Prologue
Note contains spoilers from previous seasons
For Angie and Wendy
We will always remember you
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost(1874-1963)
In Robert Frost’s famous poem, the man can only take one road, but suppose there was another universe where he took the more travelled one. Each day we have to make decisions, but suppose there was a universe where we decided differently, or a universe where we were never born. These esoteric suppositions used to be the preserve of the dreamers and of science fiction and fantasy.
Then came cosmologists and theoretical physicists and developed the
theories of multiple universes and the
Many Worlds hypothesis. Some said this was a logical extension of
M Theory, which had in turn been an extension of
string theory when it had come up with several versions in a failed attempt at finding a theory of everything and uniting the world of Relativity with Quantum theory..
Those who advocated the idea that the universe had been created by a supernatural being pointed to the
Anthropic Principal to show that our universe must have been designed. They did this because atheists had shown that certain fundamental physical constants, if they had been different by a fraction either way, then we could never have been. To the believers in a supreme deity this was clear proof of divine creation., The atheists dismissed this argument and called it “fine tuning”, they counter claimed that there could be many universes where these constants were different. To the believers this seemed like one big cop-out.
However at the end of the day neither side could prove if there were or not more than one universe so these arguments were just theoretical.
Or were they?
For there was another parallel universe, and in this universe there was a certain world. Unlike our world with just the one sun, this world orbited two yellow suns and had four moons.
Like our universe the fundamental physical constants seemed the same for this universe but this world was created and formed by the collective unconsciousness of humanity and as a consequence this world was inhabited by various creatures from our folklore, our fantasy stories, our nightmares and fears. This strange and mysterious process for forming their world, led them to term their world, The Mystical Realms and because we humans had something called a soul, our world was called the Realm of Mortals. Misnomers, as inhabitants of the Mystical Realms were just as mortal as humans are.
This other world, The Mystical Realms, was aware of our existence long before we were aware of theirs, and as they feared that the forces that shaped their world from our thoughts and fears could still create untold havoc in their world, so it was decreed that they should never interfere with ours.
Like all laws however, some would come to break them, and break them they did, but not always with the feared dire consequences that were envisaged.
For instance the leprechauns who offered their services to the then new independent government of the Republic of Ireland, in return for sanctuary from a repressive regime on their own world. Nothing they did in the service of the Irish government had any affect in their world, but then their work was ultra secret for the Irish military intelligence organisation known as G2.
Some inhabitants of The Mystical Realms, notably the major spirits of vice or virtue, would also visit our world, where sometimes primitive peoples worshiped them as gods. Indeed, these spirits were among the first inhabitants of this other world to be formed, because of this worship. In time these spirits would accept their role in humanity had ended and settle down to life on their world, apart from the few diehards who vainly tried to cling on to their “godhood” in vain.
Some of these spirits crossed to our world and bred with humans and thus the half breeds or the minor spirits came to be, but they had little power, and the rulers and other concerned inhabitants had an ingenious way of dealing with them. They fabricated magical devices, known as talismans of permanence designed to strip a minor spirit of the little powers they had and give them a human soul. The use of these devices resulted in making them forever fully human. For their part, the minor spirits of virtue and vice welcomed the opportunity to be fully human and be rid of their powers, so this was one of those rare solutions where everyone was happy.
Now along side dealing with infractions of the non-interference law, unfortunately like our world, The Mystical Realms had it’s own fair share of internal conflicts and wars, culminating in what some may say was a short, but terribly bloody civil war. One precipitated by a major spirit of vice with the overthrow of the most feared tyrant at that time and certainly not helped, by the interference of humans from our world who saw it as an opportunity to peddle crack cocaine to a troll clan in exchange for the livers of slain orcs which fetched a higher price on the streets of Miami.
But that war ended, and barring a conflict when a sect, involving not only inhabitants of The Mystical Realms but of Earth as well, for a while took over using Earth weapons, The Mystical Realms returned to more or less a state of peace. This sadly was unlike our world where wars and conflicts continue right unto the present.
But one thing there never was, was a war between The Mystical Realms and Earth, especially since the affair with the Colombian drug lords, the ruling authorities, the Convocation of the Trolls and the Gnolls forged an alliance with various governments on Earth to prevent the interference in each other’s affairs. The alliance was administered on our world through the ultra secret organisation known as Inter Dimensional Entity Control, whose headquarters originally based in London, England, were now based in Washington DC.
In a new age of secret détente, everyone wanted to be friends, even those alternate power blocks to the trolls, like the Drow High Council forged their own alliance with the Russian federation here on Earth.
This idea of war between our two worlds was unthinkable, and in fact nobody apart from a few renegade members of the old IDEC ever considered this. After all, with co-operation pacts between the two worlds and more than one power blocks on each world making friends with each other, who would have anything to gain from an inter-world conflict . . .