t have much better odds attached to the ship than floating free. He had figured out the controls of the ship well enough that he could take off without me, and in short order the ship was so distant that I couldn’t even see it.

I waited as long as I could, hoping for rescue, but none came.

Eventually, as I was starting to expire, nearly delirious with rebreathed air, I saw the portal appear in front of me, shimmering, welcoming. I had half expected that it was a hallucination, but it seemed real enough, and I was dying.

I could not, however, reach it. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in space, dear counterpart, but all the motion of the limbs cannot move you. For all my flailing, the portal simply sat there, waiting for me to enter.

In the end, I did something insane. I removed my helmet and flung it behind me. That started me drifting, even as I was choking, my eyes foaming, but I sailed through, and then I was on the ground, breathing hard and feeling my face with gloved hands, just to see whether my skin had frozen solid.

That third world was a mountain of such extreme height that I could see neither peak nor base, with pockets of different biomes clinging to the side. A ball, dropped from any spot on the face of the mountain, would roll away forever, or at least until it got caught on something. I never had a true sense of the world, what this tilt meant in the scheme of things, but I thought it was probably magic of some kind, applied over a wide area.

The people of that world treated me with indifference, even though I was wearing a spacesuit. They had easy healing available to them, and food, but they had no tradition of hospitality, and I had to trade away a piece of the suit, a glove, just to get basic healing and food from them. Their healing was beyond compare, better than I’ve experienced before or after, outmatching the technological might of the previous world. It was done with spit, which was rubbed against wounds by holy men whose godliness was proved by this practice. All the damage done to me was reversed, and then I was left to my own devices, knowing that the only things I had were the remaining pieces of the spacesuit, the clothes I wore beneath it, and my wits.

I survived well enough by doing odd jobs and sleeping under the stars, which were streaks in the sky rather than points. Eventually I had enough of a reputation as a hard worker that the people of this mountain village were willing to give me more complicated jobs, those that risked their crops or goods, and I got a proper room in a farmer’s house.

I had been there a week before I was attacked by birds. There were people around, but I was the only one who suffered their beaks and claws, and I survived only by thinking fast and ducking into a closet of a nearby building, killing the two birds that had come in with me. I waited there, bleeding heavily, a piece of my nose missing, my shirt soaked in my own blood, as the birds pounded against the thin wood. Eventually, the birds left, and I emerged. I paid another glove for more healing, then paid a boot for a net, just to have something to fight back with. The villagers thought that this was my own problem, something that didn’t concern them. I was chastised by the man whose closet I had hid in.

I started to prepare, as best I could. I worked as hard as I could, watching the sky for more birds. I traded away the rest of my suit for a magical sword of significant power, one that could fly through the air and cut a dozen leaves as they fell. Then I packed up my few meager belongings and ran.

Downhill was easy, so that’s where I went, trying to put as much distance between myself and my presumed counterpart as possible. He could control birds somehow, I knew, and I worried he could see through their eyes. He’d found me once, and I assumed was biding his time for another attack, or maybe marshaling forces. The gauntlet I have now takes some time to charge, and his control of birds might have been like that, limited by time or resources.

Two hundred miles downhill and three weeks later, the birds came again. I threw the sword at them, and it sliced through them cleanly, enough to cut the flock down to just stragglers. I had taken a few pecks in the process, but I was feeling good about myself. Alas, birds weren’t the only thing I had to deal with, because the man himself showed up, a bird mask on his face and a sword of his own, this one a giant cleaving weapon almost as tall as he was. Suffice it to say, he bested me. He’d broken my arm and my sword when a portal opened behind him, and for a moment it seemed as though he was going to finish me off. He spat on the ground and left me though, not so much as sparing another look at me before he slipped away.

I limped off, hoping to find help, but I knew the people of that world well enough by that point. They would heal me, if I could offer something, and if I couldn’t, they would let me suffer. Their apathy was profound, and sometimes felt almost malicious, so six hours later, when a portal opened for me, I went through. I hadn’t had enough to offer for them to mend a broken arm, so I carried that injury with me into the next world, along with all the scrapes and bruises. The portal was a relief. I hadn’t been sure it would come for me.

In the next world I was a professor of sorts. The school was quite excited by my presence, and referred to me as mundhleapan, though from what I was able to find out, that has a quite distinct meaning from whatever it is you want to call us. Still, I had experience with worlds, and they wanted to hear as much as possible, so I gave talks to eager students and staff, holding forth as much as I was able. I was given room, board, access to their library, and a weapon to call my own: the staff you’re acquainted with. I’m sure you want to know more about that, its origins, limitations, all that, but of course there are certain things I still need to keep close to my chest.

I enjoyed being the center of attention at the school. I wasn’t just giving talks, I was invited to dinner parties, a conversation piece, an animal in a zoo — but a contented one, save for the target I knew was on my back and the cycle that was making itself apparent. There had been quite a lot I could have picked from in terms of magical gifts, but I’d picked the staff, the ultimate defensive weapon, capable of stopping almost everything. I carried it with me everywhere, worried about the next attack.

It came with a side of heartbreak.

My newfound popularity came with perks, and there was no denying that women were a part of it. I was a curiosity, one of the mundhleapan, important, and there was plenty of opportunity for people to show me their world. By the third time, I was faking it, if only a bit, expressing amazement at bits of magic I’d already seen or vistas that had lost their luster. There was one particular girl though, both enthusiastic and serious, who I never grew tired of. By the second week, she was something of a companion.

Then, she tried to kill me.

I still had a cast on, mind you. That first fight, I was half-naked for reasons that are probably obvious, yelling as she assaulted me with a long knife. She got a few good stabs in, then I leapt out my six-story window. I sailed down to the ground with the staff twirling above me.

I hadn’t known that she was one of us. I’d thought it was mind control, a disguise, something. I couldn’t grapple with the fact that she’d been who she was all along, had arrived in the world before me, had only posed as a student, shown me tourist destinations that she herself must have been shown only days prior. I was still, a little bit, in love with her. I was seeking some explanation, something that would redeem her, or explain why she’d done it.

I spoke with the police, with the school, and they were useless. There was some speculation that this was a war among mundhleapan, some unknown battle that I was somehow involved in, much as I had been telling them about when relating my story.

They searched for her and did not find her. They had magic, as in worlds past, but nothing for finding a person, nothing for surveillance. A pair of guards were placed outside my door for a period of a week, but when nothing happened, they were removed. It was thought that this war, if it was a war, wasn’t something that anyone should be involving themselves in. They didn’t believe me when I protested my innocence.

The girl came for me again a month after that first attack. She was stronger, and had a proper weapon of her own. I have no idea where she got it from, or what she’d been doing in the intervening month, but I tried talking to her, hoping to get some kind of explanation for why she wanted to kill me. If she was a world hopper like I was, she had been through this before. Even before she revealed herself, I had explained that I didn’t want any violence. She had to have known that I didn’t want to hurt her.

All she said was that I disgusted her. It made me think of the space station and the man who found conditions there intolerable. Maybe it was the same. She refused to elaborate.

I won the fight. Her knife was fast, but not as fast as the staff, and she had no particular skill with the blade. I was taller, stronger, with more reach, and eventually her attacks tired her out. When she left me an opening, I took it, cracking her on the head.

I was watching the blood pool, waiting for her to get up, when the portal appeared behind me. I stepped through. I don’t know what became of her.

Through all these worlds, English had been a common theme, though its history and origins were always different, and the accents were always odd, with some of the words missing. In the next world, it was my other tongue, Cannalo, which I’m weaker in. This was an odd, constrained little world, no bigger across than some cities, with inputs and outputs at the sides of it that came through pipes. We might have been in a zoo for all I knew, but the walls were impenetrable and there was a ceiling of some material that was clear and hard, like glass only in that it was see-through. The sun was real, I think, though it was hard to know.

Many of the people placed themselves by the pipes, which carried in food of a sludge-like consistency along with water, and carried out waste. There was always enough for everyone, which was the only positive thing that I could say about the place.

And I, of course, came in with odd clothes, a poor command of the language, and no understanding of these people. The staff changed things though, providing me both defense and protection. It also marked me as different, attracted attention that I might otherwise not have gotten. My counterpart had gotten there before me, and found me almost right away. There was no hiding from each other in that enclosed space.

Unlike the others, he was smiling and affable. Some of the customs in that world made me blanch, but he delighted in them. As a people they were stupid and soft, whether because they wanted for nothing or because they had been selected for that pliability. My counterpart had become their leader, you see, and had started to put in place plans to tighten his grip on them, become a king in all but name. He was a hedonist, and pushed them to offer him all the delights he felt himself entitled to. It was sickening, but I don’t want to say more about that. Suffice it to say we came to blows, this time with myself as the aggressor.

There’s not much to say about the battle. It took a long time, and then I lost. He had no special powers, only the support of his guards, but that was enough. I think it was his first world, and I don’t know whether he took the portal or not, but I limped out through mine as soon as it opened. I wanted to kill him, the petty tyrant. It was the first time I’d ever felt that, and I couldn’t put him down, as much as I had tried.

We’re about halfway through. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? I’m going for a particular style, one used by an old, avuncular radio personality who you assuredly haven’t heard of. I hope you don’t find it tiresome, and I know my voice isn’t the best. I’m not a storyteller. I also know, from what you’ve said, that you would prefer facts and figures, details, but those are in short supply. It’s all memory now, my own thoughts.

The next world was civilized in a way that gave me hope, with power lines running overhead and cars on the streets. The buildings were all painted in bright colors, startling reds, blues, and greens, everything marked with neon signs and big, bold letters. I was in an outfit unfamiliar to them, and it wasn’t more than a few minutes before I was taken off the streets by their police. I tried to explain, but I think that only made it worse. They took my staff from me, which I allowed, knowing that I’d be in danger if it escalated to violence. It took time, but eventually I was placed in their version of a sanatorium.

I was forced to take pills, and they left me feeling half-dead, sapped of motivation. The conditions were terrible, the padded rooms devoid of stimulation, the other inmates truly deranged and frightening. Eventually, I was let outside for some ‘clean air’, and I thankfully had the wherewithal to finally call my staff to me and fly off after having beaten the guards.

From there I lived like a rat, stealing, hiding, and eventually, with the right clothes, doing my best to fit in. The clothes of that culture had a shapelessness to them, which helped me to keep from being recognized. I had to leave the staff so as not to draw attention to myself, but I always left it where I could call it to me at a moment’s notice.

Eventually I made contact with the black markets and the seedy underbelly, a dangerous network of criminals and dissidents. Despite the bright facades and stylish cars, it was an oppressive world, and many people were dissatisfied. I found a place to stay with those people, the revolutionaries, and we had encounters with the secret police. The revolutionaries appreciated what I had to say, the lessons from my own world, though I knew they were skeptical. The staff helped prove part of my story though, and I wondered what would have happened if I had shown its powers to the police. Most likely they would have overwhelmed me with force. I spent weeks with those people, and called them friends, though we suffered our setbacks and betrayals, along with all the petty dramas of a small group of people.

My counterpart’s arrival was marked by an explosion at the headquarters of the Predicere, the ministry that was in charge of one branch of their dystopic government. People thought that it was us, that the radicals and provocateurs had finally made their move, but no, it was a single man who’d come into the world with no small amount of power. He had seen their government, spoken to their police, and decided to attack.

I couldn’t help but admire him after seeing all the leaflets and zines and graffiti of my companions and how little it had done. In a three-day bombardment he decapitated their leadership, then put out a call for the opposition to come in and take the reins. My friends went, skittish but hopeful, and I followed, staff held tight, wondering what to make of this man.

He explained who he was, what he did. He had an enviable physique and a firm voice, and declared that this was what he was, what he did, going from world to world and righting wrongs wherever he could find him. He referred to himself as a cudgel, and seemed proud of that fact. He said to call him Kingmaker, and I have no idea what his actual name was.

He clocked me easily, almost as soon as I opened my mouth, and once that happened, I knew it was only a matter of time. He allowed the discussion of government takeover to come to its conclusion though, then tried to shoot me, only for the staff to twist in my hands and block it. Until that moment, I hadn’t known that it was fast enough to block bullets, and was mildly stunned that I was unharmed. He threw the gun to the side and threw a stone at me, which exploded almost at the instant my staff knocked it aside.

I fled. I didn’t think that I could beat him, not as I was. There was a power I was hoping he didn’t know about, a mild telekinesis granted by that world’s pharmaceuticals, if only I could get my hands on it. I was able to get away, and two days later grabbed a bottle of those pills, as the nation was thrust into a time of uncertainty, fear, and violence. My friends had seen their opportunity and turned on me, not that I expected any less, not with a walking tank on their side and the revolution in the palm of their hand. There was resistance to the takeover, which almost always ended with an explosion.

The second time I met with Kingmaker, I almost got him. I had a needle with a sedative and stabbed him with it while he was posturing, floating it to him with my mind, its movement unseen. I’d thought it was clever, but he exploded the ground beneath him and launched himself away from me, leaving me choking on his dust, unable to follow.

The third time he left me deaf and broken, crushed beneath his heel, letting up only once the portal appeared. I staggered to my feet and left, which he allowed, seeming pleased with himself. The last thing I heard from him was that there were other worlds to help, and I think he believed that, despite the violence he had inflicted and all the unpleasantness in the wake of the revolution.

I’ve already told you my record, two wins, seven losses. I’ll tell you from the outset that my next world was a loss, but it was one of my favorites all the same.