Excerpt
None of this was going as planned.
Crispin was a huge fan of as planned.
First off, the damnable Hall of Mirrors had dumped him a good half-mile away from his destination, in the midst of the rainstorm from hell, in a park next to a frightening display of men with round hats that all had numbers, every one of them glaring at him in the intermittent flashes of lightning. He'd run off in startled fear, his world-appropriate clothing feeling itchy and growing soggy—and looking stunningly drab, a far cry from his usual flair for color. None of the squirrels in the park seemed friendly, tucked away under the dry canopies of the trees as he ran past, noting his passage with apparent disinterest.
He had eventually found his way out of the park to the questionable shelter of an awning of an abandoned… he wanted to say restaurant, but it had zero charm and, due to the whole abandoned part, zero food. His stomach had rumbled at that. Before his workday had taken a turn for the worse, he'd planned to have a perfectly respectable meal of nut mush and elven mead with Minkis, if his rather unreliable pet squirrel had decided to come in for the night.
And now here he was half-soaked, on the simultaneously bland and crazy planet Earth, a world he'd managed to avoid for years. At least this part of it didn't stink. Much. Though there was an uncollected can of refuse in one corner of the little courtyard that emitted a rather foul odor. No matter. He'd be off-world soon enough and then safely back home once he dropped off his collection at the office.
The stairs he'd just climbed would have put the rickety ones on the haunted world of Thauria to shame for their sheer ability to seem both insubstantial and very creakingly real, and now he stood in a place that could charitably be called the seventeenth pit of hell, talking to a man who clearly wanted nothing to do with him.
His target, Leopold Lane, was… rumpled. That was the best and most generous word he could come up with to describe the person before him. He was shirtless and thankfully not too out of shape, not that Crispin would have said anything. That would be rude. He wore baggy gray pants and mismatched socks—maybe that was a thing on Earth these days?—and his chestnut-colored hair was messy, but not in a way that looked adorable. More like the dead cat he'd seen on the side of the road on the way over from the park.
Still, the man didn't seem unkind, only confused.
"Excuse me?" Leopold's eyebrows shot up. "What, are you with the army or something?"
Something flickered in the corner of the room. Or, in an angle of the room? None of the corners of this place seemed straight. It was like stepping into one of those weird paintings where everything curved up and around to meet itself in impossibly complex ways. Or like a bathroom on Herschel IV. "No, no army." Crispin tried a different tack. "Leo, have you ever felt… lost?"
