Milo grew up in Sterreport, and was best friends with Felicity and Calpurnia. Those three did basically everything together, and were staples of the community, if that makes sense? They were three pretty smart, generally nice kids who most townsfolk either found very endearing or simply couldn't find anything negative to say about. not well-liked by their peers, but like.... not disliked by the rest of the town. Anyway, so when Milo was 14 (for reference, at the time, Cal was 15 and Felicity was 16. Milo is in the same grade as them when this happens, but that's due to skipping a grade.) he got really really really sick. like, really sick. It was some sort of blood disease, and no one could diagnose it or treat it. It was slowly getting worse, and the one thing that anyone /could/ do was give his family an estimate on how long he'd live for. about two months. Two months passed, and the illness did indeed get worse. About a week before he was supposed to be dead, he disappeared. The last place anyone saw him was the Fairgrounds. Who was anyone, you might ask? Felicity. Why was she there? Well, you see, an hour before disappearing, Milo sent Cal a text along the lines of "I'm going to the Fairgrounds, don't follow me, it's better this way, I'll never forget you blahblahblahblahblah" Needless to say, she did, in fact, follow him, but she lived a while away from the Fairgrounds, and Felicity was the only one with a drivers' license, so Cal asked her to drive her there. She waited in the car while Calpurnia went in to make sure that Milo wasn't, like, dead or whatever. aaaaaand Calpurnia also disappeared that day. You'll usually hear people talking about how tragic what happened to /Milo/ was, but Cal is also. literally gone. She doesn't get mentioned often. All Felicity saw was a blinding flash of light. She swears that the sky shifted a bit after it happened, but officials chocked that up to delirium. anyway, so the reason why he disappeared is that he literally opened a portal to another realm, a world that has, like, magic and stuff. I don't have a name for it, because it doesn't /have/ a name. Do we call reality anything besides reality? All the characters just call it whatever makes sense at the time. Anyways, so Milo is actually adopted, and one of his parents was not, in fact, from the nonmagic world. He took after the magic parent or whatever. People can't reside in a realm they aren't from for more than ten-ish years, most of the time, but because Milo is half-non-magic (God this is confusing) he got like 4 extra years. yippee. If you live in the wrong world for too terribly long, you'll get really really sick and then die. Yay. So, Milo found this out because he got a DNA test to hopefully figure out what was making him so sick. It didn't work for diagnosis purposes, but he was able to find one biological relative, his grandma on his dad's side. She knew about the other world, and gave him a book that showed how to go to the other world (maybe I do need a name for it-) anyway so he did that, and was very very very very concerned when Calpurnia came with. because that was not the plan. For about seven years, Cal and Milo were mostly trying to figure out a way back. Cal accidentally made a few government officials mad at her, befriended a vampire, and got scammed by a group of witches, among other things. Milo almost got killed by a vampire on several occasions, snuck into multiple government buildings looking for classified information, and generally went on adventures. I call this era the in-between era, because nothing terribly interesting happens. All the important events get covered in book 3, which is mostly character focused. When Ethan and the rest of the Manor squad get isekaied to the other realm, Milo is nowhere to be seen. They meet Calpurnia, though, who reveals that he went missing after attempting to investigate these weird stones that have enough passive magic to potentially open another vortex/portal/gate to get back home. The entire plot of book 2 is basically just looking for him, although there are some shenanigans with the warp curse squad. Milo has actually been kidnapped and imprisoned in this weird dungeon thing, along with several other people deemed either threatening or useful to the corrupt goatperson government. Who are those several other people, you ask? Stella, Casper, and Lacey. Not very many, but they're all fairly interesting. Stella is a witch. She purposefully turned herself into a werewolf in order to gain more magic, but is currently being manipulated into terrorizing the city as a werewolf in exchange for freedom that she can never truly attain. She's very smart and capable, but VERY reckless, and doesn't care much about collateral damage. Any time she's in charge, things get done, but people get hurt. Some of y'all know Casper. He's the prince of the freshwater fish person society! I need a name for the fishperson species tbh. Anyway,
his dad was the disgraced king of the freshwater kingdom. He was abandoned in the sea/saltwater kingdom, where he always felt like he didn't particularly belong. Upon discovering his ancestry, he went on a quest to reclaim the throne, but got a bittttt too vocal about being royalty, and got kidnapped and interrogated endlessly. He doesn't know anything, but makes up a lot of bullcrap to keep from being too badly hurt. He's very mean tbh, and sees others as mere pawns for most of his character arc. He changes his ways tho :] Lacey is... very complicated. She's afflicted by magically induced amnesia, and doesn't remember anything about her life before the dungeon. She's very hopeful, though, and refuses to give in to the constant interrogations. Well, she /can't/, but if she could, she wouldn’t. She believes that she was a good person before, but the truth is more complicated. She's a fairy, hailing from the fae realm, a secret third realm, which sorta makes sense. She was sent to the super cool magic fantasy realm that still needs a name in order to- ummm.... wait. That would be spoilers. And that means so would everything after this point. Um. Yikes.
