Ari sent all five invitation cards at once, mostly because waiting to send them one at a time sounded like more effort than she was willing to put in.
[Invitations dispatched.] [Awaiting response.] She settled back into the sofa to wait, snack in hand, and did not have to wait particularly long.
• • Pasadena.
The apartment was, as it usually was on a Tuesday evening, arranged exactly the way Sheldon Cooper preferred it — Leonard on the left side of the couch, Howard and Raj in the two chairs that had, through years of quiet negotiation, become theirs, and Penny curled into the remaining cushion with a glass of wine, half-listening to an argument about a comic book variant cover that had already been going on for eleven minutes.
Sheldon was mid-sentence, laying out with rigorous precision exactly why the alternate cover in question violated at least three established rules of continuity, when the air above the coffee table shimmered and a gilded envelope appeared out of absolutely nothing at all.
The room went silent.
“Did anyone else just see that,” Howard said carefully, “or have I finally had the stroke my mother’s been predicting since 1998.” “You saw it,” Raj whispered, gripping the arm of his chair.
Sheldon stood up so fast his own chair nearly toppled, already talking.
“Fascinating.
This is either an extremely elaborate practical joke, a controlled demonstration of localized spatial folding, or—” he paused, eyes narrowing with real excitement, “—first contact, in which case I would like it noted for the historical record that I predicted this exact scenario in my 2009 blog post on—” “Sheldon.” Leonard hadn’t moved from the couch, staring at the floating envelope with the particular flat dread of a man who had learned, over many years, to expect his life to get stranger without warning.
“Just — don’t touch it.” “Why would I not touch it?
It is quite possibly the single most significant discovery of the twenty-first century, sitting on our coffee table, and you want me to not touch it.” “Because every time something weird floats in the air in this apartment, it’s never good for you specifically,” Penny said, not even looking up from her wine.
Sheldon, entirely unmoved by this argument, reached out and took the envelope anyway, because he had never in his life let good sense stand between himself and an opportunity to be right about something.
The information hit him a half-second later — not sound, not text, just understanding, arriving whole.
Void City.
A City Lord.
A civilization existing entirely outside the recognized dimensional framework of known physics.
Sheldon’s mouth opened.
For a full three seconds, nothing came out of it, which the other four in the room would later agree was the single rarest event any of them had personally witnessed.
“This,” he finally said, voice tight with something between panic and pure delight, “invalidates several of my working models of spacetime, and I am furious about it, and I need to sit down.” He sat down.
“So you’re going,” Leonard said, already resigned.
“Obviously I’m going.
Do you understand what this represents?
A verified extradimensional civilization has just extended a personal invitation to me.” He straightened his cardigan with great dignity.
“I would be a poor representative of theoretical physics if I declined.” “Can we come?” Howard asked immediately.
“Absolutely not.
It didn’t invite you.” • • The Hidden Leaf Village.
At the small apartment assigned to him on the village outskirts, six-year-old Naruto Uzumaki sat alone on the floor, knees drawn to his chest, staring at nothing in particular.
He’d stopped bothering to wonder, most days, why the other children’s parents pulled them away when he wandered too close, or why the shopkeepers’ smiles always seemed to freeze the moment he stepped through their doors.
He hadn’t been given a reason.
He’d just learned, the way children learn things without ever being taught them directly, that something about him made grown-ups afraid, and that being afraid of a six-year-old apparently gave people permission to hate him for it too.
He was in the middle of picking sullenly at a hole in his sleeve when the golden envelope appeared in front of him.
Naruto blinked at it, unimpressed at first — plenty of strange things happened around him that other people pretended not to notice, and he’d long since stopped assuming any of them were good.
But this one didn’t glare at him, or whisper, or go quiet the way rooms full of adults always did.
It just hovered there, warm and glowing, and something about that made him lean forward instead of away.
He reached out and touched it before he could talk himself out of it.
He simply wasn’t there anymore.
The ANBU stationed outside — a rotating watch the Third Hokage had quietly assigned since the boy’s birth, more out of guilt than obligation — noticed within minutes that the child’s chakra signature, faint as it was at that age, had simply gone silent.
What followed inside the Hokage’s tower could not, by any honest description, be called a calm response.
“He’s what?” Hiruzen Sarutobi was on his feet before the ANBU had finished the sentence, pipe forgotten on the desk, decades of careful composure fraying at the edges in a way his advisors had rarely seen.
“Gone.
As in gone gone.
As in someone got past a full ANBU rotation and took a six-year-old out of his apartment without a single trace.” “There’s no trace, Hokage-sama.” The ANBU captain’s voice was carefully, professionally level, the tone of a man who had rehearsed this report in his head the entire run to the tower and still hadn’t found a version of it that sounded less alarming.
“No forced entry.
No chakra signature besides his own, and that simply — stopped.” “Stopped,” Hiruzen repeated.
“Stopped.” Within the hour, half the active ANBU roster had been quietly redirected to search a village that offered absolutely nothing to search, because there was, in the most literal sense, no lead to follow.
One particularly senior operative — a dog-masked shinobi with a well-earned reputation for calm under pressure — was discovered forty minutes later still standing in the middle of the boy’s empty apartment, staring at the worn, half-mended blanket on the floor as though sheer intensity of focus might make the boy reappear.
“With respect, Hokage-sama,” came a dry voice from the doorway — one of the older advisors, arms crossed, entirely unmoved by the general panic, “have we considered that the boy simply wandered off somewhere and this entire village is currently mobilizing over a missing six-year-old who is, statistically, probably sulking on a rooftop somewhere.” Hiruzen did not dignify that with an answer.
He was already reaching for his own crystal ball, the old man’s hands considerably less steady than they had been an hour ago, silently praying to whatever gods watched over a village that had already lost so much that they would not, on top of everything else, be forced to explain this particular disappearance to the boy’s absent parents.
• • Number Four, Privet Drive.
Ten-year-old Harry Potter had been lying in the cupboard under the stairs, doing absolutely nothing more sinister than watching a spider make its way across the low ceiling a few inches from his nose, when the golden envelope appeared in the cramped dark in front of him and, with a small flash of light, took him along with it a moment later.
In the kitchen, Petunia Dursley was midway through scrubbing a countertop that did not need scrubbing when a small, sharp thump — like something knocking against the underside of the staircase — reached her ears, followed by silence where there ought to have been the ordinary creak and shuffle of a boy shifting around in too small a space.
She dropped the sponge, more out of irritation than concern, and marched into the hall to see what he’d done now.
The lecture she’d already half-composed died before it began, because when she wrenched open the little cupboard door, there was nothing inside it at all — only a thin blanket, a few of his broken toys, and empty space where a boy ought to have been curled up waiting to be shouted at.
“Harry?” Petunia’s voice climbed an octave on the second syllable.
“Harry Potter, if this is one of your — your freakish tricks—” It was not, as it turned out, one of his tricks, mostly because Harry hadn’t done anything at all besides exist in the wrong place at the wrong moment, but Petunia had built an entire decade of denial around the assumption that anything unexplainable in her house was somehow his doing, and she was not about to abandon that framework now.
Vernon Dursley came stomping out of the sitting room a moment later, drawn by his wife’s rising hysteria, and arrived just in time to watch her fling the little cupboard door open a second time, as though looking again might somehow change what was inside it.
“He’s gone, Vernon!
Simply — gone!
Vanished into thin air!” “Don’t be ridiculous, people don’t just vanish—” Vernon’s bluster faltered as he crouched down to look for himself, taking in the thin blanket, the little broken toys, the complete and total absence of any child anywhere in that cramped space.
His face, already prone to reddening, deepened toward a color with no reasonable medical explanation.
“This is — this is one of their doing, isn’t it.
One of his lot.
Coming round here, taking the boy, without so much as a by-your-leave—” “What do we tell people?” Petunia’s hands had found their way to her own throat, gripping at nothing.
“What do we tell the neighbors, Vernon?” “We tell them nothing,” Vernon snapped, already pacing, already sweating.
“Absolutely nothing.
As far as anyone on this street is concerned, that boy went to his aunt’s for the summer, same as every year, and if he doesn’t turn back up—” He stopped himself before finishing the thought, because even Vernon Dursley, for all his faults, hadn’t quite worked out how he felt about the version of this where Harry simply never came back at all.
Down the hall, Dudley poked his head out of his own room, drawn by the shouting, and asked with real and genuine confusion why everyone was making such a fuss over the freak finally being gone.
Neither of his parents had an answer for him that didn’t sound, even to their own ears, faintly hollow.
• • Somewhere in an ordinary Japanese high school.
Sakamoto was walking down the hallway between classes — smoothly, effortlessly, the way Sakamoto did everything, managing to make even the simple act of walking look like the culmination of years of quiet mastery — when the golden envelope appeared in the air directly in his path.
He did not startle.
Sakamoto never startled.
He simply paused, regarded the impossible floating object with the same unbothered calm he might have given a slightly interesting pebble, and reached out to take it with a single unhurried motion, as though extradimensional invitations arrived for him on a semi-regular basis and this was merely today’s installment.
A small crowd of students who happened to be passing by paused as well, watching with the reverent, slightly baffled awe that had become their default reaction to nearly everything Sakamoto did.
The information settled into his mind.
A city beyond worlds.
A City Lord.
An invitation extended specifically to him.
Sakamoto considered this for exactly as long as it took to straighten his uniform collar, which did not need straightening, and offered the empty hallway a small, composed nod, as though accepting an invitation to tea rather than to another dimension entirely.
Then he continued on to class, envelope already gone, expression utterly unchanged, leaving behind him a hallway full of students who would spend the rest of the day debating, in hushed and admiring tones, what exactly they had just witnessed.
• • A quiet manor, some time before a certain ball.
Cinderella was in the garden when the envelope found her, kneeling in the dirt with her sleeves pushed up and a basket of vegetables half-filled beside her, the kind of ordinary, unremarkable afternoon she’d long since stopped expecting anything to interrupt.
She noticed the golden shimmer before she saw the envelope fully take shape, and unlike nearly everyone else it had visited that day, she did not startle, did not call out, did not go looking for anyone to confirm what she was seeing.
She had learned, over years of a life that offered her very little that was fair, to keep her reactions quiet and her hopes quieter still.
She set down her trowel, wiped her hands on her apron, and reached for it.
The information arrived gently, almost kindly, compared to the abrupt shocks it had delivered elsewhere.
A city beyond her world entirely.
Work.
A place that asked nothing of her except her time, and offered, in exchange, an escape from a house that had never once felt like her own.
Cinderella looked back toward the manor for a long moment, toward the windows where her stepmother’s shadow occasionally passed, and felt something in her chest that she hadn’t allowed herself to feel in a very long time.
Hope, cautious and small, but real.
“Yes,” she said softly, to no one, and closed her hand around the envelope before anyone could come looking for her.
• • Back in Void City, Ari watched the five confirmations arrive on her panel one after another, mildly pleased with herself and not remotely surprised, since surprise took effort she generally preferred to skip.
[Guest response confirmed: Sheldon Cooper.
World tier: Level 1.] [Guest response confirmed: Naruto Uzumaki.
World tier: Level 3.] [Guest response confirmed: Harry Potter.
World tier: Level 3.] [Guest response confirmed: Sakamoto.
World tier: Level 1.] [Guest response confirmed: Cinderella.
World tier: Level 1.] Ari blinked at the panel, reading it twice.
“Level three,” she said slowly.
“Twice.
Out of five basic cards.” [Correct.
The Basic Invitation Card carries a ninety percent chance of connecting to a Level 1 world, and a ten percent chance of connecting to a higher-level world.] “So the odds of pulling two higher-level worlds out of five cards—” [Statistically low, Host.
The System calculates this outcome as fortunate.] Ari leaned back into the sofa, turning her drink slowly in one hand, a small and satisfied smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
She hadn’t asked for anything special.
She’d bought the cheap cards because the cheap cards were, quite simply, cheaper, and she had never once in her life turned down a bargain on principle.
“Huh,” she said, mostly to herself.
“Guess I’m lucky.” [The System concurs, Host.] She glanced toward the gate, where five very different lives were, in their own separate ways, about to collide with hers.
“Well,” Ari said, settling deeper into the sofa.
“This should be interesting.”