Pontaliamon stood watching as the world below him burnt,

“Why?” he questioned as the planet he had known for seventeen billion years turned back into the mass of molten rock it had once been.

“We must go now, if the gravity becomes much more dense then we won’t be able to escape,” said a voice behind him.

“Please…one more minute,” Pontaliamon exclaimed clutching his grav-box even tighter than before.

            Pontaliamon was not a tall person though neither was he very small; he wore a pair of orange dragonhide boots greyed by age with a hole in the base of the left sole and a rip in the side of the right one. His trousers came down to just below his knees; they were made of the finest snail silk in the 1st multiverse, imported specially, thirteen thousand light years from the planet he was currently on. Over the top half of his body was a suit jacket given to him by the horseman of the soul chariot as his mother was taken to the world beyond. Covering his eyes was a pair of very dark sunglasses presumably to shield his eyes from the many stars littered here and there, though some think they are for a much more important purpose. On his head he wore his father’s sheepskin hat. He pulled it further down over his ears, though for normal people the heat would have been unbearable enough without clothes.

“Please Sir, Now!” came the voice again a lot louder than before.

“Alright Camfolt,” Pontaliamon replied, he turned on the spot almost effortlessly and, without even a second glance, walked away from the scene of death and destruction.

            Camfolt and Pontaliamon walked slowly back to their unusual starship, three funnels were smoking at the back of it and a steady cloud of ash drifted from the exhaust pipe. This was no fancy warp drive space vehicle; in fact it was powered by coal (the last order from the last coal mine on Earth to be exact). This kind of fuel had been banned in most star systems because of its pollution, but this was the Gateway (named so, because it was the gateway to the multiverses), the interplanetary prison. It didn’t even exist on most galactic maps, and nobody knew it was not a myth until they were inside it. However, many people suspected that planets were being taken for specific, more meaningful reasons, instead of just randomly.