Just a Guy and a Gate to the Multiverse - Chapter 13 (Patreon)

Chapter 13 - Tourist

—In the Middle of Nowhere, 2007—

Stars shone brightly in the dark blue night sky until a sudden brightness interrupted the calm darkness. In the middle of nowhere, a massive, round, rainbow-colored portal formed from one moment to the other.

It didn’t take long for me and my moving house to emerge from the Gate. It wasn’t a quiet affair either. No I was loud as hell. With creaking and squeaking that could still be heard from a long distance away, I carefully drove my mobile home through the portal, bit by bit.

“Please don’t break. Please don’t break,” I silently prayed while listening to the noises echoing all around me. I knew I said I didn’t need to be an architect to build something like this, but that may have been a bit of youthful overconfidence.

Those sounds couldn’t be healthy, and the whole thing was shaking terribly, even while I was only driving slowly. Yeah, it wasn’t made to travel long distances, but I made it through the Gate relatively safely. As long as it held, even with my meager skills it would be fine.

I would probably have to use a bit of transmutation to reshape the structure and strengthen it from the wear and tear of moving around sometimes. But it made it through with everything still there.

My inactive Synths upstairs should have also made it through the Gate. I wasn’t really sure if they were considered living beings or not. After all, my skill stated that I was the only one who could pass through it. Hopefully, only for now.

Synths were just robots, nothing more. Instead of metal, they were made out of biologically grown parts. Right now, they were just empty husks, so they shouldn’t be counted by the skill no matter how you looked at it.

Since I didn’t feel any resistance while driving through the Gate, they should have made the journey safely. Or I would find a massive mess to clean up upstairs. Not looking forward to that idea.

Coming to a halt, I fastened the brakes before stepping out of the control room and approaching the exit. As soon as the hatch opened, I was greeted by a breeze of fresh air. No radiation, no smoke, nothing smelly or strange, just fresh, clean air. It was a nice sensation after over two years of exposure to the wasteland.

The next thing I saw was nature. Nothing but trees and lush forest ground in front of me, with a big hill behind me. Nothing mutated here, nothing dead, only normal nature you would find on Earth.

And yes, this was Earth. Not the Earth I was born on, nor the one from the Fallout world, but an Earth very similar to mine. And if nothing went wrong, it should be the year 2007.

I was actually surprised my skill hadn’t acted up yet.

[ Your Skill has leveled up! ]

Ah, there it was. Not that I had really expected it. This leveling speed was really fast.

[ Multiversal Gate Lvl. 4: This Skill allows the User to open a Gate from their current location to any place and time period in the Multiverse that the User can think of. At its current level, the Skill has several limitations. First, it has a cooldown of one year, and only one person can pass through. The User can now expand the size of the Gate up to a radius of 20 meters. ]

[ Multiversal Gate - Cooldown: 0:364:23:57:46 ]

That was a bit disappointing. Not that I was really complaining. I was happy about every upgrade, of course. But just an increase in Gate radius by another ten meters?

There wasn’t much I could do with that, was there?

I wasn’t going to build a bigger house. That shit was barely driving as it was. Any bigger, and it was definitely going to break after a few meters.

I had hoped for something more. Like a shorter cooldown. I really would have liked the possibility of visiting worlds without being stuck there for a year. I could have checked up on Sanctuary from time to time.

While I left them some gifts, like a copy of my entire library on some holo-tapes in the Vault. I would still feel better if I could easily check up on them.

That would also make building some lasting connections easier for me.

All I did was act like some kind of immortal cultivator, treating mortals like beings with fleeting lifespans I would never see again. And I wasn’t even immortal yet or hadn’t visited a cultivation universe. Those were really scary.

But I could only visit other worlds with a one-year cooldown, and that was just too long. It made getting into the mindset of meeting people and getting to know them really hard.

Even the ability to bring just a single person with me would make a big change. Some company would be nice. And that should be possible. The skill description probably wouldn’t mention that only one person could pass through if it wasn’t.

It pretty much meant someone else could go through my Gate instead of me. Ergo, I wasn’t the only one who could use it.

Patience. That was what I needed. Sooner or later, I was going to figure things out. There was probably something I was missing right now. All I could do was keep going and do my best.

There was still a bit more than half a year until I could use my World Attunement again. I was excited about that.

Yes, I was going to use it here. Sure, it was a parallel version of the Earth I grew up on, so there shouldn’t really be any difference on the surface. Right now, we were in a time when I had still been a child.

The 2000s. Amazing movies and TV shows, epic video games, the final Harry Potter book should have just been released, and it was simply the peak era of modern entertainment. A good time to be a child and teenager. In less than a decade, that would gradually go to shit and entertainment mostly turn into slob and politics.

At least that didn't affect me. I am in the peak era now. And this time around, I could afford it all! No longer a poor orphan. I had several million dollars’ worth of gold sitting upstairs in my house.

I was going to enjoy life to the fullest.

As for my World Attunement, while this was pretty much your standard Earth, there was still a bit of special stuff going on. A secret conflict, you could say, unknown to the majority of the world’s population. I wasn’t planning to get involved in any of that. If you asked me, the whole reason there was a conflict was just stupid.

All I was here for was to enjoy myself while getting a somewhat special, if not actually overpowered, ability in half a year for free.

First things first, I turned toward the hill in front of me. I should get settled.

Time to dig up a hole big enough to cover my house. While I was pretty much in the middle of nowhere, I shouldn’t be too far away from civilization either. There could be people passing by, and my home was eye-catching.

To be precise, I had asked to be somewhere I could hide my house. Desolate enough to have no trouble, but close enough to New York City. The Big Apple!

I had always wanted to see it. Now I was going to live here for a while. Wherever it actually was. I certainly didn’t end up in Central Park. That would have been too populated, even in the middle of the night.

And I couldn’t see a single skyscraper.

Well, it was time to get digging. Or rather, transmuting. I needed to get this thing covered before the sun came up.

———

—New York City, 2007—

Ah, New York, New York. The first thing I noticed about New York was the noise.

It was not just one sound. It was a hundred sounds stacked on top of each other, all fighting for space. Car horns echoed between tall buildings. A bus hissed as it stopped at the curb. Somewhere nearby, a man shouted into his phone like the person on the other end was standing across the street instead of inside a device. A bicycle bell rang behind me, and I jumped to the side just before a delivery rider shot past with a plastic bag swinging from his handlebars.

It was so different from the wasteland. If you weren’t being attacked by anything, it had been so quiet, almost dead. The liveliest it got was in settlements, but it had been nothing close to this.

I stood on the sidewalk with my suitcase in one hand and my for this time very advanced smartphone in the other, staring up like every regular tourist would.

New York was bigger than I expected.

Like I had asked my Gate, I arrived in a place away from civilization yet close enough to the city. It was actually a nature preserve called Great Piece Meadows, about an hour away from New York City by car.

Which fit my criteria, but it was still a good amount of time away, especially on foot. The biggest pain in my ass was getting to the city. Something I hadn’t considered before.

I couldn’t exactly use my Power Armor to get to the city faster and more comfortably. The second problem followed soon after. I found a bus stop rather quickly, but I had no dollars either.

Honestly, this ended up being one of the most expensive bus rides in the history of mankind. I paid with a bit of gold, which I transmuted into the shape of a coin. That was still worth several thousand dollars.

For a while, I had considered walking, but I was glad I didn’t. Sure, I was a fit guy now, but damn, that would have taken a lot of time.

Of course, I knew New York would be big. Everyone knew that. I had seen it in movies, in pictures, in travel videos, and in the background of a thousand stories. But knowing something and standing in the middle of it were very different things.

The buildings rose around me like cliffs made of glass, concrete, and steel. The sky was only visible in long blue strips between them.

For a moment, I did nothing. I just stood there and breathed it in.

Then someone bumped into my shoulder. I was about to pull out my gun, but then I remembered that I had left them at home. That was followed by the fact that this wasn’t the wasteland, and I wasn’t about to get jumped by a pack of Raiders.

Sure, I wasn’t unarmed. I had some Alchemy Gloves in my hastily packed suitcase, and my Philosopher’s Stone was always on me just in case. But I shouldn’t need them.

“Keep moving, buddy,” a man said, not angrily, but like he had said it a thousand times before.

“Sorry,” I said quickly.

He was already gone.

I laughed under my breath and pulled my suitcase closer. “Welcome to New York, Matt,” I muttered to myself.

Everything about this felt so strange. Not having my Pip-Boy on my arm. Not carrying any weapons or wearing some armor. Not even wearing my Alchemy Robes, which I had become famous for in the wasteland.

Just some normal jeans, a shirt, a jacket, and nice boots. Like everyone else.

The first stop on my list was a pawn shop, where I could exchange my gold for some actual cash. The bus driver was at least nice enough to point me in the right direction after becoming a few thousand bucks richer thanks to me.

After that, I looked for a hotel. Nothing too fancy for now, but nothing shabby either.

I decided to go the regular tourist route. All I wanted to do for now was enjoy my time.

The hotel I was pointed to was only a ten-minute walk from the pawn shop, but it took me closer to twenty. I stopped at two wrong corners, had to ask for directions three times, and nearly dragged my suitcase into a puddle left behind by street cleaners. By the time I reached the hotel, I had already decided that walking in New York was not as simple as walking through the ruined wasteland. The sidewalks had their own current, and if you did not move with it, you became a rock in the river.

Most importantly, I couldn’t just blow myself through any walls that decided to stand in my way for some reason.

The hotel lobby was small but clean, with warm lights, a narrow front desk, and a potted plant that looked too perfect to be real. Behind the counter stood a woman with dark, curly hair and a name tag that said Elena.

“Checking in?” she asked with a friendly smile.

“Yes, I would like to rent a room. Are there any free ones?” I asked.

She typed for a moment, then glanced up. “First time in New York?”

“Is it that obvious?”

She smiled wider. “The suitcase, the tired face, and the way you looked up at the ceiling like you expected Spider-Man to crawl across it.”

I looked up without thinking, and she laughed.

“Okay,” I said. “That one was unfair.”

“Maybe a little.” She chuckled. “We’ve got some free rooms. How long do you want to stay? And I’ll need an ID.”

Ah, the ID problem. The good thing was that it was 2007. The internet and global communications were still relatively new things, making an official check unlikely. The bad thing was that the internet and global communications were still new things, so I had to forge one with alchemy based on an unserious-looking image I found on good old school Google.

“A month should be enough,” I said confidently, handing her my ID.

Fortunately, that seemed to work out well enough, and she didn’t take too close a look. “You’re in luck. We’ve got a room unbooked for the entire month. It’s on the seventh floor. Directly to the right,” she said as she handed me a key after processing my data and taking my money.

“Thank you very much.” I nodded politely.

“So, are you here for sightseeing? Need any recommendations?”

I chuckled as I took the key and my ID. “What should I see first?”

Elena leaned against the counter and thought about it. “Depends. Do you want the classic tourist feeling?”

“Yes, completely. I’m not too proud.”

“Then start with Times Square. It’s loud, bright, crowded, and overpriced. But you should still see it once. After that, walk toward Bryant Park and the New York Public Library. Then Grand Central. That gives you a good first taste without destroying your legs.”

I nodded, trying to remember the list. “Times Square, Bryant Park, the library, and Grand Central. Got it.”

“And eat something from a street cart. Not because it’s the best food in the world, but because it feels right.”

“I already planned to do that. Street food is just classic New York. That sounds like exactly the kind of advice I need.”

After dropping my luggage in my room, including the teleportation tracker, and splashing water on my face, I tried a quick teleportation back to my mobile house just to make sure that everything was working properly before returning right back.

I had planned to rest for a while since I had a long journey behind me, but the moment I looked out the window and saw the city moving below, I knew I would not be able to sit still. I had come all this way to see New York. Sleeping could wait a bit.

[ End of the Chapter ]