Bartholomew "Bart" Thatcher had been wiping the same spot on the counter for nearly ten minutes. To the untrained eye, it might have appeared to be dedication to cleanliness. In reality, it was the mechanical motion of a man desperately waiting for the clock to strike midnight so he could flip the sign from "Open" to "If we don't open after three knocks, We're Closed.?

  The Last Call Inn wasn't much to look at. Low ceilings stained with decades of pipe smoke, lighting from oil lamps that flickered with the resigned persistence of government employees on a Friday afternoon, and the perpetual smell of spilled beer, wood polish, and that particular musk that only develops when five different species use the same bathroom. An odor which, Bart had decided after careful consideration, could serve as an effective alternative to his modified crossbow if he ever needed to clear the room in a hurry.

  Nevertheless, the inn was his. Had been for twenty-three years before the rifts opened. And somehow, miraculously, it had survived five years of interdimensional war when buildings twice its size and thrice its importance had been reduced to rubble. The clock on the wall had endured three direct magical blasts, two gravitational anomalies, and what might have been a time-reversal event that had temporarily turned all the beer in the cellar back into barley. The clock continued ticking with such perfect accuracy that several patrons had theorized it might actually be the thing holding this corner of reality together.

  Somehow, the Last Call Inn had been at just the right, and wrong, place at the wrong, and right time, and as such it had survived through countless skirmishes, patrons and battles. Not only survived, but thrived in its own little way. Bart considered this a testament to his business model: Serve anything that can pay, don't question or take sides, and keep the crossbow loaded.

  "Ten minutes," Bart muttered to himself, glancing at his multiversally resilient timepiece. His grandfather had made it, which to Bart was enough explanation as to why it still worked. Grandfathers, as everyone knows, just made things that lasted. "Ten minutes and I can..."

  The door crashed open with all the subtlety of a dragon playing hide-and-seek.

  Bart's hand instinctively reached for the modified crossbow he kept under the counter. Five years of war had taught even the most peaceable of barkeeps to prepare for the worst. After all, the worst was usually his clientele.

  But what stood in his doorway wasn't the worst. It was something... weirder. Which, in Bart's professional opinion as a man who had once served a drink to a being made entirely of sentient smoke, wasn't all that weird.

  Three figures silhouetted against the night sky, each looking like they'd been dragged backward through the nine hells while being forced to listen to an ogre with a lisp recite elven poetry. About feelings.

  The first to step forward was short, barely reaching Bart's waist. A kobold, scales the color of rust with patches of what might have been blood or red clay. One of its horns was broken off halfway, and a scar ran from where it should have been down to its snout. It wore makeshift armor cobbled together from scavenged metal, leather, and what appeared to be the shell of some enormous beetle that had clearly lost an argument about personal space.

  "Got anything that'll burn a hole in my stomach?" the kobold asked, its voice like gravel being stirred with a wooden spoon.

  Before Bart could answer, the second figure pushed in. A woman, tall and lanky, dressed in what once might have been a sleek spacesuit but was now torn and patched in dozens of places. Her helmet was cracked along one side, revealing a face covered in tiny scars that looked like constellations, the kind astronomers would name "The Extremely Bad Day" or "Somebody Tried to Kill Me with Something Sharp."

  "Whiskey," she said, her voice clipped and precise. "Or your closest approximation that won't make me temporarily color-blind."

  The third figure had to duck to enter. A mountain of a man with a mechanical arm that hissed and vented steam with each movement. Goggles pushed up on his forehead, a captain's coat torn and burned at the edges, and a beard that seemed to contain several small metal objects woven into it. The objects occasionally blinked or made quiet ticking sounds, suggesting they weren't merely decorative but potentially useful for telling time, navigating dimensions, or possibly making very small toast.

  "Whatever they're having," he rumbled with a formal, nautical cadence, "and a pint of your darkest, if you would be so kind."

  Bart's eyes flicked to the clock. Eight minutes to midnight. He sighed. The very last thing he needed was customers who looked like they'd just crawled out of the war's messiest corner. Those types either couldn't pay or paid in things that defied classification by most reputable financial institutions.

  "Last call was five minutes ago," he lied, with the practiced ease of a barkeep who had been closing "in five minutes" for approximately twenty-three years.

  The kobold snorted, a small flame escaping its nostrils and singeing the edge of a "Happy Peace Day (Someday?)" banner that had been hanging optimistically since year two of the war. "Someday" had been added later based on the differing writing style.

  "Bar's still open. We can see the bottles from here," he pointed out, tapping a claw on the counter that left a small scorch mark. The sound of talon on wood created a distinctive sizzle, like bacon frying on a particularly irritable griddle.

  "And if time is your concern," the spacer said, tapping a strange device on her wrist that seemed to display several different times simultaneously, none of which agreed with each other, "I can assure you it's a far more relative concept than you might imagine. Tuesday has been happening continuously for the past eight days just north of here, you know."

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  She delivered this information with the matter-of-fact tone of someone reporting the weather.

  The pirate simply stared, his mechanical hand flexing with a series of clicks and puffs of steam that somehow managed to sound judgmental. The metal fingers clinked against each other in what might have been Morse code for "serve us or regret it."

  Bart recognized the look in their eyes. He'd seen it often enough these past five years. The thousand-yard stare of those who'd seen too much, done too much, and somehow lived to tell about it, even if no one would believe them. Even worse, it was the look of people who needed a drink badly enough that they might get creative if denied. His hand moved away from the crossbow. Creative customers were bad for the furniture.

  "Fine," he said, reaching for glasses that could charitably be described as "clean-adjacent." "But you're paying up front. Last time I accepted a tab from a kobold, I ended up with scales in the register that melted the coins."

  The kobold clambered onto a stool, leaving little scorch marks where its claws touched the wood. Each mark added to the collection that had turned the barstool into a connect-the-dots puzzle of previous patrons. It dropped a handful of glowing gemstones onto the counter, which skittered across the surface like sentient marbles before Bart caught them. Each stone pulsed with a light that seemed to come from within and emitted a barely-audible hum that somehow managed to sound exactly like the color blue would if blue made a noise.

  "These work?" the kobold asked with the hopeful expression of someone who had attempted to pay for things with mysterious glowing objects before, with mixed results.

  Before Bart could answer, the spacer placed some kind of metallic card next to the gems. It gleamed under the lamplight with an iridescence that suggested it might be made of something not entirely from this world.

  "Universal credit," she explained, her tone suggesting this should be obvious to anyone with a basic education in quantum economics. "Works in seventeen systems, though there's a terrible exchange rate in systems twelve through fourteen. Daylight robbery if you ask me."

  The pirate sighed, reached into his coat and produced a handful of actual gold coins, which was the first currency Bart had seen from them that didn't require a degree in theoretical physics to understand. The coins clinked against the wood with a reassuringly solid sound.

  "Real gold," the pirate said unnecessarily, setting the coins down with precise, deliberate movements befitting a ship's captain. "Not the kind that turns into butterflies after midnight."

  Bart reached for the gold with the practiced nonchalance of someone who had once accepted payment in the form of a chicken that laid time-delayed eggs. The weight felt good in his palm; real currency that wouldn't try to escape, explode, or philosophize.

  "What'll it be?" he asked, already reaching for bottles.

  "Fire whiskey," the kobold said, baring teeth that glinted in the lamplight like miniature daggers. "The kind that validates my life choices."

  "The same," said the explorer, removing her cracked helmet completely to reveal more of those constellation-like scars across her scalp. The removal released a faint odor of ozone and something else that smelled suspiciously like space itself. Cold, vast, and somehow theoretical.

  "Dark ale," rumbled the pirate, stroking his beard with his flesh-and-blood hand, causing the small metal objects woven into it to chime softly like tiny ship bells. "The kind that requires a spoon. And a whiskey chaser, if you'd be so kind."

  As Bart turned to fetch their drinks, the bottles clinking against each other in a familiar rhythm, he noticed the taproom wasn't as empty as he'd thought. In the shadowy corners sat other patrons: A high elf in a once-immaculate robe now singed with peculiar blue-green burns, delicately sipping some concoction that glowed faintly and hummed a minor chord whenever he set it down; a pair of dwarves with mechanical limbs and steam-powered monocles that wheezed and clicked as they argued over blueprint sketches, their beards intricately braided with copper wire and tiny blinking lights.

  The Last Call had always attracted an eclectic clientele, but since the rifts opened, "eclectic" had taken on an entirely new meaning. Not to mention an entirely new smell, which was something like ozone mixed with dragon breath and whatever that peculiar metallic tang was that accompanied teleportation spells gone slightly wrong. Bart had grown used to it, the way someone living next to a fish market eventually stops noticing the overwhelmingly piscine atmosphere.

  "Rough day?" Bart asked, sliding their drinks across the bar while ignoring the other patrons. It was the question he always asked, though he'd long since stopped expecting honest answers. In his experience, the rougher the day, the less people wanted to talk about it. Unless they'd had at least three drinks, that was.

  The kobold laughed, a sound like a box of nails being shaken in a tin can.

  "Rough five years." It took the fire whiskey and, to Bart's alarm but not surprise, lit it with a flick of its tongue before downing it in one go. The flames briefly illuminated the kobold's face, highlighting scars Bart hadn't noticed initially.

  "We just came from Horizon Ridge," the explorer said, staring into her glass with the intensity of someone seeing something far beyond transparent liquid. Her fingers, calloused and precision-steady, traced the rim with microscopic accuracy.

  "Typical brass idiocy," the pirate added, taking a long pull of his ale and leaving a foam mustache atop his real one. His formal tone contrasted with the bitter content of his words. "Send in the heroes, see who survives to declare victory."

  A strange, uncomfortable silence fell over the bar. Even the ambient sounds of clinking glasses and murmured conversations in the corners seemed to dim, as if the very air were listening. The lamps flickered in unison, casting momentary shadows that seemed to have too many dimensions.

  "You didn't hear?" the kobold finally asked, addressing no one in particular as his tail swished behind him nervously. The movement created a soft whooshing sound, like a very small, very annoyed broom.

  Bart paused mid-wipe. "Hear what??

  ?It’s over.?

  ?What? The war?"

  "So it would seem," the explorer nodded, her expression unreadable as she ran a finger along one of her facial scars. The scar briefly luminesced at her touch, then dimmed.

  "Hard to tell the difference," the pirate added, his mechanical hand clenching with a soft hiss of steam. "The dead are still dead. The ruins still ruined."

  Bart found himself wiping that same spot on the counter again. Five years of war, just... done. He wasn't sure how to feel about that. After all, the Last Call had kind of thrived because of the war. People fighting tend to be thirsty, and prone to dull both physical and mental pain with whatever their currency could afford. Peace might be bad for business, assuming there was enough world left for business to happen in.

  "Well," he said finally, "I suppose that calls for a real drink. On the house." He reached beneath the counter and pulled out a dusty bottle he'd been saving for a special occasion. Whether the end of an interdimensional war qualified as "special" was debatable, but it certainly qualified as an "occasion." The bottle made a satisfying thunk as he set it on the counter, dust motes dancing in the lamplight.

  "Didn't you lot fight for different sides?" Bart asked as he poured, the question that had been bothering him since they entered together. Their equipment and appearances couldn't have been more different, yet here they were, drinking together like old friends. Bart was no stranger to different sides in his little tavern, but they rarely entered together, and they almost never sat together without at least one attempted murder. The lack of bloodshed was almost disappointing. It would have given him something to bill them for beyond the drinks.

  The three exchanged glances.

  "Not anymore," the explorer said flatly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear to reveal another scar shaped like a perfect hexagon.

  "Someone actually did it," said the pirate with a shrug that caused his mechanical arm to vent a perfect smoke ring. The ring hung in the air for a moment before dissolving into nothing.

  "War's over," the kobold stated, exhaling a small puff of smoke that formed itself into a tiny mushroom cloud before dissipating. "As far as we're concerned, anyway."

  The clock ticked closer to midnight, the sound somehow more ominous than usual. Bart decided he wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. Some nights you closed the bar. Other nights the bar decided when you were done. This was shaping up to be the latter.