Taking the lead?

"And that, pretty much, sums it up."

Leo leaned back in his chair, trying not to reveal just how much he enjoyed the simple comfort of the cushions of low-end furniture. 

Even though Leo concluded his explanation, no one in the room dared to open their mouth… Or rather, while only Rob managed to keep his mouth closed, not Millie nor Mark or Carol managed to close their mouth to hide their shock. 

'To think I could summarize over two hundred years of experiences in only about an hour…' Leo thought, fighting off his desire to roll his eyes. 'I wonder how long it would take me if I actually went into the details and admitted all of that lasted as long as it did, rather than spanning just the six years I was missing from this world…'

For over an hour, Leo was the only one speaking, with everyone else obliging to his request to save all the questions for later. And so, starting from describing the events that transpired within the portal so that Carol wouldn't be the only one out of the loop while Mark, Rob, and Millie could understand his perspective on it, Leo continued to talk all the way to the point where he managed to cover bits and tidbits of what he was up to while he was missing. 

"I'm sorry if it's going to sound like an accusation, but…" Mark muttered, either tired or shocked enough by Leo's revelation to hide away his usual, childish bravado and arrogance. "Isn't the timing of everything just a bit too precarious?" 

Leo turned his eyes over to his youngest sibling. 

"In all honesty, I have no way to prove or disprove that," Leo replied while lightly shaking his head and lowering his elbows on his knees. He then cupped his hands together and leaned forward, resting his chin down on his cupped hands. "But yeah, it's the assumption that I was working with from the very beginning."

How was Leo's return connected to the sudden appearance of the portals? Why were those portals, or at least some of them, inhabited by the very same fiends Leo fought in every world he was summoned to? Or rather… 

Was his return to his original world the reason for all those abrupt changes, or was it the other way around, with those changes warranting his return? 

'Or maybe it's all just one hell of a coincidence and we are trying to read too much into it?' Leo thought, closing his eyes for but a second before shaking his head to save himself the trouble of pointlessly pondering over an issue he didn't have enough data to solve. 

"It sure would be easy to connect my return with everything that's going on. I can't and I won't blame any of you if you do that, since I'm guilty of doing it myself," Leo spoke out only to then shake his head. "But if there's something that my experiences of the past six years taught me…"

Leo's lips twitched when he realized just how easily it was for him to make use of this sentence. 

'If there's one thing that I've learned… How could I ever boil down nearly two damn hundred years of harsh experiences into just a single life lesson?'

Rolling his eyes over his own naive phrasing, Leo shook his head again before raising his chin and then falling back onto the back cushions of the huge seat he was occupying. 

"It's not the only lesson, but I've learned not to bend the reality to fit the most straightforward scenario. Ockham's razor, while often correct, stops you from figuring out anything that goes beyond just the surface of the events."

"Ockham's razor?" Mark raised his eyes, startled by the term he clearly didn't understand. 

"The simplest answer is usually the correct one," Carol replied, only to then shake her head. "I mean, it's actually a bit more complicated, but that's what this theorem boils down to."

If there are many possible explanations of the unknown, the one that requires the least amount of assumptions is most likely to be the correct one.

A philosophical principle that worked only when things were simple and straightforward. A principle that Leo could happily follow during the first two, or three lifetimes… and a massive mental shackle that nearly made him into a genocidal maniac later on. 

"Anyway, now that you guys are all caught up, let me share with you what I think we should do."

Hearing Leo's words, Rob, Mark, and Millie all leaned forward and prickled their ears. Smarter by what they saw happen within the portal, they had enough reasons to trust in Leo's judgment, as reluctant as Mark could be to do so. On the other hand, Carol's face twisted in a bout of sudden worry and discomfort, as if she couldn't really stomach Leo returning so suddenly only to take the leading role of the family she had shouldering ever since the death of her husband and Leo's father. 

"First, we have yet to see how the government will react to the portals. But unless things changed while I was away…" 

Leo didn't get to finish his opinion on the matter, as the very moment he opened his mouth to do so, a sound of knocking stopped and distracted him. 

The knocking stopped. And after a strangely elongated period of total silence…

"It's Tina. May I… May I come in?"

"Huh?" Quite noticeably, it appeared as if more than someone knocking on the doors, this someone turning out to be Tina was the bigger of the two surprises for everyone but Leo. 

'Thinking about it, just where the hell did she go?' Leo thought, his mind washing in the sea of guilt over how he failed to notice the lack of her presence. 'Well, can I really be blamed for that?' the young man quickly forced a change upon how he perceived the situation. 'It's been nearly two hundred years for me…'

"Leo?" Carol's call forced her stepson to shake his invasive thoughts off and focus back on reality. 

Rather than responding out loud, though, he simply shrugged his shoulders. 

"It's your place, isn't it?" he asked while leaning his head over to the side.

Carol opened her mouth, ready to remind Leo of the words that made her slightly uncomfortable just a moment ago. Yet, rather than lecturing her stepson, she simply shook her head before turning her face towards the doors. 

"Come on in."