10000netherworlds | A Link Between Worlds

A Link Between Worlds

One of the major quirks of living where Morgan did, a nexus world which connected countless different places like a knot in the cosmic strings of fate, was the portals. Sometimes they simply popped out of nowhere, turning an ordinary area into a crossing zone where the nexus overlapped a different world.

This was how Morgan had stepped into the back of his closet and promptly found himself stepping out of an alley into a different place altogether.

Well, these things happened, he acknowledged, with an awkward rub of his head, and luckily he hadn't done it in his underwear.

Reaching back, he stuck his hand through the alley and into the comfortable temperature of his closet. So not one-way and he could go back. That was a relief, and it definitely brightened him up. The alternative was extraordinarily inconvenient. Not faced with it... hey, he might as well explore a bit!

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It should be noted--he has not arrived in Narnia. In fact, by all appearances he's stepped into a bustling city marketplace, in the middle of a fine afternoon in the late 18th century. A few people give his odd clothing a suspicious glance, but otherwise pay little mind, too busy selling their wares and trying to out-shout their competitors in the process. Between them and the clatter of carriages, it would've been a miracle if he'd heard the woman approaching.

As it is...

Well...

Lacie had been trying to just have a nice walk, out in the city. Really! It had been a month or two since her last escape from the Baskerville Estate, and it was a beautiful day, and... Honestly, even with grounds as extensive as theirs, you can only stroll about the gardens so much before you want to take a pair of shears to all the roses!

Sneaking out had been easy; she'd been doing it so long, she had it down to a science. And, once she'd made it the short walk into the city proper, it had started out being exactly the pleasant afternoon she'd wanted. But, of course, then people happened. (Oh, how she loved and hated people.)

You see, there had been a little girl in rags, and there'd been an apple cart, and Lacie remembers being that girl, once upon a time. She hadn't always been the adopted daughter of one of the most powerful Dukes in Sablier. And well. She might have stolen a few apples for the little kid. But, then, of course, the girl had gotten a look at her eyes, as she'd been trying to hand her the apples and started wailing about not wanting to be cursed, and the apple-seller had noticed them as well as the conspicuously lower number of apples in his cart, and now Lacie may or may not be running from the constabulary.

So, it's not an especially unusual Escape Day.

And, look, there's a convenient alley!

Except there's a guy who looks a little like her brother, but with floofier hair and probably a better sense of humor, and if he sees where she went, he might point her out, so she guesses he's just going to have to come with her.

Which, long story short, is how Morgan finds himself nearly crashed into and pulled right back into the alleyway he'd just left, by a petite woman with alarmingly red eyes.

The funny thing is, Morgan wouldn't even have noticed her if not for his own sudden abduction. He was oblivious by nature almost to the point of alarm, the sort of guy who occasionally caught things tossed at him, carried them around for several minutes, and only then paused to wonder where the heck said thing had come from.

But hauling him into an alley tended to catch his attention.

The job wouldn't have been easy if he'd resisted; he probably weighed over twice what she did, all in muscle. But he didn't, half because of the suddenness of it and half because of the sense that such resistance would be bad -- physically, if nothing else. One doesn't bully people smaller than him by almost a foot. So back into the alley they half-stagger, half-tumble --

--and, because Morgan was aware of the portal and not the alley, through it and into a wall of clothing hanging on racks within a walk-in closet the size of a small house.

"Uh. Hi."

... They're...

They're inside, now?

It's awfully bright, for being inside...

From where she had landed half sprawled on top of him, Lacie looks up through a windblown mop of raven hair to witness electric lighting for the first time. And... why are there clothes everywhere?

"Hi..." she says, absently, pushing herself up and off of him.

She'll pay attention to you in a minute, Morgan, I promise, it's just that on the surface, you're the least weird thing in a day that is suddenly weirder than usual. (And, for Lacie, that's kind of saying something.) Without so much as a by your leave, she moves off to explore. Had they somehow missed the alley and ended up falling into some sort of shop? That makes no sense on several levels...

Spotting a door at the far end, she begins to make her way toward it, the full skirts of her gown rustling.

Morgan's wardrobe tended towards the monochromatic, so the bulk of everything in here was black -- identical black Armani T-shirts, perfectly-cut suits with some navy blue for mild variety, and then an assortment of stranger things for when he decided to try out some niche hobbies like diving or surfing or what have you. Quite a variety, though it still struggled to fill the space it inhabited.

First things first. "Are you all right?" he said, pulling himself back up to his feet with fluid grace. He thought the answer was yes, but nonetheless he had to check. She'd been running from something, after all.

This question actually manages to bring her up short, causing her to pause and look back at him in mild confusion. She honestly doesn't remember the last time anyone asked her that... And anyway, how do you answer that, when you're her? Alright for her and alright for other people are two completely different things. For her, being hated by strangers and propositioned to make a baby by your adopted father, while being kept under discrete-if-ineffectual guard by his robed cult and waiting for your only brother to kill you, someday, is like...

That's Tuesday. And a boring Tuesday, at that.

"I'm... of course, why wouldn't I be?"

She shrugs it off quickly enough, turning her attention back to the surroundings.

"Where is this?"

"You were just in a hurry. Then slammed into me." And he was a solid object, sure, but -- when a tiny girl comes bowling into an alley at speed enough to send him backwards, he had to wonder. Who was chasing her, or what. But whatever had her running, it probably couldn't get to her here -- so far, he mentally added, looking back to where the portal lay.

"It's my closet," he said. "There's a portal there -- a weakness between worlds that lets you cross back and forth. You pitched through with me, and I knew it was there and was thinking about it, so through we went."

His powers of observation bring a wry little smirk to her lips.

"In a hurry. That's a way to put it."

She looks around, folding her arms in front of her. This, she surmises, is a ludicrous situation. But her whole life is made of ludicrous situations, so why not run into an alley and end up in someone's closet? It's not any stranger than when she visits the Abyss...

Her expression turns contemplative. Now, there's a thought.

"... Is this part of the Abyss?" she asks.

But she's never found a place that looks like this, there, but it's the only other time she's visited anything resembling another world...

One of Morgan's eyebrows slowly rose, before he folded his arms over his chest. "Why would my closet be in the Abyss? Or is that a crack on my fashion sense?"

He did his very best to keep a straight face, but the corners of his mouth betrayed the smile he wanted to flash.

"Seriously, this is common for me. I'm sorry you got sucked into it."

Well, it isn't precisely the kind of wardrobe she was accustomed to. After all, most men wore frock coats in bright colors and lux fabrics, among Sablier aristocracy. Even the common ones, apart from priests, tended to wear something other than black. Except for her brother, of course. She waves the joke aside, her mind latching onto one important word, like a steel bear trap.

"Common..." Her eyes narrow.

Abruptly, she heads for the door, throwing it open and stepping out to explore the rest of the house, making a beeline for the closest window.

"What do you mean, common? There are other worlds?"

The door, of course, led to his bedroom -- a massive affair on all levels, which featured at its heart a bed that probably had its own zip code, surrounded by wooden furniture of impeccable quality. Much of the decoration here appeared to be martial in nature -- swords, primarily, but also guns of various sorts, all mounted for display. Technology dominated here too, in the screens on the walls and the speakers subtly folded into the molding. Likely a mix of the familiar and the strange, all dominated by modern sensibilities.

Outside the large windows, though, things looked fairly normal: a broad stretch of land culminating in a line of trees that demarcated Morgan's property and offered him privacy. A large yellow bird strolled contentedly about in that field, while just off to one side, a rock garden stood close to the house, large and elaborate.

"Yeah," Morgan said, shaking his head as he followed her. This was definitely not how he'd ever choose to get a beautiful girl in his bedroom... "I'm actually from a different one myself. This particular place, it's like a meeting point."

The opulence barely phases her--after all, her adopted father is one of the most high-ranking nobles in Sablier. It's the technology that distracts her, and once she's ascertained that the view out the window doesn't tell her much, she turns her attention to it, walking up to one of the screens and poking at one of the buttons, tentatively.

"... a meeting point, " she murmurs.

She's silent for a long moment, expression's flitting across her face. First wonder blossoming into excitement, then settling into a deep, thoughtful frown, as she wrestles her way through the only real hurdle to the next question she asks.

"Can you control it?" she asks, finally? "Can you decide which worlds are connected and which aren't?

"It would take someone fantastically powerful." It could be done, of course. At the farthest reaches of Magick, anything was possible. But it would take an Archmage of unsurpassed ability to pull off a feat like that for the entire world. "I don't believe such a person or being exists, no."

One eyebrow went up, inviting her to explain that. He had some guesses, and wasn't going to pry.

When the screen does nothing, she loses interest as quickly as she'd done with the window, finally focusing properly on him. Her ruby-colored gaze is almost predatorily sharp, though she smiles at him. (For the moment, she ignores the quirked eyebrow. She is not the type to plead--in her experience, it does not work. But charm. That has a chance.

"But we could go to a different world, couldn't we? You could show me a place even farther away from my world?"

A place where they might never find her...

That told him enough. She'd been running, and now she wanted to run further. Why she was running was beyond his knowledge. She might be a criminal, or have done something awful, or -- any number of things that put the guilt solely on her. But his intuition, on which he prides himself, thinks otherwise.

It might just be suckered by a pretty face, he admitted. And he couldn't pretend that something nagged at his senses that weren't physical, but not in a way he recognized as danger. More as a sort of... distant kinship. (And to be honest, with their fair skin and their long black hair, they had a lot physically in common. Never mind the height; his own twin sister is tinier.)

In any case, his being as a whole came down decidedly on the side of "help". Which was not a difficult side for him to come down on generally.

"It's possible to go to another world, another jump away from here, yes. Though I don't know if that really counts as 'far'. If you can get here, you could probably get there too, so in some ways it's closer in time and distance traveled than the other side of your world would be."

For a mage, that something nagging at his senses probably is not helped by the fact that she is a living distortion. There is a lot of untrue superstition around what her world calls Children of Misfortune, but that much, at least, is an actual fact. She is a ripple on the face of reality.

She makes a dismissive gesture.

"Well, we won't know whether two worlds away is far enough until we try, will we?" she says with a scythe-like grin.

Reaching out, she takes his hand as if he's an old friend and she's about to drag him off on a picnic.

"So, what do we do, now? Are all the doors to different worlds hidden in your closet, or do you keep some in your parlor just to spice things up?"

"I am saying one world is enough if two is," he said, though he didn't protest her intent to haul him off in the slightest. Not like he had anything better going on, and there were far worse fates in the world than to be pulled onto an adventure with a strikingly pretty girl. "But if you really want to go hunting, who am I to stop you? If I have any more portals in my house, though, I don't know of them."

Somehow he managed to refrain from making a crack about transporting people to new worlds of delight in his bedroom.

"This one has a door to my world in it," Lacie explains, making for the hallway, with him in tow. "The other one won't."

Or at least, she hopes it won't. Given that it's the Baskervilles tracking her, it's almost certainly better to be two worlds away than one. They may still be able to scent her out, if she were to have reason to use her Chain. They could follow the power signature to the portal that had led her here. Her brother could get from one side of her world to another in a blink, using the Raven. The more tenuous connection between all that and whatever world she ends up in, the better her chances of truly being free.

She may not have to die, after all!

Almost as an afterthought, she flashes a grin at him, over her shoulder.

"My name's Lacie, by the way. What's yours?"

She was missing the point, but... eh, if it made her happier and more comfortable to play it that way, sure, why not?

The hallway was wide and every bit as pleasant as the bedroom, with numerous other doors branching off on each side. Some distance down, the left side gave over to a railing and then a wide set of stairs leading to the ground level.

"Morgan," he said, one hand going to his chest and his head bowing slightly. "Your name is pretty, though I wouldn't have guessed it for you!"

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A Link Between Worlds

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