Ame Perdue

Chapter Nine

The trip back to the Wanderer dimension was largely uneventful. Even knowing and expecting the nausea of teleportation didn't diminish its effects of it. I had found out from Milo that there weren't very many human-born Wanderers. Apparently, the amount of humans to other creatures was less than one percent, making it highly unlikely for a human to hold the curse.

Lucky me.

There was a vampire and a werewolf in the mix that had been born human, a few creatures scattered around that had turned into something else at some point in their life. Before I arrived, Dare was the closest person to a human. He had lived most of his life before being a wanderer as a human, it was an accident of some kind in his teenage years that had half of his body replaced with metal. According to Milo, his world was like something out of a sci-fi novel. Far more advanced than most dimensions.

Apparently, I would be able to teleport myself at some point. As a human, I wouldn't have much in the way of powers, but part of the Wanderer package was being able to teleport through the different dimensions. He said that it would likely be a year or more before I reached the point of being able to teleport on my own, until then I would have to rely on others to transport me from dimension to dimension.

There was a small amount of dimensions that actually needed our help compared to the amount that actually existed. There was a nearly endless amount of dimensions out there, we only went to certain ones that were on the verge of collapse. In every dimension, there stood a balance of good vs evil, of calmness vs chaos. That balance was what kept the worlds spinning. When either side of the spectrum got too powerful, the world would slowly start to collapse in upon itself.

And apparently, a collapsing dimension wasn't being alive one moment and dead the next. It was the effects of thousands of stars exploding all at once. It was a layer of ice covering the living creatures as they burned alive. It was suddenly breathing in clean air before all of the air was ripped out of the world. It was billions of souls being torn from their homes, left to find their way out of the void that had become their dimension with the hopes of finding the afterlife. Most never did.

It was complete chaos taking over a world that didn't know how to fight it off. For anyone that was there, it was a terrifying last few hours of life. There was nothing that they could do as the world that they had come to cherish collapsed in upon itself, giving in to the bittersweet relief of death. They had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide as the world beneath their feet revolted again its own existence.

Milo had smacked the back of my head when I remarked that it seemed like some of the dimensions needed the number to the suicide hotline. I got another smack when I claimed abuse of a minor.

Even the dimensions that were unbalanced by being too perfect were in danger of total collapse. In those situations, it was our job to uproot the perfect way of living and replace it with some chaos. I was mildly excited about the idea of going to a place full of perfect people. People that were used to perfection made easy targets. Especially if my entire job revolved around screwing up that perfection.

I hated the idea of this being the rest of my life, and I refused to allow this to become all that I ever was. Traveling from dimension to dimension to try to save them. The idea of being the hero might excite some people, but I was almost dreading it. I didn't care that people were out there ruining their worlds, that they would die a painful death when the balance broke. That wasn't my problem. It was natural selection. Why was it my job to clean up other people's messes?

Half of my life I had spent intentionally pissing people off. I had never cared about them before. Now I was suddenly supposed to care about them? Just because there was some kind of curse on me that said that I didn't belong where I was born, that meant that I was supposed to save everyone else's home? Screw that, I was more tempted to destroy them out of spite.