Salem flew above the city, observing the people's reactions with interest. Seeing the hustle and bustle of the city reminded him of home, making him miss Callum.
Shoving aside his homesickness, Salem proceeded to land in the large plaza where Jane still stood, shell-shocked at his return.
Amused by her reaction, Salem knelt to allow the girls to slide off and proceeded to transform himself back into his humanoid form.
Jane stood awkwardly, unsure of what to do, before copying the rest of the people and kneeling.
"Why are you kneeling?" Salem asked.
"You're our people's savior. Why would we not?" Jane responded with confusion.
"I am not your savior." Salem said. "I mereley fixed what was broken."
"And that brought about our golden age." Jane responded.
"She's right, you know." Ruby whispered to him.
"I'm well aware of that, but that doesn't mean you should hail me as a god." Salem pointed down the street to an awful depiction of him in his draconic form. "And please, for the love of all things holy, don't make statues of me."
Alina giggled next to him, amused by his dislike of being immortalized in stone.
"Would you like to come in for tea?" Jane asked tentatively, trying to alleviate the sense of awkwardness she felt standing there, unsure of what she should do next.
Nodding his head, he followed the bewildered Jane into her rather spacious apartment.
Sitting down, the three of them waited while Jane hurriedly made tea.
Seeing her struggle to keep her hands steady, Salem decided he wouldn't stand by and watch her make a mess. When she spilled almost half of the tea leaves in the box, Salem stepped in and made the tea, gesturing for her to sit down.
Placing the tea leaves in the cups and adding the boiling water, Salem passed around the cups of tea and adressed Jane.
"Why are you so afraid?" He asked. "I'm not here to hurt you in any way."
When Jane heard him say he wasn't there for punishment, her shoulders slumped in relief.
"I thought you were here because you didn't like my management of the Shadows." She admitted.
"On the contrary, your management of them is splendid." Salem praised her. "You're what? Thirteen? And you're capable of creating an entire society of Shadows capable of enforcing order and having minimal corruption? I find that admirable."
"Fourteen." Jane mumbled, hearing him guess her age wrong, but hearing him finish his sentence filled her with a sense of pride. "Do you really think I did well?"
"You surpassed his expectations." Ruby broke in. "He kind of expected it to collapse."
"I kind of did." Salem admitted. "But when I saw you were on the right track, I stopped worrying so much about the state of this world."
"Why do you always say 'this word'?" Jane asked suddenly.
"There is an endless number of worlds out there." Salem said, gesturing above them. "And an endless number of Universes as well."
"How do you know?" Jane asked, gauging his reaction to determine if she could continue her lije of questioning. "Have you been there?"
"We haven't been to all of the worlds within this Universe, but we have visited several Universes." Alina explained. "This is his third Universe, and our second Universe."
"You can travel between Universes?" Jane asked incredulously. "So you can prove the theory of the Multiverse?"
"Not in mathematics, but in experience. Yes." Salem responded, amused.
"What were the other Universes like?" Jane asked, leaning forward against the table, anticipating wild stories.
"My original world was a world without magic." Salem said. "But it had pretty cool technology. The headgear I gave your people for communication was based off of a prototype from my original world."
"How did you get out of that Universe?" Jane asked, her curiosity piqued.
"That's a secret." Salem chuckled. "But when I travelled to the second world, I was almost sold as a slave."
Jane spat out her tea in disbelief.
"What? How?" Jane asked, wiping the table and her mouth with a cloth, clearly still shocked.
"When I entered the second Universe, something went wrong and I entered as a burnt husk." Salem said, shuddering as he remembered the pain. "I was weak, my nerves were basically fried, and I was unable-"
"How did you recover?" Jane interrupted.
"We'll get there." Salem said, laughing outright at her enthrallment in his story. "I was unable to move, so a man by the name of Colgate set it up so that he could 'heal' me, lining up a buyer in the process."
"He then freed us, along with hundreds of other slaves, and led us to a new home." Ruby said, resting her head on his shoulder.
"I went with Alina," Salem gestured to Alina, aware that they had never given their names to her. "And explored the wilderness as I recovered. Ruby stayed behind so she could govern the small town we had made together."
Salem sighed as he remembered the stress he had felt when searching for Ruby.
"Ruby," He gestured to Ruby. "Was cast out by the villagers after she became a sword mage, blaming one of my big mistakes on her."
"He made a dimension travelling washing machine that blew up and irradiated a massive area in my homeworld." Alina said. "We searched through the massive zone for her, hoping that we could find her before the radiation killed her."
"Obviously, they succeeded." Ruby said. "Otherwise, I wouldn't be here."
Jane stared at Salem dumbfoundedly.
"You...Made a dimension-travelling washing machine." She muttered, trying to comprehend the implications behind such a device.
"Yes." Salem said, laughing once more at her apparent ignorance. "The first time I allowed too much energy to flow into the singularity and caused a mini black hole to form, which promptly collapsed, sending partially fused protons, electrons, and neutrons, along with a massive quantity of radiation into the atmosphere."
"So...You basically bombed the planet." Jane said.
"Yep." Alina said, drumming her fingers on the table as if were no big deal.
"You're insane." Jane said, shaking her head in disbelief.
"The opposite actually. I can assure we are completely sane." Salem said. "It was an accident."
"You accidentally bombed a planet." Jane said, laughing at the absurdity of it. "You bombed a planet and just kind of went 'Oopsies!?'"
"Well, yeah." Salem responded. "Althought he world had developed magically, they had not developed very far technologically. So they thought it was divine retribution or whatever. The world's king at that time was also getting into slaving, which I could not allow, so I killed him and left behind a legacy that could help them remove the radiation contamination."
"Are you going to do the same to our world?" Jane asked, growing bold.
"No." Salem said firmly. "I intend to give you the legacy directly and lead these people on the path of light."
"So what happened after you left the legacy?" Jane asked.
"We literally just left after that." Salem said. "And arrived here, to correct this f**ked up world the next."
"So...You're multidimensional policemen." Jane said.
"Sure." Alina said.
"We're damn good policemen then." Ruby said. "It took us what? Two weeks? To bring about massive changes."
"It was more along the lines of four days, but okay." Salem said.
"Even so, that just proves my point." Ruby responded.
"It does." Salem agreed. "We're going to leave as soon as we give you your inheritance."
"What? Right now?" Jane asked, shocked with how things were progressing.
"Yep." Salem proceeded to make a small orb infused with every single element he had access to, and handed it to Jane. "This will make you a Nanomancer, like me."
"What does that mean? Is it like a small Necromancer?" Jane asked, holding the little ball.
"Basically." Salem admitted.. "You can summon nanobots to form into shapes so that you can use them for fun things. The mask I gave you was made from nanotech."
"This thing is made from nanobots?" Jane asked, pulling it from a drawer. "But it's solid!"
"Just because it's solid does not mean that nanobots cannot adapt to it." Salem lectured. "If you knew half the things I've made, you wouldn't find that surprising."
"How do I use this?" Jane asked.
"Swallow it." Salem said.
"That's it?" Jane asked disbelevingly.
"Yep." Salem responded. "And I have a ton of blueprints that will be uploaded to your mind as well, including that of the orb. What you do with this power from when we leave, is up to you."
"Goodbye." Alina said, gently.
"Bye." Jane said numbly.
Salem materialized his washing machine of doom and had Jane observe it.
"This is one of the few blueprints you will need to figure out on your own." He said.
"And risk bombing the world? No thanks." Jane responded instantly.
"You'll feel differently in the future." Salem said, certain of that.
Once the washing machine of interdimensional travel was successfully able to create a small tear in the fabric of the space-time continuum, Salem had the girls hang on to him like koalas and passed through, giving his final goodbye to the fourteen-year-old with the weight of a world on her shoulders.