Snippet Saturday #3

A bit of a time-travel something I've been working on for a while ...

***

And suddenly they came to the edge of a great gaping abyss. Selena clung to Jeremy, but he let go of her. "No, don't. You can't throw off the time warp. You have to go by yourself."

Selena stared into the endless black and thought about her parents, her brother, her new lock on the basement hideout. She wondered whether her brother would have opened it by now. He would have tried, of course -- he would be trying from the moment she left the house.

"Remember to bend your knees and roll when we land."

"Are you crazy?" Selena tried to shout about the roar of the wind, but her words were caught up in the whirlwind and pulled away from her. Jeremy didn't hear, but he knew what she said.

"Don't think about it - just put your arms out and - JUMP!"

Together, they fell through the great vast black tunnel, sucked away by the burning of time and space, swooped into the vortex of wind and noise and whirling about them and about their heads and in their ears and - silence.

Silence. The noise ceased; the wind blew no more. Enigma lay on her back, unaware of any sensation. She knew existence. She knew consciousness. And then, failure. Dread. Anxiety. Worry. Jeremy? Failed. Dead? Dead. Gone. And she would die too - dead already? Probably.

Suddenly, laughter. It was not hers; it came from somewhere else. Laughter. Jeremy. Dead and laughing? Only he would do that. Suddenly, she found herself shaking her head. Dizzy. She wasn't shaking; the room ... the outside ... was shaking. Something hung above her head. There it was, that thing; that was making the laughing.

"You forgot to bend your knees, I think," and there he was, helping her to sit up. She stared as the world around her came into focus.

They had done it. They had landed in ... well, what looked like a great white nothingness. Was that a shadow? Something moving? Well, maybe it wasn't all nothingness ...

"Come on," and Jeremy helped her to her feet. "Wobbly, eh? Don't worry, it'll come back. You can hold on to me for now." He began leading her away through the whiteness. Something about it continued to shift and sway, and shadows came and bent before her. Something sparked; something lit, and there a flash of color flew. Lines grew thicker, bolder; shapes began to form and appear. Soon enough, the whiteness rolled away, and out fell the world again, in all its colorful glory.


"Where -- where are we, then?" She stared down the unfamiliar street at its nondescript buildings, the average-looking trees, the mediocre people milling aimlessly around.

"The question is when," Jeremy replied, "and if my calculations are correct, we're just in time for a lecture on the dimensional proximity theory by a very good friend of mine. Come on."