"So these," I said to the assembled group, "are some examples of what we're looking for. Note the look of the interior doors, and these baseboards. These things on the walls are outlets, we specifically want to see ones that look like this - different countries might have other kinds. What else... okay, these are light switches, see, they move. Zoey, what else am I not thinking of that we can easily make them picture?"

We were getting ready to start our day, and I was hoping to get us to our destination within a few hours. I didn't want to let Grunkle into my memory palace, but I'd pulled everyone else in to get some quick examples of Earth architecture.

"Do we want to go residential?" Zoey asked. "If we look for a fast food chain, or a hotel, or something like that there's a thousand of them that all look the same. Wouldn't that be easier?"

I nodded. "Yeah, probably it would. I'm a little worried about getting caught on camera though, plus for some of them it'll be extra hard to figure out where we even are. Although, that's another whole thing; I know you want to go to Arizona, and human Calliope wants to go to New Jersey."

Zoey shrugged. "We can aim for New Jersey, I don't care."

"Seriously? You're sure?"

"Yeah. I mean, I can just call my parents and they'll get it sorted out. I might not be able to fly, since I just have an expired learner's permit and Matlyn obviously doesn't have even that, but they'll help me get a car and stuff, or figure out how we can take a bus or train. Also, I want Mattie to see more of the country anyway. It's all good."

I was having a really hard time reconciling this relaxed pleasant person with my memories of being bullied. "Uh... thanks? Okay, cool, so East coast it is. That means we can look for older homes, with wood floors and shit, and increase our odds a little; those are all over, but East coast will have a teeny bit more than the West coast, and statistically we won't end up in the middle of the country just because of the lower population density."

"Carpets," Calliope said. "You mentioned wood floors, but the carpets are distinct on Earth. It may help to look for those, at first, and then narrow things down after we're in a closer place in Nusos."

I nodded. "Okay, yeah. Oh, and kitchens! Yeah, let me show you guys a bunch of kitchens, they don't look the same at all on Earth." The parts were there, of course, but the overall appearance was very different. I pulled up memories of various houses for an hour or so, showing off anything that felt like they'd be able to get a feel for it. I realized that a big problem was generalizing things they weren't familiar with; I could show them a bed from Earth, but there were a million different styles they might encounter. How could I get them to picture a generic bed? What were the core properties of an Earth bed, that were different from a fantasyland bed?

"If this doesn't work," I said to Zoey, "I'll go with your idea. A hotel, probably, since so many of them have the same vibe."

We started walking. It was tempting to try and go directly to my mom's house, but I didn't know if the iron would fuck things up or if she'd shoot us or something. Anything else in New Jersey was out, since I hadn't been there since I was twelve and I didn't want to count on anything looking the same. Better to just give it some time, see what we could find. Katrin and Errod cornered me at the first stop, and we hopped back into the memory palace.

"So..." Katrin said, "this place looks... different."

She wasn't wrong. The bedroom from Bill's house was still there, but I'd added a door to one of the walls and had moved what was left of my conspiracy-theory board into the room. Some stuff was now in another room hidden below us, including random bits from the rooms that I'd unraveled. I'd started categorizing things, and had added a library with all our books and - for atmosphere - the creepy sculptures. There was the original creepy statue of me - probably - that was curled in on itself, and then the two I'd made to look like the things in that vision I had when I was using Yesrin's Loom, and finally the bust of Betokat.

Errod examined it. "Should you be keeping this?"

I sighed. "It's fine. It's... okay, so, Betokat kinda got away from me. I lied when I told Matlyn and Zoey that I'd dealt with it."

Katrin frowned at me. "I figured, given the look you gave me."

"Well I didn't want to get into it, but I wanted you to know I wasn't trying to keep it from you. No more secrets, right? Betokat saw the things, the boxes, that I got from the Queen of Candles. And I guess they're not on the best of terms. I almost stripped the oydirme clean, and I did super fuck it up, so maybe we're okay? As for the bust... that's harmless on its own. I'd copied it before re-imprinting the oydirme in case I fucked up, so this is just a totally normal copy - but I can't use it anymore, probably, because the oydirme it was originally on was modified. If I put this imprint on a regular one Betokat will know something is wrong right away."

I could still get something out of it, maybe, with some practice and time. And anyway, I wasn't going to destroy it or throw it away - it was a copy of a Demigod, that was incredibly cool. I led them into the other new room, which took the place of everything else I'd nuked - it was basically just a big rectangular space. "I'm open to ideas about this bit, I'm thinking some couches and stuff. Maybe a hot tub. The other rooms were getting cramped when we were all in there. I can re-create the wagon or my old room at the Long Haul Hotel or whatever any time, I want to start shifting this place to more of a permanent, planned space."

Errod raised an eyebrow. "But... you kept the bedroom from Bill's house?"

"That... wasn't intentional. As soon as I tried to put anything back, that kinda snapped into place. It was the first room here, and I'm wondering if it's sort of built-in somehow. It feels like it wore a groove into this place or something. Anyway, I might get rid of it later, it's fine as a placeholder for now."

Everyone promised they were trying their best to picture the right kind of place - Grunkle made a snarky comment about me not showing him what I'd shown the others, but I just ignored him - and we got moving. As we went from room to room, I couldn't help but think about how much I loved Nusos. I'd always liked the idea of exploring abandoned places, but in the real world most of them smelled like piss and were covered in graffiti and broken bottles. It wasn't even good graffiti, most of the time.

But Nusos... every room felt like one that had been left with everything in place, by someone who fled the city in a hurry. There were the occasional glitches, like the hallway where it was just fifteen doors in a row and then a dead end, or the room with curtains made of wood. Speaking of windows, there were a few rooms that would have been dead ends if we hadn't climbed through the window into another passage - obviously none of the windows or doors led outside.

There were enough of us that several monsters ran away when they saw us; I caught glimpses of strange, skeletal forms through doorways and something that looked like a chair made of bones that squeezed through a hole in the wall as we approached. When Matlyn fell a few steps back in one hallway arms reached from the walls as if trying to pull her in, but Errod had been keeping an eye out and lunged out, destroying both arms before she'd even seen them. She squealed and jumped, probably thinking for a moment that he was trying to stab her, and then her eyes went wide as she saw the still-twitching limbs impaled on his blade.

She stayed closer after that.

I didn't mind the monsters, other than the mind-altering ones. One of those did try to snare us just after lunch, but it didn't go well. I wasn't using divination, since Cyne had said it was dangerous to look through the walls and I didn't want to slip up, but even just having my ghost traveling alongside my body was enough - when the room we were in tried to change, tried to fill with sunlight and birds and the sounds of a busy street around us, I saw everything like a double exposure. Errod, Grunkle, and I all walked directly towards the tentacled creature in the corner and proceeded to slice it to bits. The others were a little disturbed at having been almost snared, but knowing that half of the group could see through the mental manipulation was reassuring.

Human Calliope had been quiet, but she came up to me shortly after that. "You are in a good mood. Are you looking forward to seeing Earth again?"

I smiled and shook my head. "Nah. I mean, I'm a little excited for that. But mainly I just... really like this place. Look at that, where the doors line up. You can see a room in the distance with oil lamps burning. Does that mean it just popped into existence? That's amazing, right? And this stuff is... I know technically it's ephemeral matter, but it's so close to real that I can barely tell the difference. A whole endless building of rooms that appear, full of stuff, out of nowhere. That's so neat!"

She nodded, but I didn't think she agreed with me.

We kept walking, and in the afternoon we stopped at a kitchen that was clearly from Earth... but not recently. A memory pinged at me, and I recalled Bill explaining that around the time a huge number of houses had been built in the Phoenix area there were two options for your kitchen: Harvest Gold, or Avocado Green. This one was Harvest Gold. Yellow fridge, yellow oven, yellow linoleum tiles. "Okay, great news. This is not only from Earth, but it's almost certainly from the right country. It's also like... I don't know, fifty years old? But that's fine. Take a closer look at the outlets - the white rectangles on the walls - and get a feel for the size of the doorways and stuff."

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

The sink didn't work, which wasn't surprising, and there was nothing in the refrigerator. There was, however, some very 70's serving dishes in the cabinets - the kind of shit I saw sometimes at the Goodwill. I was tempted to take some, even though I knew that it would fall apart after a day or so outside Nusos. We got moving again as soon as everyone had had a chance to stretch and drink some water, and much to my relief we stayed in Earth-adjacent rooms for the most part.

When we did open a door to somewhere that looked wrong, I just backed us up and tried another way. At one point a room had a whole wall missing, and I could see other incomplete rooms through the hole. Something was odd about it, odd but familiar, and as Katrin sent more lights out ahead of us I realized what it was. We were looking into an IKEA, or some similar place. The partial rooms were showrooms for furniture. We backed up and took another door, but not without a little hesitation.

Finally, we began to really narrow things down. "Alright, gang. Here's the deal. The last two rooms looked pretty good to me, the outlets were American and they looked reasonably modern. I don't think I can fully control how we exit, so it's time to start trying and see what happens. I'm going to open the way to my domain in Biltagiretzae, the one people use for storage. We're going to dump all the shit we shouldn't take to Earth in there, and I'm going to get out some stuff I brought for us to sell. We need to assume that none of that stuff will be accessible until we leave Earth again."

We all got changed into our most Earth-friendly outfits, and overall we looked like some sort of well-off slightly wealthy and eccentric people. Not normal Earth fashion, but not anything that would stick out all that much. Getting some blue jeans would be high priority, and our backpacks would be notable, but... yeah, it was all fine. I twisted the dial on my bracer until it was on the symbol for Biltagiretzae and began to concentrate, but it ended up taking almost two hours before things clicked into place.

I blindly shoved everything I was handed in, and finally moved my own things over. I looked at the little cage with Exposition in it - the flame-like spirit had been quiet during our journey, except when I had tried unsuccessfully to ask it about Zoey's odd spirit. "You're going to be okay in Biltagiretzae?"

"Query received. I feel the open connection. This one will be safe on its plane of origin."

"You're from Biltagiretzae?"

"Correct. Clarification. Has this plane had its fundamental structure altered?"

I thought about that for a moment. "Yes, I think so. I think someone... two thousand years ago, probably... wiped it clean and changed it somehow." Harmid had said that it used to be a plane of just toxic gas, until the Clockmaker had wiped it clean - with the planar terraforming device that had later destroyed the world - and somehow created the indestructible metal cubes around each domain.

"Understood. This one cannot detect other spirits. Clarification. No. Disregard. This one is ready to proceed."

Fuck, this thing's type of spirit had been genocided by the Clockmaker - other than the ones I'd released in the Temple of Convergence, or others that had been off the plane when it had been wiped. I put Exposition into the plane, right next to Katrin's identical spirit which she hadn't named yet. I looked around, sure I was forgetting something, and saw it. "Errod. Buddy. You're going to need to stash the sword. Nobody on Earth is walking around with swords, it's going to be a big problem."

He frowned. "I... it's...."

"Yeah, I know. It's a magic sword that was destined to be with you. I totally get it. If you wanted to part with it I'd be shocked. But I'm telling you that if you bring it to Earth it's going to cause trouble, and that trouble is going to lead to you getting arrested and the sword being taken away. It's a bad idea."

Katrin put a hand on his shoulder, and after a moment he nodded and handed the sword over. I finished up by hauling out the little gold ingots, and we all took some - they were super heavy, so there was no way I could have carried them all myself. "Okay," I said, "I'm going to let the connection close. And none of us want to wait another two hours to get it open again, so are we sure we're all good? Great."

We started walking again, but this time we were all holding the shoulder of the person in front of us and concentrating on the idea of leaving Nusos. For a few rooms nothing happened, and then suddenly there was light streaming in through actual windows. I stopped dead, and felt at the edges of the doorway - it wasn't like the portals I'd seen before, because it wasn't properly tethered to anything. Normally, there was a sense that two places had become one... but here, it was like a hole leading to absolute nothingness, the edges flapping in the breeze. Except, visually, it was just some normal-looking bedroom.

As we'd agreed ahead of time, Zoey pushed past me into the room. It had to be either her or me, since we were most familiar with Earth, and there was no way it was a good idea to possibly separate the planar expert from the group. If the worst happened and Zoey got left here without us, she'd be able to figure things out for herself. She looked a the books on the shelf first, and the headed towards the window.

"Books are in English," she said, "nerdy shit. We're on the second floor, looks... oh shit, there's people leaving the house right now. Hang on. Okay, they're getting in a minivan. I can't see the plates. You're blocking the exit I think, so I can't look at the rest of the house, but there's a sort of office in this little side nook... I think it's a closet they turned into an office. Yeah, there's a computer and shit in here. Uh... bingo! Yes, found mail. We're in Virginia. That counts as East coast, right?"

I was shit at geography. "Uh, yeah. I mean, D.C. is in Virginia, and that's pretty close to New Jersey. But I think Virginia also sticks out pretty far West, so it depends where we are."

Zoey shrugged. "I say we go for it. There's a parking lot across the street, we're probably right at the edge of a residential area. That's better than showing up in the middle of the suburbs somewhere. And we know the people who live here just left, so we're not about to get arrested for trespassing."

Those were all good points. "Okay, everyone head on through. I'll go last."

Most of them looked excited, though Grunkle frowned as soon as he stepped through - as if he'd just eaten something bitter. "Can we get out of here?" He said, "It's making me itchy."

The room was mostly filled with a very large bed, so things were a bit cramped by the time it was my turn. Katrin was the second to last to go through, and she stopped dead as soon as she walked past the doorway. "Oh. Oh. There's... really no mana here. At all. It's... completely barren, I thought there was nothing in the middle of a city, but this is... this is less than nothing. Oh, it feels so strange."

Well, that answered that question. We had kept the mana battery with us, and the smaller one made from the chunk removed from its casing, and Katrin also had a little one medically implanted into her body - it had previously been in Jeort and we had cut it out, but Katrin had decided to keep it and use it herself. It wasn't a bad idea to have extra mana in an emergency. Between all those, and Katrin's ability to quickly move it around, I wasn't worried. I stepped through, and let the connection to Nusos close behind me.

"Okay, here's test number one. Cross your fingers, guys."

The dial in my bracer was made from the same stuff as the planar lodestones, which had clearly worked on Earth. So I turned it to Nusos, concentrated, and... nothing. I thought about the time we'd scryed on Earth from Brinkmar and how it felt, and tried to sort of... reverse it... and then tried to remember how it had felt to use the planar lodestone, and then tried putting as much mana as possible into it. Nothing helped, although I did get this faint sensation of something just out of reach. "Okay, so... I'll keep trying, but as of now we're stranded here. I think I can get it though, it's just going to take practice."

Test number two was about our minds and souls, which had - as expected - snapped back to our bodies the way they would in a highly warded area. I'd been hopeful that wouldn't happen to me since mine were using fate threads, but no dice. Now I concentrated and tried to shunt them back to my memory palace, but... nothing. I turned the dial on my bracer to Ematse and tried again, and after a moment I was able to send my mind - but not my ghost, oddly - to the memory palace. As soon as I stopped applying pressure it snapped back. Huh.

"Okay, partial failure on test two. I don't get why, though. I was sure I'd be able to do it." Katrin and Errod knew what I was referring to, of course, but I hadn't gotten into the fate stuff with the others so I couldn't properly complain. Normally I'd get around that by pulling the two of them into my memory palace, but... well. This was going to be a pain in the ass. I also wouldn't have divination, which I'd gotten used to using all the time.

Test three was to try threadsight, and that one seemed to work fine. I did, in fact have a fate thread that was pointing off through the walls and into the distance. "Test three is positive for me. We'll map it later. Okay, that's that. Let's get out of here."

We headed downstairs, and while I was tempted to poke around in the house I really didn't want us to start our time on Earth by getting arrested. Some cats scrambled away from us and hid, but there were no people and it didn't look like there was any security to worry about. We headed out the front door, acting casual, and I looked around. It was early, and it was cold out - trees were either bare or showing off fall colors, something I hadn't seen in a long time. In Phoenix, trees either stayed green all year round or they abruptly dropped everything at some random time of the year - often well after fall, like they'd just realized they missed it. Even then, they rarely turned any color other than brown.

By my reckoning, it was the eighteenth of November - so the weather made sense. Still, I somehow hadn't thought about that and so I'd left my cold weather clothing in planar storage. It was probably for the best, since the warm stuff looked very out of place for Earth, but I was already freezing my ass off. There was frost scattered around, and the wind was cutting right through me. The coldest I was used to, in the early morning in early February in Phoenix, was maybe thirty-five degrees. This... was probably colder than that.

"Okay, top priority is finding some coats," I said. The others nodded.

I looked around to get my bearings. There was a parking lot across from us with some sort of big meeting hall, a hill I couldn't see over to my right, and to my left... looked like probably businesses? That seemed like the way to go for starters. We headed down to the corner, and sure enough there was a gas station maybe two hundred feet away. "Okay, this way looks like it's going to be our best bet. We'll head along this road until we find something, although... looks like stuff may not be open yet. That's fine. We'll still be able to see what our options are. We'll be looking for clothes, somewhere that buys gold, somewhere to get phones, and somewhere to get a car."

Grunkle watched a car drive by, eyes wide. "Where the fuck are we?"

Oh. Right. "You ever hear a creation myth about the gods plucking humans from somewhere with no magic? Uh, Monduhile?"

Grunkle nodded, still looking stunned.

"Well... welcome to Monduhile, locally known as Earth. Specifically the United States of America, more specifically the state of Virginia. I didn't catch the name of the city, nor does it matter since we're going to get out of here as soon as possible. You guys don't look like the locals - you know how it's hard to place where the fuck Zoey and I are from? That's how people are going to be looking at you. All they'll know is that you're not from around here, so we might want to pick some countries to say you're from at some point."

Grunkle was looking all around himself. "There's no magic here. Katrin, you have the battery, right? You need to keep me alive. I'm going to shrivel up and die. Oh, this is fucked up. I thought it was maybe just that house or something, but it's not. Is it? It's the whole plane."

"Not a plane, a planet. Floating in a giant void filled with more worlds than you could possibly imagine or ever hope to count. Anyway, keep the third eye closed or shit is going to go really badly."

His frown just got deeper. "I want to go back," he said, "I've changed my mind."

I grinned at him. "Too late, Grunkle. You're trapped here. Enjoy."

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