Fic: Worlds Away 2/6
Mar. 20th, 2010 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amediaTitle: Worlds Away
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
amedia
Word Count: 6706
Rating: PG
Pairing: Cain/Ambrose
Summary: Ambrose returns from a strange journey.
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Imagiquest. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
Author's Note: Many thanks to TODS for beta-reading far above and beyond the call of duty.
Part 1 may be found here.
Cain smiled with affection. "We figured you'd get around to it eventually."
Ambrose nodded slowly. "I wish I could tell you. I'm honestly not sure where I've been, and I honestly didn't believe that I would ever find my way home, even with this." He reached into a waistcoat pocket and pulled out a translucent box that glowed from within with a kaleidoscope of constantly-shifting colors. "I can't wait to show it to Tutor," he added brightly.
"What is that thing?" asked DG.
"This device is how I found my way here," said Ambrose. "I call it a Trans-Axial Home Dimension Locator. It helped me TAHDL home, as it were." He looked around hopefully to see if the others got the joke, but they were still staring, mesmerized, at the colors that flickered just under the TAHDL's translucent surface.
Azkadellia spoke first. "Are you saying that you were trapped in another dimension?" she asked.
"Several, actually," Ambrose said with a nod. "You see, I set out from this very palace... I don't know, some months ago?"
"Six months," said Cain.
Ambrose nodded. "Yes. It was summer then. I went to Central City to obtain some supplies for my laboratory. I remember checking a motorcar out of the palace garage. They offered me a driver; I suppose in hindsight it was a mistake to turn them down. I had no trouble getting to the shop..."
He trailed off for a moment and Cain supplied, "Arcane Apparatus Incorporated." Pulling a notebook out of his pocket, he flipped to a page near the beginning. "The owner's name is Aloysius Vissen, and he delivered to you twenty grams of lab-grade Moritanium and the Antique Aethera Mechanism, which, I was told, is a new calculating instrument for historical astronomy. From there you went to 21600 West Central Avenue on the outskirts of the city, the site of the Scientists' Association, where you have member privileges. You went into one of the private rooms, closed the door behind you, and never came out." He closed the notebook.
Ambrose beamed. "Exactly! I had reserved the room and even brought along a toolkit because I knew that I simply would not be able to resist opening up the package to play with my new toy. I mean, to examine my paraphernalia." He grinned sheepishly. "The outside of the astronomical calculating device looked exactly like what I had expected from the description in the store catalogue. There was a set of dials for selecting an historical year, month, and day, and a display that would read out the positions of the moons, planets, and stars on that date. I just couldn't figure out how such a small mechanism could store all that information and have the computing power to produce it on demand."
"Let me guess," DG said with an affectionate grin. "You just had to take the whole thing apart, didn't you?"
Ambrose smiled back at her. "You know me too well, Princess! That's exactly what I did. I opened up the case expecting to see a complex assortment of gears, or perhaps a miniaturized reasoning-engine. But when I opened it up..." his face grew dreamy as if he were reliving an astonishing revelation.
"What was in it?" Cain asked.
"Magic!" Ambrose said. "I was able to glimpse a magical energy field inside. It's what you see in here, actually." He waved the TAHDL. "When I looked more closely into the interior, I was also able to see a very small magical generator. It was not at all what I was expecting, and it took me a little while to figure out how it all worked. The controls on the outside of the box transmit the requested time period to the magical generator, and the inside of the box actually travels to that time period. I lifted out the generator and as I expected, I also found a set of astronometric sensors inside that connected to the display on the outside. These sensors would detect the positions of the stars and planets as they were at the time inside the box and transmit that information to the display on the outside."
"So there was no actual calculation going on, was there?" asked Azkadellia.
Ambrose smiled. "None. The device would display the exact position of the stars on a particular date in history by actually going back to that time and obtaining the information directly. A time machine like that isn't a theoretical impossibility; what truly piqued my curiosity was the fact that it was able to communicate the data from its sensors to the display regardless of their relative displacement in time."
"I noticed right away that the temporal field generator did not include a dimensional stabilizer. However, it was so small, and drew so little power, that I figured it probably didn't need one to accomplish its very specific task.
"While I was examining the mechanism, I suddenly found myself spinning in darkness, a most baffling and unpleasant sensation. It lasted only a few moments before I landed with quite a thud on my... ahem, dignity. That was when I realized that I had left the package of Moritanium on the table next to the mechanism! The magical field had been drawing energy from the Moritanium the whole time, and the resulting power surge must have catapulted me… somewhere.
"I looked around and saw that I was sitting next to a brick road, not unlike the Old Road, but entirely smooth, as if new or at least well-tended, and very bright yellow. I still had all the pieces of the mechanism, my toolkit, and the Moritanium, but there was no sign of the Scientists' Association. In fact, there weren't any buildings nearby at all."
"Had you traveled into the past, then?" asked the Queen.
Ambrose nodded. "Exactly, your Majesty. I estimate that I landed in the same spot geographically from which I had left, but at some time in the past. Central Avenue is, after all, the name for the portion of the Old Road that goes through Central City and its suburbs. Indeed, I soon had a very good clue to the exact time.
"Off in the distance, I spotted a group of four people traveling away from me. They were instantly recognizable to anyone with half a brain." He chuckled. "There was a girl in a gingham dress, with blond hair and silver shoes—that was your ancestress, of course, your Majesty. The one DG is named for. She was accompanied by the Scarecrow, Nick Chopper, and the Cowardly Lion, all looking as if they had stepped out of the illustrations in my fifth-form history book."
"That's incredible!" said DG.
"Did you talk to them?" asked Azkadellia.
"I tried," said Ambrose, "but they were too far away. I shouted, and for a moment the Lion turned around and looked at me, almost as if he recognized me, but then he turned back around and went on with the others. Then they all shimmered like a heat mirage, and when they came back into focus, they looked different. The biggest difference was in Dorothy Gale herself. She was now an older girl with long dark hair and sparkling red shoes. Oh! And there was only one sun."
"Weird!" said DG.
"I was still trying to figure out the more subtle differences among her companions when the phenomenon happened again, and afterward, she was a young woman. She and her companions were all human, even the Lion! They all had dark skin, and the Road seemed to be leading through something like the Realm of the Unwanted instead of the countryside.
"I realized then what must be happening. I was no longer moving in time, but I was slipping sideways from one dimension to another.
"I took a few steps off the Road, intending to sit down and figure out how to stabilize the device dimensionally. I took three steps away from the Road without a problem, but when I began to take a fourth, I ran into—I don't know how to describe it—something like a travel storm, all gray and whirling and quite impenetrable. I stepped back immediately and the sensation went away. I sensed that if I left the Road, I would find myself lost forever in the utter chaos of infinite possibilities. Indeed, something told me that I needed to stay on the brick road, whatever color or condition it was in, and that it would somehow lead me home. DG, weren't you the one who told me that 'all of life's answers can be found along the old road'?"
"Did I say that?" DG asked. "I'm flattered you remember."
Ambrose looked puzzled for a moment, then continued. "It's such a relief to be home. I was afraid I'd never make it."
Cain leaned forward and squeezed his arm. "We're glad you're home, too," he said warmly.
"Let me see, where was I?" Ambrose said, pleasantly disconcerted. "Oh, yes. The Road. My first priority was to get the device partially stabilized pretty quickly so that I wasn't being shuttled across dimensions every few minutes. Then it was just a matter of finding a way to steer it. To cut a long story short, I spent the next several months traveling along the Old Road and trying to refine the device so that I could use it to get home."
DG, predictably, was interested in the engineering aspect. "You couldn't have had everything you needed in that little toolkit, could you?"
"No, you're quite right," said Ambrose." Fortunately, I had some helpful encounters. "Once, when I was tinkering with it, the mechanism hiccupped back about a generation or so in time and I ran into two college girls on vacation. One was very serious, the other rather giggly, but both were remarkably gifted magic users. They helped quite a lot." He stopped for a moment, thinking. "I didn't notice it at the time, but I think one of them was green." He shrugged and went on. "After another hiccup—forward this time, I think—I ran into an Otherside pilot fixing an old-fashioned airplane, who gave me some spare parts. And so on."
"Sounds like you had some pretty far out adventures," said DG.
Ambrose nodded thoughtfully. "I kept wondering how these dimensional differences had come into being. Perhaps there would be a dimension in which, perish the thought, your father never Slipped over from the Otherside. Or one in which the Witch of the Dark was never released from the cave." He stopped abruptly. "I'm sorry, that was tactless." In the silence that followed his comment, Ambrose realized that he was getting a little too warm, now that the fire was burning briskly. He unwound his scarf and pulled off the cap.
There was a collective gasp. The Queen was the first to recover the ability to speak. "Ambrose, dear heart, what happened to you?"
"You must have traveled into the Middle Past at some point," Cain said.
Ambrose turned to Cain, confused. "What?"
Cain nodded toward the top of Ambrose's head. "That punishment—headcasing, they used to call it—hasn't been used for hundreds of years."
Ambrose regarded him for a long moment. "You don't remember?" he finally said, in a voice tinged with uncertainty and a dawning fear.
Cain shook his head.
The princesses remained silent, baffled. The Queen rose and stepped closer to Ambrose. "May I?" she asked, and when he nodded, she took his head in her hands, stooping over him to look closely at the zipper. After a long look, she sighed and released him. "The original incisions are long healed," she said.
"Yes, your Majesty," said Ambrose.
"This didn't happen on his trip," the Queen said to the others.
Cain started. "Then this isn't… you're not… "
Ambrose turned. "I'm so sorry, Cain. I just realized it myself." He took Cain's hands in his own. "I am Ambrose," he said firmly, looking into Cain's eyes, "but I'm not your Ambrose."
Cain bit his lip and looked away, shaken, trying to gather himself, holding Ambrose's hands like a lifeline. But not my Ambrose, he reminded himself, and remembered that moment of hesitation before Ambrose had kissed him back.
Part 3
Author:
amediaWord Count: 6706
Rating: PG
Pairing: Cain/Ambrose
Summary: Ambrose returns from a strange journey.
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Imagiquest. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
Author's Note: Many thanks to TODS for beta-reading far above and beyond the call of duty.
Part 1 may be found here.
Cain smiled with affection. "We figured you'd get around to it eventually."
Ambrose nodded slowly. "I wish I could tell you. I'm honestly not sure where I've been, and I honestly didn't believe that I would ever find my way home, even with this." He reached into a waistcoat pocket and pulled out a translucent box that glowed from within with a kaleidoscope of constantly-shifting colors. "I can't wait to show it to Tutor," he added brightly.
"What is that thing?" asked DG.
"This device is how I found my way here," said Ambrose. "I call it a Trans-Axial Home Dimension Locator. It helped me TAHDL home, as it were." He looked around hopefully to see if the others got the joke, but they were still staring, mesmerized, at the colors that flickered just under the TAHDL's translucent surface.
Azkadellia spoke first. "Are you saying that you were trapped in another dimension?" she asked.
"Several, actually," Ambrose said with a nod. "You see, I set out from this very palace... I don't know, some months ago?"
"Six months," said Cain.
Ambrose nodded. "Yes. It was summer then. I went to Central City to obtain some supplies for my laboratory. I remember checking a motorcar out of the palace garage. They offered me a driver; I suppose in hindsight it was a mistake to turn them down. I had no trouble getting to the shop..."
He trailed off for a moment and Cain supplied, "Arcane Apparatus Incorporated." Pulling a notebook out of his pocket, he flipped to a page near the beginning. "The owner's name is Aloysius Vissen, and he delivered to you twenty grams of lab-grade Moritanium and the Antique Aethera Mechanism, which, I was told, is a new calculating instrument for historical astronomy. From there you went to 21600 West Central Avenue on the outskirts of the city, the site of the Scientists' Association, where you have member privileges. You went into one of the private rooms, closed the door behind you, and never came out." He closed the notebook.
Ambrose beamed. "Exactly! I had reserved the room and even brought along a toolkit because I knew that I simply would not be able to resist opening up the package to play with my new toy. I mean, to examine my paraphernalia." He grinned sheepishly. "The outside of the astronomical calculating device looked exactly like what I had expected from the description in the store catalogue. There was a set of dials for selecting an historical year, month, and day, and a display that would read out the positions of the moons, planets, and stars on that date. I just couldn't figure out how such a small mechanism could store all that information and have the computing power to produce it on demand."
"Let me guess," DG said with an affectionate grin. "You just had to take the whole thing apart, didn't you?"
Ambrose smiled back at her. "You know me too well, Princess! That's exactly what I did. I opened up the case expecting to see a complex assortment of gears, or perhaps a miniaturized reasoning-engine. But when I opened it up..." his face grew dreamy as if he were reliving an astonishing revelation.
"What was in it?" Cain asked.
"Magic!" Ambrose said. "I was able to glimpse a magical energy field inside. It's what you see in here, actually." He waved the TAHDL. "When I looked more closely into the interior, I was also able to see a very small magical generator. It was not at all what I was expecting, and it took me a little while to figure out how it all worked. The controls on the outside of the box transmit the requested time period to the magical generator, and the inside of the box actually travels to that time period. I lifted out the generator and as I expected, I also found a set of astronometric sensors inside that connected to the display on the outside. These sensors would detect the positions of the stars and planets as they were at the time inside the box and transmit that information to the display on the outside."
"So there was no actual calculation going on, was there?" asked Azkadellia.
Ambrose smiled. "None. The device would display the exact position of the stars on a particular date in history by actually going back to that time and obtaining the information directly. A time machine like that isn't a theoretical impossibility; what truly piqued my curiosity was the fact that it was able to communicate the data from its sensors to the display regardless of their relative displacement in time."
"I noticed right away that the temporal field generator did not include a dimensional stabilizer. However, it was so small, and drew so little power, that I figured it probably didn't need one to accomplish its very specific task.
"While I was examining the mechanism, I suddenly found myself spinning in darkness, a most baffling and unpleasant sensation. It lasted only a few moments before I landed with quite a thud on my... ahem, dignity. That was when I realized that I had left the package of Moritanium on the table next to the mechanism! The magical field had been drawing energy from the Moritanium the whole time, and the resulting power surge must have catapulted me… somewhere.
"I looked around and saw that I was sitting next to a brick road, not unlike the Old Road, but entirely smooth, as if new or at least well-tended, and very bright yellow. I still had all the pieces of the mechanism, my toolkit, and the Moritanium, but there was no sign of the Scientists' Association. In fact, there weren't any buildings nearby at all."
"Had you traveled into the past, then?" asked the Queen.
Ambrose nodded. "Exactly, your Majesty. I estimate that I landed in the same spot geographically from which I had left, but at some time in the past. Central Avenue is, after all, the name for the portion of the Old Road that goes through Central City and its suburbs. Indeed, I soon had a very good clue to the exact time.
"Off in the distance, I spotted a group of four people traveling away from me. They were instantly recognizable to anyone with half a brain." He chuckled. "There was a girl in a gingham dress, with blond hair and silver shoes—that was your ancestress, of course, your Majesty. The one DG is named for. She was accompanied by the Scarecrow, Nick Chopper, and the Cowardly Lion, all looking as if they had stepped out of the illustrations in my fifth-form history book."
"That's incredible!" said DG.
"Did you talk to them?" asked Azkadellia.
"I tried," said Ambrose, "but they were too far away. I shouted, and for a moment the Lion turned around and looked at me, almost as if he recognized me, but then he turned back around and went on with the others. Then they all shimmered like a heat mirage, and when they came back into focus, they looked different. The biggest difference was in Dorothy Gale herself. She was now an older girl with long dark hair and sparkling red shoes. Oh! And there was only one sun."
"Weird!" said DG.
"I was still trying to figure out the more subtle differences among her companions when the phenomenon happened again, and afterward, she was a young woman. She and her companions were all human, even the Lion! They all had dark skin, and the Road seemed to be leading through something like the Realm of the Unwanted instead of the countryside.
"I realized then what must be happening. I was no longer moving in time, but I was slipping sideways from one dimension to another.
"I took a few steps off the Road, intending to sit down and figure out how to stabilize the device dimensionally. I took three steps away from the Road without a problem, but when I began to take a fourth, I ran into—I don't know how to describe it—something like a travel storm, all gray and whirling and quite impenetrable. I stepped back immediately and the sensation went away. I sensed that if I left the Road, I would find myself lost forever in the utter chaos of infinite possibilities. Indeed, something told me that I needed to stay on the brick road, whatever color or condition it was in, and that it would somehow lead me home. DG, weren't you the one who told me that 'all of life's answers can be found along the old road'?"
"Did I say that?" DG asked. "I'm flattered you remember."
Ambrose looked puzzled for a moment, then continued. "It's such a relief to be home. I was afraid I'd never make it."
Cain leaned forward and squeezed his arm. "We're glad you're home, too," he said warmly.
"Let me see, where was I?" Ambrose said, pleasantly disconcerted. "Oh, yes. The Road. My first priority was to get the device partially stabilized pretty quickly so that I wasn't being shuttled across dimensions every few minutes. Then it was just a matter of finding a way to steer it. To cut a long story short, I spent the next several months traveling along the Old Road and trying to refine the device so that I could use it to get home."
DG, predictably, was interested in the engineering aspect. "You couldn't have had everything you needed in that little toolkit, could you?"
"No, you're quite right," said Ambrose." Fortunately, I had some helpful encounters. "Once, when I was tinkering with it, the mechanism hiccupped back about a generation or so in time and I ran into two college girls on vacation. One was very serious, the other rather giggly, but both were remarkably gifted magic users. They helped quite a lot." He stopped for a moment, thinking. "I didn't notice it at the time, but I think one of them was green." He shrugged and went on. "After another hiccup—forward this time, I think—I ran into an Otherside pilot fixing an old-fashioned airplane, who gave me some spare parts. And so on."
"Sounds like you had some pretty far out adventures," said DG.
Ambrose nodded thoughtfully. "I kept wondering how these dimensional differences had come into being. Perhaps there would be a dimension in which, perish the thought, your father never Slipped over from the Otherside. Or one in which the Witch of the Dark was never released from the cave." He stopped abruptly. "I'm sorry, that was tactless." In the silence that followed his comment, Ambrose realized that he was getting a little too warm, now that the fire was burning briskly. He unwound his scarf and pulled off the cap.
There was a collective gasp. The Queen was the first to recover the ability to speak. "Ambrose, dear heart, what happened to you?"
"You must have traveled into the Middle Past at some point," Cain said.
Ambrose turned to Cain, confused. "What?"
Cain nodded toward the top of Ambrose's head. "That punishment—headcasing, they used to call it—hasn't been used for hundreds of years."
Ambrose regarded him for a long moment. "You don't remember?" he finally said, in a voice tinged with uncertainty and a dawning fear.
Cain shook his head.
The princesses remained silent, baffled. The Queen rose and stepped closer to Ambrose. "May I?" she asked, and when he nodded, she took his head in her hands, stooping over him to look closely at the zipper. After a long look, she sighed and released him. "The original incisions are long healed," she said.
"Yes, your Majesty," said Ambrose.
"This didn't happen on his trip," the Queen said to the others.
Cain started. "Then this isn't… you're not… "
Ambrose turned. "I'm so sorry, Cain. I just realized it myself." He took Cain's hands in his own. "I am Ambrose," he said firmly, looking into Cain's eyes, "but I'm not your Ambrose."
Cain bit his lip and looked away, shaken, trying to gather himself, holding Ambrose's hands like a lifeline. But not my Ambrose, he reminded himself, and remembered that moment of hesitation before Ambrose had kissed him back.
Part 3
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 12:55 am (UTC)My first reaction until the last little bit was "THIS IS SO COOL" then you had to throw THAT little loop in there and OH. *weeps and shivers* Poor Ambrose! All of them! Oh, my goodness. This is awful! *wrings hands fretfully* I'm so worried about their Ambrose now, and our Ambrose who is still lost, and for all the Cains out there who are waiting for their Ambroses to come home!
*meep* So good! So very, very good and ~omg angst~!
no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 01:31 am (UTC)Hurray! I was hoping you'd say something like that. :-)
I'm so glad you're enjoying it!!!! Thank you for the sweet comments; they really make my day!
no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 01:22 am (UTC)I totally did!
no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 01:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 01:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 02:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 02:53 am (UTC)In any case I love where this is going. Perfect continuation from the first chapter.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 03:15 am (UTC)Never! I was somewhat influenced by All the Myriad Ways, though.
In any case I love where this is going. Perfect continuation from the first chapter.
Thank you so much! *blush*
no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 03:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 07:52 pm (UTC)WHAT? Whoa!
I can't wait to see where this goes. :)
no subject
Date: 2010-03-21 08:08 pm (UTC)Oh, that made me so happy! :-) Thanks for the fb--much appreciated!
no subject
Date: 2010-03-22 01:55 am (UTC)Nice little twist going on here.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-22 02:20 am (UTC):-D I figure that's where Ambrose's genius lies, in his understanding of how to harness magic and science to work in tandem.
Nice little twist going on here.
Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2010-03-28 03:23 am (UTC)Oh, poor Cain. I love how you (and Cain) encapsulate what must have seemed ages of desperate investigation down to a few terse notes in his notebook.
References to the road when it was new and bright and yellow, and DG's ancestress and company...and their various incarnations as we know them from different media... very intriguing!
Indeed, something told me that I needed to stay on the brick road, whatever color or condition it was in, and that it would somehow lead me home.
*flails at this most canon of canon truths*
"I am Ambrose," he said firmly, looking into Cain's eyes, "but I'm not your Ambrose."
Oh, no! Everyone being shocked at the sight of the zipper was quite a shock in itself. And if it's not enought of a shock that Ambrose isn't Cain's Ambrose, Cain isn't Ambrose's Cain! O.O
no subject
Date: 2010-03-30 01:38 am (UTC)I'm glad you liked that!
I love how you (and Cain) encapsulate what must have seemed ages of desperate investigation down to a few terse notes in his notebook.
Oh, my. I hadn't quite thought of it like that, but you're absolutely right!
And if it's not enought of a shock that Ambrose isn't Cain's Ambrose, Cain isn't Ambrose's Cain! O.O
Oh, well said!
no subject
Date: 2010-07-05 02:46 am (UTC)also: that was totally a reference to Wicked! Two college girls, one giggly and one serious, but both gifted in magic? That can only be Galinda and Elphaba!
no subject
Date: 2010-07-05 03:57 am (UTC)YES! *happy dance* You got it! *throws Tin Man star confetti* Thank you for commenting!