“I’m already on my way back to Portland, my dear Nick.
I know you have a lot of questions, but don’t let your imagination run wild.
Wait until I get home.” Aunt Marie ended the call immediately after saying those words.
Nick tried calling again, but her phone had already been turned off.
He stared at the screen for several seconds before releasing a helpless sigh.
Marie clearly knew that his Grimm abilities had awakened.
Her sudden decision to return confirmed that her cross-country trip had involved far more than sightseeing.
Unfortunately, there was nothing Nick could do until she arrived.
He went to the kitchen and reheated a bowl of chicken and dumplings left in the refrigerator.
After finishing the meal, he took a shower and climbed into bed.
Sleep refused to come.
Nick closed his eyes, counted sheep, changed positions, and tried every breathing exercise he knew.
His thoughts continued moving between Aunt Marie, the Wesen hidden throughout Portland, and the golden ticket waiting inside his body.
After nearly an hour, he gave up on falling asleep naturally.
Nick struck his thigh hard enough to leave a minor bruise, then lay back against the pillow.
A familiar sensation appeared in his mind.
Minor physical injury detected.
Activate Suspended Animation Recovery?
Nick confirmed the prompt.
His breathing slowed until it became almost impossible to detect.
His heartbeat weakened, his muscles relaxed, and every conscious thought faded as his body entered a deathlike restorative state.
When he opened his eyes again, orange sunlight was streaming through the bedroom window.
The sun was already setting.
Nick sat up and stretched.
The exhaustion from the previous night had disappeared, and the bruise on his thigh was completely gone.
Suspended Animation Recovery remained one of the most useful rewards he had received from the Magic Movie Ticket.
Any injury or physical discomfort, even something as small as a scratch, allowed him to activate the ability while resting.
Once confirmed, his body entered a state resembling clinical death.
His heartbeat became faint, his breathing nearly stopped, and his metabolism dropped to an unnaturally low level while every wound and illness began healing.
Nick rarely became sick because he had trained consistently since childhood, but he still used the ability whenever stress or sleeplessness left him exhausted.
The sensation after waking was better than ordinary rest.
His muscles felt loose, his thoughts were clear, and even his mood improved.
There was little risk of frightening anyone.
Nick rarely stayed away from home overnight, and he never invited casual partners back to his house.
No one would accidentally discover him lying in bed without an obvious pulse.
After getting dressed, he sat at his computer and wrote a report for Captain Renard.
The document summarized the Robin Howell rescue, the discovery of the hidden cellar, and his actions at the cabin without mentioning Monroe, Blutbaden, or anything else that could not be explained through normal police procedure.
Once the report was sent, Nick closed the computer and raised his right hand.
The Magic Movie Ticket materialized above his palm.
Golden light flowed through the intricate patterns covering its surface.
Unlike its dormant state, every line now appeared alive, as though molten energy were circulating beneath the unknown material.
Nick admired it for several seconds.
His first movie journey had ended in humiliation aboard the Nostromo.
The second placed him inside an unfamiliar Spanish zombie film where he survived but failed to rescue the intended targets.
This would be his third opportunity.
Nick tightened his grip on the card and tore it in half.
A brilliant glow erupted from the separation.
The light gathered into a sphere around his body before expanding without warning.
The bedroom vanished.
For an instant, Nick felt himself falling through an endless golden void.
Then the light exploded.
The roar of ocean waves reached his ears.
Something warm and wet dragged across his cheek.
Nick opened his eyes and found a large Golden Retriever standing over him.
The dog panted happily before licking the side of his head again.
“Bad dog.” Nick pushed the animal’s face away and sat up.
He was lying on the sand near Cabrillo Beach, not far from the San Pedro side of the Port of Los Angeles.
Massive container cranes rose in the distance, and the letters painted across the port equipment made his location unmistakable.
Nick had never visited Los Angeles in either life, but there were few places in America with a harbor that large.
Men and women walked along the shoreline while children played closer to the water.
None appeared concerned by the stranger who had been lying motionless on the beach.
The Golden Retriever turned and bounded toward a couple walking hand in hand.
Its owners laughed as the dog rejoined them without looking back at Nick.
“So much for loyalty.” A notebook lay in the sand beside him.
Nick picked it up and read the unfinished lines written across the open page.
A meteor screams as it reaches the end of its life… The poem was dramatic enough to make him wince.
At the same moment, a fragment of foreign memory entered his mind.
In this world, his name was Levi Kane.
Levi had served as a Scout Sniper in the United States Marine Corps before leaving active duty.
He had no surviving relatives and suffered from severe post-traumatic stress, depression, and recurring nightmares.
Several minutes before Nick arrived, Levi had come to this beach intending to end his own life.
That was the entire explanation.
Nick searched through the implanted memories, but most lacked detail.
The Magic Movie Ticket had given him enough information to support the new identity without providing a complete lifetime of personal experiences.
Levi Kane had grown up on a small ranch in Oregon.
His childhood was stable, his parents treated him well, and he developed an interest in shooting while hunting and controlling predators around the property.
At eighteen, he joined the Marines.
His natural marksmanship and patience eventually led him into Scout Sniper training.
What followed was a career built around deployments, surveillance, and carefully selected shots taken from extreme distances.
Levi’s official record listed more than one hundred confirmed kills.
Not all of them had been enemy combatants.
Some operations ended with civilians caught in the line of fire.
Children had also died during strikes and engagements connected to his missions, whether through mistaken identification, poor intelligence, or orders issued by people far removed from the battlefield.
The memories did not clearly show every incident.
They carried only the emotional weight left behind.
By the time Levi turned thirty, guilt had made continued military service unbearable.
He left the Marines but soon discovered that civilian life offered little structure for someone whose most valuable skill involved killing people from a distance.
Private military contractors provided an easy answer.
Levi spent the next four years moving between more than eleven security companies and military contractors.
His marksmanship remained exceptional, and his operational performance was rarely questioned.
His employers had a less favorable opinion of his personality.
Levi refused certain assignments, challenged questionable intelligence, and occasionally abandoned positions when civilians entered the target area.
Supervisors described him as highly effective but difficult to control.
Private work still placed blood on his hands, yet it offered one advantage over military service.
He could walk away.
Disobeying a direct order in uniform might have led to a court-martial.
A contractor who demanded that he shoot civilians could simply be told to find another sniper.
Even with those limits, Levi’s combined kill count had passed two hundred.
The nightmares grew worse.
Several company psychologists eventually declared him unfit for deployment.
Once that evaluation began circulating between contractors, no reputable organization would hire him.
For almost six months, Levi remained unemployed and isolated.
That morning, he finally broke.
Nick reached into the sand beside him and found an M1911 pistol.
He brushed the grains from its slide and checked the weapon carefully.
One round was missing from the magazine.
The metal near the chamber still held traces of warmth, confirming it had been fired recently.
Nick inspected his clothes and body but found no wound, blood, or injury.
There was also no corpse hidden nearby.
Levi Kane had apparently died, yet Nick had not taken possession of a dead man’s physical form.
His body remained his own.
This matched his previous movie journeys.
The Magic Movie Ticket physically transported Nick while altering the world around him to accommodate his presence.
It created records, memories, relationships, and identities that had never existed in the original story.
The Nostromo had gained an eighth hypersleep pod and a complete personnel file for him.
Now Levi Kane possessed Nick Burkhardt’s face.
Nick returned the M1911 to its holster and removed a wallet from his pocket.
The driver’s license inside carried his photograph beneath the name Levi Kane.
The image confirmed what he already knew.
Whatever the original Levi had looked like, the man now occupying his place was still Nick.
“That’s one strange way to enter a movie.” He checked his remaining equipment.
The wallet contained several credit cards, cash, military identification, and permits connected to Levi’s work as a contractor.
A duffel bag nearby held clothing, ammunition, and basic personal supplies.
Nick then pulled out the smartphone in his pocket.
The date displayed on the screen was June 5, 2024.
A brief sense of disorientation passed through him.
Only moments earlier, he had been inside his Portland home in 2008.
Now sixteen years had disappeared in an instant.
His previous lives made the shift even stranger.
Before becoming Nick Burkhardt, he had lived into the mid-2020s.
When he awakened as a six-year-old child, the Cold War had only recently ended.
His first movie journey sent him forward to 2122 aboard an interstellar commercial vessel.
Compared with outer space more than a century in the future, arriving in Los Angeles during 2024 was almost reasonable.
Nick took a slow breath and adjusted.
The modern smartphone, vehicles, clothing, and port infrastructure all looked familiar from his previous life.
He would not need to learn an entirely new society or pretend to understand technology decades beyond his experience.
His greater concern was identifying the movie.
Levi Kane did not belong to any story Nick clearly remembered.
The name stirred something faint in his memory, but no complete plot followed it.
There were only two likely explanations.
Levi was either an obscure supporting character from a movie Nick had overlooked, or this world belonged to something he had never watched.
Neither possibility was reassuring.
Even complete knowledge of Alien had not saved him from dying before the crew reached the derelict spacecraft.
During the Spanish zombie film, ignorance of the plot left him almost entirely dependent on luck.
If this movie was unfamiliar, completing its mission would be far more difficult.
Nick searched the false memories for names, organizations, or events that might provide a clue.
Nothing useful appeared beyond Levi’s military and contracting history.
The Magic Movie Ticket usually assigned its objective shortly after arrival.
He needed that mission before making any decisions.
A notification sounded from the phone.
Nick looked down.
The message came from an unknown number.
Report to Camp Pendleton at 1:00 p.m.
on June 7.
Transportation will arrive at noon.
A long sequence of capital letters appeared beneath the instructions, likely representing a classified military office, intelligence unit, or private organization.
Nick did not recognize the abbreviation.
That was not necessarily a problem.
Camp Pendleton was one of the largest Marine Corps installations on the West Coast and home to I Marine Expeditionary Force.
Whoever had contacted Levi possessed clear connections to the United States military.
The message also gave him two days to prepare.
Before Nick could search the abbreviation, the Magic Movie Ticket sent a new prompt directly into his mind.
Main Mission: Save the world.
Secondary Mission: Save the female lead.
Nick stared at the calm ocean.
His first objective had been to kill a Xenomorph aboard the Nostromo.
The second required rescuing two trapped civilians during a zombie outbreak.
This time, the ticket expected him to save the entire planet.
Nick looked again at the order directing him to Camp Pendleton.
Whatever waited there was connected to a threat large enough to endanger the world.
Somewhere inside the same story was an unknown woman the ticket had identified as its female lead.
Saving her would increase his final reward.
Failing might mean there would be no world left to return to.
Nick closed the notebook, collected Levi Kane’s belongings, and rose from the sand.
Two days remained before the scheduled pickup.
He intended to use every hour.