All he remembered was the drunken brawl last night. Some of his buddies had gone out after duty and they'd had a few too many. A fight started, and the last thing he remembered was one of the bear-men clunking him over the head with an empty beer stein.

He looked around him, and instantly almost threw up. That had to be the hangover. He wasn't even in a room at all, just an impossibly dark blue space. He was pretty sure it was black, but for some reason his brain said blue. But it had a hangover so really couldn't be trusted. Strange though, the hangover usually had a headache attached to it. He thought he could see stars, but he wasn't sure. And if he could, they were all around him, not just above. And moving. That can't be right. He tried to push himself up off the floor, but there wasn't one beneath him. It was like floating, only it didn't feel like he wasn't subject to gravity. Very odd.

It was an eternity before he noticed the other people there with him. Surely they hadn't been there before, else he would have noticed them. But he should have noticed them appear if they weren't there before, so they must have just escaped his notice.

There was another human there, dressed up in the robes of the mage's order.. only the symbol wasn't right. It was like backwards or something. And the robes were the wrong color. Night blue. Were they always that color? He thought for a moment he remembered them being burgundy, maybe it was crimson, but the more he thought about it the more he thought maybe it was night blue after all. It looked like Gubhai, but he'd died months before. Or was it days? Maybe he hadn't died after all. Gubhai was a cleric though.. or was it a thief?

One of the mongrels was there, wearing furs of some animal he'd never seen before, but still it looked vaguely familiar. Maybe it was something he'd read about in one of his daughter's books. What was her name again?

The fight.. there was a fight.. an enemy soldier had knocked him into a wall and he'd passed out. Maybe he'd been drinking.. that seemed familiar.

Over there was an elf.. wasn't it just behind him a moment ago? That didn't seem right, he figured maybe he'd just gotten confused.. he'd just been in a fight after all.. knocked out a bunch of ruffians in a bar before passing out from exhaustion when he got home. He thought he had said goodnight to his wife.. but he wasn't sure because he couldn't remember what she looked like.. Brown hair? He remembered he had a son.. he liked to read..

The last person in the space was a dark elf. He was pretty sure it was a dark elf, he'd read about them once in the library. One of these days he was going to have to get some books.. they'd be nice if he had some kids someday.

Wait.. there was another person there.. He'd been there all along, except that he hadn't been there before. When was before? He met this girl in a bar and went home with her.. was she a brunette? The newcomer that had always been there looked normal. Indescribably normal. He glanced at the others and forgot what the newcomer looked like.. wasn't there someone else here? If only his head would stop spinning.. his fiance had hit him over the head during an arguement last night, knocked him out.

"Welcome," the newcomer spoke. Oh.. yeah, there definitely was a newcomer. But he'd been there all along before he got there.

"What is this place?" the thief asked. Hadn't he just been a cleric? Yeah, a cleric in blue robes. Or were they crimson?

"I can't tell you that," the newcomer said.

"Excuse me?" That was the mongrel. The one wearing silk. "You take us to some bloody purple space and not tell us where it is?" The mongrel sounded angry. Was the room purple? He thought it was dark red.

The newcomer spoke again, he seemed like he was repeating a conversation he'd had thousands of times before.

"I can't tell you what this place is, only because it isn't."

No one in the impossibly dark green room looked like they had a clue what she was talking about.

"Imagine it this way," she continued. A line of light appeared behind her, but in front of her at the same time.

"This is time as you see it. As you used to experience it. But that wasn't real. Or it was, but not completely real."

He noticed the wooden door in the middle of the space. Hadn't it been there all along, behind the mongrel in the platemail?

"This door represents any decision you'll ever make. Do you open it or leave it closed?"

The line came apart, but hadn't it been apart the whole time? Now it branched like a sideways "Y".

"Now, if you don't open that door, you'll eventually come to another, do you open that one? And behind any door is an infinite number of other doors, all waiting to be opened."

The branches of the "Y" branched into more branches, all of which branched into more branches, millions upon millions of times. He had a headache again.. he thought it was from getting punched by his friend during a drinking game.. but there was no end to the branches. They continued to split and split an infinite number of times, then another infinite more until they wrapped around them in a tangled web of branched lines.

"Each of these branches represent a decision. A decision someone, somewhere, sometime made."

The pounding in his head wouldn't stop. He wished he'd gotten more sleep last night, but he'd been kept up all night by his son practicing the violin.

"Wot that got to do with us?" the mongrel in the dark robes asked.

"Some of these threads of time are causing some problems, bumping into other timelines. You've been charged with stopping them, in order to prevent Time itself from ending"

"Why would that be so bad?" the dark elf asked. He was wearing bloodstained armor. "Seems to me this would be fine with my gods."

"The destruction of time itself would negate even your evil gods, dark elf. While they're all for the chaos that would ensue, they don't want to become pure chaos themselves."

"So wot we do 'bout it?" asked the mongrel in tattered clothes.

"I was just getting to that. Virtually every world has it's share of heroes. For good or evil, they shape the world around them. Unfortunately, in some circumstances, there ARE no heroes. You have been chosen to fill that gap. To be heroes to a world that desperately needs them."

"Again, why should we care?" the dark elf in the studded leather asked. "Heroes? These so-called heroes are the bane of my god's existence. Stopping us from doing our work in the world."

"Not all heroes work for good. In this case, what you do will alter the timelines enough so they don't collapse."

He looked up at the woman. "Why us?" He asked. "I'm not a hero. I'm a simple bartender. My biggest fight has been kicking a couple unruly mongrels from my bar last night before being cracked over the skull by a mugger."

"The true heroes of your world are still needed there. You have all been chosen because you have the capacity to become heroes where heroes are needed. But to answer the question, you should care because once taken to this place, you can only go back one way - finishing what has been started here.

"I am the Scion of Orn. I charge you with preventing the death of Sir Util of Guecl in one week. If you do this task, you may go home. You will work together, because if you don't complete this task, you may be trapped there forever."

A book. His wife had accidentally knocked a large book off the top shelf and it had knocked him out. He passed out.