Picture a world…
In the infinite depths of space, a fragile little planet hurtled through vast expanses of nothingness. It was rather unhygienic, as worlds go, and so a small case of bacterial infection had by now progressed into a chronic forest syndrome.
The forests were being endangered by large, predatory cities that devoured entire thickets to fuel their furnaces. Each decade there seemed to be a few thousand fewer trees and a few hundred more columns of smoke ascending from the rapidly encroaching development.
The cities themselves were, for the most part, stuck in a better class of imperial era. Long before anyone had figured out what atoms were for, someone had discovered that, exactly half an hour after midnight, if you carefully waved your hands in a certain manner over a crudely drawn heptagon with a candle on each axis, there would be a thundering great bang and you'd wake up in a few hours missing your eyebrows. Thus the magicks were born, and like most things that are invaluable to their users, they were immediately declared illegal to be used by average, ordinary people and carefully kept in the hands of a select few who could be trusted to use it only for the good of The People, who invariably turned out to be their friends and themselves. These people over the coming centuries were eventually called wizards.
Gradually, the wizards got a handle on the wild magicks, eventually refining them to the point where the unruly k hardly appeared at all. The Seven Ancient Schools were established, each one holding a point on the mystic Heptagram that represented the foundation of magic. The Crystal Bowl was soon invented afterward, which was widely considered the most important magical breakthrough of all time, because one day, after hours of careful adjusting, tuning, and refilling, a wizard named Copeye looked through the bowl and saw a planet that was not his own.
Picture a world…
...That, everyone agreed some years later, was the easy part.
"Blast this damned reception!"
A group of aged, learned men were huddling worriedly around a large crystal bowl. These men were the eight members of the Sevenfold Council, housed in the Flatfellow College of Mystic Arts, the foremost institution of magic in the Realm of Ston. Each man was one of the most powerful and knowledgeable individuals in the world and, therefore, tended to treat everything over which he had no power or knowledge with suspicion. This definition inevitably extended to their colleagues, which is why the word for a group of witches is coven and the word for a group of wizards is argument.
At the moment, the councilors' nervousness and distrust was temporarily diverted away from each other and toward a hazy image that swirled unsteadily in the water that filled the bowl. Horace Gadfry, the undisputed leader of all wizards everywhere (when they could be bothered), was attempting to overcome this knowledge barrier by means of shouting at it until someone explained it better.
"This is a disgrace of a crystal bowl! Where the deuce is that proper diamond one?"
There was the sound of someone tentatively clearing his throat. "I'm afraid that the diamond bowl is still being cleaned, Archchancellor," said the Professor of Higher Magics. "We still haven't gotten the chili stains out," he added a shade reproachfully.
There was a deafening moment in which the assembled wizards very expressively said nothing at all. Being solitary men with access to nigh-unlimited power, many of the resident wizards of Flatfellow tended to exert their considerable mystic strength in the pursuit of the perfect meal. The wizards had cheerfully and frequently pursued this very important research task for decades, and consequently were (secretly) described by nonwizards as very broad mountains; old age had given them a silver-haired look while the average wizardly diet gave a broad face accompanied by a torso that only got broader on the way down. The look was completed by long robes decorated with stars, sequins, ornaments and, in most cases, what they had for lunch.
"Right, then," said the Archchancellor, his expression suggesting that anyone who wished to add anything more would be spending the rest of his life on a lily pad. "Just as well that we get back to basics. Nothing wrong with good old emerald, I've always said."
The councilors, being very old and powerful, had not gotten that way by being stupid, and therefore said nothing. Mildly irritated by the lack of anyone to be irritated at, Gadfry turned his attention back to the image in the water. "Let's have it one last time, Lyle."
"It's Kyle, sir," the apparition said meekly.
"Yes, of course. Go on."
Kyle looked nervous, insofar as a shimmering, fading reflection in a substandard far-seeing magical device can look nervous. "Well, sir, all the gurgle colonists have been either blub or eaten, sir. Squelch and I are the only ones left, and bubble slurp off lately. Frankly, sir, we need help."
Gadfry, after taking a moment to mentally fill in the gaps left by the poor water reception, said, "Very well, then. I'll be sure to send our best man in. You can expect him by tomorrow."
The relieved face faded as the connection was broken. The leader of wizards turned to face his fellow councilors. "Right, then. Anyone got any ideas?"
Silence reigned for exactly three seconds before being unceremoniously overthrown by the ensuing chaos as every wizard struggled to make himself heard over the others. "I suggest Woolsthorpe for the task," shouted the Senior Eldritch Summoner. "A very powerful warlock, with a mastery of exotic weapons!"
"Woolsthorpe?" cried the Professor of Unorthodox Enchantments. "He couldn't outsmart a chair! Locksley's our man, good head on his shoulders, with a sound background in Purplish Spells!"
"Herbet Locksley is an absolute ninny!" screamed the Chief Instructor in Ballistic Artifacts. "Trevor Hammond could reduce him to cinders in a picosecond!"
"Oh, is that right? Bet you five silvers he'll be plum pudding when old Herb's done with him!"
At this moment, Archchancellor Gadfry broke up the argument by conjuring a fireball and firing it over the assembled wizards' heads. Seven elderly faces, some freshly shod of their eyebrows, turned to look at him. "Right, then, break it up," he rumbled irritably. "We're figuring this out now, and we're not eating until we do."
The wizards paled. Some of them hadn't eaten for nearly two hours. Gadfry scratched his generous beard ponderously. "Let's see, then. Who would be fool enough to…" He brightened as an idea came to him. "It's settled. We'll send young Crowley over."
Most of the councilors, pleased that the crisis of possibly not having anything to eat had been averted, simply nodded and hopefully looked around in case someone had left a dessert trolley lying around. The Professor of Unorthodox Enchantments, however, who was quicker on the uptake, tapped his hair-insulated chin in thought. Eventually, he said, "You mean we're sending the handyman?"
"Why not?" Gadfry asked amiably. "Bright lad, good with his hands, doesn't scare easily."
"Yes, but…" The Professor of Unorthodox Enchantments opened and shut his mouth a few times. "The handyman?"
"I didn't notice you complain about him when he unstuck your toilet."
"That's because he's the damn handyman!"
"It was clogged with demons!"
"That's not my fault!"
The Archchancellor sighed. "Look at it this way," he said not unkindly. "No matter who we send, they're likely to get killed or worse out there. Now, we could, in theory, send a highly accomplished champion wizard who will no doubt demand our very best resources for the task, or…"
"…Or we could send some oik," The Instructor in Confounding Illusions spoke slowly, as if trying the idea on, "who would be happy with a handful of copper tools and a pay raise."
The wizards smiled. For a bunch of fat and jolly old men, they could be very good at being nasty. You didn't rise to the top of your craft by being generous to little orphan boys, and so none of them had ever bothered with it.
"I'll send for him right away," The Archchancellor said, just before a few heavily laden cards rolled into the council office. "That is, right after supper."
It was right after supper. Robert Crowley, Flatfellow's premier fix-it man, stood somewhat nervously as he listened to the wizards carefully explain the nature and theories behind the strange place to which they were planning to send him.
"You see, young man," the Lecturer in Transdimensional Thingummies said, "Our world is not entirely alone, as such, in its capabilities to support life. Ever since the Copeye Discovery back in 238, we've found out that our realm has n number of siblings, in which n may or may not be the number of dust motes in the average cellar; in short, out there, in the night sky, there are, in fact…"
…an infinite number of planets, each one bearing some degree of similarity to each other yet curiously different from the Realm of Ston, which was the home of humanity. Robert tried his best to comprehend what he was hearing as the Lecturer in Transdimensional Thingummies, occasionally interrupted by his fellow councilmen, tried his best to explain something that no one had yet been able to explain. Apparently, in each neighboring star system there was at least one Terrarium, which, according to the ancient notes of Copeye the first Spacelooker, was any planet that had some degree of plant and animal life. Since there were hypothetically infinite star systems (or at least as many as could fit in a very dusty cellar the size of the universe), there were therefore infinite Terraria.
The wizards described their attempt to colonize the Terrarium that Copeye had discovered. Settlers, soldiers and experts in various fields were sent to the planet by means of dropping them into a giant crystal bowl that had been modified to work as a portal to the frontier. Thus, the Copernicus colony was born.
The wizards fell silent, waiting for Robert to voice his opinion on the twofold history lesson and secret revelation. At length, he spoke. "So, they need a carpenter, then?"
There was some degree of nervous coughing. "Not exactly, no," the Chief Instructor in Ballistic Artifacts said.
"A mason, then?"
"Not as such," The Professor of Uncommon Enchantments said, his gaze rooted to his shoes.
"A tunnel digger? An exterminator? A plumber?" Robert asked, his bewilderment increasing with each question.
The Archchancellor sighed. "The fact of the matter is that they're lost," he admitted.
"A navigator, then?"
Gadfry scowled, his ears pinkening with acute embarrassment. "That is to say, we've lost them."
Robert blinked. "What, the whole colony?"
At this moment, because Gadfry was dangerously close to taking his shame-induced rage out on someone nearby, the Senior Eldritch Summoner quickly said, "Most of the colony. All but one, in fact. Their guide, Kyle, is still about."
The wizards nodded miserably. None of them wanted to talk about Kyle.
"A guide?" Robert asked. "For a planet no one's ever been to?"
There was some degree of murmuring. The Lecturer in Dimensional Thingummies explained, "The colonists found Kyle shortly after they arrived. He was a natural guide because of his, well, special skill…"
Kyle, as described by the Lecturer in Dimensional Thingummies, was a bit of an anomaly. No one knew his last name, including Kyle. He had apparently been born on Ston, once upon a time, but no one knew how or when he had gotten from one planet to the other, including, once again, Kyle. He had managed to survive the apparently vicious fauna on account of his inability to do anything else. For some reason, Kyle was indestructible. He could fall off of a cliff, be mauled by an angry animal or be crushed by a cave-in and turn up a little later, curiously unharmed.
"In fact," the Instructor in Confounding Illusions went on, "This happened quite often, because while Kyle has the durability of, in a manner of speaking, a rock, he also tends to have the survival, observation and critical thinking skills of, not to put too fine a point on it, a rock."
"He's got a good sense of geography, though," admitted the Archchancellor in the tone of one who has rubbed a finger on the surface of a metaphorical table to find hypothetical dust only to find, against all expectation, that it is completely spotless.
Robert looked from one wrinkly face to another. "What do you need me to do, then?"
The wizards brightened somewhat. Now they were on familiar territory, or at least territory that didn't contain any mention of Kyle. "Put simply," the Lecturer in Dimensional Thingummies said, "we want you to find out what happened to the colony and, if at all possible, start a new one."
"What, by myself?" Robert asked incredulously.
"You will, of course, be supplied with the proper tools to get started…" said the Archchancellor as if he hadn't heard Robert. "A pickaxe, hatchet and sword is all we can spare at the moment, unfortunately, but we all know that you're a resourceful man, Mr. Crowley."
"Yes, but by myself? On a planet that's already swallowed a whole colony without chewing?" Robert's voice was at the point of bewilderment and steadily approaching panic.
"We'll be sorry to see you go, certainly, but clearly you're a man destined for great things," Gadfry went on, valiantly keeping a straight face as he spoke.
"You can't be serious!"
"I'm excited, as well, Mr. Crowley. Right, then, gentlemen. Shall we send him over?"
It was, they reflected later, a little needlessly cruel. Surely they hadn't had to hit him over the head like that.
A sleeping spell would have been just fine.
Robert slowly opened his eyes and saw hell. An alien sky greeted him, which was terrifying, but not nearly as terrible as the slightly worried face that looked back down at him.
"Oh, good, you're awake. You must've hit your head coming through the portal. My name's Kyle. I'll be your guide."
Robert Crowley blinked once, opened his mouth, and screamed.