I hung high above the universe. A universe full of dimmed stars. A universe of my own making. As I entered this universe I pulled on the cosmic laws that held it together. A gentle tug, just to be sure that everything was as it should be.

I wasn’t stealthy in my approach. I couldn’t be. I was making yet another change to the world and its administrators and guardians would need to know the “what and why”, according to the contract between them and my employers.

Soon, a grand lattice surrounded the world. An extra measure of enforcement that would protect the world from being shaken apart, corrupted, or invaded by outside elements. I built a fortress on the ridges of the lattice. This fortress would output an ever-increasing number of modified FC-Units that would watch over and protect Uhrwerk during those moments where I was too distracted to do so myself.

Once I was done with that final measure, I sent a prompt to Margot who sat in her office in the world above.

She pulled me out of Uhrwerk and compiled a final module that would finalize a host of other changes we’d felt needed to be made to protect Uhrwerk and our investments into Uhrwerk. If a whole host of outside eyes were now turned to our little world, we damn well intended to make sure that no one got greedy and tried to do something stupid.

*************************************************************************************************************

Morning came. A certain girl’s interface started chirping. The sound coming across as thunderous as it echoed within the confines of her skull.

“Mhm….” the girl groaned as she reluctantly joined the waking world. She opened one eye and hissed as some of the sunlight that poured through the gaps in her blinds found her head on her pillow.

After a few more minutes of struggling with herself, the girl sat up, yawned, and then stood. It was time to face the day. There were quizzes to take, passages to be read, and friends to meet. It was time for the girl to go to school.

The girl was tall. She was taller than most girls anyway. She was also taller than more than a few boys she knew. She was tall and stick thin.

She had unruly, curly, brown-black hair that she kept short for the sake of making her mornings easier. She had a square face with a rounded jaw. She had a small nose, long pointed ears, well-defined cheekbones, and full pouting lips. Her eyes were a sort of glow in the dark bright-green.

A long thin tail snaked out of her pajamas, ending in a pointed spade. Hinting at her demon ancestry.

*************************************************************************************************************

Uhrwerk was less a world, and more a grand machine. A machine similar to much of the natural cosmos. Each gear, each cog, each screw, pin, and bolt, was a channel. A mass of interlocking dimensional data, energy, and law that was used to suppress and process the energy of the countless universes that were consumed during Uhrwerk’s construction.

If my calculations were correct, and I was pretty sure they were, this machine was immensely powerful and would generate even more power over time. Eventually, Uhrwerk would become a sort of cosmic dynamo as it processed the energy of the constituent universes.

Uhrwerk was home to countless souls, both human and non-human, but there was very little strife on those grounds. The historical context for the world had been massaged and artfully constructed to make it so that relationships between the species were relatively stable.

Following the trend for most of the civilized cosmos, the genetics for the myriad sapient lifeforms of Uhrwerk were unified to allow for free interbreeding. Then to push things in a settled direction, over the eons, I’d made sure the proverbial melting pot was allowed to continuously boil, till everything had been normalized. Making the fantastic into the mundane.

All of Uhrwerk’s nations were in a state of peace, at least as far as the public was concerned. There hadn’t been an actual war since the age of myths and legends and as far as Uhrwerk’s mortal history was concerned that was thousands of years ago. The world was controlled by a shifting group of mortal and immortal authorities, who fell in and out of power based on a very complicated game that the world’s administrators allowed them to play.

Null was the name given to the 1,000,000 universes used to form the Uhrwerk’s core. The core was made up of those channels that began with the number 0. They were the worlds that became the first ten thousand channels of Uhrwerk. 00000-09000. Null was modelled after the patterns that the majority of those worlds held, which in turn was modelled off of the pattern that our own Terminus-Earth held.

In plain language terms, all of Null that was strikingly similar to somewhat toned down Terminus-Earth. The cultures were roughly analogous. Ditto for the tech. Magic and anomalous forces were a semi-known quantity that was being utilized in the economy and the military. However, for the most part, most people didn’t really get involved with magic outside of the mundane day to day stuff, and the kind that came in the form of over the counter products.

I’d dialled back some of the uncertainties that made life on earth such a tense experience. Certain potential futures and possibilities had been forcefully erased. Yet Null was still a place of trials, travails, and all manner of miraculous and calamitous experiences.

*************************************************************************************************************

This was the world that young Alexandria Peterson was born to. “Alex” Peterson was seventeen going on eighteen. She was right on the verge of graduating from high school but hadn’t the foggiest clue whether she even wanted to go to college never mind knowing what she wanted to major in.

Alex Peterson was just an ordinary girl. As I’ve already mentioned, this wasn’t a world where such things were outside of the norm. Unfortunately for her, she was also one of Uhrwerk’s countless chosen heroes.

The road she’d been set on would be a tumultuous one and I and the rest of this world’s keepers would be watching closely.

*************************************************************************************************************

Elsewhere, in Null, another youth was rising to meet the morning. Dark green hair. Dark green eyes. With wolfish good-looks. The boy woke up and he realized that something was amiss. He realized that this something had been amiss for the last sixteen years that he’d been alive.

He got up, got dressed, and stumbled across the street where his best friend, and neighbour, Catalina, was waiting.

“Morning, Sev…,” said the black-haired neighbour girl. Her inky tresses were done up in pigtails.

“Morning...Cat,” said young Severin West.

“Does….Does the name Sevastion sound familiar to you?” said Sev.

“Oh, so you finally remembered, you numpty. The boss said you might be slow about it, but damn, you certainly took your time...” said the young woman. Rolling her eyes at her long-time partner in crime, and former-husband.

“Huh?!...”