A Fencer for Bixbus

On 28 July 2018, Nial Triffett arrived in Bixbus. Unlike previous arrivals—who had been manipulated, accidentally transported, or reluctantly persuaded—Nial was pushed. Physically shoved through a Portal he'd been admiring as "a remarkable piece of work" before he understood what it was.

The recruitment had begun with a phone call. Luke Smith offered one hundred thousand dollars in cash for urgent fencing work—a sum that should have triggered every alarm, but Nial's business had been collapsing for twelve months. Suppliers wouldn't return calls. Debt was mounting. When you're desperate enough, you stop asking if something's right and start asking if you can survive saying no.

Nial kissed his wife Jenny goodbye that morning and told her he'd be back in a couple of hours. Just getting details on a new job. Just a chat.

The drive to Collinsvale took him into the hills, to a property belonging to Karen and Chris Owen—conservationists who had themselves been transported to Clivilius days earlier. Luke met him at the door with nervous energy that should have been warning enough. The promise of plans on the kitchen table. The hallway with its swirling colours that shouldn't exist.

Nial hesitated at the doorway. Something felt wrong. The money was too much. The location too remote. Luke's insistence too eager. I'm not sure I can do this, he said.

Luke's response was a shoulder to the ribs. Calculated force. The element of surprise. Nial fell through impossible colours and landed in rust-coloured dust under an alien sky, his world rewritten in the space between heartbeats.

Bixbus gained a professional fencer that day—someone whose expertise could transform improvised shelters into defended perimeters, whose business back on Earth contained the industrial equipment the settlement desperately needed. Triffett Fencing Solutions, established 2003, would become an unwitting supplier for inter-dimensional infrastructure.

The settlement also gained something else: its first arrival by violence. Previous transportations had involved deception, accident, manipulation—but Nial's arrival marked a threshold crossed. A man had been physically forced between dimensions against his will, his autonomy stripped in a single calculated shove.

On Earth, Jenny Triffett waited for her husband to come home. He'd said a couple of hours. By evening, she'd start to worry. By the following day, she'd start to panic. The text messages she'd eventually receive—carefully composed by someone who wasn't her husband—would buy time but not answers.

In Clivilius, Kain was assigned to help Nial adjust. Show him the tents. Explain the basics. Answer the inevitable questions about where they were and how they'd gotten here and whether they could go home.

The answers wouldn't help. But the fences Nial would build might keep everyone alive long enough to stop asking.