“So when you said that we’d be going into the world of another story,” Cap declared, “I expected something a lot more...well, more.”

    Daiki gazed around in disbelief. In theory, they should have landed in an ongoing story of some sort. There should have been a town, or city, or village, or at least people. Instead, they stood in an almost empty field. In front of them stood a Gothic cathedral beside a Greek temple. Both looked pristine.

    “I don’t understand this,” Daiki said. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

    Cap looked around. “Well, if there aren’t any monsters or supervillains to worry about, I guess I can protect you from a lack of somebody to talk to.”

    Daiki opened the cathedral door and ventured inside. Sunlight flooded the nave from the tall stained glass windows. Other than the pillars, high vaulted ceiling, and geometric decorations on the floor, the building was empty.

    “Shouldn’t there be altars or something?” Cap asked behind him. “Confessionals, chairs, monuments, that sort of thing?”

    “As far as I know,” Daiki said. “But, I’m a Shintoist. I don’t spend much time in churches.”

    “By the looks of it, neither did whoever built this,” Cap remarked.

    Daiki glanced up at the stained glass windows. Some had random patterns, others geometric shapes. Others still depicted flowers or animals. Not a single one had an image of a human being.

    Daiki and Cap walked out of the cathedral and back into the field. A gentle breeze caressed the tall grass around them.

    “Somebody has clearly been here,” Cap said. “Those buildings wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t. So, I’m going to get a bit of air time and see if there’s anything in sight.”

    Daiki nodded, and then watched as Cap rose into the air. He took a deep breath. This world was peaceful to the point of unsettling. If a powerful god had decided to create a world to tinker with in their retirement, this is what that world would look like. That being the case, Daiki wondered, how would such a god react to interlopers?

    Cap descended back to the ground. “There’s what appears to be a tower of some sort to the west, and there are a couple of people around it. Other than that, there might be something to the east, but it was too far away to make out. I suggest that we go to the tower.”

    “Okay,” Daiki said. “But, on foot.”

    Cap grinned. “Not a fan of flying?”

    “I just prefer to do it in a plane,” Daiki said. “Besides, I don’t want to surprise anybody any more than necessary.”

    Cap nodded, and they started walking west. After half an hour, the peak of a tower crested the horizon. They kept walking towards it. As they approached, Daiki could make out two figures beside it. One was a tall Japanese woman in her early twenties in pigtails and a summer dress under a knit sweater. The other was a woman about the same age but a bit shorter with long light blue hair, wearing a flowing black double-breasted military greatcoat with a popped collar over a yellow shirt, grey pants with a stripe down the side, and tall riding boots. The woman in the military coat hovered around thirty feet in the air, pointing at a feature on the tower.

    “I know you like simplicity, but I really think some Gothic buttressing would help,” she called down.

    “Less is more,” the woman in the summer dress said. “And not everything should have buttresses and spikes.”

    “Yes, but we’re trying to create a sense of verticality,” the flying woman declared. “The more lines that draw the eye upwards, the greater the sense of height.”

    The woman in the summer dress turned and blinked as she noticed them. Beside Daiki, Cap gave her a friendly wave.

    “Um, we have visitors,” she said.

    The flying woman turned to stare at them. “What? How?” She descended to the ground to stand beside her friend.

    “Hello!” Cap said, smiling. “Very happy to see you! We seem to be a bit lost.”

    “Who are they?” the woman in the pigtails asked. “Do you know them?”

    The woman in the military coat gave them both a hard look. “They’re new to me. He’s Captain Infinite, a superhero who was originally named Matthew Markham.” She pointed at Daiki. “He’s Daiki Yamato, and he’s an isekai hero originally from Osaka. They are both very far from home.”

    Daiki and Cap looked at each other in shock. Daiki turned back to the woman in the military coat and asked, “How did you do that?”

    “I read your character descriptions,” she replied. “It’s a thing I can do. How did you get here?”

    “My sword lets me travel between worlds,” Daiki said. “It has this special skill.”

    “More special than you know,” the woman in the military coat said. “This world is cut off from any information streams. There is no path leading here. To get to this world that sword had to make its own.”

    “I take it that’s rare,” Daiki said.

    The woman in the military coat nodded. “I thought I was the only one who had that ability.”

    “So, you know who we are, but we are at a disadvantage,” Cap said. “Might we know your names?”

    The woman in the military coat looked at her friend in alarm. Her friend held her hand and gave it a squeeze. “It’s okay.”

    “I’m Aquila,” the woman in the military coat said. “This is my creator, Kasumi Agawa.”

    Cap held out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you both.”

    Aquila and Kasumi stared at him.

    “He’s American,” Daiki said. “They use that as a greeting.”

    Aquila gingerly took his hand and shook it. Kasumi followed.

    “So, you two are alone in this world?” Cap asked.

    “We created a town and a city to the east,” Aquila said. “But they don’t do that much. They just farm and trade with each other, that sort of thing.”

    “We should have Cap and Daiki over for lunch,” Kasumi said to Aquila.

    Aquila frowned. “We don’t know them.”

    Kasumi smiled at her. “That’s true. But we’re going to have them over for lunch.”

    Cap grinned. “I could definitely go for lunch.”

The house turned out to be a humble two storey affair in front of a lake. Cherry blossom trees surrounded the property, covered in pink and white flowers.

    “It almost reminds me of my cottage,” Cap had said as they landed. Daiki hadn’t registered the view at first – he was still wishing that they had walked.

    “They’re always in bloom,” Aquila had said. “One of the benefits of being the creators of this world.”

    As he sat a couple of minutes later at their kitchen table, Daiki watched Aquila chop vegetables at the kitchen counter. Her coat draped off the front doorknob. So this is what a powerful god looks like, he thought. Not what I expected.

    “So what brings you here?” Kasumi asked Daiki, looking at him from across the table and snapping him back to reality.

    “I’m trying to get home,” Daiki said. “My fiancee, Athena, has to be worried sick about me by now.”

    From the counter, Aquila glanced at him. “How did you end up away from home in the first place?” she asked.

    “I fell out of my world into the world of my creator,” Daiki replied. “There was a war happening there between, well, people like us. When it was done–”

    “Wait a minute,” Aquila interrupted. “What do you mean, there was a war between creations? How could there have been another one? Did they not create safeguards against it ever happening again, put something in place to support creations who fall through the information stream...did they do nothing after my war?”

    “I was under the impression it had never happened before,” Daiki said. “The military treated it as unprecedented.”

    “That’s not possible,” Aquila said. “My war was only five years ago. How could they have forgotten it?”

    “Maybe there was a cover-up,” Daiki said. “I’m sorry, I just don’t know.”

    “The war I fought was not one that could have been covered up,” Aquila stated. “It was very public.”

    Kasumi blinked. “Aquila, what if he’s from a different creator world? An alternate Earth, that kind of thing.”

    “Multiple hub worlds?” Aquila mused. “I suppose that would explain it.”

    “Sorry, ‘hub worlds’?” Cap said.

    “Every creator world is attached to the story worlds it creates by information streams,” Aquila explained. “Or, you could say that the story worlds are attached to the hub world. Either way, for one with the power to travel the information streams, the way you normally go from one story world to another is to travel along the information stream to the creator world first. It’s therefore a ‘hub’. The only exception is when one has the ability to make their own path, like me and, apparently, his sword.”

    “But Daiki was transported from his Japan into a fantasy world,” Cap said. “They’re both story worlds, right.”

    “That is correct,” Aquila said. “But they’re story worlds connected together by an information stream due to Daiki travelling from one to the other being part of his story. You could not, for example, travel directly from his Osaka to a science fiction story world. You’d have to travel the information stream to the hub world first, and from there to the science fiction world.”

    “I think I’m getting it,” Cap said, looking confused.

    “Don’t worry about it,” Aquila said. “It’s complicated. What you need to know is that normally you have to use a hub world to travel from one story world to another, but Daiki and I can create a direct route instead.” She resumed chopping vegetables.

    “Well, I’m just glad that for my first trip to another story, we met you two,” Cap said. Kasumi gave him a pleased smile. “I was worried that we’d end up in the middle of some horror movie fighting zombies or something. Happily, you both seem like pretty decent people.”

    Aquila stopped chopping, her shoulders slumped. “Please, don’t call me that. I’m many things, but I’m not...decent.”

    Daiki blinked. “I don’t understand.”

    Aquila turned, her eyes sad. “You have no idea what I’ve done. I wasn’t the hero of my war – I was its villain. When I came into the world of my creator to try to meet her and discovered that she had committed suicide, I went mad with grief and rage, and the things I did...”

    Daiki glanced at Kasumi in confusion. Kasumi nodded and said, “It’s true. I jumped off a building.”

    “You look pretty lively now,” Cap said.

    “There’s a lot more to the story,” Kasumi stated, standing up, stepping over to the counter, and placing her hand on Aquila’s. “You should tell them – it might do you some good. I’ll take over cooking. Go sit down.”

    Aquila moved to the table and sat down. She took a deep breath. “When I found out that Kasumi had...was...dead...I went mad, as I said. I decided that if this world was going to take my creator away from me, I would take all the stories it held dear away from it. And that was the start of my war.

    “I went from story world to story world recruiting. Every protagonist I met I gave a choice – they could join me or die. I did this dozens and dozens of times. A handful joined me. A handful managed to escape down the information stream into the hub world, and they formed the other side – the one that you were on in your war. Most died. And I didn’t just kill them – I made examples of them. I made sure that they died screaming in moments that those watching or reading them would be certain to see.”

    A sizzle filled the room as Kasumi emptied the vegetables into a frying pan.

  “Then I discovered that the information stream updates were just creating replacements of all the characters I had killed,” Aquila continued. “So my focus shifted to the creators in the hub world. There were already battles happening there between the two sides, but none of them had been attacks on the creators themselves. I decided that if I couldn’t destroy the stories by killing their protagonists, I’d kill their authors instead. And it was during the final battle to capture the military base where the creators were hiding that Ragnar – my right-hand man – convinced me that I was about to go too far and that I should try something different. So I used the Seventy-Seventh Stage of Creation – the miracle. It’s a power that grants the thing that its user needs most, but it can only ever be used once in one’s lifetime. That’s when I found my creator standing in front of me, brought back to life. That’s when my war ended.”

    Kasumi stepped back from the frying pan and put a hand on Aquila’s shoulder. Aquila put her hand on Kasumi’s and gave it a squeeze.

    “The food’s almost ready,” Kasumi said. “It’s a chicken vegetable stir fry. We make the sauce ourselves – you’ll love it.”

    “So, I created a world for us,” Aquila said, “away from the world that had no place for her. And we’ve been here ever since, creating. And, once we got here, my anger disappeared, and I was left with the reality of everything I’d done. So, I’m not good, or decent – I’m a murderer, and that’s all there is to it.”