It was an old underground train platform. It hadn't been used for its original purpose in years. Well-kept but empty, it made footsteps echo like the last sounds in the world.

Zach and his father walked along the platform, not too fast, each lost in his own thoughts. For once, Zach was more dressed than his father - Zach was in his Sunday suit, Mr. Amsterdam only in shirt and tie. They had Zach's luggage split between them, and it was enough to keep both their hands full. Zach's glasses had slipped down his nose, and he couldn't push them back up.

At the end of the platform was a sign. If the markings on it were writing, they weren't any kind Zach had seen before. He thought they were probably abstract, unsettling spirals that came just short of making a picture. Zach stopped in front of it, and took a deep breath.

"Son. Are you sure this is what you want?" It was said kindly, but Zach flinched. "I know you want to put things behind you, but are you sure this isn't too much?"

"No, Dad. I want to go." Zach could have said that a little louder, but he'd said it.

"Okay. Then good luck. And if you ever need to come home, even if it's just for a couple days. . ."

If Zach's dad kept offering him ways out, he was going to lose his nerve. "Dad!"

Mr. Amsterdam sighed. "Sorry." He set the bags down and wrapped an arm around Zach's shoulders. "I love you."

"Love you, too," Zach muttered. At least there was no one around.

"Can you do the teleport yourself?"

Zach nodded. His father stepped back, and Zach concentrated on the weird-looking sign. He was going to a place that looked just like this, but far away - in a place where the marks on that sign made sense. He had to bring all his bags with him. He had to. . . Oh, God. . .

Something slipped in Zach's head, and he felt a psychic bang in his brain that bypassed physical sound. He fell to his knees. "Zach!"

"I'm fine. I just fumbled the 'port, I'm okay. Just let me - ow."

"Do you want help?"

This was so embarrassing. "Yeah."

"Okay." Zach stood up, and Mr. Amsterdam put a hand on his shoulder. Their minds linked, and they reached out together. Good luck, son, Zach heard in his mind. Do something amazing. Zach stared at the sign. He felt the connection click in his mind, and suddenly the hand on his shoulder was gone.

Zack blinked and looked around. It looked like the same platform - but then, it was supposed to, to make the teleport easier. His bags were there, his dad wasn't. And the sign was different. Instead of the weird sinuous spirals, there were English words, a teleport key back home.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

It sounded old and famous - probably Shakespeare. Zach didn't know why they'd picked something so gloomy to trigger a mental link to Earth.

Whatever. It didn't matter what the sign said, just that it wasn't the one in Chicago. Zach was on another plane. He'd teleported clear out of the universe. He was really doing this.

He was also standing on the landing spot, right in the way of anyone else trying to 'port in. Hurriedly, he dragged his bags away from the sign. The ones he didn't have hands for, he grabbed telekinetically. They hovered grudgingly after him, toward an old wooden bench partway down the platform. Zach piled his bags beside it and sat down. There were no adults here waiting for him, and no obvious way to walk out. Apparently he was supposed to wait for the train.

This place looked just like the echoing old hole in the ground back on Earth, but somehow it felt like another world - or at least, Zach imagined it did. It felt strange, somehow, scary and exciting, like something weird was about to happen.

Zach felt a nudge against his ankle. He nearly levitated to the ceiling, for all that it was supposed to be impossible to use telekinesis on yourself. He did yank his feet up onto the bench, and let out a very embarrassing yelp.

"Rrrrouw?"

Zach sighed. "Just a cat." It was a half-grown tom, with long tan and black fur, and a gravelly little voice for such a young animal. "Hey, fella."

"Rrouw." He hopped up on the bench beside Zach, and started grooming.

"Wait a minute, do they have cats in alternate universes?" That was Zach asking himself, not the cat - he was a pretty good animal empath, but he had no chance of getting a housecat to understand multiverse theory. Still, the cat gave him a green-eyed stare. "Did you get caught up in the 'port by mistake?" Given the trouble they'd had with it, it was possible, though Zach hadn't noticed any cat back on Earth. "Come here, fella, I'll send you back home." He reached for the cat, but it stepped to the other end of the bench, out of reach. He leaned over and tried again, and the cat jumped away.

With a sigh, Zach got up and crouched down in front of the cat, holding out his hand in a loose fist. "Come on, I'm gonna send you back where you live." He reached out with his mind, trying to make a psychic link. Animals weren't smart enough for real language, but you could get across basic ideas. "I'll send you back where you have food, and where your territory is. And maybe a girl cat?" He felt the cat understand, but it just backed up. "What, you don't want to go home?" The cat took a couple steps further away, and looked back at Zach pointedly. Zach shrugged. "Okay, have it your way. There'll be plenty of people around who can send you home when you get hungry." He sat back down. The cat came back and wove around the legs of the bench, apparently convinced Zach wasn't about to do anything horrible like send him back to the plane of his birth.

Despite the way they still showed it in the movies, teleportation didn't involve any sparkles or bangs or flashes of light. The person just appeared. If you didn't happen to be watching the spot, you didn't know they were there until they said something.

Luckily for Zach, the next arrival said something right away. "Whoo-hoo! Multiverse, here I come!" Zach looked over, and saw a boy about his age, square-shouldered, redheaded, and freckled. He saw Zach and headed straight for him, floating his luggage behind him like a trail of ugly, rectangular ducklings. "Hey, man, I guess we're the first ones here. I'm Scott McLaren."

"Zach Amsterdam."

Scott sat down on the other side of the bench, and his luggage piled itself up beside him. He eyed Zach's suit nervously. "Should I have dressed up? We're just moving in, aren't we?" He was wearing blue jeans, himself, and his t-shirt showed a fantasy scene of a wizard fighting a dragon.

"I think. . ." you should have, Zach started to say, but then he realized he was guessing. "I have no idea," he said instead, pushing his glasses up. He'd studied everything he could find about their destination, but there wasn't much to study. He knew basically what he was getting into, but he had no details.

Scott squinted, and Zach felt a psychic brush against his mind. "Man, you're nervous," Scott said. Reading emotions was a basic telepathic trick, though Zach didn't usually bother. He tried it now. Scott was ridiculously excited and beneath that, to Zach's surprise, nervous. "How can you not be totally psyched? We're on another world. We're gonna meet aliens, and see magic, and learn to be planeswalkers."

"You're not supposed to call them aliens," was all Zach could think to say.

"Sure, sure. 'Members of other sentient races.'" Scott rolled his eyes as he repeated the politically correct phrase, but his grin seemed friendly enough. He definitely didn't seem like a xenophobe, anyway. "I guess it'll be sort of like college? Except starting younger." Zach would have been starting high school this year, and Scott looked the same age.

"Or boarding school," Zach agreed. "But definitely with different classes. And different kids."

"Yeah, no kidding." Other people were starting to 'port in. They were all about Zach and Scott's age, some a little older, one obviously younger. They were from all over the world - even Scott had an accent to Zach's ear, speaking fast and dropping d's and t's. And a quick psychic scan confirmed what Zach already knew, that they all had the auras that came with very strong psi. There were twenty, twenty-five kids here, every one of them strong enough to teleport between planes. Zach doubted any of them had fumbled their first attempt and had to get help from their daddies.

Scott poked Zach in the ribs, and he jumped. "Calm down, man, it's gonna be great! You'll do fine."

Zach frowned, then changed his mind and chuckled. "Heh, I guess this is day one of everyone I meet knowing how I'm feeling." Zach was strong enough to hide his emotions from most people, even most of his family, but not this crowd.

"Nah, not everyone. Just all the humans. Other races don't have psi."

"And that's another thing," Zach said. "What do the other races have? They're supposed to have some kind of weird powers instead of psionic gifts, but Wikipedia didn't have any details."

Scott nodded. "Like magic, right? I don't know much about it either."

"I thought magic was something else," Zach said. He guessed it wasn't like the lightning and rays of fire on Scott's shirt, either. But who knew?

"Perdona me." Zach turned around. A girl with dark, curly hair was crouched behind the bench. Zach didn't speak the language she used - Spanish? - but it was easy to read thoughts that someone was actually trying to communicate. "Excuse me," she was saying. "Whose cat is that? I wish I'd known they were allowed, I'd have brought one, too."

Zach leaned over and looked under the bench. It was the same cat from before, the young tom. "I don't think he belongs to anyone," Zach said. The girl understood his English, the same way he understood her. "That's Peter Pan - no one knows where he came from and he doesn't want to go home."

"He's handsome," the girl said. "But he must come from Earth, right? There can't be mice here for him to eat."

"Well, he doesn't want to go back yet," Zach said. "Someone can 'port him over when he changes his mind."

The girl nodded and reached under the bench to scratch Peter Pan behind the ears. He put up with it for a few seconds, then shifted out of reach. "I'm Clara." Zach and Scott introduced themselves. "I'm from Barcelona."

"I'm from Waterford," Scott said. The other two looked blank. "It's a little town in Connecticut," he added, which helped Zach but not Clara.

"I grew up in Emerson," Zach put in. "It's just outside Chicago."

"Oh, I've visited Chicago!" Clara said. "It's a wonderful city." With a quiet electric hum-hiss, a train car slid up to the platform. Clara pointed. "And look! Just like an el train, except quiet."

"Speaking of quiet," Zach said, "where's the engine?"

Scott laughed. "Hey, if a train with no engine is the weirdest thing we see today, I'll be really surprised. Come on, we'd better get aboard." Clara ran for her bags, and then saw Zach and Scott hauling theirs telekinetically. She copied them quickly.

"I never did anything like this at home," she said. "It freaked everyone out, how strong I was." Actually, her suitcases wobbled as they floated onto the train, while Zach and Scott's floated smoothly. Out of practice, Zach guessed.

Luckily it was a roomy car. Twenty-odd kids and their luggage fit inside without anyone sitting on anyone's lap, though it was a close thing. Zach, Scott, and Clara ended up inside a little fort of their own suitcases. The enclosed space was noisy with chatter in a dozen languages, often two or three in the same conversation. The doors slid closed, and the one-car train started back up the track as quietly as it came.

"It's so strange," Clara said, "how I already feel more at home here than in Spain."

Scott laughed. "That's not gonna last long. If you're looking for someplace that feels like home, you're going to the wrong school."

"Isn't that the point?" Zach added. The last thing he wanted was a place that felt like his home.

She shook her head, bouncing her hair around. "No, I'm serious. Haven't you ever felt like, I don't know. Like you're an alien? Like you're so very different from everyone else?" They hadn't, particularly - or at least, Zach hadn't, and Scott didn't answer either. "Sorry," Clara laughed. "Never mind, I sound dumb."

The light changed. The train rose up out of the ground, and took a corner. "Holy -" Zach pressed his nose to the window. The frame of his glasses clicked against the clear plastic. "Guys, look!"

The sky wasn't the pale blue of the Earth they knew, it was a deep blue, like twilight, like the sea. There was no sun - instead, the light came from a spiraling cloud in the sky the size of a constellation, glowing rose and yellow and white, with occasional flashes like lightning. The train was running through fields of long prairie grass, not green but burnt orange and bronze, each blade splitting into fine feathery strands that strung out in the wind. And in front of them, they saw a great eight-sided tower, angular and reflective, like a crystal of polished steel.

Every kid on the train was staring raptly out the window. In five seconds, Zach learned a dozen translations for "Cool!"

"There it is," Scott whispered. "The Babel Academy of the Multiverse."

Zach swallowed. "Here we come."

--:--

A Helpful Excerpt From the Planeswalker's Gazetteer:

"Multiverse - An infinite collection of interconnected universes, or planes, that make up all existence.

There are some phenomena that are indeterminate, or random at the fundamental level, though the probability of various outcomes can be predicted. These phenomena include the motion of subatomic particles, the choices of sentient beings, and magic. Observers will see an indeterminate agent do A, or do B. In reality, the universe has split into two, and the agent has done A in one universe and B in the other.

Not all universes are created equal. Many planes are unstable: either short-lived, or apt to superimpose with their near-copies. (When two planes superimpose, observers in each one will sometimes observe events of the other universe instead of their own.) Most near-copies of planes inhabited by planeshifting races seem to be unstable in one way or the other. To take a famous example, all near-copies of the home plane of the human race. . . "