Story: 'Triangles', VII

(Part VI , VIII)

Delores was seated in what was the equivalent to her kitchen in this angled mirror to her own world. She had come down the hill in a haze, looking at everything in a dulled manner and finally stumbling into her house, which was in keeping with the rest of the town in its unlocked state. She'd gone to the bedroom first but the sight waiting there pushed her back out into the kitchen, shaking like a leaf.

There was tea of a kind and Delores was drinking it. The world was a little fuzzy as she adjusted slowly back down to the reality of what was going on. The door to the bedroom was closed and would stay that way, the three triangular sections locked into place by a complicated latch mechanism. If this were all happening, and there was no reason to think it wasn't, then Delores Grey had to work out the big picture and then get out quick and make it home somehow.

The scientist had discovered portals but none were to be seen anywhere. Massive whirlpools were sucking away the ocean but the levels never went down, there was a... thing in what would have been her bed in another plane of existence, and the tea was all finished. She made some more and ate a biscuit. The thing in the other room wouldn't mind; She was reasonably certain it was dead, unless every living thing had gone into some kind of bizarre siesta.

Whirlpools had been nagging at her the whole time, whirlpools and water. Somehow the portals were all submarine in this area, with some of them maybe being subterranean too. The water was flowing away but being replaced elsewhere, perhaps with water from the square dimension of the kumquat plane, or the Klein Bottle Universe. The scope for alternate dimensions with bizarre topologies, or topographies, or whatever was boundless as she knew from her mathematics.

Was the only way out to ride down a whirlpool and hope not to be crushed or die at the other side? Surely there would be a better option? Researches at the National Library had proven to be of mixed usefulness. There were more videos that she'd watched. The loopy scientist had worked on, examining the repercussions of his act, showing bizarre new weather phenomena and plotting sites on a large map. The map had been attached to the video, as she'd found out when playing with the touch symbols. It had imprinted itself into the memory of her eBook reader in some display of otherworldly advanced technology.

Almost without knowing it, the student collapsed forward onto the table and began to fade. It had been a long time since the last sleep. Such a long time. Hours ticked away, the bizarre time pieces whirring on in what appeared to be a ternary timekeeping system before she awakened and checked her watch. Sixteen hours had passed and she felt... well fuzzy still. Probably it was the different physics making her brain work harder to understand. The other Delores in the bed wouldn't have had any problems, she thought, admitting that that whatever it is was the closest thing she had to family in this twisted world. How similar had they been at heart, if at all?

Maybe things would look better from a freshened point of view, and with some breakfast, and if both those things failed then reconnaissance was in order. To do that required a view, and there were plenty of views around.

It was time to climb a hill.


More shall follow...