A way back was a long way away, apparently. A very long way away. Daniel looked at the bags they’d purchased, fit for travel. They’d only be gone for a few days, but, Eliza had said, a little dourly, it was better to be safe than sorry. He had the feeling she was scared it wasn’t going to work out, that she had to prepare for the way back. It was possible, but not a possibility he was willing to entertain. If there was no future for them here, they had to be able to go back. They had to. 

The way there was more than a little complicated. Apparently, Liz was barely in control of her powers enough to do something even remotely complicated, and so she’d come up with an interesting solution. Eliza knew how to use that power, though. So an object had been sent through with a bit of that power in it. 

Infusing objects with magic is a complicated and arduous ordeal that most self-respecting mages eschew in favour of throwing raw magical energy at each other. The problem, mostly, is that using an object that has magic running through it is a little bit like opening a souped-up version of a modified Schrödinger’s box. The contents of the box exist in a quantum state, multiple possibilities in superposition until you open it. The magical object exists in a state of both being powered and unpowered until you try to activate it. In both cases, the odds have been fiddled with to massively increase the likelihood of the desired outcome. The shield reflects fire. The cloak becomes invisible. 

But when playing with odds, even massively fixed ones, there is always the chance that you’ll open the box, and the cat will be neither alive nor dead, but instead be a very living, very angry badger. 

It was for that reason that Daniel had never bothered with magical objects and items much. They were too unpredictable. Even a thousand-to-one chance that your boots turn you into garlic bread when you jump, he figured, was a chance too high for him to take. 

But this one was, apparently, simply an object that held some power, enough for Eliza to drain, and to send them both back to their own world. As Eliza said it, it would take less energy to get someone home than it would cost her to turn someone into a frog, if that was something she was interested in doing. Between her and Liz, they had discovered a fundamental truth about their realities. 

Objects, people, stories shared between realities were, as they had discovered, coiled up like a spring or a rubber band. With only a gentle magic nudge, someone like that could be catapulted back to where they were from, new body included. 

What Liz hadn’t discovered was how to send the object somewhere specific. So it had slipped through the veil between worlds and it was… somewhere. Eliza knew where. She could feel it, even, but they’d had to go through dozens of maps, with only the vaguest sense to go on. Eventually, however, with a lot less excitement than he’d expected for something this important, she exclaimed that she’d found it, and pointed at a specific point on a map. A map, they figured out a second later, of Iceland, an island off the coast of an entirely different continent. The distance between here and there would have taken them forever to cross where they’d come from. Voyages like that were simply, well, not taken overseas. But people here had discovered most of the world in a way that they simply hadn’t back in their own world. 

Iceland, it turned out, was a six-hour flight away. So they packed their bags. Quietly. There wasn’t much to talk about after all, right? They both wanted to go back. Eliza wanted him to go back. He didn’t doubt it. He had to assume she’d want to be out of that body too. Sure, to him she was, well, beautiful. Right up until the dinner with Jenny and Hayden, he’d seen her light up a bit more every day, and her lust for life had given her a glow, an energy. He could’ve looked at her forever. But something like that couldn’t go both ways. They both had to go back. Even if that made things painful and awkward right now. It was, simply put, for the best. He wouldn’t be able to find happiness here.

He hated this, though. The quiet. The not talking. It was painful and constant and it tugged at his emotions like a hook in his brain, putting him on edge in a way he hadn’t been for months. Not that he had any intention of lashing out. But it made him feel like there were things he had to say and he couldn’t think of any of them. It was frustrating beyond belief. He tried not to think about it much, but every once in a while something would come along and make itself impossible to ignore. 

Eliza had brought him a plate of food when he’d just got done packing. Not that he’d been bringing much. He wasn’t exactly intending on coming back. She had handed it to him and for a moment their fingers had touched. Like electricity shooting through him, he had been so acutely aware of the short moment of connection, it had tied his stomach in knots. Neither of them had said anything, only keeping their eyes locked on each other, unspoken, invisible words churning in his head. It had been physically painful. 

Then she’d turned away to finish up her own bags, her face an unreadable portrait of emotions. She’d been packing for a while, but he hadn’t been wanting to pry. Her privacy was important, doubly so now. The last thing he wanted was to say or do something wrong and ruin their last few days together with an explosive fight. Not that he was worried she’d leave him behind. He just… didn’t want to remember her like that. He wanted to remember her sitting across from him with a pair of chopsticks, smiling at the terrible joke he’d just made, radiant in ways she had no way of ever seeing herself. Even if they never saw each other again in that other world, that’s an image he would probably cherish for… some time. 

The airport wasn’t far, and a single bus ride, much as both of them disliked buses, took them there in less than an hour, just after sunrise. The ride was as quiet as the past few days had been, although Daniel caught Eliza looking at a mother entertaining her child with a smile he didn’t even want to think of as wistful. Whatever she did with her life once they’d arrived back in the other world, he wasn’t going to be a part of it, and he didn’t want that as a reminder. But it was nice to see her smile again, at least. 

The airport itself had been a hurdle they had been expecting to overcome. Daniel, with all of his cards still present, would have no trouble getting past customs, but Eliza had been a different problem to consider. They had done their due diligence in researching everything that came with international travel, and Eliza had promptly gone to city hall. Shortly after, she’d made a trip to the bank, and then back to city hall. As it turned out, it was remarkably easy to get a temporary travel passport if the right palms were greased, and it wasn’t like they were going to need their nest-egg much longer after this trip. Eliza’s official identity just hadn’t come up before. 

When she’d come home, she’d clutched the paper with her official name and identity close to her chest, a look of melancholy on her face. She hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t either. 

It turned out to be no problem at all. Customs took her temporary visa without trouble, and they were waved through to the ‘gate’, which was just another building rather than the, well, gate he’d been expecting. There, they waited quietly for their flight. Daniel retrieved some pre-packaged food from his carry-on bag. -- apparently airport food was overly expensive, and they wanted to avoid any unpleasant surprises on their journey -- and offered a sandwich to Eliza. She took it with a smile that didn’t quite make it to the rest of her face, and they nodded at each other, eating quietly. 

After a while, the monotone voice on the speakers started to become background noise, and it was only because everyone around them stood up when it called out the name of the city -- which Daniel wasn’t even going to try to pronounce -- they’d be landing at. Strangely, it looked like Eliza was nervous, even though they’d already made it past the part that had been most likely to give them trouble. After all, the flight would be a piece of cake, just six hours of waiting in what was, according to his research, the safest way to travel. Then, in the city itself, they would be able to rent transportation. 

They shuffled through the tube and into one of the most cramped spaces Daniel had ever set foot in. It reminded him of a makeshift barracks he’d once spent a few nights in. Okay, so it wouldn’t be a pleasant six hours, but he’d been through a lot worse. Shuffling to their seats -- Eliza had asked, quietly, for the window side -- they stowed their bags like they saw people around them do, and then sat down. There was a lady giving them instructions and almost mechanically, he listened and followed. Clicked the belt closed. Then there was more waiting. Waiting to wait. It was familiar, at least. 

Finally, a man with an accent warbled tinnily through the speakers overhead, giving him information about the air that he had no idea what to do with, and suddenly, everything started to move with a jolt. He’d braced himself, of course, but hadn’t been ready. It was strangely exciting, right up until the whole cabin suddenly tilted backwards and they started to accelerate with the roar of engines louder and bigger than any he’d seen before. He tried not to panic, and decided to look out the window. The ground was going down. He was going up. It didn’t help.

What did help was seeing how utterly terrified Eliza seemed to be. Something in the panicked look in her eyes calmed him down. If she was scared, he couldn’t be. He had to be there there, after all. 

“Hey,” he said, breaking the silence that had been hovering between them for hours. Her gaze fell on him, and she looked scared. Small. “It’s going to be okay.” Eliza just nodded, her lips a thin line, her jaw tense. He hoped she wasn’t going to throw up. She looked scared and uncomfortable enough, but he also knew she had the kind of willpower you could bend a horseshoe around. He nudged her. “I would have thought you’d be the one comfortable with flying,” he said with a little smirk. That got him a frown that seemed to shake her out of her reverie of fear .

“It’s… it’s very different when I’m the one doing the flying, you know,” she said with a veiled indignity, keeping her voice low. “Being locked in a tube made of who knows what and going straight up like that… it’s unnatural!”

“Considering where we come from and how we got here,” Daniel mused, “I think we’ve done a pretty good job of blurring the line between natural and unnatural.”

“You’re not wrong,” Eliza said with a soft laugh. “Regardless, I have every right to be uncomfortable. There’s barely enough room for my legs, and if this thing goes down we’ll all be crushed like--”

“Don’t think like that,” Daniel interrupted her. “Things will be fine. We both know that.” He nodded, trying not to think of what ‘things’ included. ‘Things’ meant goodbye. They meant going back to their own world. They meant not making dinner together anymore, or sneaking a glance at her when she smiled. They meant going back to being the hero. They meant going back to things as they were supposed to be. 

“Yeah,” Eliza said. “They will.”

“Try to get some rest,” Daniel said, closed his eyes and failed to get any sleep at all.

Elamimax

I barely remember the first time I was on a plane. I know it's the first time I left the continent I was born on, and the anxiety and wonder that came with it. I think the biggest, most dramatic thing I realized when I stepped off the plane was how different the climate was. Everything else only hit me later, but that change in time of day and temperature is downright surreal. Have you ever traveled by plane? What was your first flight like?

A reminder that this story is completely finished and has over ten chapters that have yet to be released on scribblehub, and that you can already read all of them through my Patreon, and you get a whole bunch of added benefits! On top of that, it keeps my lights on and even lets me eat! Patrons get a ton of benefits, like access to new stories, sometimes weeks or even months in advance, as well as cheaper commission rates, exclusive discord roles, and access to private polls about future projects. 

Regardless, I hope you like this, and I'll see you all soon!