(End of Book 1) Chapter 51: Epilogue
“I’m still not sure we made the right decision.” To all appearances, the doubtful six-year-old-boy speaking was trying to start a brick, wood-fired oven using a lit splinter of wood and failing badly. “We haven’t changed a class like that before.”
“We haven’t had the opportunity.” As the splinter burned down dangerously close to the boy’s fingers, a very short, very stout middle-aged woman stole it out of his hand and threw it directly on the kindling he had carefully piled up. It burst into a healthy flame almost immediately. She winked and sat down. “And that’s the point, isn’t it? The Infinite is about giving the brave a place to spend that bravery, when nothing else is left for them to accomplish. We already let various worlds game that a little, but…”
“But it’s a mockery of what we were made for. Or something like that.” The boy rolled his eyes. “I’ve heard this a million times. It still doesn’t mean we can just create an entirely new, unbalanced thing.”
“Unbalanced as of yet.” A twenty-something man ruffled the boy’s hair. “It was part of the deal, remember? He had to be okay with a lot of turbulence in the process. Not just to agree to it, but to actually be okay with it.”
“Still, I don’t think…”
“Shush. All of you.” A very large man of not-at-all-human-looking features swept through the door of the house into the yard where the others were gathered. “It’s a dinner meeting, remember? The format of these little thinking sessions isn’t just for show. Cook first, eat second, and then let the conversation dwindle naturally before we get into business. Those are the rules.”
Nobody complained out loud. The oven fired up a bit too fast to be completely natural and fueled a few more cooking surfaces than made sense, but the work done on it was authentic enough. Deserts were baked, meat was roasted, and vegetables were prepared in a dozen different ways. Soon enough, there was a full, long table of food ready for consumption.
The table itself was the real stretch of reality. The general thought most people held about how The Infinite earned its name was that it had an endless number of floors, an endless amount of danger, or some other characteristic of the dungeon. It wasn’t so. Whether any particular version of that train of thought was true or false, the actual reason for the name was something different.
It was a nickname, essentially. The number of persons contained within the makeup of The Infinite was not actually endless, but there were thousands of them. Getting them all around a table at once and facilitating communication between them was something that required a bit of reality-stretching. It wouldn’t have been something that was easy to explain to an outside observer. Luckily, the only person who really needed to understand it was The Infinite.