I managed the gate for a looooong time, and now....

**Chapter 1: The Last Watch**

You’d think watching a magical gate to other worlds for ninety-eight years would turn a man into some kind of philosophical sage. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. It just made me very good at making tea and extremely talented at sitting.

Now, before you ask how I managed to live for almost a century without becoming a raisin, let me clarify: I was twenty-five when I took the job, and I stayed twenty-five until I retired. That was the deal. You sign the contract, take the oath, and they put you on what they call "extended temporal suspension." Sounds fancy, right? It’s basically the world's most boring immortality plan.

My job? Sit. Watch. Wait. Make sure no one unauthorized stumbles through the gate. Sounded simple enough when they offered it to me. No family, no debts, no major plans beyond surviving on ramen and Reddit. I figured, why not? I get to stay young forever, eat decent food, and once I hit the hundred-year mark, I get to retire and pick a world to live in. Forever. Well, usually forever.

It’s not like I had a better offer.

So I did it. I watched the gate. For years. The chair wasn’t even ergonomic. Just a big squeaky leather thing that leaned slightly to the left and made a fart sound if you shifted your weight wrong. I spent ninety-eight years in that chair. Ninety-eight.

People think that means I’ve got some kind of epic tales to tell. Dimensional invasions, intergalactic politics, maybe a time I had to swordfight a demon wearing Crocs. Nah. It was mostly just coffee, reports, and checking ID badges. Once, a guy tried to sneak through wearing a really bad fake mustache. I confiscated it and wore it myself during my birthday week. That was the highlight of year forty-two.

Toward the end, they sent me a memo.

"Congratulations on ninety-eight years of service. Upon completion of your tenure, you are entitled to one (1) permanent transfer to a destination of your choosing."

No gold watch. No pension. Just the promise of a new life.

Now, I’d spent a lot of time daydreaming about where I’d go. Tropical beaches, medieval kingdoms, futuristic space resorts. I even once considered a world entirely populated by friendly cats, but then I remembered I’m allergic. You’d think after nearly a century I’d have it all figured out. I didn’t.

That’s when I remembered the Key.

I hadn’t told anyone about it. Technically, I wasn’t even supposed to have it. Let’s just say I found it during inventory day in year seventy-three, stuck behind a bunch of broken teleportation rings and half a vending machine. I fixed it. It worked. And it wasn’t just for one trip. It let you come back. As many times as you wanted.

Yeah. I know. Game changer.

But that wasn’t today’s problem. Today, I was clocking out.

I brewed myself one last cup of tea—black, with a little powdered lemon peel—and sat back in my squeaky throne. The gate shimmered in front of me, rippling like a glass of water on a subwoofer. You never got used to that sight. It was like staring at a portal to possibility. Or a very sparkly jellyfish.

There wasn’t a party. No cake. Not even a farewell sticky note. That was fine by me. I didn’t like goodbyes. They were always awkward and involved way too much hugging. Instead, I just signed out on the little glowing orb embedded in the desk. It blinked a few times, then chirped like a toaster in distress.

“Congratulations,” it said in a chipper robotic voice. “You are now officially unemployed.”

Touching.

I stood up, stretched, and took one last lap around the room. I didn’t have much. Just my old cot, a locker full of books I hadn’t read in thirty years, and a mug that said "World’s Okayest Gatewatcher." I left the mug. Let the next poor guy have it.

I grabbed my pack. It was already loaded with the basics—stuff I knew would sell or be useful: rough ground salt and pepper, some old-world grain, a small toolkit, a handful of gold and silver, my trusty herbal guidebook, and a mess of odds and ends that might make me look clever later.

And that was that.

I walked up to the gate, reached out, and gave it a little pat.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I told it, “but I hope I never see you again.”

It shimmered. Probably insulted.

I stood there for a moment longer, just breathing. The air inside the facility was always the same—clean, crisp, a little antiseptic. It had no real smell. No personality. Just like the place itself. I wasn’t going to miss it.

The gate shimmered again, as if impatient. But I wasn’t stepping through. Not yet.

First, I needed to pick my world.

And that, my friend, is where the next chapter starts.

**Chapter 2: The Key Nobody Else Has**

If I’m being honest—and I try to be, unless it costs me money—the Key wasn’t supposed to exist. Not anymore. According to the protocol handbook (volume seventeen, subsection D, paragraph forty-three), all multidimensional access keys with multi-use functions were decommissioned decades ago. Too risky, they said. Too much potential for “temporal destabilization and narrative inconsistencies.”

In regular-person speak: it lets you come back, and that makes people nervous.

I found mine by accident. Not a cool accident like stumbling on a treasure map or accidentally unlocking latent wizard powers. No, I found it while cleaning out a supply closet during a mandatory quarterly inspection that only one person was supposed to do. Me. Because I was the only one there.

Buried under a box labeled "misc. dangerous" and behind what looked like a toaster with antennae was a small, sleek black fob. About the size of a hotel keycard. Had a single button and a tiny, faded label that said "Property of HR."

HR in this case meant “Heuristic Realities.” Those were the folks who set up the entire Gatewatcher system. Think IT support, but if they also ran reality like a call center.

I didn’t report the key. I’m not a saint. I’m a guy who’s spent decades eating shelf-stable noodles and talking to himself. You get weird. You also get curious.

So, I tested it. Found an old training portal, booted it up, and gave the key a try. Worked like a dream. I went in, poked around, came back. I even brought back a rock. Nothing exploded. No time cops showed up. Just a rock. It glowed faintly, but hey, free mood lighting.

I hid the key in a canister of powdered milk behind the third shelf in Storage B, mostly because nobody would ever willingly open that. And for the next twenty-five years, I kept it secret.

When my retirement date got close, I pulled it out, cleaned off the powdered milk, and tested it again. Still worked. Still no time cops. Either they didn’t care, or I wasn’t important enough to monitor. Probably the second one. I wasn’t exactly a high-value asset. I was the guy who flagged ID cards and restocked the break room.

Still, I took precautions. I scanned the key. Ran diagnostics. I even put it in a Faraday cage made from leftover lunch trays and a repurposed electric toothbrush. Not fancy, but it worked.

Once I confirmed it was stable, I got to planning.

Most retirees picked one world and dumped everything they had into prepping for that. Not me. I was prepping for options. Options are power. Options are freedom. Options are also the reason I now had a duffel bag that weighed as much as a Labrador and contained:

- Ten pounds of rough sea salt
- Ten pounds of whole black peppercorns
- Five pounds of cracked ancient grain (think wheat, but meaner)
- A collapsible skillet
- My mushroom and herbal survival guide
- A rechargeable lantern
- Duct tape (of course)
- A hand mirror
- One blank journal, leather-bound
- A collapsible fishing rod
- Ten pounds of gold, minted into old-world coins
- Ten pounds of silver, same deal
- An emergency chocolate bar (strictly rationed)

I even threw in a sewing kit. Because you never know when a button might betray you.

The hardest part was choosing where to go first. The gate interface gave me a menu with previews. Each shimmer had a signature: terrain, language complexity, monster density, and local economy scores. I wanted laid-back, low-monster, low-technology, mid-economy. And maybe somewhere goats didn’t scream like humans.

I found one. Peaceful. Forested. River system. Low governance. Strong barter culture. Economy dependent on salt and preserved goods.

Bingo.

I bookmarked it under “Test Run” and preloaded the key. Not that I needed to preload it—I just liked pretending I was launching a spaceship instead of casually stepping into another plane of existence with nothing but my wits and a satchel full of overpriced condiments.

I spent the next three days running last-minute prep. I rotated the salt to make sure it stayed dry. Re-oiled the crossbow I hadn’t technically cleared for checkout. Sharpened my pocket knife. Said a silent goodbye to my chair (even the left-leaning squeak).

Then I sat down for one last meal in the compound cafeteria. The AI chef offered me rehydrated chicken parmesan. I said no thanks and ate the chocolate bar instead.

I stood before the gate, key in one hand, duffel in the other. Took a deep breath.

"All right, world number one," I said. "Let’s see how much pepper buys me."

And I stepped through.