As Sky walked away from the warehouse she worked in, she turned and looked at the Valkyrie logo with a stylized sword resembling a smile. In her mind, she gave it an imaginary middle finger. This was the very warehouse that had killed her mom through a health condition made worse by overwork. It was the last place Sky wanted to work. And yet it was the only real job option in town for her. The only thing that kept her sane and able to continue on was her younger siblings and thinking of their preciousness and how much they needed her.

With a sigh, Sky kept walking. A car was well out of her means. She had three siblings to care for, after all. Everything she made went into paying the bills and necessities. Her parents' leftover mortgage. Clothing. School supplies. Food. Medicine. Entertainment to keep everyone including herself sane. And so on and so on. Just last week, she'd bought a flute for her youngest sister to nourish the little cutie's growing love for music.

After a half hour of walking, Sky let herself back into the house. Just half an hour until the school buses arrived to dump off her siblings. She'd had to practically fight tooth and nail to both get and keep the hours she had (willingly dating the supervisor helped), just so she could be home when her siblings got home. Even then, sometimes she was forced to work alternative hours, so she had provided her siblings with copies of the house keys.

Leaning back against the couch she was vegging out on, she looked at the pictures on the wall of the whole family smiling. Dad, a way less tired looking mom, and the four kids. Too bad turning back the clock was impossible. Dad's mysterious disappearance, only to be found weeks later dead in a lake. What happened to her mom. And Sky was afraid she would disappear too from her siblings' lives too one day. Some days it felt hard to go on.

But then there was the sound of the first of two buses pulling in. Sky found a smile growing on her face as she heard her oldest sister's excited running. But Sky was first to the door, opening it just in time to embrace Star, who immediately started chattering about the story she’d written at school. The rest of her siblings soon followed suit. Moon, her brother. Sun, her littlest sister. All of them with brown hair and freckled nearly pale skin, except Sun, who had bright green hair. It was rare for someone to be born with hair like that, but it happened for some reason.

"Hi," Sun said briefly and immediately sat down to begin playing her flute. Ever since last week, it had been hard to keep her hands off her flute. But Sky tolerated the unskilled playing with a wry smile. At least Sun was sincerely practicing and trying to get better.

Moon briefly hugged Sky on the other side, since Star hadn't yet let go. "Love you," he said, and let go. "Gonna do homework now."

"If only our sisters were as responsible as you," Sky said with a chuckle.

"Homework sucks!" proclaimed Star as she continued squeezing Sky.

"Yeah, it sucks, that's why I do it right away so I don't have to put up with it anymore." Moon nodded sagely.

Sky sighed, but with an amused smile. Homework... she weirdly missed it in a way. She'd had to drop out in her seventeenth year, after mom's death. If there was a single good thing Valkyrie did, it was the program that had helped her get a GED. That and paying well, but not well enough to put up with the workplace hazards and the frenetic pace.

Doing her best to get her mind off those sour thoughts, she said, "You better do your homework, all of you. If you do all of it right now, we can watch more Junk Chaos after dinner. Oh, wait, isn't today your raid day, Moon? With that all-teen static team of yours."

He shrugged. "Raid was canceled because the healers both got bad colds. Both live in the same house, so. Means I can watch Junk Chaos, I guess."

"Yaaay, Junk Chaos!" Star said as Sky gently pried her arms away.

Sun silently got up and put away her flute, then pulled out her homework.

After an evening of homework (and housework on Sky's part despite her tiredness), dinner, and watching oversized trucks with huge wheels wreck cars, Sky sat down to do another check of the budget.

It wasn't looking good. Even if she hadn't bought the flute, the household would be well on the road to having to choose which necessities to do without and which bills to not pay, with the inheritance from their parents running out. And Sky was getting more and more tired from her job, so trying to get additional hours wasn't looking like a good option.

Once again, Sky stared at the invitation that hovered in her vision whenever she let it out. She had mentally willed it away six months ago, only bringing it out occasionally, but it was beginning to seem more and more tempting.

It was the resources part that tempted Sky. Ever since those invitations had started popping up two months ago, those who accepted had started gaining all kinds of things. Supernatural powers, fame, and wealth. You could sell things gathered within the subrealm and use your gained powers to better your life.

She could just cut down on expenses in a number of ways. But there were things like higher education and other such opportunities that she wanted her siblings to have, things that were expensive. In short, right now she couldn't afford to give them a good future. Hell, she was becoming increasingly unable to give them a good life in the present.

But she was afraid. She didn't want to face those perils. She didn't want to leave her siblings alone like her parents had left them all alone. And yet... she had made her decision. She would simply have to not die.

As she grabbed her glass of water to swallow her evening dose of anti-androgen and popped an estrogen pill to dissolve under her tongue, she worked up her resolve. In the end... she would do anything, risk anything for them.

And if all else failed, she had recently taken life insurance out on herself. She was young, only nineteen years old, and in good health, so she had been able to get a good rate with a good payout. Not that she planned to die. It was just in case.

She looked at the line under that invitation message. "I,"  and there was a blank line for her signature, "accept this invitation." Even as she tried to figure out how to sign it, that line filled out with the cute stylized signature she liked to do, with a heart at the end.

Another message appeared.

Sky blinked at that last name. All this was a lot to digest, but a name like her own... Probably a coincidence; there were many with that name. As for the whole apocalypse business, it seemed unlikely, but not less likely than a subrealm that you could visit in your dreams and bring back loot from.

Suddenly another message popped up as she was still processing her thoughts about this whole apocalypse.

Sky could only feel her heart plunge. The 'them' the message referred to could only be her siblings. She... she had to admit she believed this message, and if the other message had her counterpart involved in it too, she would have to believe it. Believe that the world was going to end in some manner.

She could only laugh bitterly. Her dream of giving her siblings a good life, opportunities she didn't get. That dream would likely be pointless. No. She would find a way. She would claw a bright future for them from the grips of the apocalypse itself if she had to.

But she would need power, of the sort she could only get from the subrealm itself. With that, the signature line for the oath filled itself as she accepted the oath.

And she was nowhere. No, elsewhere. No, everywhere. Locations flowed together like in a particularly surreal dream. Messages flashed by in her sight so rapidly she could only briefly catch individual words and phrases like “integration”, “dreams”, “anti-Horror system”, “linkage installation”.

With a sudden feeling of a shock to her body, she found herself in the most unexpected place: her town. But there were what she could only describe as indigo tears in space irregularly scattered around the area. One tear was so large that it completely bisected a bank, extending all the way into the ground. There was a cluster of tears nearly blotting out a pizza joint. Barely identifiable animals writhed on the floor, emitting indigo light through cracks in their bodies.

Sky shifted uneasily in place, feeling her scaled tail sliding across the asphalt... wait. Looking down, she realized that she had from the waist down a rather large snake tail covered with purple and black striped scales. The most bizarre part was how it felt completely natural. She could only stare as her tail moved exactly as she willed it, without the slightest awkwardness.

A message appeared in her vision.

Those artifacts... Sky had to get some for her siblings. And herself, too, she supposed. Selling some should help considerably with the budget issues as well. With that thought, she set out to start the search.