Thereafter Chapter 1: Lex
Lex Chlebek, former Hero of Legend, ponders their work and social life before something impossible takes them away.
Book One: The City After The End
Chapter 1: Lex
Reflected in the matted aluminum of a cup noodle lid, the sun set over Warsaw. For most people, indeed most biological life humans were comfortable comparing ourselves to, this meant the definite end of the workday, the beginning of times of rest and recuperation. Lex was, like their noodles, just getting warmed up, however. Raiding the communal researcher snack cupboard had become a bad habit, but Lex had sworn solemnly that they’d stop doing it the second the university started paying its research assistants properly.
There was, put simply, entirely too much to do. Getting Lex’ position in the university hierarchy was precarious, and taking on entirely too much busywork was one of the few things they could do to smooth things over. Then again, Lex pondered as they chewed on a celery stick, their grace and magnanimity had not bought them many friends in the department. It was, they figured, on account of their winning and truthful personality and how transparently correct they were about most things.
Lex took a disdainful look at the celery. They had decided to get better about eating greens, but this particular green had been a misstep. “You are a stick of grass and water” they chided. Again with the English. Lex had every intention of being less dependent on the language of imperialism, but the international character of academia made ridding themselves of it entirely impossible. “Smakujesz źle,” Lex told the apium as they got up, it was time for another of their frequently ignored good habits, namely a good stretch.
As they stretched their quintessence of dust, Lex took a moment to check themselves out in the reflection in the mirror. They liked to style themselves as a bit of a mad scientist, but their scant, elfish form probably brought to mind something more akin to a manic pixie dream person, but there was only so much one could do about the meat robot one were given to pilot in life. It wasn’t like Lex wasn’t trying, with their pierced eyebrows and short crop hair, dyed toxic green for the occasion. The occasion, of course, being that Lex felt like dying their hair toxic green. Most days, they even wore a lab coat. Not today though, a usurper cup of instant pasta bolognese a previous night had claimed territory on their last clean one, and while seeming a bit “out there” was no problem, Lex in fact considered it a mark of pride, they would not let it stand to seem a slob.
Lex blinked, the world felt oddly out of focus around them. This wasn’t in itself unusual, but considering how diligent they had been with water and physical movement lately, it was cause for some concern. They stretched again, making sure to roll their neck to work out any errant tension that might have holed up along their narrow shoulders. It wasn’t perfect, Lex knew they needed a massage, maybe a happy ending, maybe several happy endings, actually, but this night there were still work left to be done. As they threw an errant glance out at the city below, they started noticing It.
It wasn’t a huge, bombastic thing in the way reality collapsing was generally portrayed. Rather, it was tiny, infinitesimal really. Rounding errors in the underlying math of the universe that added up to a something. It wasn’t that Lex understood the math in question better than everyone else, although they would argue that they did, as much as it was that they had seen it be undone before them once before.
Lex found themselves reaching out to the tiny rift in reality. Not physically of course, they could not touch the rift any more than they could touch a radio wave, but their conscious thought could, that’s at least how they had come to conceptualize the sense-that-wasn’t-a-sense necessary to manipulate what the uninitiated might call magic. The rift wasn’t a rift, Lex came to realize, it was a perforation. As it was made with the express purpose of being easy to close, it’d be borderline trivial to mend it. Lex didn’t go for borderline trivial, they never had, and so they probed the perforation, seeking to unfold what lay underneath. Past the mount of the perforation there was space folded tightly in on itself, and growing tighter, so the perforation was fixing to open wider, under the folding space, some sort of coil of gravity? Lex hesitated at this, surely this was to compensate for time flowing weird in the compressed space, but why was it so big? Determining where the perforation was leading wasn’t easy, in part because it didn’t connect two spots in physical space, at least not two spots in the same physical space.
Lex briefly wondered how they looked at this moment, did they stare slack-jawed into the middle distance, or was there a look of immense concentration on their face? It didn’t much matter, and it’s not like they could extract themselves from the workings of the perforation to check at the moment, anyhow.
Below the gravity coil, there was something else, a working of some sort of intention that Lex couldn’t quite identify. Poking around in magic like that was always risky. This particular Celtic knot of magic wasn’t big enough to be something really big and damaging, but it could, for example, turn all the air within a ten-meter sphere into sand or cotton candy, including what was already inside Lex’ lungs. Still, Lex couldn’t leave well enough alone even under ideal circumstances, so they started carefully examining the working, attempting to find a weak spot, the seam on the roll of tape that was this particular spell.
Lex got so into this examination that they didn’t notice the perforation widening, folding the space around it away to open a two-meter diameter sphere in the night sky over Warsaw. Lex’ consciousness slid back into their physical body just as the gravity coil kicked in, pulling them off their feet, through the window that had just been there, into the waiting sphere that hung ominously in the night, like a reverse black hole.
Of course, Lex found themselves thinking as they fell into the yawning portal orb and the working of magic activated. It was an entirely superfluous addition to the spell, but it only stood to reason that allowances for comfort were made. The innermost working started unfolding, and as it did, the working transmuted, creating a liquid out of thin air. Lex thought it to be water until it congealed into something far more viscous around them. Yes, this made sense, Lex thought with the same general tone of mind as the mild annoyance that they never got around to eating their cup noodles. Then again, there was every possibility they’d still get the chance. Time was funny like that.
Behind them, the sphere diminished, folding space back into place as its restriction of local reality shrunk, at first fast, then exponentially slower until only the small perforation remained. The Perforation didn't as much wink out of existence as it folded itself ever smaller, to the point where it was entirely a meaningless question whether the hole still existed or not. There remained no trace of the flagrant breach of the assumed base rules of the universe, apart from a still hot serving of cup noodles steaming in the darkening dusk of the university workspace.
Author’s Note: The tale begins with a brief POV cameo from Lex. I decided to give the rest of the Heroes a bit of time in the spotlight before we zone in on the main POV character for book one. Lex is a fun character to me, being both clearly intelligent and also mostly Freudian Id by volume. They probably are the most outrageous of the Heroes on balance, but I think attentive readers will find a core of humanity under all the science and magic and dirty jokes that aren’t jokes, but they are, but wouldn’t it be crazy if they weren’t hahaha?