Eventually the lights faded away, leaving him standing in a pitch black void. Now, it took him a while to realize this, but this was because he had his eye squeezed shut. He slowly opened one eye and found himself standing in the exact same spot he had been standing in earlier.
Despite it being the same room he had just been in, it looked a lot different. It was still decorated the same but the colours were strangely off and nothing seemed to be standing perfectly upright. Cartis walked around the room and noticed that everything seemed lighter than usual, the feel of things, the lights, and even he himself felt lighter.
He looked down the hall and saw Dr.Summers arguing with someone he hadn’t seen before. Since he had no idea what was going on he walked over and decided to ask.
“What is going on?”
They both stopped arguing and turned around to look at him.
“Pardon?” The man asked him.
“I asked what’s going on.”
“We are currently trying to figure that out. Dr.Summers who is this?
“This is Cartis, he was unfortunate enough to be in the building when it happened.”
“And what is it that happened exactly?” For one of the few times in his life, Cartis was getting impatient.
“Fine,” Dr.Summers said, “you want an answer, here. We have reason to believe that one of our Reality Cores got damaged and sent us to another dimension. One where nothing looks quite right no matter where you’re from.”
Cartis was silent for a moment while he tried to understand what he had said.
“So something malfunctioned and we’re somewhere where things look weird, got it.”
“Yes, so we just need to figure out what went wrong and fix it before we end up somewhere, ‘unpleasant’.”
The man sighed and turned to Cartis, “Since you were thrown into this situation and there’s no easy way to explain anything I guess you can come with us.”
Cartis followed them down the hall into an elevator that should have only gone up since they were in a two story building, but of course it went about twenty stories down. Around floor 6 the building shook and the lights went out temporarily, when they came back on everything looked normal again.
“What was that?”
“We must have ‘jumped’ again.”
“So we’re in a new place.”
Dr.Summers looked at him with a somewhat confused look on his face. “You’re taking this extremely well.”
“If I don’t need to know then I'm happy to just wait until this is over.”
“Well you may need to know because this could take a while.”
Cartis sighed, “Alright, what's going on?”
“Do you want a full explanation or just a small one.”
“Full one, like where are we, why are we here, and oh, WHAT IS GOING ON!”
“Calm down, no need to rush. We are currently in a building filled to the brim with knowledge of basically every single one of the fifteen trillion different species that call our and some other dimensions home. However we are no longer in our dimension as one of our reality cores has been damaged somehow, so we are going to go see why and hopefully fix it before we travel to a dimension that we can't survive in.”
“And what are the chances of travelling to one where we can't survive?”
“50%, but there is also a 50% chance that we travel to any one of an infinite number of dimensions that will allow us to fix the reality core without an issue.”
“So it's a flip of the coin for our fates is it.”
“Pretty much, but this is a bit different.”
“How so? And please explain it in a way I'll understand.”
“Alright,” said Dr.Summers, “say you have a combination lock.”
“Ok.”
“Each wheel is a variable, and each number on the wheel is a way that that variable can change.”
“Makes sense.”
“Now say that that combination lock is the multiverse. So on this combination lock there is an infinite number of numbers on each wheel and an infinite number of wheels.”
Cartis thought to himself for a moment, “Ok.”
“Every single combination that you could then put on that combination lock is the exact description of a dimension.”
“My brain’s starting to hurt a little.”
“That’s ok, it means that you're starting to understand. So, since every combination is a different dimension, no matter how small the difference in one combination to the other, they are different.”
“And how small can the difference be?”
“Infinitely small, so small that we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that and one similar to it. Making it that there is technically an infinite number of every dimension. Therefore, your chances of going to a dimension that you describe are 50%, since there are an infinite amount of that dimension-or ones almost exactly the same-and an infinite number of every other type of dimension.”
“So there's a 50-50 chance we’ll appear back in our own dimension.”
“No, there is a 50-50 chance that we’ll appear in a dimension similar to our’s. For us to appear back in our own dimension, we’d have to either fix the Reality Core or get infinitely lucky.” Dr.Summers stopped and shouted into the air, “Unless Ehph wants to show himself and help us that is.”
“What was that for? And who’s F?” Cartis asked him.
“E-H-P-H, and it’s not important.”
Cartis hesitated for a moment but ended up saying it anyways, “Do you need therapy?”
“No, just used to things that don’t make sense.”
Cartis was about to ask him what he meant but the elevator doors opened and Dr.Summers walked out before he could. Cartis followed with the other man, whose name he still didn’t know. They ended up coming to a room that was at least 4 stories tall and held the biggest - he decided to call it a reactor - that Cartis had ever seen. Dr.Summers walked up to one of the technicians inspecting the machine for whatever was wrong with it.
“Have you managed to figure out what happened to break the Core.”
“It appears,” he said, “that it was damaged by overlapping molecules.”
“Was or is?”
“Was, there’s no sign of extra molecules, but at the same time, that's the only thing (in our dimension) that could affect it this way.”
“So us traveling to a different dimension put it in a staysus.”
“It would appear that way, and we don't have anything to fix it at the moment.”
Then once again, the lights went out, and came back on, the only difference being the dragon like screeches coming from outside the building. Dr. Summers sighed and motioned for Cartis to follow him back to the elevator. Hesitantly, he got in the elevator and watched as their current floor changed from sub twenty to thirty-four.
“There's thirty-four floors in this building?”
“Sixty actually.”
“But it was only two stories tall when I came here.”
“On the outside, do you know the TARDIS from Dr. Who?”
“Yeah.”
“It's like that, except much bigger, both inside and outside.”
“How did you make any of this?”
“We didn’t, we were given it about thirty something years ago.”
Cartis looked more confused than he already was, “By who?”
Dr. Summers shrugged, “said his name was Denice, but we never saw his face.”
“How did this Denice guy give you a building thirty years ago that wasn’t even finished being built last week?”
“We’ve just traveled to two-”
The lights went out then came back on.
“Sorry, three, different dimensions, and you’re stumped at how we got this building thirty years before it appears to have been built.”
Cartis took a little while to figure out what he had said, then seemed disappointed to have taken that long, “So all the construction happening was just for show?”
“Mainly, we were actually doing construction on the outside of the building so it would fit in with its surroundings.”
“Wait, it wasn’t two stories tall when Denice gave it to you?”
“No,” Dr.Summers said, while checking to see if the elevator was working, “It was actually a campervan when we got it.”
“Something wrong with the elevator?”
“Yep, normally it takes a while for the elevator to travel between the different pocket dimensions, or floors, of the building but this is taking a lot longer than usual.” He took off one of the elevators panels and started fiddling with the wires. Cartis opened his mouth to tell him that that didn’t seem like a safe idea when the elevator gave a small ding and the doors opened.
“Ah, here we are.” He walked out of the elevator and motioned for Cartis to follow. Cartis hesitated, then stepped out into a long hallway, or rather room, or, well Cartis wasn’t quite sure what to call it. It appeared to be a hallway, but a really wide one, with multiple sections kind of zoned off along the walls with different groups of people in them. One of them was looking at a jumble of symbols on a whiteboard and talking, another was just sitting and reading, there was even one that was just staring at a rock.
Cartis couldn’t help but feel out of place, yet no one seemed to notice him standing and staring.
“Hey.” Cartis turned to see Dr.Summers waiting a ways down the hall, “You coming? Or are you going to stay and watch what they’re doing.”
“I'm coming, just, well, what are they doing?”
He shrugged, “Don’t know, not my job.”
“But aren’t you, like the boss or something.”
“Something, not really the boss, not really an employee, kind of like, a trusted advisor. People don’t really have to listen to me, but they do anyway.”
“Ah,” Cartis said, “so where are we going?”
“My office,” Dr.Summers replied, “or rather the office I've been lent for the past seventeen years.”
“I thought you worked here for thirty years.” He said, running to catch up.
“Well I’ve technically ‘worked’ here for thirty two years but for the first fifteen years I was out studying, researching, and cataloging a whole bunch of different creatures. Then I got promoted and got to, well, do the same thing, but not as much because I also became the ‘company’s’ therapist. Which is why I’m normally at the front desk and don’t really need an office, which also means that it looks like this.” They had reached a door and Dr.Summers opened it for Cartis to enter.
Cartis, was, well, not quite sure what to think, mainly because of everything that had happened so far.
“This,” He managed to get out, “this is a closet.”
“Was,” Came the reply, “basically still is, but ‘officially’ an office.”
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