A Long Way From Home

Kait

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“…Um, tests?” Chloe stopped just short of putting some fish in her mouth. She looked worried. “What kind of tests are we talking about?”

To be fair, it was a good sign that Aurora was asking, first. The kinds of people she worried about – they wouldn’t have asked. They would just incapacitate her somehow, take her somewhere they could keep her under control, and, well… there wasn’t a lot of consent involved, from what she’d heard.

She slowly put the fish down, watching Aurora closely. She didn’t know how much it was safe to tell her, or even whether it would be safe to eat this fish. She hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to Aurora when she was preparing it – it might have a sedative in it or something, for all she knew. All this stuff about magic, and elves, and demons and metahumans was too fantastical. It might have all been an elaborate trick to make her lower her guard.
 

Thirteen

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"Nothing invasive I assure you."

Of course that probably wouldn't comfort the young girl in front of her. At the very least however, Aurora was not lying. The tests were completely harmless and non-invasive. Although apparently her stricter tone may have been off-putting. Maybe the mage should have had a little more tact. She smiled.

"Seriously. The first one is simply telling me the date. The second..."

Aurora shuffled through her desk, which apparently was carrying almost an infinite amount of random assorted objects, including four 20 sided dice. She was not an RPG player, but the dice did provide an interesting magical measurement.

"...Is rolling this set of dice on this book's pages. Also, you haven't answered my questions about where you come from exactly."

Aurora flattened out the book so that the dice would not fall when cast. If Chloe did roll the dice, the both of them would find something quite strange happening: the dice wobbled on their edges for entire seconds before falling in a straight 16-17-18-19-20.

If she rolled again, the dice would again wobble unnaturally, but with a different set of numbers.
 

Kait

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It was the fifth time Chloe had gotten paranoid about something like this, and it was the fifth time she had to reassure herself that, no, the people here probably weren’t interested in vivisecting her. Or anything like that.

She sighed. The date. Right. “Today’s November the eighteenth. And the year is twenty-fourteen.” Made sense to ask that – they would be able to rule out time travel. Unless she had actually time traveled.

Chloe picked up the dice in cupped hands and shook them around. “I said I come from the US. I was from New Mexico originally, but I go to a boarding school in Montana.” The school’s initials – B.A. – were embroidered on her blouse as well as her skirt. She rolled the four dice and scrunched her eyebrows at the result: 17, 18, 19, and a natural 20. “Critical hit,” she muttered. “Anyway – it’s a school for meta-humans that I’m legally required to attend. I’m also not legally allowed to leave the place, being an Abomination Unto Our Lord and all,” she added dryly. “I’m one of maybe three kids at that school who can’t pass for human. The rest are basically just humans with superpowers, so they can go do whatever they want.” One could almost taste the bitterness in her voice.

She rolled the dice again. Once again, they wobbled unnaturally, but this time each of the dice stopped moving with its 6 facing up. “Spooky,” she remarked, half-serious.
 

Thirteen

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Some good news, time travel was pretty much ruled out. There may have been a discrepancy of minutes or even hours, but not enough to actually have any tangible effect on the universe. Unlike Aurum, who had crossed over 38,000 years of humanity's history.

Although Aurora was aware of most supernatural presence on Earth, it stood to be reasonable that maybe there was a nexus of other students at another school somewhere that she was not aware of.

That said, it wasn't where she had come from that was important. More specifically, it was the wobbling of the dice on the book, and the numbers that were popping up. Mostly the first one though.

"Well you're not in Montana anymore. Or even your version of Montana for that matter. Are you familiar with entropy at all?"

Even if she wasn't, Chloe at least deserved a theory on what Aurora thought of her predicament.

"If not, it's how entropy moves from being in a concentrated state to a state of dispersal. It's more complex than that, but it'll do. When you roll the dice, entropy normally tells how the dice will fall. Kind of like fate. The problem is, when you get two entropic fields clashing with one another, the dice don't know how to fall."

Yes, it was long winded, but hopefully she'll understand.

"And the way you come from another entropic field, is by being from a different universe altogether usually. Being on this side of the book, this universe's rules dominate, but it looks like there's some residual energy leaking from the book. But given the date, it looks like you just hopped parallel to your own world, not through time or anything."

As if it was trivial almost. The event was trivial for Aurora, who saw it happen quite a few times. For the students however, it could be traumatizing.

"I suspect I haven't heard about what happened in America, because it never happened."
 

Kait

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“I’m from a different universe.” Chloe said. “And you can tell because of some weird dice rolls. And entropy.” She understood most of what Aurora was telling her, but it all sounded like ridiculous horseshit. She took a bite of fish, then rolled the dice again, fully expecting something more disorderly. All 1s. She rolled again. 13-14-15-16. Again. 17-18-19-20.

Chloe did not like these results. It had to be some kind of trick. Agitated, she looked up at Aurora. “Do you have internet here? I’d like to check a few things.” She was eager to disprove everything Aurora was saying, to prove that the things she was talking about actually happened.
 

Thirteen

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"You're from a different universe, and I can tell from some weird dice rolls and entropy. You would be surprised how many times I do this per month. Give them a roll on the table, they should start rolling normally."

Aurora did not stutter, and just as always, the dice came up with some very strange patterns. If rolled off the book, they stopped being so hesitant, and instead dropped quite normally into more random patterns like they should.

"Hold on, I should have internet around here somewhere...uhhh."

Computers were not one of Aurora's strong points.

"Here. They gave this to me awhile back, I'm not really sure how to use it."

Aurora handed over a tablet. There was wifi in the room, just so that students could use it, but Aurora herself had very little use for it.
 

Kait

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“Thanks.” Chloe was a little more familiar with how to operate the tablet. And she didn’t have any patience for dice tricks anymore.

Swipe across the screen to unlock, and no password. She went straight to the web browser and began her search. The virtual keyboard was programmed to make the tablet vibrate a little, and to make a clicking sound every time she pressed a key. In Chloe’s hands, the tablet was a veritable noisemaker, with a soft pulsing buzz and rapid, sharp clicks.

News pages were first. Or, “news,” in this case. Fox always had something colorful to say about the ‘nephilim,’ as they liked to call Chloe’s kind.

She scrunched her eyebrows. Fox had plenty of colorful things to say today, but none about nephilim. What about Reuters, though? The Romanian situation was supposed to be getting pretty bad, and every other story of theirs was about that… And also apparently no longer present in their “world news” section.

That couldn’t be right. There had to be some kind of filter on the internet here. She’d have to find a way to beat it. First, an obscure conspiracy theory: if Aurora looked, she would find the search term “Barack Obama Nephilim Illuminati Montana” in her tablet’s online history. The site Chloe expected to find – an HTML monstrosity written entirely in capslock and likely fueled by methamphetamine – could not be found. The next unusual search term: “Lesbian Pikachu.” It was a particularly infamous post on a gossip column by and for metahumans. It also didn’t exist anymore.

Chloe looked up at Aurora. She tried to maintain her composure, but there was a glimmer of panic in her eyes.

Before Chloe could admit that Aurora was right, she had to try several more things. First, she tried to log into her email account. Didn’t work. As a last resort, she tried a proxy service she knew about, to get past her old school’s web filters. The proxy service still existed, but either it had adopted the same filters that this school had, or… there were no filters. This was the unfiltered internet, and she was in a different universe.

The whole process of scouring the internet took about five minutes. At the end of it, Chloe leaned back in her chair, stunned. “I… am in a different universe.”

She sighed there wasn’t any reason to panic yet. Even if all of this was true, even if there actually were many worlds, they could still fix this. “Um… Aurora? You said you deal with this a lot.” A nervous chuckle. This whole situation was ridiculous. On an emotional level, she still didn’t believe it. “Can you… um… send me back?”
 

Thirteen

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For Chloe's sake, Aurora secretly hoped that she was wrong. The most wrong that she had ever been in her life. That somehow, magic had returned to the world by storm, and that the traditions had finally overcome the stifling mediocrity that was slowly choking the world of any form of dynamism whatsoever.

Unfortunately, at the first sign that Chloe was realizing that not all was right with her world, Aurora's heart sank for her. It was incredibly traumatizing to be ripped from one world and placed into another without realizing it, and especially a world that was so close to your own, with only minor differences to distinguish it.

"You are indeed."

Aurora leaned back into her chair. She knew exactly what was coming next, because the question was exactly the one she would ask in Chloe's situation. She sighed, also knowing the answer to his question.

"I...don't know actually. If you had come from a different time in this universe, yes, I probably could. But my abilities don't extend across parallel timelines; I've tried. Way too many times. And every time is the same. Trying to send a human across lines is quite lethal for both myself, and the subject being sent."

Aurora pulled the glasses off her face, and finally closed the book that had summoned Chloe in the first place.

"I can see into other timelines, and manipulate them from here to an extent...but not send you. I don't think anyone can send you. No one I know at least."
 

Kait

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Chloe stared at Aurora.

There were a lot of implications to what she just said, and her mind hadn’t even begun to parse them yet. Her parents – she just got off the phone with them the night before, about their crazy thanksgiving plan to drive up to Montana for her – she’d never see them again. She’d never see anyone she used to know, ever again. She would be stuck here, effectively orphaned, among total strangers in a world she didn’t understand.

She didn’t know if she could accept that. There had to be a way to go back.

“I… well, it’s – it’s obviously possible to bring someone here from my world. Because that just happened. Right? So… can’t you just, just… reverse-engineer whatever’s in that book, or something?”

Chloe knew that she was wasting her breath the second she opened her mouth. This woman was supposed to be an expert in whatever-the-hell-this-was. She would know whether it was possible to do something like that. She’d probably already thought of it, and immediately decided that it wouldn’t work. Or maybe she didn’t even think of it because it was a stupid idea and none of this worked the way Chloe hoped it did.
 

Thirteen

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"Sure it's possible. If you're a summoner. It's easier to pull someone from their world than push someone into another. I've tried with you already. 16 times. 14 times both of us were killed in the attempt. 1 time only you. 1 time you got pushed to the wrong temporal line."

Temporal permutations. They were a wonderful way of ensuring that nobody actually died. Well, they did, but they never actually knew about it. Chloe was probably one of very few that knew what Aurora could, or couldn't due. At least to this extent.

"I could maybe find a specialist; but I can't guarantee anything."

That specialist was actually Aurora's daughter, someone that could possibly mitigate a lot of the problems that Aurora had trying to get Chloe home.

"Until then however, you're stuck, I'm afraid.
 
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