“Yeah, it’s nice to see you, too.”
The woman rolled her eyes and then walked in leisurely. Camilla slowly tiptoed past the door. She looked up at the man. He wore a plum colored suit, with a deep, blue ascot. The man was shaped like a pudgy rectangle, with very wide shoulders. Small spectacles framed his unamused eyes. He looked down at her past his barrel chest. His disapproving stare cut right through her.
She immediately turned her eyes away from him.
“I should’ve known it was you,” said the man to the mystery woman . “You’re the only one brazen enough to bother me this early in the morning.”
Camilla ignored their conversation. She began to scan the room. The walls were covered with well stocked mahogany bookcases. The whole room was tall and circular with big windows. A small spiraling staircase led to a higher level where more books could be seen. Many maps of places Camilla didn’t recognize decorated the few free walls. The young girl strode further in, onto the plush carpets.
The man’s study was in fact very fancy and worth gawking at. But the fancy wood and lovely carpets weren’t what caught Camilla’s eye.
Standing in the middle of the room, amongst all the maps and carpets, was a large, golden, machine. It was very tall and pill shaped. It reminded Camilla of the body scanners she had once seen at the airport. There was a wide doorway in the middle of it, large enough for someone to walk through.
Atop it was a giant, golden model of a planet. The planet, just like the lower part of the machine, had etchings of stars on it. Tiny moon sculptures circled around the planet on thin wire hooks. It was a pretty device, but she couldn’t for the life of her imagine what it was supposed to be for.
She was so entranced with the apparatus, that she didn’t watch where her feet were going.
“Ouch!” yelped the man.
Camilla looked down. Under her foot was a black, fuzzy, squirming, cylinder. The man's hand snapped down and pulled it from under her shoes. She saw him raise one end to his hand to rub. And saw the other end extending from his rear.
“You… ” she choked to get everything out. “... y-you… have a tail.”
“Yes. And?,” he answered snarkily. He looked at her as if having a tail was the most normal thing to have.
She looked back at his hair. She could now see that out of the many coiffed spikes of his hair two of them were in fact not spikes. They were ears. Two black cat ears stuck up and out of his hair from where his regular ears should have been. She saw them twitch in the light.
“And … and ears!”
“What about them?”
Ghost security guards and now people with animal ears and tails. If Camilla had a weaker constitution, this would've been the point where she completely lost it. She was close, but she stopped and thought. Something about this didn’t feel scary. It felt a bit familiar.
She was suddenly snapped back to weekends with her grandpa, spent flipping through storybooks.
“Wait. Are you a…,” she started. She had to search for the word. “Feranthro ?”
He raised an eyebrow and seemed a bit offended.
“I thought that was fairly obvious.”
The book, thought Camilla.
She felt the backpack straps around her shoulders. She turned and skirted further into the study.
“You’re friend seems a bit jumpy,” said the man to the woman.
“That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Camilla ran over to a small, mahogany table. She pulled her backpack off and tossed it onto the table. Just like the rest of her clothes, it had transformed. Instead of a colorful nylon and plastic sack, it was now a leather satchel. She didn’t check to see if anything else in there had been changed. She only needed one thing.
Over in the corner, the woman and the man conversed quietly.
“I think this girl has been displaced,” said the woman.
“What!?” said the man.
“I know it sounds crazy, but she’s got all the symptoms.”
Camilla kept looking until she spotted the page she was looking for.
The illustration of a humanoid figure with cat ears and a tale flanked the side of the page. There were similar illustrations on the sheet. Humans with ram horns, humans with wolf ears, humans with panther tails; the page was filled with a number of creatures just like the cat-eared man. The word “Feranthro” stood at the top of the page with a description below it. Camilla began to hyperventilate.
The man and the woman walked up to Camilla’s table. She didn’t acknowledge them. The man cleared his throat.
“Hello, miss. My name is Julius, and I hear you’ve been having some troubles with your loca-”
“Did my grandpa make you?!” Camilla screamed.
“I’m sorry?” the man blinked.
“You! You’re in my grandpa’s book! Well, a description of you. Does that mean I’m in my grandpa’s book? Are my grandpa’s books magic or something?! Was Grandpa a wizard or something? I feel like grandpa should’ve told me that! Way to be open grandpa!”
Julius looked completely and entirely lost.
Camilla turned the book and slid it to him. He picked it up and began to look through it himself.
“That’s my grandpa’s book,” she explained. “He’s been writing those things for decades, now.”
Julius flipped through the pages and examined them. He looked over the pages about different species, and the ones about types of magic. And the ones about kings and queens.
“Hmmm,” he muttered. “Interesting.”
“I don’t understand, did my grandpa make this place?”
Julius examined the pages a bit longer. He then closed the book with an authoritative slap.
“You’re grandfather’s illustrations are very nice and accurate, miss…” Camilla saw he was waiting for her name.
“Camilla,” she said.
“Camilla, but make no mistake.” He handed the book back to her. “The Puzzleworlds exist with or without your grandfather’s books.”
So it is true, she thought. She was in the world her grandpa had crafted, or at least had documented. She hadn’t exactly seen anything to disprove this.
“But how did I get here? And how did my grandpa know so much about this place ?”
“Hard to say. But if I was guessing, which I don’t usually do, I’d say the same thing that happened to you, also happened to your grandfather at some point. Displacing.”
Camilla turned her head. “What’s displacing?”
“Oh, I know!” A voice Camilla didn’t recognize flew through the room.
She turned to see a young man sliding down one of the ladders near the bookcases. He wore a vest atop a white t-shirt and khaki pants. He rushed over to Camilla.
“Miss Camilla, this is my assistant, Montgomery.”
“Assistant and third year cartography major!”
Just like Julius, Montgomery had perky cat ears and a long tail. Unlike Julius though, his were not deep and black, but brown and spotted like a leopard. His hair was curly and short, and his skin was golden like sand. He looked down at Camilla with friendly, hazel eyes as he extended his hand to her. Camilla shook it.
“So, anyway,” he started. “Displacing is actually really easy to understand! Okay, so you know that thing called spontaneous combustion, where you’re just walking along and then suddenly it’s like ‘fwoosh, aahh, fire!’ and then you’re, like, on fire?”
Camilla nodded.
“Well, displacing is just like that, but instead of catching on fire you travel across dimensions!”
The young man seemed very proud of his description. Camilla on the other hand was still very confused. Julius took note of the situation.
“Okay, Montgomery. Just go set up the origin scanner.”
Montgomery pranced over to the pill shaped machine.
“Miss Camilla, do you know what pores are?”
“Yeah, they’re like tiny holes in your skin, right?”
“Tiny holes in anything, really,” corrected Julius.
He moved past the table they were at and towards one of the maps on the wall. It depicted what appeared to be a solar system with a number of planets. But these weren’t like the eight or nine planets Camilla had learned about in elementary school. One of the planets had large, visible, foliage sprouting out from its orbit. Spike shaped boulders were circling around another planet. One glowed in obnoxious pink and green neon shades. There were dozens of them and no two managed to look even mildly similar.
Camilla was starting to wish she had taken the time to read that map in the book.
“Between each world there are tunnels, closets, and passageways that help the people of them travel from place to place rather easily.” Julius pointed at the spaces between the planets. “But around these passageways there are still walls. And in those walls there are pores, tiny little holes that things shouldn’t be able to slip through. But sometimes they do.”
He led Camilla to another diagram. This one depicted a person falling through what seemed to be a barrier and landing on the other side.
“The exact science of how displacing works has yet to be pinned down. But the main accepted theory is that on occasion people, animals, and the like, accidentally find ways to trip into the walls, push through these pores, and land in unexpected locations.”
“So I just… tripped?” This man seemed rather smart. Camilla wished he could’ve given her a more scientific term than ‘tripped’. “I still don’t get why this happened.”
“The exact ‘why’ of displacing has yet to be discovered. The only common thread that’s been found between all of this is that it’s usually brought upon by forced unconsciousness. You know, blows to the head and such.”
Camilla blushed a bit.
“I-,” she hesitated a bit. She didn’t really want to admit it, especially the circumstances that brought her there. “I may have gotten knocked out by a flood after I crawled into a ditch.”
“Well, that’s probably what did it.”
Of all the ways to get transferred to a magical fantasy land, Camilla figured that being knocked out was probably the lamest.
Camilla heard the rumble and clicking of something starting up behind her. She turned to see the golden machine burbling and coming to life. The planet on the top began to spin slowly.
“Figuring out the ‘why’ isn’t so important right now,” said Julius. “We should be more concerned with the ‘where’. Considering you didn’t come here willingly, I imagine you’d probably like to get home as soon as possible.”
Camilla nodded. If this was under any other circumstances, she might have relished the idea of vacationing in a magical dimension. But there was too much going on at home to ignore right now. Especially considering the terms she left on. Her mother’s face flashed in her mind. And what about her grandpa?
“If we find out how far you traveled from, we can figure out the best way to get you back.”
“Okay, I think it’s ready,” Montgomery called over from the machine. Julius walked Camilla over to it and the woman followed.
The gold device shook and rumbled like it might fall apart. The little planet and moons above began to spin much faster.
“Don’t worry, kiddo,” advised Montgomery. “A few zips and zoops and we’ll have you back on your front lawn before you know it.”
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