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The students at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children had a new science teacher. His name was Danny Fenton, and as far as Eleanor knew, he had never crossed through a door of his own. As such, she expected the students to maintain the illusion that this was a perfectly mundane, if quirky, boarding school for perfectly mundane, if quirky, youths. They needed to learn how to interact with normal people anyway, in case their doors never came back to them.
Mr. Fenton was tall and lean, and he wore a novelty tie depicting the solar system. After he introduced himself, he took a moment to look over the classroom, making sure to examine every individual student. “Huh,” he said. “Okay, I have to ask: do I need to be concerned about the fact that all of you have been to other dimensions?”
Jill smirked, twirling her sparkly pen in her fingers. “Well, so much for pretending to be normal.” A few other students muttered similar sentiments.
“No, really, do I need to be concerned about this?” Mr. Fenton repeated in a lower, more serious voice. “I once knew a guy who thought he was basically interdimensional border control and arrested me a few times. Do any of you have any reason to believe you might have bounty hunters, trophy hunters, or anything else after you that might follow you here and cause problems?”
Most students demurred, with Kade and a few others muttering that the problems would start if they went back.
Mr. Fenton nodded. “That’s ominous, but I’ll allow it. Next question: do I need to be concerned about the fact that a few of you are slightly dead? Because some of you are slightly dead and I don’t know if that’s a normal amount of dead for you guys.”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t know if you’re talking about me, but if you are, it’s not causing any problems, no.”
Christopher gave him a thumbs up. “That’s actually kinda good news for me!”
“I could stand to be a bit more dead,” Jill sighed dramatically.
Nadya nodded. “Same, but not in a creepy vampire way like her. It’s just I went to a Drowned World and, well, there’s only the one way to go to one of those.”
Mr. Fenton pinched the bridge of his nose in a gesture that suggested he regretted asking. “Great. So, this isn’t a school for rich delinquents, it’s a school for, what, people who went through portals and didn’t adjust well when they came back?”
Kade, with assistance from the others, started explaining the doors as Mr. Fenton sat down at his desk, steepled his fingers in front of his face, and stared deeply into the middle distance. At the end, he snorted. “Lots and lots of doors. Theoretically an infinite number of doors,” he giggled. “An infinite number of doors, for an infinite number of realms. Infinite doors! Infinite goddamn doors!” His giggles grew into laughter that sounded less than sane, and then a cackle that was downright mad.
“Uh-oh. We broke him,” Jack deadpanned.
“Ha! Nope, no, I’m fine. This just… recontextualizes some things. A lot of things. Fully half – heh – of my life thus far. I’m fine. This is fine!” He took deep breaths and laid his hands flat on the desk. “This is fine, and I will process it later, because I have a syllabus to go over now.”
“Maybe someone should go get Lundy,” Sumi speculated.
“Who?”
“The school psychologist.”
Mr. Fenton grimaced and recoiled as if slapped. “Eugh. Please tell me Lundy’s human?”
“Wow, speciesest much?” Loriel snarked, only half joking.
He turned a surprisingly intense glare at her. “The last time I saw a psychologist, she tried to goad me into killing myself the rest of the way because she was secretly a ghost that feeds on suffering. Forgive me for being suspicious.”
“What does ‘the rest of the way’ mean?” Jill asked.
“Syllabus time!”
“How can you tell that we’ve been through doors?” Jack at least had the decency to raise her hand.
“Syllabus time!”
Angela whined. “But what was your door like?”
Mr. Fenton stared her down, unsettlingly blank-faced, and didn’t blink until she squirmed. “It killed me. We’re going over the syllabus now.”