Jeanean

Its a little late, but I didnt really know how to write this chapter...

A little over half an hour passed by before one of the researchers, Kate, said something to James.

"Well, seems like they have now all the data they need. You can stand up now.", James said.

Dexter stood up from the bed and asked: "What should I do now?"

While James had asked Dexter many questions over the last half hour, Dexter had quickly become more responsive. His sentences had become longer, and he had stopped only responding when James prompted him to but started to ask questions on his own accord. At the same time, he had become able to understand simple English even without the soul translation spell and even his speech had gone from grunting and groaning to something where one out of ten words could be understood if one really tried to.

Over the course of that time, they also had found out a lot about Dexter's knowledge. Most of it had no logic behind it and was completely random, sometimes actually even completely wrong. For example, he had thought that mirrors were doors to some kind of "mirror dimension", but at the same time was able to recite the first fifty-nine digits of Pi without a single mistake before he suddenly started to mix letters in.

"That is indeed a very good question.", James answered. "All in all, you are a very unique case. We thought of having you stay here for a while, but you seem intelligent enough that this doesn't seem to be necessary. And just looking from the outside, your body looks already more muscular than anyone else in this room, but with your body being the way it is, even if we had you make rehab training, we wouldn't know if it would even have any use. So, my thought was, that I could show you to your room and even introduce you to your room-mate. You two will be living together after all. How does that sound?"

"Yes, sounds good. But I will also need someone to teach me common sense."

"Hahaha, I never thought I would hear someone say that about themselves! Actually, I was thinking of asking my little sister to help with that. She wants to become a primary school teacher, so teaching you might be a good experience for her. You don't mind if you aren't taught by a professional, do you?", James asked him, still with a grin on his face.
"I don't, as long as I can learn properly.", Dexter answered.

"In that case, let's go and take a look at your room. Kate, we will be going then!"

"Until later then!", Kate waved them goodbye.

Not long after, Dexter walked along a corridor, following James who was leading the way. Dexter had thought that he was inside a hospital, but when they left the room, he realized that it was only the room he had woken up in that looked like that. Now that he was outside, his surroundings looked much more like a laboratory.

Soon, they turned around a corner and the scenery changed. The ceiling was much higher, plaster decorations and chandeliers giving it the look of a medieval castle.

When they went up a flight of stairs, they were suddenly in an office building and turning around another corner the surroundings suddenly turned dark and grimy. The walls were made from roughly chiseled stone blocks in irregular sizes and many small rooms with beds were visible behind thick iron bars.

Dexter would immediately claim them to be lying if anyone dared to say that this was anything else but a dungeon.

Not long after, Dexter had completely lost all orientation. It wasn't as if he couldn't find the way back if he just retraced his steps, but it just didn't make any sense at all. Just within the first ten minutes, they should have ended up in a previous corridor several times, but they never crossed the same path again.

"Ahhh, I really hate that the Labs are so far out of the way. Oh, right!"# James suddenly exclaimed after complaining. "I completely forgot to explain this!"

James stopped in front of a corridor that, once again, looked completely different than the one they were currently in.

Pointing at a small plaque at the wall, one side shining silver and the other black, he started to explain: "This is the sign for a gate. They are put since it's not always as obvious as here. Raiklas isn't just an academy for magic, it's more appropriate to say that Raiklas is a city. It has at least the size of a small one. But, we don't have any public transport. Simply because it's not necessary. The reason is exactly these gates. From top to bottom, Raiklas is completely covered with these teleportation gates. If you know your way around, you can get pretty much anywhere within a quarter-hour on foot without going outside even once.

But I'm showing you this because, if you don't know your way around and accidentally walk through a portal, you can get lost extremely quickly with no way back. So be careful and don't walk around on your own for the time being."

"Yes, I will be careful."

"Also, this a what we call a silver-black gate. The ones marked like this by the Gate-office are the most secure and you can be ninety percent sure that they won't suddenly change their destination so they are worth remembering. I won't go in-depth on the different colors, but as a baseline, every portal that is marked in different colors stay the way they are for about a month at most.

But just to be sure, if these signs don't align properly or the colors are different than you remember them, you can be pretty sure that the portal changed destination."

"I will make sure to remember.", Dexter answered.

"You should, there are more than enough stories of people going missing for a day or two after going through a portal they didn't notice to have changed! There are actually a lot of legends and rumors, that there are still areas that we didn't even know existed, or of dead ends where the gate closes the moment, you stepped through.

Someone supposedly went missing for ten years and his corpse was only found when the portal he was trapped behind opened right in the police station.", James gave Dexter a wink.

At that moment, they stepped out of another corridor and into a large room.