Chapter 2
by 
Karbenyte
What do you do next?
Think about where you are, the Bridge Between Worlds
As you stand in your bedroom, you think to yourself about how different your current location is to the world you knew for most of your life, and the lives your ancestors would have known.
Until a about 150 years ago ago, anyone on Earth would have thought the idea of a portal to a world of magic and strange creatures was ridiculous. They would have said it sounds like a plot of a cheesy fantasy novel or a video game. They certainly wouldn't have expected such a portal opening right in the middle of the Canadian prairies, nor the decade or so of back-and-forth warfare between the people of Earth and the inhabitants of Raumina, the world beyond the portal. Nowadays, though, the Two Worlds War is a matter for history books, and travel between worlds is possible, though expensive and sometimes risky. Rather than the stuff of dreams, crossing between realms is more akin to a transcontinental sea voyage.
You never understood the details or how any of this stuff works - you never had a head for magic and metaphysics - but you understand that the place you now live, the Bridge Between Worlds, was created by the greatest wizards and engineers of the day in an attempt to stabilize cross-world travel following the end of the War. Apparently it's less risky to travel from Earth to the Bridge, then from the Bridge to Raumina, than to just travel straight between the worlds themselves.
Nowadays, the Bridge itself is almost a small country in its own right. Aelfryd Hall itself lies within the Tarius region, roughly in the center of the Bridge. It's a big, empty region, mostly devoid of people, other than the small number of villages and isolated estates like yours. Most of the land between settlements in the region is flat, barren and infertile, and shall remain that way until someone takes the time to terraform it through either magical or scientific means.
Rather than looking at the region as isolated and undeveloped, though, you usually prefer to think about what it could be someday, possibly soon. You aren't coming into an empty land. You're getting in on the ground floor.