How Did We Get Back Home?

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The Heroes went to Another Dimension where they fought countless Mooks and the Big Bad is destroyed. But how do you deal with the point at the end where you have to explain how they got back home? Answer: you don't, you just transport them back through some undefined mechanism. Suddenly the Heroes are surrounded by a flash of light and then they see that they are back in their homeworld.

Often the Heroes are dumbfounded about how they got back. Maybe they think it was All Just a Dream. The use of the transfer can have further unspoken implication that you may find useful. After a tense moment, it feels like a sweet release and actually increases the drama of what went before. It may imply that the Pocket Dimension stopped existing, or that the dangerous connection has been severed, you've managed to Save Both Worlds and now you can't return or just the implication that The Magic Goes Away.

As an Ending Trope, Spoilers ahead may be unmarked. Beware.

Examples of How Did We Get Back Home? include:

Film

• In the Futurama movie: Bender's Game After Mom gets the MacGuffin she, Fry, Leela, Hermes, Zoidberg and the rest return back to Earth.
• In the Super Mario Bros movie after the meteorite fragment is returned back to the meteorite, both Worlds start to fuse, and Mario and Koopa arrive back in Brooklyn
• At the end of The X-Files movie Fight the Future, Mulder and Scully are stuck in Antarctica with a Snow Cat with no gas on the verge of conciousness. The next scene shows them back in Washington D.C. without any explanation to how they got there. When this is brought up three seasons later by an admirer, Mulder and Scully comically bicker with each other and do not give a straight answer.

Literature

• Robert A. Heinlein's Have Space Suit—Will Travel ends with the protagonist's return home.

Tabletop RPG

• Happens if the PCs succeed in killing Lolth in the Dungeons and Dragons adventure Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

After a short, dizzying, gut-twisting spin, they will black out, regaining consciousness somewhere on their own world...If characters delve into these events, they might learn that they were rescued by their gods as a reward for their services.

Video Games

• The Pokémon video games do this every time you beat the Elite Four. Rather frustrating, especially if you're Level Grinding and just have to turn around and go right back.
• Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2 Neue Regisseur pulls everyone back to Earth's Orbit where Neue fuses with the White Star becoming Stern Regisseur and plans to Colony Drop Earth
  • In this particular case, it only happens in the "True Final Boss ending". The normal ending begins with the heroes essentially using a Combined Energy Attack-fueled teleporter to return home.
• Final Fantasy V: One minute, you're taking out the Big Bad in his castle, the next, you're back in your homeworld in front of Tycoon Castle. Subverted in that it's just the end of Act II.
• At the end of Super Mario Galaxy, after defeating Bowser and rescuing Peach, Bowser's galaxy explodes and destroys the universe. The Lumas all throw themselves inside the black hole that is tearing up the universe as an attempt to stop it, and after their sacrifice results in the birth of a completely new universe altogether, Rosalina appears and tells Mario that the material left from dead stars are actually used to create new ones, followed by him, Peach, and Bowser finding themselves back in the Mushroom Kingdom as if nothing even happened.
• At the end of Chrono Cross, the split timelines are united ("fixed"), and everyone supposedly return to their respective home, with Serge waking up at the Opassa Beach by Leena's side. Worth of note is that he can always flee from the Final Battle if he so wish, but it's Schala's power that sends him back after the job is done.