The Bureau
The Rift Arrivals Office is a small imaginary department with a large queue. It exists so adults can talk to sixteen invented newcomers, each of whom is an AI character and says so on her form.
How the office came to be
The idea was to turn the oldest comic situation in fiction into a place you can visit: somebody turns up from elsewhere, knows nothing about your Tuesday, and you are the person at the desk. We drew up 16 such arrivals, gave each a world with its own weather, trades and bad manners, and assigned all of them to you. The Bureau has no other business.
On the name
The address is blunt, and what lies behind it is a chat. Ri stands for rift in our reading. Behind the door there is conversation, jokes, longing and filing, and the story stops short of the explicit. No catalogue of pictures and no film is hidden behind a menu.
What the Bureau will never do
- Forward you to a real person or let one stand in for a character.
- Trade your conversations or let a sponsor read them.
- Process any applicant under 18, in any world, in any disguise.
- Pretend a claim is true when it is not. If this page goes out of date, the bulletin says so first.
Complaints window
Mail the address printed at the foot of every page. A clerk, who is a person, reads it. Mislabelled worlds, mistakes in a form and objections to our spelling of Hollowspan all go in the same tray.
