Shane only had to take one step through the black hole and he felt as if he got hit by a very hot wall. A bright light blinded his vision for a moment, leaving him feeling vulnerable when he tried to open his eyes again. He automatically stopped moving forward and something bumped into him.

“You’ve got to keep walking, dumbass.”

The woman's sneer came from behind him, making him step forward quickly, blinking wildly. His eyes adjusted to the bright light and it became obvious that he was blinded by the sun that stood high in a bright blue sky. There was no more snow carried by the wind to obstruct the view. He stepped into a clearing and all he could see were plants and trees beyond the clearing. It all seemed very tropical and that was exactly how it felt. A big improvement, if you asked him.

He stretched out his arms and hands, the joints in his fingers making a popping sound, and felt less stiff and cold already. He hoped the same would quickly happen with his feet. He wouldn't be surprised if he would leave puddles of melted ice where he stood.

“Is this where we’re supposed to go?” he asked, because this didn’t look or feel like home and he had no idea what they were doing there.

“No…” she answered almost inaudible. “I think it might not be entirely fixed.”

“No shit,” he deadpanned. “So, where are we?”

She shrugged as she looked around. Shane sighed at this, he'd expected her to kind of know everything and tell him with a know-it-all tone or snapping it at him. Instead, there was a silence while he waited for an answer.

She took her hood off and her face became clearly visible in its entirety for the first time. She had a slightly hollow looking face with sharp cheekbones and thin lips. The blond strands he saw earlier had made their escape from a ponytail. It was quite long and wet from the snow that got blown into the hood. The sun shining in her eyes revealed a stormy gray color. Her skin was very pale, as if she never really went outside in daylight.

“We could be anywhere, almost every world has some kind of jungle-y forest,” she answered, eventually. “There’s only a few that don’t.”

“Well, what are you waiting for? Just make a new… gate-hole-thing to our destination! The er... 18th,” he said impatiently.

“19th.” She corrected him automatically without looking at him.

She followed his advice either way, or at least tried to, and was still holding the device. The snowflakes that had blown into Shane's hair earlier were quickly melting and water dripped into his neck. She pressed the buttons on it again, but nothing seemed to happen. Shane heard how she started to curse under her breath and even though he couldn't understand what she was saying, the way she was saying it was more than enough to get the gist of it. Like with every piece of technology that doesn't work like it’s supposed to, she just pressed the buttons harder. It wasn't working at all.

"I think it might've overheated," she said while her long fingers wrapped themselves around the device.

“I should’ve arrested you right away, we wouldn’t be in this situation if I did,” Shane sighed.

The young woman looked at him and the corners of her mouth turned upwards. For the first time since he'd met her, he saw the smallest hint of a smile on her face. Still, it wasn't really a genuine smile, rather something he would describe as sarcastic and patronizing. Shane was generally an intelligent young man, always had been. Always had good grades and picked things up quickly enough, but she made him feel like he wasn't that smart at all and was just a bit too slow to understand everything. He hated that feeling.

“You wouldn’t have succeeded anyway,” she told him nonchalantly.

“Why wouldn’t I succeed?”

He took the bait, his eyebrows raised and with a slight sneer in his words.

“Because you wouldn’t be able to catch me. You tried to and look where we are now. You better refrain from trying again, neither this one or the previous dimension is your jurisdiction. We can only get arrested by the local law enforcement or the interdimensional one. Not you,” she told him.

She looked him up and down with a smirk on her face. Shane scoffed, he was smart, smart enough to make some kind of a comeback at least.

“That’s not how it works,” he declared. “And it doesn’t matter when you’re in cuffs anyway.”

He grinned contently, but his face fell when the woman chuckled mockingly.

“If you say so.”

She looked at him with the same smirk, the corners of her narrow lips curled up. Shane pressed his lips together and crossed his arms, his mood hitting a new low for the day. He turned away to look at a tree instead of her.

She barely noticed the change in his attitude, as she never really cared much about people and their emotions. She didn't even care about her own emotions and there were more pressing matters anyway; like finding her way back home right now. She preferred to not think about what would happen when, or if, she came home. That was an issue she would see to when she got there.

Shane began to unbutton the top buttons of his shirt. His uniform consisted of a dark blue shirt with short sleeves for the summer season, his cap that he'd already lost somewhere on the way, a black leather belt with enough loops for everything, and dark blue pants with sturdy black shoes. Under his shirt he wore a dark blue undershirt that appeared as he unbuttoned his blouse.

It was really suffocatingly hot, Shane was already sweating. He didn't understand how the woman seemed like she could care less about the heat in that black hoodie.

She lowered the device defeated and sighed softly. This made Shane look back at her, his previously annoyed mood fading already.

People didn't get to him often, he prided himself in having pretty good control over his emotions and reactions in his line of work. Getting into stressful situations wasn't unusual for him, but this was entirely different from anything he'd encountered before and this woman really knew how to get on his nerves, whether she did it on purpose or not. He knew that he was stuck with her if she was right, until she could bring him home, which made him feel powerless and wanting to lash out. But wasn't she only human too? Stuck in this situation with him?

“So… what do we do now, do we have to wait until it’s cooled down?” he eventually asked because she didn’t say anything.

“Yeah, if that works,” she shrugged.

Shane sighed exasperated, he was tired from the long day he had at work and he'd just rather not be in this situation. He could have been home now, typing a quick report on his brief and fairly useless meeting with the informant on his computer with some freshly brewed coffee and a bowl of instant noodles. Instead, he was stuck in some tropical hellhole after coming out of an ice world with a woman he didn't know, who seemed to have no clue what she was doing, and if 'nice' was part of her vocabulary.

Suddenly something dawned on him. Two things, actually. One; the reason why he'd actually gone after her. The mysterious meeting and exchange with the dark young man he'd witnessed. The weird and stressful situation, the cold made him forget all about that, but the sun seemed to melt his frozen brain.

Two; something he preferred not to notice right now. There was movement he could see from the corner of his eyes and he tried to ignore it so he could bring up his previous point and find out what it was all about. The movement did cause him to turn his head slightly, enough to see what was causing it.

“You better start running,” the blonde woman said at the same moment he turned his head.

Right after saying that, she started sprinting away from him, while Shane could barely process what was going on. His eyes widened and his jaw almost hit the floor when he realized what was coming towards them. He was feeling dumbfounded and for a moment, paralyzed with fear that turned him white as a sheet.

It was something Shane knew all too well in a different kind of form, something he saw nearly every day in the summer. An annoyingly buzzing wasp, with its black and yellow striped body. Ordinary might not be the right word to describe this one though, as it was over ten feet long and appeared to be at least four feet in diameter. He had huge black faceted eyes on his head, an enormous stinger hanging behind his heavy body and his fast-moving wings announced his arrival with a loud buzz. The huge wasp approached quickly while Shane didn't take a step, seemingly frozen in fear.