Chapter 952: All Your Well-Learned Politesse

The new and extremely popular new member of the Asano family was looking rather shell-shocked. Jason extracted Nik from the clutches of Hana and Jace, taking him to a quiet corner of the balcony.

“Well?”

“It’s… I don’t know. It’s a lot.”

“I know. You shouldn’t expect to just wander in and have some inherent connection to everyone. Get to know them. Let them get to know you, once they’re past the cuteness that makes everyone want to hug you and put you in a series of adorable costumes.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Dad…”

“What?” Jason asked with unconvincing innocence.

“Have you come into possession of a series of novelty hats?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s about time I brought the team in to introduce them to everyone. That should take the pressure off you a little.”

“You may wish to hold off on that, Mr Asano,” Shade said from Jason’s shadow. “The Australians have finally noticed their missing officials.”

***

“This is so good,” Josh mumbled around a spoonful of gelato.

He was standing outside the gelato shop with Sue, Solomon and the Concierge.

“It is quite palatable,” Solomon was forced to concede.

“It just occurred to me,” Sue said, “that we didn’t tell anyone where we went. Asano just kind of swept in and it all got strange from there. You don’t think that’s going to cause any problems, do you?

***

In the offices of the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet was a conference room. The three government officials meant to be in that room were not, the open portal at one end of the room the obvious reason for their absence. If the trio had been having a more normal day, the kind that didn’t involve visiting an alien world in an alternate reality with a wizard, they might have done things differently. Told someone where they were going, for example, or running for the hills. Some days, however, are just so out of the norm that you end up going with the flow, only to later wonder what you were thinking.

The security force currently crammed into the conference room were already wondering what the trio had been thinking. A full squad of silver-rankers had been deployed, all equipped with magically enhanced tactical armour and firearms. They waited on a gold-ranker to portal in from the artefact city and lead them through.

What they found on the other side was a warehouse-scale space, with floor, ceiling and three of the walls made of unadorned metal panels. The last wall was a single, humungous pane of glass, looking out onto a planet.

“Are we in orbit?” asked Garnett, the squad’s silver-rank leader.

“Not just orbit,” said Lu, a gold ranker liaising from the Chinese government. “That isn’t Earth.”

Garnett looked again and saw that Lu was right. The planet did look like their big blue marble, but the continents were wrong.

“Where the hell are we?” he asked. “Some kind of space station? A spaceship? We have gravity. Is it from rotation, magic or some kind of alien science?”

“Figuring that out is why we’re here,” Lu said. “Where we are, and what Asano did to our people.”

He turned from the window to give the room a more thorough examination. The panels making up the walls were large, each several metres across. There were doors in each of the non-window walls, including one set that were warehouse-sized, large enough to let massive freight pass through.

“Some kind of warehouse?” he postulated. “A loading bay?”

“Maybe a security room?” Garnett suggested. “There could be recessed weapons behind some of these panels.”

“I was tempted,” Jason said, and the squad wheeled to level their guns at him. He was standing in the middle of the room, dressed like a tourist with his hands in his pockets. He looked at the guns with a sigh.

“Really?” he asked. “Have you guys not seen a movie? When one guy is standing casually while a bunch of SWAT-looking guys point guns at him, those guns definitely aren’t going to work. Look, let’s just skip ahead. You blokes shoot me and we’ll see how it goes.”

“Hold your fire,” Garnett ordered his squad. He glanced at Lu, the only one of them without tactical gear or a gun. He was wearing plain black fatigues that looked simple but had more powerful magic flowing through them than the tactical gear.

“Asano, where are we?” Garnett asked.

“On a space station in my personal universe.”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Your personal universe?”

“Yeah. I don’t have time to go into the details, but it’s very small, by universe standards. Just the one solar system. That’s the main planet out there, smack bang in the goldilocks zone. Some of the others are habitable, if a little more exotic. I had to do some odd things to make that work, depending on their distance from the sun.”

“You say that we’re on a space station, in some private universe,” Garnett said. “Even with magic, it seems a lot more likely that it’s all a ruse. The air and gravity feel like we’re in a room on Earth, not in orbit around it. For all I know, that window is just a high-definition screen and that portal brought us to a warehouse in the middle of Geelong.”

Jason blinked surprise, then erupted into laughter.

“Oh, I totally wish I’d done that, now. I like you, Mr Garnett, so I’m not going to be to harsh on you and your lads.”

“We’re well versed in your methodology, Mr Asano,” Lu said. “You like to use absurdity to confuse and distract. That will not work here.”

The grin that crossed Jason’s face would have put the Chesire Cat to shame.

“Funny you should say that. In your world, you’d probably be right. But this is my world, Mr Lu, and you have no concept of how absurd it can get. Gentlemen, I told you to shoot me.”