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Call me Jack. Most people do.

I started out as a time traveler, but I had to give it up. Not only is it illegal, but it’s dangerous to the continuum. One cannot go around creating new universes willy-nilly, and that’s the most probable result of time travel.

I became a time traveler completely by accident, stumbling across what I assumed to be a unique device while exploring some ancient ruins in South America. The device had apparently been left there by another time traveler, whom, I’m sure, wasn’t thrilled when I accidentally hijacked it.

Unlike many such devices, this particular gadget, which looked a lot like a small pyramid crafted out of blue glass, could cross both time and space with equal efficiency. It dumped me in the American West in the year 1884.

That was the first of many stops and it’s possible I’ll share them with you at a later date. But this particular story is not so much about my travels as it is about how my travels ended, and how I ended up where I am today.

The year is 2260. The place, San Francisco, California, in the former United States. The exact locale is on Haight Street, less than three blocks from the legendary Golden Gate Park.

I’m probably lucky to be alive, considering that no one told me that time travel was illegal until I ran into a group who took it upon themselves to police the activity. I’d skipped back to a time just around the second year BC in an attempt to meet Jesus Christ.

Apparently that’s not an uncommon thing for time travelers to do, so this aforementioned agency keeps a monitor in place to watch for our arrival. I was snatched off the dusty road within minutes of setting out to find the guy.

Two people seemed to pop out of nowhere, each grasping one of my arms, and frog-marched me into an alley between two mud huts. One, a remarkably tall fellow (he must’ve been seven feet if he was an inch), shoved me against a wall as the other, a short, elfin-faced woman, went through my pockets and frisked me in a so professional a manner that I didn’t even consider making a lewd comment about it. That should tell you how freaked out I was.

“He’s clean,” she said finally, glancing up at her companion. “Where’s your time machine?” she asked me.

Shocked to my core, I saw no option but to answer honestly. I’d been running around in the thing for nearly a year by this time and hadn’t ever run across anyone like these two. I had the feeling that if I jerked them around, I’d live to regret it.

“You take care of him, I’ll go get the machine,” the woman told her partner.

The big guy nodded.

“What’s all this about?” I asked him as the woman dashed away.

“It’s about you being in big trouble,” he told me soberly. “Time travel is illegal, dangerous, and really, really stupid.”

“Okay,” I said. “When was it made illegal?”

This took him by surprise and he gave me an odd look. I noticed then that the whites of his eyes were literally silver in color, the iris an extremely pale green. I couldn’t quite tell, but there was something weird about the pupil as well.

He never did answer me, but I found out on my own later. Time travel was made illegal in 2236, years before I ever found my time machine. I’d been breaking the law the whole time and had no idea.

Yeah, I know. Ignorance is no excuse. I have discovered, however, that stupidity makes a great excuse. Sometimes.

As it turned out, he was a lycanthrope. A were-tiger, to be exact. He and the elfin woman, who was indeed an elf, were agents of an agency called Hex which had taken over monitoring time travel from another agency known as TAU.

None of this was known to me at the time, nor would it have mattered. I’d rarely been as scared as I was at this precise moment. Not even when I’d been hunted by a posse in the old west for a train robbery I hadn’t had anything to do with. All I needed to do then was make it back to my machine and escape—which was apparently no longer an option.

I wasn’t sure what the punishment would be for unauthorized time travel, or who’d decide my fate.

As it turned out, I had very little to worry about. Hex’s first mission was to eliminate the time machine and return me to my own time. Rather than facing punishment, I discovered that my adventures had impressed someone important, namely the legendary Jasmine Tashae.

Now keep in mind that the people of my time know about other universes, and are at least aware of rumors surrounding the interworld agencies. Not much, I’ll admit. And most of us don’t spend time thinking about it. The “monsters” that appeared just before the Cen War back in the early part of the twenty-first had pretty much been acclimated into our society. Vampires, lycanthropes, mages, and the various kinds of “supers” had become part of the landscape. Jasmine Tashae—known by most only as “Jaz”, or, alternately, “The Lady of Blades”,—had been a major player in that war. Her name was in the history books along with such luminaries as Deryk Shea, Nemesis Breed, and the vampire Raven.

After the Cen War, most of the old national boundaries dissolved, or new unions were formed. This precluded the eventual formation of a single world government, but not before the most intractable were assisted off the planet. They went on to colonize other star systems. Some had wanted to escape through the worldgates into other universes, but the newly formed interworld agencies didn’t want malcontents from Earth Prime flooding the metaverse. They made it abundantly clear they were willing to back up that preference with force, if need be. So with the help of Deryk Shea, now the richest man on Earth, a fleet of colony ships was constructed and launched into space, aiming for potential homelands spread out amongst the stars.

I’ll admit it. Earth is a strange place these days. But it’s still my home. I didn’t flee through time to escape this world, but to discover new ones. And discover them I did.

My rather unique method of self-education caught the interest of the near-mythical Jaz, and she approached me with an astounding offer. In the place the interworld agencies call home, on Starhaven, there exists a watering hole called the Magitech Lounge, known as a refuge for all manner of sentient beings.

As Jaz told me, Earth could use a place like that. Even with all the preternaturals, parahumans and metahumans here, it’s still a melting pot that hasn’t been stirred real well. Normal folk are fascinated by the strange and unusual, but they’re also still afraid of it and no amount of book learning will change that. They needed something a little more…immediate.

I took her offer. It wasn’t as though I had anything better to do.

Earth’s Magitech Lounge is in an old converted warehouse half a block off Haight Street in San Francisco, above which we set aside a few rooms for rent and my own living quarters and office.

San Francisco, as you can imagine, has become quite the Mecca for the preternatural and paranormal. Not as much as Tacoma, which is where it all began, but San Fran always did have an open-door policy for society’s misfits.