fandomtownies | The park, Thursday evening

Plenty of room to avoid the weird girl!

Interrupt her or catch her when she's trying to relax, whatever works!

Elsa's class under Navaan had been much earlier in the day, yes, but she was in no hurry to get back to a haunted house on an island across the water, and so she'd made her way out to the park, even with a dress that was still a little splotchy with green jelly, mostly just to try to wind down before returning to Ingvar and to her room.

She couldn't help but pause on her walk to stare in fascination at the girl who was... working through some sort of form, some sort of pattern, she wasn't quite certain. They were all new to Elsa, and that was enough to prompt her to stop and watch curiously.

This was far more interesting than the jelly golem wrestling.

Jalian, rolled, turned, and caught sight of Elsa. She smiled, remembering her from the class they'd had. "Hello. I thought most people were back in the buildings."

Elsa smiled faintly and shook her head.

"I'm starting to get fed up with whispers while I sleep and the feeling that something is watching me whenever I close my eyes," she explained. "I thought tonight would be as good a night as any to get some fresh air away from the ghosts."

She was going to just accept that that's what they were. Her brain would hurt so much less if she did.

"Ghosts?" Jalian asked curiously. Her room wasn't haunted. "I've heard others speaking about them, but I haven't seen any myself."

"I haven't really seen any, exactly," Elsa offered, giving a thoughtful frown. "It's more a... general sense of something, more often than not. Other people have mentioned chills. I've noticed breezes in rooms with no open windows, things that move around when you turn your back for a moment... If you haven't seen them yet, I suppose you're one of the few lucky ones."

Elsa would happily trade. She missed sleep.

"Maybe it's related to things like this weekend - if timelines are crossing imperfectly, echoes of one could invade another," Jalian suggested. She huffed in irritation. "If I could only do the math, it might help!"

Well, there was a quick and surefire way to get Elsa's attention.

"I suppose there would be some sort of mathematics behind the physics of the different timelines," Elsa replied, blinking. "You know, I'd never really thought of that? But now that you've mentioned it, the idea of putting the theory of it down is fascinating."

Jalian smiled hugely, relieved and excited. "Yes - and useful! If we know what's causing it, we can predict it, if nothing else. Perhaps even use it to our advantage. But nobody here seems the least bit curious about it!"

"Shame on them," Elsa replied, shaking her head. "Especially in the wake of all of the chaos that happened in the spring, with realities colliding into one another with seemingly no rhyme or reason. You would think that a group of people who spent up to a month stuck as somebody else would take more interest in learning how to avoid things like that in the future."

"It happened for longer?" Jalian asked, curious. "It's so strange; I've never heard of temporal physics like this before. A transformation wavefront only occurs in subcritical cases, and the timeline is wiped from existence, not something that can return. Above a certain energy level, the timelines split, creating new ones, and we shouldn't be aware of it at all!"

She grinned a bit wickedly. "My teachers would be very jealous of me, to see a place like this exists."

"We haven't made nearly enough in the way of scientific advances for people in my part of the timeline to be able to follow that without a bit of learning, first," Elsa admitted, "though I think I'm following along. Do you mean that new alternate timelines would exist only briefly, and be destroyed unless it was strong enough, in which case it would exist in a place different or far enough from ours that we'd never see that it was there in the first place?"

She looked apologetic, though she was trying. She'd only had a short amount of time to study maths and sciences that had barely been in infancy in her own time, after all.

"When it happened in the spring, it was far more haphazard than the strange pocket we seemed to have stepped into for the weekend. It wasn't that everyone was from the same sort of alternate possibility, it was that people were themselves from any number of different probabilities. A version of myself where I never had a sister, or a teacher who would go from one week to the next as somebody completely new. There were creatures in the streets, and before it was all said and done, it was almost so bad that it was impossible to tell those who had changed from those who hadn't."

"That is..." Jalian shook her head. "Nearly unbelievable! But...yes, to some extent. Here."

She found a patch of ground with a bit of dirt and sat cross-legged, then drew a line in it. "A timeline, though vastly simplified, of course. For every change," she drew spokes off the line, "other timelines exist where different choices were made. They start from the same point, and diverge further the more they go. This is the Great Wheel. A certain amount of energy is needed to view or move from one to another. More energy the further across the wheel they are."

She drew another line overlapping the first one. "Make a small enough change, or one close enough to divergence, and it can't separate; you alter the original timeline, changing it completely."

She shrugged. "But either way, the timelines themselves don't move. You can travel between them, but it doesn't just happen. And if they all just split and came back together and crossed...can you imagine what sort of wheel that would make?"

"It would be... less of a wheel, more of a knot," Elsa murmured, looking at the wheel in fascination. "Assuming that Fandom is one of those timelines, it would be a mess of lines twisting in and out and around it. Or perhaps one of the spokes branching off of it, intersecting with... everything."

It would at least sort of explain the fact that so many people from so many times and places found themselves here. Perhaps.

"Exactly! And timelines don't do that!" Jalian looked around for an example, then just picked up her knife, held it above her head, and dropped it. "Like gravity - physics says they run straight-line, unless something else acts upon them. So how is any of this happening? What is causing it?"

Oh, it was such a relief to discuss this! Even if Elsa didn't know temporal mechanics, at least she was interested!

"Something else?" Elsa bit her lip. "There's a machine on the island that had something to do with the mess that became of reality in the spring," she offered. "I've seen it up close, once. A little too close, I'm afraid. It changed me into somebody else as well, however temporarily. I don't have the first clue what it really is, or how it works, but it seems to be at the root of a lot of the island's stranger troubles."

"A machine?" Jalian scrambled back up. "Where is it now?"

Oh, this would end well.

"I think it's in the preserve somewhere," Elsa replied, "though I haven't exactly gone looking for it since the last time around. Most people around here refer to it as the weather machine, but... last I checked, weather had nothing to do with timelines or broken realities."

"Not that I've ever heard of," Jalian confirmed. "Can you take me to it?"

You wanted to wander around the preserve at night, didn't you, Elsa?

Oh, yes. Nothing struck Elsa as a better plan than that.

"I'm not certain it's still there," she noted, "and I'd advise against touching it if it is. It's... I can't think of a better word for the thing than 'moody,' really."

Jalian frowned, puzzled. "It's alive?"

"I'm not sure," Elsa admitted. "I've heard people refer to the island as a living thing as well, with thoughts and ideas and a sadistic sense of humor. And after some of the things that have happened around here, it seems like it would be folly to rule it out, even as a possibility."

"I've never heard of a living island," Jalian said. Not that she was ruling it out, either. "I can't think of a way to test it, though; I'm not a biologist. I could only try making it angry enough to do something, and that would be a bad idea."

"Given some of the things the island does when for all intents and purposes it should be happy, I'm inclined to agree," Elsa noted. "But I really don't know enough about the island to have any idea where to check, myself."

Jalian sighed, then smiled and shrugged. "We'll have to find another way, then."

"The library, perhaps?" Elsa smiled a little bit. "We found the blueprints for the weather machine in Special Collections at one point, but it's off-limits to the general public unless somebody gets express permission from the librarian."

"How do you get that?" Jalian asked.

"I think by asking nicely," Elsa offered.

Beyond that, she hadn't a clue.

"I am...not very good at that," Jalian confessed. Her version of "asking nicely" tended to include not immediately pulling out her knives.

At least she knew her weaker areas?

Fortunately, diplomacy happened to be an area that Elsa had been raised to excel in.

"I'm not terrible at it," she offered. "I suppose if I were to explain that we're curious about the island's inner workings, the librarian might let us go inside. Though he does keep the door locked for a reason."

"What reason?" Jalian asked curiously.

"It's dangerous," Elsa replied, and then after a moment's consideration, she decided to elaborate. "I heard on the radio that the other weekend, when all of the pink ponies were running about, all of that began in Special Collections. There's wild magic in it, nothing even remotely tame."

Jalian shuddered at the memory of those pink things. "It could be a very important place, then! We should definitely go." She looked around the darkened park. "Maybe not tonight," she conceded.

"I imagine the library is locked by now," Elsa agreed with a nod. "But another time, certainly. I can't see any harm in asking, after all."

Ha, as if Constantine was going to let them just wander around in there simply because they were curious.

But it was for science!

And it might keep Jalian from trying to find the weather machine and mess with it on her own?

"Asking is harmless," she agreed. She'd tried to tell her teachers that any number of times. Admittedly mostly disingenuously, but still!

I really need more icons.

The park, Thursday evening

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OOC!