The clanging of a pen hitting the side of a coffee cup woke Hiro up.
He'd wound up at the orientation meeting early because he had nothing better to do and the bus line didn't run out to this part of town for another hour. He was surprised that he had fallen asleep while waiting. That's not normally something he did, but being back in his home dimension was draining. He was feeling lethargic and sleeping way more than normal.
He looked up from his folded arms to a smirking red-haired man with sideburns, "Rise and shine." Before he looked around the room at the other dozen people scattered about the lecture hall, "Large crowd this month."
The lecturer walked over to the podium while placing his mug on the table up front, "Most of you have already been given handouts. Some of you are already up to speed, but a few of you just got back and so we're going to be taking this from the top as if you just reappeared." He glanced back at Hiro, "Please try and take this seriously as it IS a matter of life and death."
Hiro sat up and looked annoyed at being singled out but closed his mouth to let it slide, ~Just tired~ He thought to himself, ~We haven't even started~.
The man continued, "Some of you are going to have real problems adjusting, especially those of you returning from excessively low-resolution universes. Here in the highest resolution universe in all of known existence, you are going to have real problems adjusting." He looked at Hiro again as if reading his mind, "Narcolepsy isn't uncommon. So if you can't deal with it, see the medical unit for medication to help. We recommend Vigilant. It is available on demand, however, you will be monitored on it, since we've noticed that cases of addiction are common among returnees."
The lecturer held up a small metal wand and clicked it. The projector turned on as the lecturer continued, "Welcome to the Returnees Reorientation Course or the RRC. This course is mandatory by international law for anyone who has been displaced from the planet Earth and returned, assuming you don't just go through a memory wipe. Yes, that is an option for some of you. If anyone wishes to attempt a memory wipe and just go back to living a normal life... as best you can... please speak up now so I can stop wasting my time on you."
The lecturer looked around the room for a few seconds, "Right. Moving on. This course is held every month on the last Sunday of the month. We have a large group this month so let's try and keep questions to the end as most of them will be answered if you just-" He then whipped a rubber ball into the corner of the lecture hall causing the ball to bounce off the wall, the ceiling, then the table right next to a kid in the back who was focusing on his smartphone. The sound of the ball hitting the table jolted him awake causing him to look around frantically.
The ball arced up high and the lecturer held out his hand to casually catch the ball before he continued, "PAY. ATTENTION." He then smiled very politely, "So please turn off all electronic devices until the lecture is over."
He pocketed the ball and clicked his wand again causing a large wall of text to appear, "Call me Chimon. I'll be your instructor." He rolled the wand in the air as he clicked through several pages of text, "Blahbity Blahbity Blah. Disclaimer. Disclaimer. Warning. Disclaimer." One more click before he paused on a world map, "Important crap."
He turned around, "Alright. We have several returning summoning victims, two reincarnators, and..." He paused then pointed at a rather shy-looking girl in the corner of the room, "Someone who escaped from an Otome."
Chimon sighed, closed his eyes, and lowered his head as he shook it slightly, "Sorry to say we're getting more of you lately. More on that later." He took a deep breath and looked up around the room before letting the breath out slowly, "In case nobody has had the time to say it, 'Welcome back'. I don't know your individual stories or what you have been through. It may have been easy and glorious, but chances are it is filled with death and horror. Unfortunately what happened to you has been going on for quite a while. We're trying to keep a lid on it as much as possible, but it's been picking up in recent years. We have theories as to why, but nothing concrete."
He paused to look around the room for a while, judging the faces and reactions before he continued, "Sorry what happened to you. If any of you need to talk, we have professional counselors to help as well as support groups of people who have been through the exact same shit as you. I've had more than one person in this class break down in tears so you go right ahead and if anyone gives you any shit, I will personally tear them a new one. This is often a point where it sinks in what happened and I want to help."
He then gestured to the projected map with his wand, a red laser dot playing around it, "But before you start to vent your personal demons, let's try and stay focused on the task at hand. This is important."
He turned to face the map, "The world. Your birthplace. Planet earth. Or as the rest of the multiverse calls us, Dark Earth."
"Contrary to popular belief, the multiverse is not infinite, it is merely very large. If infinity existed anywhere, reality would collapse. However, For reasons we don't quite understand, there are most likely thousands of alternate worlds out there, but most of them tend to follow the same general guidelines. Note these are different from parallel worlds, which I'll get into later... or divergent timelines... or pocket universes. The exact cosmology of reality is a bit beyond the scope of this class, but we'll be touching upon it."
He paused to turn around and look back at the class, "I'll be focusing on here for the most part. Our world seems to be... unique. Mostly. While there is only one dark world, there are several... reflections of our world, but those aren't always parallel worlds or alternate worlds." He paused to look thoughtful, "Best to imagine that there is only one here, but there are a few... after images. I'll get into that another time. Suffice to say, we have something in abundance that the rest of the multiverse wants and it is all because of..."
He clicked his wand and the slide changed to the words DARK MATTER, "Dark matter. Our earth is currently passing through a massive cloud of the stuff. It has been doing this for the past few thousand years and we are only now entering the thickest part of the cloud. As our solar system orbits the center of the galaxy we will slowly pass through this cloud and we suspect in the next five thousand years we will finally be out the other side. Why is this important?"
He clicked to another diagram that showed lines of force around a globe being scrambled and canceled by a cloud of darkness surrounding it, "Magic doesn't work near dark matter." He clicked again to show a field full of dead fairies and unicorns, "Usually what happens if a planet moves through a cloud of dark matter all life on the planet is killed. All life needs some amount of mana to survive. The dark earth sort of hit the cloud at an angle and thus it was a far more gradual experience than other worlds who have endured the same thing. Life on the planet had time to adjust. The more fantastical creatures died off, but the rest of the planet adjusted to the changing conditions."
"In short, we evolved to survive in a place with dwindling mana resources."
He clicked again to show a typical city street, "Because our world is so mana starved, the humans of Dark Earth are among the most mama efficient self-aware creatures in the multiverse. Truth is, nobody even understands how we can even exist. We shouldn't. The amount of mama needed for a creature to be self-aware is quite high, and yet. The people of our world are able to not only live but thrive and survive. This went unknown for quite some time until..."
He clicked again to reveal an atomic mushroom cloud, "World War Two. The truth is, the rest of the multiverse couldn't even see us until after the detonation of the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The resulting massive amounts of souls leaving this world at the same time shattered the ley lines that are around the ring of fire and sent cracks throughout most of Asia. Those two explosions opened a path through the dark matter into the rest of the multiverse."
"And it is only getting wider since the rest of the multiverse keeps poking at those cracks." He clicked to reveal a picture of a bunch of people gathered around a summoning circle, "The so-called 'Hero summoning' ritual is actually fairly well known throughout the multiverse, but it was never really effective. It was always a hail mary to be used as a manner of last resort, but the hero summoned often was rarely strong enough to be of actual use. High-level heroes could resist the summons, and chances are you already have more than enough low-level candidates locally, so why bother?."
He clicked and a picture of a rift appeared next to the summoners, with a little sick figure hopping out of it, "However, now with a crack in the dark matter to our Earth, the hero summoning ritual, which searches throughout all of time and space for the ideal candidate, is now finding low-level humans, who cannot resist the summons, yet they have the potential to become insanely powerful."
He clicked to show a weak stick figure standing on what appeared to be a crystal world, then a super strong stick figure on earth, "It's the Superman effect. On Krypton, normal. On earth, superman. It's like if you lived on Jupiter your whole life only to come to Earth where the gravity was a mere fraction of what you are used to. Now, understand that not everyone is like that. Maybe one out of twenty can become a superstar, but the other nineteen out of twenty aren't shabby either."
He clicked and it went back to the summoning figures, "The spell has a tendency to also seek out people who would be easy to train, have the most potential, easy to manipulate, and most likely to want to be a hero. And so... it tends to abduct..." He clicked one more time. The picture changed to that of a school, "Students"
He turned off the projector as he let out a long sigh, "It took a while before we caught on. The Americans were the ones who put two and two together, but the Japanese government took over the management of the problem in the localized area. America then saw this as an opportunity and attempted to replicate it in their own country, but they didn't do it right. They inadvertently ripped a hole into a demon dimension and have been fighting a non-stop war of containment ever since." He smirked, "There's a reason for the above-ground nuclear weapon testing ban, FYI."
He looked around the room, "Over time the international community got on board, and for the most part we try to keep this quiet. There is a magical cold war going on, and it has been going on for quite a while. You see, magic is SURPRESSED in a cloud of dark matter, not flat-out blocked. That means some magic can work, it just works at a greatly reduced and weakened state." He sighed, "And with the cracks in the dark matter getting wider, its getting increasingly easy to use it here on earth.
He pointed around the room, "You people left here and came back and you earned Experience and levels over there... wherever there was. You might be much weaker here, but you are still head and shoulders stronger than everyone else on earth. Now, back in the day, experience and levels were called other things. You guys see status windows now because that's how you were raised. It used to be arcane symbols and colors. The whole status window thing is just your mind interpreting things the best way you can figure it out."
"Levels and experience are also subjectively measured depending on the universe you are in. Some experience is just mana force, some use actual life essence, some experience can be shared, some cannot, and levels are also subjective, as well as skills, talents, lores, whatever they are called, it's just a manner of internal reference. This has led to some difficulty in... standardization. Especially when dealing with returnees." He paused to click his tongue.
"The problems arise depending on where you wound up. Many of you wound up going to your new universe after being filtered through..." He smirked, "The Duty-Free, as we like to call it." He chuckled softly to himself, "You would be informed that you were talking to the god of the world you were visiting and he'd often give you some sort of..." He held up his hands and made finger quotes in the air, "'cheat' or two, then send you down to the world. Typically these cheats only seem to work in the world you wound up in, but one does seem to stick with most returnees. Universal translators, although it sometimes stops working on written language, but almost always keeps working for speaking. All of you have both according to your files, so know that since you are now all polyglots, you stand to make a fair amount of money just being a translator. Not the most exciting of occupations, but it pays the bills."
"The cheat that is the worst to get is 'accelerated level gain.' Unfortunately for some of you, you wound up with this cheat meaning you gained experience faster than other denizens of the universe you visited. An advantage to be sure, but a huge problem returning here. You will notice that all those bonus experience points have vanished, and no, before you ask, they will not return if you go back. Sorry. You have received a permanent power down when you left. You might regain your cheat if you returned to that universe, but you are unlikely to retain that cheat in any other universe than the one you had it in."
"A few of you were summoned directly and if you received a cheat, you got it just by appearing there, it is rare but some of you might retain your cheat, or some level of your cheat, depending if you invested any experience into it. There are several factors, but I won't get into it."
He looked over at the shy girl in the corner, "Alas, the summoning rituals are difficult and there has been an organization that has invaded Earth. They have come here to... harvest." He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose, "Miss, if you could be so kind as to tell us the last thing you remember before winding up over there. I think the rest of the attendees could benefit."
The young miss spoke in a melodic voice that cut through the air and stirred the hearts of all the men present, "Well... I had left work... I was 34 at the time, and I had been playing this game called 'Roses Never Cry'. I crossed the street while I was re-reading a help file on how to speed run-" she paused for a second, "Never mind. Anyways. I was reading it over for the third time when a truck ran a red light and hit me." The girl who couldn't have been more than 16 sounded downcast as she finished, "I was killed instantly. " She took a deep breath, "And wound up in 'Roses Never Cry'. It took a long time since I was 3 when I awakened over there, but eventually, I made my way to the magic school and figured out how to use the magic core of the school to rip a hole back here and came home. I... wasn't sure how I'd explain things, but..." She let the thought drift off unspoken.
The instructor raised a finger, "Correction. Your body was killed, but the truck in question had a soul harvester installed behind the bumper plate. Your soul was harvested, transferred to a holding tank, and eventually sent to the goddess who had requested you." He started to wander around the room, more talking to himself at this point than the class, "We call them the truckers. We don't know much about their organization, but they use local humans to carry out the actual harvesting while the people behind the scene are hard to catch. The hero summoning summons the best candidate for the job, but the way it is designed you can't pick and choose and oddly enough, the ritual understands intent.
"Because of this, if you want a powerful soul for a SPECIFIC reason, sometimes it's because they have problems to solve..." He sighed, "Usually it's just for the fun of it."
The instructor leaned back against the table next to the podium, "Mostly its goddesses. They watch a given story unfold in their world and don't like how it turned out, so they rewind time and put in an order for a soul from earth. They used to replace the main character, but lately, the trend is to put the soul in the body of the villain character. I say character because since time has been rewound, the goddess in question knows what will happen. She typically writes it up as a story, maybe lets it play out a few different ways to get the various angles, then either publishes a book, like in the old days, or she has the truckers make it into an otome game. The game is often given out on the general market looking for someone who is a good candidate to get hooked, then they run them over."
"He rolls his hand in the air, "It's also been happening with online games, but not as often. We've tried to put a stop to publishing the games and books, but it just makes them more desperate and the truckers will, in a pinch, run over anyone to fill their quota so, we find it best to let these games hit the market where we can keep an eye on them."
He held up the wand and clicked twice until it came up with a swirling image surrounding a ghost-like person in the center, "We also have actual reincarnations going on, but that seems to happen mostly in China and Korea." He clicked again and the picture turned into a scene out of a zombie horror flick, "Next we come to divergent timelines. It seems that our world has several divergent timelines. These timelines all seem to center around the alternate timeline having a weakening of the dark matter cloud ahead of schedule allowing for magic or some sort of super science. They almost always involve some sort of apocalypse, usually of a nuclear kind. That many nuclear weapons going off could, theoretically..." Again he makes the finger quotes, "'clear out' the local dark matter for a while, so it seems only natural that such alternate timelines would form. Although this is a rough guideline and not set in stone. We've been seeing several artifacts showing up that let people jump from our world to the alternate timeline. We don't have anyone one of those in this class, but we treat them like you guys when we can get ahold of them."
"However, we have discovered some alternate timelines that don't fit with any known models. For example, " He clicked and showed a picture of several stick figure girls drooling over a computer and a bunch of boys nearby recoiling in fear, "We have in recent experiments managed to locate a world with just about as much dark matter as our universe, but the sexual morality has been reversed. All the girls want to constantly get laid, and the boys are all encouraged to maintain their 'manhood' as long as possible because no girl will ever marry a boy who isn't a virgin."
A hand went up in the back of the room when the instructor continued, "No, we are not taking volunteers for people going on an expedition there. Right now the transference seems to be accidental, not intensional. Random people are being exchanged with their alternate counterparts and it's causing a great deal of confusion. Apparently, there are no summonings in that universe, so there are no returnees, and thus no Exemplar Association on the other side. If there was, we assume we'd be able to figure something out. but..."
The instructor clicked off the projector, "As you can see, Our earth is constantly under pressure and someone has to push back. That's us. The Exemplar Association is an international organization, but the vast majority of members are Japanese, with China coming in second, Korea a close third, and America in fourth. America doesn't have many returnees, but they do have an endless war against a non-stop demon invasion from whatever demon world aligns with the rifts they blew open around Area 51. You can still gain levels an experience here on our Earth, it's just you don't get much, and it has to be from a being from outside our universe. So what America lacks in quality, they make up for in quantity as well as overwhelming firepower."
He sighs, "Which brings me to you guys leveling up. It's hard to level up on this planet. Some returnees have gone rogue. They want to level up more but can't go back. So... you guys are nice, tasty bags of XP waiting to be popped. We try to keep them under control, but more and more are slipping through the cracks. It also means we have a strict policy of never killing one another, for any reason. We do not want martyrs giving up their XPs to their friends by letting themselves get killed. Don't do it. We do not allow assisted suicide. It is not allowed. It's murder. We will put you in jail. And yes, we have a jail for people like you."
"But, that all said, if you really want to level up, and I know some of you are very... very weak compared to what you were over there, the Americans are always looking for help. It's become rather standard practice for grade F and E heroes to team up and do a tour over at 51. In a year or two, you might bump up a grade." He hooked a thumb at himself, "I returned as a class F. Spent a decade over there, and came back class C." He smirks, "But I'm a success story. About 20% of the people who go there die. It's not a walk in the park, but if you can survive, you WILL get stronger."
"Finally, I want to get you guys up to speed on a rough outline of the world in general. China has been maintaining a series of dragon nests across their patch of Asia and thus they have the highest ambient mana on the planet, overall. Japan comes in a close second, but when it comes to concentration, it is nowhere higher." He looked about, "If I were to put it in terms of elevation, we have the highest mountain. China's mountains aren't as high, but they have more mountains than anyone else."
"America and Korea coming virtually tied for third, although America's mana is... strange. Let us just leave it at that. The largest organizations are the Exemplars, simply because we have the most governments backing us. Politically speaking, we supply the manpower, but America is footing the bills. They are doing a fine job supplementing their lack of quality with combat gear and power armor."
"Next we have the Truckers, which we talked about. After them, there is a loose alliance of demons. Mostly half-demons as when a real demon comes here they almost always die. The few demons on this planet occupy dragon nests in China, live off the energy spilling out of the rifts in America's old Nuclear testing sites, and few tough old birds who simply had nowhere else to go. There are about fifty self-proclaimed Demon Lords and none of them get along with each other."
"On a local level, we have a wide array of what we call bygones. Magical creatures who found a place to hole up and wait out the magical drought. The really dangerous ones have been whittled down over the centuries, so most of the ones remaining are classified as contained. As long as they lay low, we leave them alone. The problem comes from... hunters."
"The last outstanding group isn't really a group, because they don't, by definition, work together. Think Highlander. There can be only one. These guys are XP junkies and they will kill anything that will give them so much as a deuce of XP, which includes killing anyone in this room, any companions that might have come over from elsewhere, bygones, demons, and usually anything that ticks them off."
"We hope that you are willing to sign on with the Exemplars and help out, but we also understand if you just want to get back to a normal life. You guys are victims here. We won't force you to join up, and if you wish, we will do our best to give you back some semblance of a normal life. We have several services available to help you, and we hope you will make use of them."
He checked the clock on the wall, "And now is a good time to take a break, we'll pick back up in 15."
