Chapter 4

The giant portal shimmered right before me. It looked like a calm lake that had suffered a gasoline spill, giving it a dirty sheen. Every other second, tremors raced through the surface, subtly rearranging it, like things were moving beneath the surface. I felt trapped, frozen in the knowledge that I was actually observing something entirely, fully alien. I-

“Hey! Move yourself, du gottverdammte Drecksau. I have a world to invade, jah?”

The hostile voice tore me away from my musings, and I raised a middle finger behind me. Was it to the angry older German asshole? Or was it to the rest of the world? I wasn’t quite sure. But right this moment, I felt sure I wasn’t going to miss Earth one bit.

I took a step. The world changed.

A voice shouted, practically in my ear. ”Move along! Get moving! Yes, that means you, lady. Move it! You can gawk over there!” The voice was loud and hoarse as if it had been shouting all day.

It was also enough to get me moving, before I’d even started taking in what surrounded me. On all sides, people were marching, in smaller groups or alone, being ushered in one direction. What was I wearing? This was-

There were people here. People who clearly knew what was going on. Humans with cold, clear eyes and… magic. That nearly made me stumble, as I watched a rat-faced, dark-haired obese man wearing a leather armor that carried a shimmering aura of blue frost all around it.

“That way. That way, man. You’ll get your questions answered soon enough.” Somebody pushed me from the side. I nearly struck out at him. I was all jitters and reflexes.

As we moved along, I understood it, though. Constant traffic emerged from the portal, with nearly no movement going the other way. Unless people were made to move along, we’d stopper up the open ground beyond the portal in minutes. We moved as a shapeless mass, unthinking, minds trying to catch up.

I came to a belated realization, my mind trying to catch up to the changes. My old clothes were gone. I was now dressed all in white, as was every single person stumbling alongside me. Not a single outlier among the bunch, we were all clad in simple, form-fitting white clothes, tailored to our shapes. I didn’t recognize the material. It was elastic, comfortable and silky soft. I also had form-fitting harder shoes, and thin socks. They’d thought of everything. Oh. My passport was gone, though. And my phone and my… everything.

We were being corralled onto a muddy field. Sections of the place had been cordoned off with ropes, like cattle being prepped for slaughter.

A tall, stark lady with a grey bun and what looked like simplistic sunglasses stood at the side, counting out loud. Then started the wait. A few people started talking, but she simply glared them into silence.

I took the chance to properly take in our surroundings. We were on a plain. A broken-earthed, muddied plain with patches of coarse, yellowish grass here and there to break the monotony. That was all I could really see of this new, alien realm. Well. That, and the wall.

Perhaps half a kilometre in either direction, a wall cut off any stares. A weird wall. At a glance, it was about six meters tall, with battlements of some sort tacked onto the top. It was also uniformly made from stone. That was where the similarities stopped. Even from afar, it looked like it had been created by three dozen different crews, who’d only ever had the plans explained to them verbally, probably while they were drunk. On one side of the camp, it looked well-made, from a grey rock. On the exact opposite, some red stone material mixed with black and white, and it looked more like somebody had tried to cobble together a bouldering area for a gym. The damn thing hurt the eyes.

The tower at the centre of the walled-up area… okay. That one was impressive. And weird. Basically, it was a watchtower. An extremely thin and spindly watchtower, less than three meters across, and at least a dozen meters tall. A spot of movement on the top indicated somebody was up there. The construction looked like it was swaying in the wind – or maybe that was just in my mind. No money in the world would get me up there.

I’d just thought how underwhelming the scenery was – there was nothing outlandish, nothing alien or magical – when it happened. A tremor started beneath my feet, seeming to expand into my body, until it rattled my entire being. It wasn’t just physical, but mental too. Like somebody was screaming in pain at the top of their lungs right next to me, only soundlessly. Then, as fast as it started, it stopped. I looked around to see everybody else looking about in shock and consternation. The lady with the sunglasses didn’t flinch, didn’t even show that she’d noticed.

Ten awkward minutes passed, twenty. Some started talking between themselves. A few started complaining, but were silenced. The lady kept counting out loud. When she hit a hundred, she nodded, and a rope snaked out of nowhere, cutting in between two persons. She shouted. “The rest of you, move on to the next enclosure. Don’t worry. You’ll be introduced and let loose soon enough.”