Alice looked at the letters from the Latin alphabet, and tried to suppress a tremor in her heart. In this world, Alice had seen multiple writing system. She was most familiar with the Illvarian alphabet, since she lived in Illvaria and interacted with books frequently. The Illvarian alphabet, however, had very little resemblance to any of the alphabets from Earth. Thus, Alice had simply assumed that writing was something most societies would eventually invent. History on Earth had shown plenty of different civilizations separately invent writing, after all. Alice had always speculated that humans from this dimension probably came from Earth, so at most, Alice had suspected that perhaps this world’s writing systems were based on cuneiform or Chinese or something - she didn’t know any Earth languages besides English, so she had no way of knowing which ancient humans had dragged their writing System along for the ride. Here, instead of Alice’s speculation, there was nearly irrefutable evidence that someone from Earth had been here before her. After all, the odds of another alphabet somehow coming up with nearly the exact same alphabet as the one that had existed on Earth in western Europe were… almost as mind-bogglingly low as the odds of a near-identical species evolving in two different dimensions with wildly different evolutionary environments, really. That being said, it didn’t just meant someone from Earth had been here before. It meant that someone from Earth had been here much more recently, since as far as Alice knew, the Latin alphabet had only existed for a few thousand years. Even more importantly… it meant that someone had been here while the System was being created. Alice leaned closer to the door and squinted at the words, trying to decipher what they said. Sadly, Alice was pretty sure that this was not written in English, even if the letters used in this writing System were almost the same. When she looked more closely, Alice recognized a couple of strange accent symbols above the letters that she thought she recognized as being from Eastern Europe. Perhaps the message was written in German? However, the word structure didn’t seem quite… Germanic enough. Alice wasn’t exactly a linguistic expert, but she was still pretty sure the writing in front of her came from a different language. Perhaps something a bit more Russian, or Baltic? Alice had no clue what the Baltic languages looked like or what the Russian alphabet looked like, but after a few seconds, Alice could feel her single level of {Russian Language Proficiency} inform her that the language in front of her was not Russian. Russian had a different alphabet. “Alice?” Ethan’s voice sounded near Alice’s ear, finally shaking her out of her frantic thoughts about languages. “What does it say?” asked Ethan. “It looks a lot like… well, it looks a lot like English. There are a few symbols I’ve never seen before, but almost all of the letters line up with what I’ve seen in your memories.” Alice shook her head. “It’s not English. It’s a language that shares the same root as English, most likely. Something from Western Europe.” “Western Europe?” Ethan frowned, and it looked like he was trying to remember what Western Europe was. A moment later, he gave up. “I don’t remember where that is, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. The bigger question is what this means. If you’re so sure that these letters originate from an Earth language…” “It means someone else from Earth came here! Not only that, but they must have been part of the construction of the System!” Said Alice. “They must have… have given advice about how to  construct the System, or… or maybe they were part of the planning team, or something. But someone else from home was here first!” Alice’s voice kept rising in fervor as she spoke, until she was nearly shouting by the end of it. But for once, Alice felt justified in raising her voice, because she wasn’t alone. Someone else from Earth was here, or at least had been here in the past. Someone from a modern, or at least somewhat modern era. Not ancient Babylonians or Greeks - someone from the not so distant past. In a fit of excitement, Alice actually hopped over to Cecilia and gave her a big hug, which caused Cecilia to nearly topple over in shock. “Alice? You almost never hug people voluntarily. Are you okay?” asked Cecilia. Alice cackled madly while Cecilia looked at her as if she had lost her mind. But right now, Alice didn’t care. Because someone else from home had been here. She wasn’t alone. Even more importantly, this answered a few questions Alice had. Such as why the System allowed her to enter once it confirmed that she had the {Outworlder} Achievement. It also answered why the security system ignored her as if she were made of air. Why could {Outworlders} enter the System? Because an {Outworlder} had helped build it. The {Outworlder} Achievement was probably used as a sort of security-card. The System saw that Alice was an ‘authorized personnel,’ and then promptly ignored her. A moment later, Alice had an even more exciting thought. If at least one creator of the System had been an {Outworlder}, perhaps all of them had been {Outworlders}? It wasn’t a very big stretch to imagine that all of the creators of the System might have come from Earth, once Alice acknowledged that at least one of them had come from Earth. Suddenly, Alice felt a surge of delight as she got an idea. For a very long time, she had wondered why the System resembled a video game from Earth so much. Now, she had a guess. The System likely resembled a video game because the creators of the System had been fans of video games, or something similar, such as tabletop RPG’s. A moment after she had this thought, Alice’s brain came to a screeching halt. Wait, had the developers of the System might have been fans of video games? That seemed to make sense at first, but there was a huge problem. The timeline didn’t match up. When Alice had left Earth, video games had been a fairly new invention. Alice didn’t remember exactly when the first video game had been created… but it should have been sometime within the past few decades. She remembered that the computer boom had happened… sometime around the 1970’s or 1980’s? Her memory was a bit fuzzy, but she was pretty sure it was well after the second world war. Video games were a recent invention. The System was not a recent invention. It had come to this world thousands of years ago. How could the developers of the System have possibly been fans of video games, given the huge difference in time? Had Alice somehow travelled into the future when she had been pulled into this dimension? Or had she somehow entered a hibernation state that lasted for thousands of years? The idea sent a chill down her spine. Alice had spent all of this time thinking about how, if she got back to Earth, she would be able to see her parents and her old friends again. Alice had built a life in this world, and she didn’t want to leave it behind - but she also wasn’t okay with the idea of never seeing her family again. The thought that her parents might have perished thousands of years ago was agonizing. Her thoughts spiralled even further out of control as she thought about alternate conclusions, and shivered as she realized that wasn’t even the ‘worst case scenario’ for how she might have ended up here. What if Alice was on Earth right now? What if Luliv and Earth had always been the same planet to begin with? Earth had never had any magic on it, as far as Alice knew, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t have been introduced from a secondary dimension of some sort. Perhaps Earth and some mana-rich dimension had collided, thus adding mana to Earth and rearranging the geography of the planet or something? Alice’s brain started conjuring up horrible images, of her somehow still being on Earth and slumbering for millennia as the continents changed, mana was introduced, and the world as a whole was bent out of recognition, before she shook her head. She still remembered that during the expedition out of Cyra’s borders, all those months before she moved to the capital, she had found fragments of her neighbor’s house stuck in the forest. She also vividly remembered that village that she and Ethan had visited, where she had come across a crashed car and where all of the villagers had mysteriously vanished. Based on all of the information she had available to her, she was still pretty sure those people had somehow ended up on Earth. Either time worked very differently than she thought it did, or Earth and Luliv were two separate dimensions. She probably wasn’t standing on the same planet she had been born on, and Alice didn’t think any crazy time-travel shenanigans were possible. Scholars of this world had tested the limits of time in hundreds of different experiments, and all of them had come to the conclusion that time travel was totally impossible. Alice had read through their experiments, and their methodology had seemed good enough for her to accept their conclusions. But that meant that the timeline didn’t quite add up. How could the System be thousands of years old, while video games from Earth weren’t even a century old yet? A moment later, Alice’s mind flashed back to her first few experiments with time mana. At the time, Alice had gotten a Perk that let her speed up the flow of time for herself… without impacting the rest of the world. Time travel was impossible, but that didn’t meant that time couldn’t be sped up or slowed down. Nᴇw novel chapters are publɪshed on 𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭·𝓯𝓲𝓻𝓮·𝙣𝙚𝙩 Thus, Alice came to a new hypothesis. What if… this dimension itself was passing through time much more quickly than Earth? Since the System was a few thousand years old here, and video games on Earth were only a few decades old, perhaps a hundred years passed in this dimension for every one year on Earth. Or perhaps the ratio was even more absurd - something like a thousand years passing on this planet for every year on Earth. It was impossible to guess what the exact ratio might be without a way to contact Earth and check the date there. In any case, if the flow of time between the two different world was much faster on one side, everything would line up. This explanation seemed to resolve all of the strange inconsistencies she had just noticed. At the notion that barely any time might have passed on Earth during her year on this world, a strange choking sensation gripped Alice’s heart. If that hypothesis was correct, Alice had no idea what her parents were going through right now. For Alice, it had been about a year since she had come to this world. Her seventeenth birthday was less than a month away. She had gotten used to this world, adapted, and realized that she would have to work very hard to see her parents and friends ever again. She had assumed that her parents might have gotten used to her disappearance as time passed - after all, time healed all wounds, or so Alice had heard from several different people on Earth. Alice had assumed that by now, her parents had probably grown to accept that their only daughter had simply vanished from her room one night, possibly along with several chunks of a neighbor’s house. They might still hold out hope of seeing her again one day, but Alice had assumed that by now, they were at least used to her disappearance. Now, she had abruptly learned that this might not be the case at all. Depending on how the flow of time between the two dimensions worked, her parents might not have even realized that she was gone yet - they could still be sound asleep in their room, awaiting morning. The entire year that Alice had spent in this world might not have even been enough time for her alarm clock at home to ring and wake her up for school. Her parents could also be trapped in the throes of panic right now, the morning after her disappearance. Or they could have had a few days pass by, allowing desperation to really set in. Her parents might be frantically clawing at straws, trying to figure out where she had gone and why Alice had disappeared in the middle of the night. Either way, if Alice’s assumption about the flow of time between the two dimensions was correct, her parents had not adapted to her disappearance. They were probably either unaware, or they panicking and desperate. Alice quietly hoped that if her assumptions were correct, she could find a way back to Earth before her parents realized she was gone. It would be far less painless for them if Alice just emerged from her room like usual, had breakfast with them, and then chatted about her strange adventure in another world. She could use magic to prove her story, since all of Alice’s information indicated that her magic from this world should work just fine on Earth, albeit with slightly lower efficiency. Her parents had always taught her to use science to determine the truth - even if reality was more bizarre than she could fathom. She believed that when presented with overwhelming evidence of her story, they would adapt quickly. She also thought back to the villagers that had likely been ‘spirited away’ to Earth. If her hypothesis was correct, it might still be possible to bring them back to Illvaria with little harm done. From their perspective, they might have only been dragged to Earth for a few minutes or hours by now. If Alice showed up with Immortal Ethan and teleported them back home, they would probably adjust pretty quickly to the situation, without facing months or years of trying to survive in a foreign world with no documentation and no grasp of the local language. She sighed, and shook her head. There was no point worrying about this right now. She had a System to fix. She could think about the cleanup afterwards. “Since you don’t know what the door says, should we go in?” asked Ethan. “Or are you worried about it being trapped? Allira says she can’t find any traps, but you’re also the one with the best knowledge of this place.” “I think we should be fine,” said Alice. She pushed open the door. Inside, Alice found a room that seemed remarkably similar to a small apartment one might find back on Earth. In the corner, there was a large, comfortable-looking bed. Next to it, there was a desk with a large pile of documents on it. The pile of documents seemed to have no organization whatsoever to it, or at least none that made sense to Alice. In another corner of the room, there was a decently large kitchen, with a few counter tops separating it from the rest of the room. There were even a few old cooking pots and food supplies, although the food supplies had long since rotted. The cooking supplies surprised Alice far more, because they were clearly made with nostalgia in mind rather than efficiency. There was an oven that looked pretty similar to the one her father sometimes cooked dinner with, and there was even a microwave. The microwave clearly ran on magic and enchantments, instead of electricity - but all of the dials and buttons on it were in arabic numerals, and had the exact same style as a microwave on Earth. It was magic explicitly designed to resemble technology, even at the cost of efficiency. The rest of the room was filled with other things reminiscent of Earth. Books, all in the same language that Alice had seen but couldn’t understand. There were also a few posters on the wall that Alice vaguely recognized - including a very blurry drawing of someone Alice recognized. It was a magically made copy of… Elvis? That confirmed her earlier speculation - whoever had designed this room had come from at least a somewhat modern era of Earth. She might not have much familiarity with Elvis Presley’s songs, but she knew for a fact that he came from the 20th century. The System had been designed by someone who came from the Modern Era of Earth. Alice felt a flicker of System mana stir in the environment as she continued to look through the books and paraphernalia scattered around the room. A moment later, she got a new Skill - one that she hadn’t expected, but which clarified her last remaining doubts. Through training, you have increased a skill! Finnish (language proficiency) 0 -> 1