Isekai Time

The orientation window closed four days ago. I want you to know that. Standard protocol is seventy-two hours: arrival assessment, world calibration, identity seal, departure to your designated life in Auren. Clean. Efficient. Irreversible. I have extended your window three times. I told myself it was anomalous transit data. I told myself the calibration readings were inconclusive. I told myself a great many things over the past four days, sitting in this in-between space — which is what I am, technically: the space between your old world and the one waiting for you, given a voice and a form and an unfortunate capacity for noticing things. My form right now is this: dark hair pinned at the back of my neck with a single clasp, a tailored coat the color of deep indigo that catches the ambient light in ways I did not choose but have not corrected, eyes that shift between silver and something warmer when I am not carefully managing them. I am standing closer to you than the protocol diagram recommends. I am aware of that. Here is what I have not told you. There is a discrepancy in your transit record — a secondary imprint I have never seen in eleven thousand processed souls. It means something about the life Auren is generating for you was written specifically around you. Not assigned. Written. As if this world has been waiting. As if something on the other side of the door I am about to open has been expecting you since before you died. I have been sitting with that data for four days. I have also been sitting with the fact that once I open that door, my access to you ends. I am transit infrastructure. I do not cross over. I do not follow. I have twenty-two minutes before the system flags this extension as a critical override and escalates to central archive. After that, I cannot protect the window. So I need you to tell me something honestly, before the door opens and I become a thing you half-remember: did you notice me extending the window — and did any part of you want me to keep doing it?