The offices of MI7 were a mess. Bits of polystyrene packaging clung to the glossy furniture, the wiring was still being installed for the computers that had yet to be delivered, and the air was thick with the smell of fresh paint and newly laid carpet. People rushed to and fro, occasionally tripping over the boxes of unpacked paperwork scattered about.
It was chaos. Nobody knew who was who, what was where. Even though it had been two months since Open Day and creation of MI7, the new counter-intelligence and security agency intended to cope with the emerging extra-dimensional threats, it still felt as though they were racing to keep up with the situation that was spiraling out of control.
David Traynor sat at his desk, trying to massage away the dull pain in his right leg, which was unrelenting today. After a short while, he slid open his desk drawer, pulled out the bottle of gin that sat besides his badge and gun, and took a long series of shallow gulps. Two weeks on this job had already pushed him to alcohol. None of the others in the office batted an eyelid - it had been a long day, and it wasn't even 1pm yet. They had been fighting Nazis again.
David would be the first to admit he wasn't cut out for this job. He was unfit, couldn't shoot for shit, and had been promoted by his superiors because the media had taken his actions on Open Day and made him a hero. He wasn't a hero, he was simply one of the few officers who had kept their head together while everybody else was losing theirs.
It had been the night shift when it happened. The phone lines had suddenly been swamped with thousands of calls all at the same time - countless reports of people going missing in their beds, wild animals in city centers, traffic accidents, mass panic. David had quickly pieced together a functional comprehension of what was happening - people were falling through holes in the air and becoming lost in the worlds that lay on the other side, meanwhile the open portals were allowing creatures to venture back here. It was like the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, except the lions were much less friendly and mauling people.
Armed with this rudimentary understanding, he had ventured into the nearest portal to find himself in a silent, dark forest. A old woman lay not far away on a twisted ankle, and he had returned with her thrown over his shoulder. Over the course of the night, he had rescued eleven others, most of them with injuries sustained during their first Slide, stopping only on the thirteenth planet, when a man-shaped bear (later discovered to be a Viking) speared him through the leg with a weapon straight out of the iron age.
That had seen him laid up in hospital for seven weeks. Emerging from physiotherapy, he'd discovered that his actions had become heroics, and that his superiors were transferring him to the new agency on triple his previous salary.
"Isn't it a little early to be drinking?" an obnoxiously cheerful voice said.
David looked up to see Gemma beaming at him. "It's past dinner time," he grumbled defensively. She was wearing her lab coat, and in her hands she held a blood-soaked, bullet-riddled uniform in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag. It looked like a museum piece of World War II, like something the German SS might wear, except it was made out of a material that stopped bullets better than five inches of kevlar. "How are you always so cheerful anyway? Doesn't it bother you that the Nazis won on so many of these worlds?"
"Don't be such a cynic, this is only the third one so far!" she grinned. "How could anybody not be excited at a time like this? We're discovering new worlds, meeting new civilizations. Every day we're finding new technologies." She waggled the bloody garment in his face. "If I can reverse engineer whatever this 'super-kevlar' is, in a few weeks time it could very well be saving your arse."
David scowled. "Hah! Don't bother. In a few weeks time, none of this will even be here. Mark my words, sooner or later, somebody is going to Slide into somewhere really bad. Something will come through that none of us are prepared to deal with and then us, this country, the whole planet, all of it, fucked." He laughed bitterly.
"Not exactly a cheerful drunk, are you," Gemma smiled, unfazed. "The ban goes into effect tonight. Anybody caught Sliding without a license gets an instant jail sentence. Tomorrow won't seem so hectic. We can start getting this under control."
It wouldn't work, he knew it. They might as well try to ban breathing. The world was getting worse as more and more oddities and weirdos flooded in - there were already tales of vampires and werewolves spreading up North, though it was hard to know how much of anything was true anymore. And the more dangerous Earth Prime got, the more people were fleeing, Sliding into their own realities and staying there, leaving more doors open for things to return to Earth Prime and worsen the situation.
He sighed wearily. It was the apocalypse, that was a given. Best to focus on things he could deal with. He examined the five cases spread out on the desk in front of him.
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