Stella sat at a one of the tables in the Japanese Self-Defence Force base conference room.  At the door stood two guards with rifles.  To her right sat Adam, and to her left were Atria and Captain Infinite.  She looked at her fiancé.  He was fidgeting as he always did when he was nervous.  She took his hand and squeezed it.

    “It will be okay,” Stella said.

    “We’re foreigners,” Adam said.  “We have no legal standing here.  What’s stopping them from just throwing us in jail and tossing away the key?”

    “That wouldn’t happen,” Cap said.  “Under Japanese law, if a foreigner is arrested the police have to inform them of the suspected crime within 48 hours or let them go.  The longest they can keep you without charging you is 28 days, and to do that they have to get an extension from a court of law.  And these aren’t the police anyway, so this isn’t a criminal justice matter – at least not yet.”

    Everybody stared at Cap for a moment.

    “What I do is adjacent to law enforcement,” Cap explained.  “You have to know what the laws are before you can even think of helping to enforce them.  Besides, in a worst-case scenario I can just fly you back to Canada myself.”

    “I wish we had been allowed to go back to the hotel room first,” Atria said.  “I really want to get out of this uniform.”

    “I wish they hadn’t taken our cell phones,” Stella added.  “Kaguyama and Mitsubi must be worried sick about us by now.”

    Footfalls sounded outside and the door opened.  Stella looked up to see Kaguyama and Mitsubi ushered in and directed to sit at their table.  Kaguyama glanced at the bloodstain on Atria’s uniform as he sat down and went pale.

    “What happened to you?” he asked.

    “Fight didn’t go well,” Atria replied in Japanese.  “Don’t worry about it.”

    “You’re my creation,” Kaguyama said.  “I’m allowed to worry.”  He looked at Cap.  “Are you Captain Infinite?”

    Cap nodded and smiled.  “I guess I’m famous,” he said in Japanese.  “It is an honour to meet you.”

    “I’m Junichi Kaguyama,” Kaguyama said.  “I wrote Atria’s light novel series.  This is Aiko Mitsubi, my illustrator.”

    “It is an honour to meet you, Captain Infinite,” Mitsubi said.

    “Please, call me ‘Cap’.  All my friends do.”

    The guards snapped to attention as a party of officers entered the room, along with a man in a dark suit.  The party took its seat at a facing table, a couple of the officers opening up laptops while one pulled out a paper file.

    “Oh good, we can get started at last,” Atria whispered.

    One of the officers stood.  “My name is Colonel Hajime Sato,” he said in Japanese. “Commanding officer of the 47th Infantry Regiment of the Eastern Army.  According to our files, you are Adam Jacobs and Anne Marie Sorenson of Kingston, Ontario, here on a tourist visa, and Junichi Kaguyama and Aiko Mitsubi, author and illustrator of Eternal Chronicle of Hyperborea.  Mr. Jacobs and Ms. Sorenson have a moderate observed fluency in Japanese.”  He cocked his head as he read something in Kaguyama’s file, and closed it.  “The other two of you we have no file on, as you appear to be fictional characters, Captain Infinite from Superhero Comics and Atria Silversword from Eternal Chronicle of Hyperborea.”

    “That’s ‘Major’,” Atria interjected.  “I am Major Atria Silversword, commander of the 18th Mechanized Company in the 2nd Hyperborean Army.  My world may be a fiction created by yours, but I am still a duly commissioned officer, and I have a rank that should be respected.”

    Colonel Sato looked at her for a moment and then bowed.  “Apologies, Major.  You are correct.  Normally, we would find the idea of fictional characters coming to life unbelievable, but the implications from the CCTV footage from the altercation late this afternoon cannot be ignored.”

    Stella raised her hand.  “She and Cap are not the only ones from a story.  I’m Princess Stellaria from Chronicles of Arcaniana.  I got to this world about five years ago.”

    The colonel glanced at the man in the suit and then back at her.  “So you are in this country on falsified documents.”

    Stella opened her mouth to speak, but then looked down at the table.  “I guess so,” she muttered.

    “You understand that we now have an obligation to contact your embassy and bring this to their attention,” Sato said.

    Stella stared at the table and didn’t reply.  She felt Adam take her hand and give it a squeeze.  It wasn’t comforting.

    “Anyway, let us get everybody on the same page, as you foreigners like to say,” Sato said.  “On or about 16:00 hours local time this afternoon, Major Silversword, Mr. Jacobs, Princess Stellaria also known as Ms. Sorenson, and Captain Infinite were involved in an altercation with two unidentified individuals in the New Keihin Industrial Park, located in the Keihin Industrial Zone.  This altercation quickly escalated to include large amounts of property damage across three city blocks.”

    “If I may,” Captain Infinite interjected.  “I may have been a latecomer to this incident, but I did hear it start.  My friends here attempted to negotiate, but these negotiations failed.  I do not believe they can be blamed for starting this fight.”

    Sato looked up from his notes.  “Did you see this?”

    Cap paused.  “No sir, I only heard it.  But my friends had a good reason for what they did.”

    “We’ll get to that,” Sato said.  “Right now, we are just establishing the timeline of events.  This altercation lasted approximately 35 minutes, during which time alarmed civilians in the area contacted the authorities.  At 16:21 hours my unit was deployed to secure the area under the authority of the internal security and public order provisions of the 1954 Self-Defense Forces Act.  The area was reported secured at 16:49.  Major Silversword, Captain Infinite, Mr. Jacobs, and Princess Stellaria AKA Ms. Sorenson were apprehended at 16:54 without incident.  The two unidentified participants in this altercation were not located or apprehended.  Based on information from initial debriefings with Major Silversword and Princess Stellaria AKA Ms. Sorenson, men were sent to apprehend Mr. Kaguyama and Ms. Mitsubi, which also occurred without incident.  Are there any disagreements as to these facts?”

    “I want to know why we were apprehended,” Kaguyama said.

    “It’s okay,” Atria said.  “They were just trying to minimize the variables in this situation.  Now everybody is in the same location.  I would have done the same.”

    “As I said, my friends here had good reason for what they did,” Captain Infinite began.  Colonel Sato raised his hand.

    “Let’s move on to preliminary estimates of property damage,” Sato said.  “In the affected area, two buildings have either partially or fully collapsed.  Five buildings suffered sufficient structural damage to be declared unfit for human occupation, and have been deemed unrepairable.  Three buildings have suffered sufficient structural damage to be declared unfit for human occupation, but are considered to be repairable.  Four more buildings suffered minor structural damage, but have been deemed fit for continued occupation so long as repairs are completed within 14 days.”

    Captain Infinite stared at the table.  “We may have gotten a bit carried away.”

    “It is a miracle that nobody was killed,” Sato declared.  “I trust I do not need to review the casualty figures to impress further upon you the seriousness of this situation.  People were hurt.  Now, my colleagues and I would like to know why fictional characters have appeared in the real world and fought a battle in the middle of Tokyo on a Saturday afternoon.”

    “I think that’s you, my love,” Adam whispered in Stella’s ear.

    Stella stood.  “Sir, I am a graduate student of quantum physics at Queen’s University, and my research area is directly connected to my appearance in this world five years ago.  I think I can answer at least some of your questions, but I do have to caution you that this material is very complicated, and may not be understandable to lay persons.”

    “Please, indulge us,” Sato said.

    Stella took a deep breath.  “Very well.  Every single sub-atomic particle has what we call ‘information’.  A good way of thinking of this is that each particle is stamped with documentation of every quantum state it has ever existed in.  The ability to interact with this information is the basis of quantum computing theory.

    “My research suggests that information can contain much more than just the present and past states of the particle in question.  If this particle comes from the neurons of the human brain, it can also encode the ideas and concepts the person was thinking about when that neuron fired.  When enough people think about the same ideas, such as the setting of a popular story, this information reaches a critical mass, turning it into a physical place – effectively creating an alternate reality based on the encoded information.”

    Stella looked around the room.  Nobody looked lost yet.  Good.  “These realities are not independent.  They are linked back to the world that created them – this world – by what I call an ‘information stream’.  As new additions are made by the creators of this world and people read or see them, they travel down the information stream and are manifested in the created world as a physical reality.

    “Up until the last hundred years or so, this transit was only one-way.  What was possible in the created world and the information stream itself was governed by what was thought to be possible by those consuming the stories in question.  So, information could move down the information stream to the created world, but not back.”

    “What changed?” Sato asked.

    “In 1912, an American author named Edgar Rice Burroughs published a novel titled A Princess of Mars,” Stella replied.  “This story involved a character travelling from one world to another.  As Burroughs’ Mars stories became more and more successful, the idea of being able to travel between worlds entered the information streams generated by anybody who had read it, regardless of what story they were reading at any given time.  With travelling between worlds as a possibility now encoded into the information streams, they became two-way – under very rare circumstances, a person from one of these created worlds could accidentally fall into the information stream and arrive here, in the world that created them.”

    “Wait,” the man in the suit said, speaking for the first time.  In her peripheral vision, she saw Captain Infinite blink in surprise.  “So you are saying that characters have been coming out of stories into the real world for the last hundred years?”

    Stella nodded.  “It is almost a certainty.  Once the path was opened, people started falling through it.”

    “Why haven’t we known about this?” Sato asked.  “Why is an altercation like this just happening now?”

    “For one thing, there is a disconnect between the laws of physics here and those of the created worlds,” Stella replied.  “When one of us transits the information stream, we carry with us a bubble of the physics of our world.  This allows us to use abilities that would otherwise break this world’s laws of physics, at least for a short while.  But, the longer we are here, the more that bubble fades.  Within a year, there is no functional difference between a person from a created world and somebody who was born in this one.

    “For another, most of us who fall into this world probably don’t survive long enough for anybody to notice us.  When we arrive in this world, we are shocked and alone and confused.  We don’t know anything works, who might be friend or foe, or sometimes even what we can eat or burn for warmth.  Those who come from created worlds similar enough to this one to avoid the confusion probably survive long enough to integrate, but they just blend in.”

    “You’re saying that characters from fiction have just been coming into our world for decades and dying without anybody noticing them?” the man in the suit asked, disbelief in his eyes.

    Stella nodded.  “How many unidentified cosplayers have died of dehydration or exposure in the last ten years?”

    “Back to the main subject of concern,” Colonel Sato interrupted, “why is an altercation like this happening here and now?”

    “If I had to guess, it’s because of the isekai genre,” Stella replied.  “People travelling between worlds has become a stable of Japanese pop culture and literature.  This, in turn, finds its way into the information stream, making it easier for somebody to either fall into it by accident or travel along it deliberately, which is what our opponent has been doing.  If you want to look at it another way, the gate that used to be open just a crack is now wide open.”

    Sato nodded.  “Thank you.  We would appreciate you putting this in writing for us.  English is fine – we have our own translators.”

    Stella sat back on her chair, hoping that nobody had noticed her legs shaking.  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath to calm herself.

    “Now, what was this fight about?” Sato asked.