Linked Worlds | Other Dimensions #1

One - Sequana

© 2021 Calliope Night. All rights reserved.

"It's not like they have anything the other books don't."

***

The white sand that would've shone in the moonlight looked dull in comparison to the bioluminescent waves of the bay. The sound of the waves lapping against the shore had always helped Sia concentrate, and this time was no exception.

The sixteen-year-old was sitting in her favorite spot - the banquette in the alcove of the bay window, three stories above the ground, in her bedroom - a faraway look on her face whilst reading a book.

"-And it was never to be seen again."

She closed the book and sunk deeper into the pillows surrounding her as she stared out into the starry night.

***

It was the first day of Sia's vacation and she'd slept nearly the entire day. After dinner, she'd gone straight to her personal library, to look through the collection books she'd either scanned or downloaded but never read, trying to figure out what she would read next.

After nearly an hour of agonizing over what to read, she settled on an old book, one that was originally written a millennia ago, titled "The Past That Is The Future". It was an odd title for a philosophical book, however she thought nothing of it. After all she always thought people had a thing for catchy, fantasy-like, titles - even for non-fiction books - back then.

When Sia was done with the book, she thought about what it had said. She had been expecting the usual stuff - a whole bunch on gods and how they helped the planet function. She'd even prepared herself for the weirdness. However, she didn't think it would be as strange as it was.

The book was filled with essays upon essays on how the world was in fragments, how there was a stone with the power to "take away what we know and show what we don't", help unite the universe, and how the worlds are connected in "places of great peril".

She thought it was ludicrous. Sure she found it intriguing, but the science, the logic, it was all wrong, even for the time it was written in. How anyone could have ever believed that, she simply couldn't comprehend. Then again, I suppose people can believe anything if they make up their mind.

***

A loud beeping snapped Sia out of her thoughts. It was midnight.

A small dodecahedron whirred around her, blinking in rhythm to the beeping. Sighing, she tapped the flying robot, which she had named Lucy, twice to stop the sound.

She picked up Maria, a mechanical turtle that looked like a smaller version of the extinct green sea turtle. Maria's shell was made so that it lit up like the waves in the darkness. The turtle also had an attachable chain, so (when it pulled it's head and limbs into the shell) it resembled, and could be used like, a cross-sling messenger bag.

Since Sia was already wearing an aqua skater dress, she slipped on a pair of strappy sandals that were the same deep violet as the velvet capelet she wore, and made her way underground. She could've gone into the tunnels anytime she wanted, she just preferred going at midnight. It seemed more mysterious to her.

She dressed up because she wanted to feel like what she was doing was kind of important, besides, she liked being fancy. It also gave her a reason to wear the caplet, which was lined with a thin, bulletproof, material.

Maria hung by Sia's side, the glow of the shell bouncing off the walls and lighting up the place, as she made her way over to the restricted library - one that only her family could access.

The restricted library was filled to the brim with early texts. She didn't know why no one else was allowed to access them, she'd tried asking her father but he'd just shut her down. "It's not like they have anything the other books don't." she'd said.

Once she arrived, she picked out some books she wanted to read and set up the auto-scanner. As they were being scanned, she picked up another book and started to read it. Scanned books would be a lot easier to read inconspicuously than paper ones, which were mostly replaced by their electronic counterparts. Sia usually just read in the library, but she wanted to keep the books with her so she could look through them later.

When the scanning, which took only about twenty-five minutes, was completed, she walked out, flipping through their holograms. Since she wasn't tired and simply didn't feel like sleeping, Sia decided to roam the tunnels for a bit.

About an hour later, she stumbled upon an engraving on the wall, it was written in a strange script. Sia wanted to study it more to see if it was a language she knew, but she was exhausted and close to slipping into dreamland. So, she took a picture of the wall and made her way back to her room before she fell asleep.

***

She started working on trying to translate the script, right after eating her breakfast, by feeding the image to the translators. There were five of them and they all had different languages in them. When an entered language isn't stored in the translator, it takes six minutes and thirty seconds trying to match the text before an error message popped up. This specific language wasn't there in any of them. To Sia that meant she'd just wasted a little over half an hour of her time.

She huffed in annoyance when the error message popped up. It was the last translator and none of them recognized the script on the wall. That meant she'd have to identify the language and translate it manually. Sia didn't mind doing it, but she just found it so much easier to have the machines do it for her.

She went to her library and started to look through the books in the language section, just in case one of them had the mystery language. Unsurprisingly, she came up empty handed. Refusing to give up, she decided to look through her Grandfather's notes, he'd written notes on nearly everything.

When Sia brought out the books, she thought of the time her grandfather gave them to her, just a week before his death. She was overjoyed when he told her they were hers to keep.

She started skimming through one of the books, looking for one on languages, preferably ancient ones. The third book she picked up was exactly that. The hundred page book, with it's worn pages, didn't look like much, but it was Sia's last shot at being able to read the engraving. Halfway through the book, she found a script that matched. The language was called "Slanigean" and it had nearly a hundred characters. That meant that Sia had to hand-draw a hundred of those jagged, curly letters and put them in the translator, and then double-check the translation for errors.

That'll take a while, a long while, but being able to read the engraving would be worth it.