whoops?

[andaisq]

Morty knows he shouldn't be screwing around with multidimensional shit. It's dangerous, it's impractical, it's blah blah blah. But it's a potential key to unlimited energy, how does nobody see that? He's built a dimensional siphon (it kind of looks like a cardboard box with a funnel and a TI-84 taped to it, but it damn well works), keyed in the dimensional coordinates to a random plane, and by God he's going to use it.

He flips the switch and waits for the energy bar to fill up.

It does! It fills up very rapidly. Then it explodes, along with the box. There's rather more smoke than there should be, and once the smoke clears someone is standing there.

"Whoops?" Morty says faintly.

Comments

[subtly_artistic]

Sounds like he's good, then. If receptively uncontrolled.

[andaisq]

Yeah. Fringe benefits of turning into a horrible fish-monster, I guess. ...no, wait, actually he was psychic before he turned into a horrible fish-monster. Scratch that.

There is a knock at the window. Morty sighs and opens the blinds, revealing Mrs. Carson hovering in the air bearing a glowing platinum scepter.

[subtly_artistic]

Bella blinks at the hovering glowing-scepter lady, then bows politely as a hedge and attempts to figure out the window mechanism.

[andaisq]

Morty helps! The window opens sufficiently for Carson to swoop through.

"She doesn't speak English, but she's a telepath, so you can-"

"Thank you, Mr. Halliwell, that will be all," she says sharply. He wisely shuts up.

Hello. My name is Elizabeth Carson; I apologize for all of this, and promise that I will do everything in my power to set it right. Do you have any pressing needs?

[subtly_artistic]

Isabella Swan, ma'am. If it's at all convenient I'd like my parents not to be too alarmed about my disappearance; they'll probably think I did something really stupid and got eaten either literally or metaphorically, otherwise. I don't know how long I'll be staying but I haven't seen anything that makes it look like I have locally unusual needs, since I'm a human. Morty suggested that I get my shields tested against local psi, which sounds like a good idea.

[andaisq]

Carson sighs. It would not be strictly impossible, but the effort involved in getting a message across the dimensional border would be almost as much as getting you across, so we would probably prefer to just get you home. Unless you'd like to stay here for longer than a few weeks, in which case arrangements can be made. If you're identical to local humans, that does simplify accommodating you somewhat. We can test your shields at your convenience, though there are some more urgent matters, such as vaccinating you against various local illnesses and making sure you aren't carrying anything serious yourself.

[subtly_artistic]

If you're going to do science things to me it probably is not safe for me to go home again. And I was considering staying anyway.

Bella bounces Carson's contributions to Morty and includes him in her own as a courtesy.

[andaisq]

Carson blinks.

I may need that sentence unpacked a bit.

Thanks, Morty "whispers".

[subtly_artistic]

It sounds to me from what Morty's told me that you have a very friendly universe which lets you get away with a lot of science and doesn't kill you, just occasionally drops novel sorts of magic on you to give you a new challenge. Where I'm from, vaccinations are a science fiction thing and anybody trying a stunt like that in real life is lucky if all that happens is they get the disease they were trying to ward off and find it mysteriously resistant to ordinary magical healing.

[andaisq]

Carson takes a moment to process this.

Would that still apply to a disease with no equivalent in your world? she asks. We can waive the standard flu shots and such on practical grounds, but what we're really concerned with is airborne Ebola, hyperplague, that sort of thing. Profoundly lethal, extremely quick onset, and only existing due to very specific events in our universe. Do you think your... world... would object to that?

[subtly_artistic]

I don't know, we haven't met socially, I just live there, but it's not the sort of thing you want to guess on if you can avoid it because the last time somebody decided to exploit the tendency of mockdragon handlers not to get pleurisy half the population of the Glorious Mountains died.

[andaisq]

Well, we definitely don't want the Glorious Mountains getting hyperplague. Different tack, then - what about magical protection from disease? I can ward you against infection more or less airtightly, and if necessary dispel the ward before you return.

[subtly_artistic]

I don't know, is it normal magic or science magic of some kind? I mean, frankly I'm not sure my universe won't decide I've been hanging around bad company and squish me the moment I go back no matter what I do. I'm very tempted not to return and just live here in Science Fantasy Plane.

[andaisq]

Liz snorts. I certainly wouldn't blame you. I don't think our magic is particularly sciency, it seems very appropriately mystical to me, but then again I'm not a malevolently insane universe-monster.

[subtly_artistic]

How quickly does all this need to be decided?

[andaisq]

Not very, but if you want more than a few hours to decide, then I am going to want to put you in quarantine while you do it so that you don't either die or infect someone with space flu. We've got some very nice quarantine facilities, though. Considering.

[subtly_artistic]

I don't know that I need hours per se but I do need to know what my options are with respect to contacting my parents, maybe getting some subtle arts textbooks, and generally continuing to exist here if I'm going to do that.

[andaisq]

We can arrange that. Long-term parental contact is proportionally less of a problem than short-term; the textbooks we can probably manage using you as a dimensional anchor, or if we're very lucky we might find them in the Great Library; and generally continuing to exist is quite feasible and would be generously subsidized by the Academy by way of apology for putting you in this position in the first place.

[subtly_artistic]

That's very kind of the Academy. As long as my parents can be convinced that I have not been vivisected by demons or run afoul of fey or savaged by ogres or something I don't feel the need to contact them on a particularly frequent basis.

[andaisq]

That much can certainly be arranged.

[subtly_artistic]

What's the Great Library?

[andaisq]

...Difficult to explain. A few decades back an unusually unhinged Devisor created a building which... structurally resembles a library, is apparently infinite in volume, and contains, to all appearances, all of the books that have ever been written in any universe. The only problem is that every book is placed completely at random, scrying is very difficult in the stacks, and going too deep can lead through pockets of badly distorted time. There are people with the talent or skill to reliably check books out of the Library, but their services are expensive and always in high demand. Our main hope is that the books you need would crop up in the front thousand shelves or so, which occasionally rearrange their contents and can be scried.

[subtly_artistic]

That seems like a fairly thin hope. Maybe my parents could get together a decent curriculum's worth for me and you can just bring that in?

[andaisq]

Also an option. Probably a better one, but it costs very little to keep track of the Library entrance, so we may as well see.

[subtly_artistic]

Okay. Depending on how dramatic my vanishment looked on the other end I might not be missed for a day or two, and then the school will probably put a token effort into finding me again before bothering my parents, so there's no need to have a message to them ready to go particularly soon.