Chương 173: Book 3 Chapter 21.1: Earthbound

The sun was shining (as it always did, thanks to weather control technology) on the Einstein-Odinson campus, illuminating a study session between Lee, Harley, and Skye. While she scrawled away at her robotics classwork, curiosity on another subject crept up into Harley's mind.

"Hey, you two are both technically witches, right?"

"I suppose so," Skye said.

"It's a matter of debate," Lee said.

"I could go one way or the other." While they were both female magic users, there was ongoing debate on whether that alone qualified someone to be a witch. There were a lot of women in pointy black hats who insisted there was more to it, and quite a few women with nose piercings and tattoos of cats who said there wasn't more to it. Lee thought that both sides had excellent points and excellent fashion sense, so she wasn't sure where her loyalties lied.

"Why do you ask?"

"Well I was wondering," Harley said.

"If a witch goes to a potluck, do they have to bring their shit in a cauldron for the aesthetic, or can they just use a regular crockpot?" Skye and Lee looked at Harley for a while, then at each other.

"Obviously the cauldron," Lee said.

"Yeah, obviously."

"Hmm. That sounds inconvenient," Harley said.

"I- wait, are you fucking with me?"

"Obviously," Lee said.

"Yeah, obviously."

"You bitches," Harley said.

"I come to you, with trust and curiosity in my heart, and you betray me like this."

"This betrayal was inevitable, dear," Lee said.

"Once you're done reeling from my treachery, could you give me my blue highlighter back?"

"Yeah." Harley tossed the highlighter Lee's way, and Lee caught it. While she was looking up to catch the marker, Lee noticed that Harley's hair was starting to drift upwards.

"Harley, your hair's floating."

"Whoop. Yeah, that happens," Harley said.

"Hold your breath, everyone." The slight upward drift usually foreshadowed a sudden teleportation to the far-flung homeworld of the Rogorians. Theta Beam teleportation usually ripped the air right out of her lungs, so Harley held her breath, closed her eyes, and waited for the shifting sensation of the heat and light to pass.

"What just happened?"

"Well, Skye, we have been teleported to an alien planet called-""This alien planet looks a lot like Earth," Skye said.

"What?" Harley opened her eyes. If this was the Rogorian homeworld, they'd done a hell of a lot of redecorating. They were sitting at the same picnic table, on the same quad, under the same blue sky as before. Even the clouds above hadn't changed.

"Well that's weird. Usually when that happens we're-""Hara-Lee!"

"Ah!" Skye screamed and jumped back as a three-inch high alien with purple skin and pincers walked out from under the picnic table, followed shortly thereafter by a dozen others. The sudden swarm of Rogorians kept coming until the three women were entirely surrounded.

"Little dudes! What are- how did you get here?"

"We have been following your illustrious example and pursuing 'see-ants'," the Rogorian chief said.

"We have experimented with our Theta Beam anomaly, and discovered a way to reverse it!"

"That…is really impressive, actually," Harley said. The Theta Beam anomaly bridged two points in space, but as far as Harley knew it only operated by taking things from Earth to Rogor and then flinging them back.

"You know these guys?" Skye had hiked her legs up onto the picnic table bench to avoid being anywhere near the Rogorians and their tiny little pincers. Harley demonstrated their harmlessness by picking one up and holding the tiny creature in the palm of her hand. Since it was the first loop, she didn't want to waste time telling Skye the full story, but the basics would help calm her down.

"Yeah, they're just one of those recurring bits that happen to me," Harley said.

"I help them out with an evil emperor that lives on their planet. It's pretty chill. The Rogorians are nice, I get to wear some spandex, and everything on their planet is weak, so I never really get hurt." Harley held out the Rogorian in her hand towards the ground, and he jumped off. Harley thought nothing of it until she heard a small crack. With dawning horror, she looked down and saw a hundred tiny fragments of the Rogorian.

"Oh god." The wind picked up, and the scattered fragments of the Rogorians broken body got carried off by the wind -as did a few dozen other Rogorians. The tiny aliens were swept away by the breeze, and drifted through the air until they hit something. The tiny purple aliens were all vaporized on impact.

"Oh god! Everything on their planet is weak!" As their fellows died, the other Rogorians panicked and began to scramble around. Even those too heavy to be carried away by the wind were not safe from the gusts, as stray leaves and feathers blew across the ground and struck them as if blown by hurricane force winds. A single lone Rogorian was impaled on the quill of a drifting feather and speared against a nearby wall, shattering on impact.

"Everything on our planet kills them!" Just as the earthlings were nigh-invulnerable on Rogor, the Rogorians were hyper-vulnerable on Earth. The higher density and gravity meant even the slightest breeze existed on a scale utterly lethal to the tiny, fragile lifeforms. Harley snatched up the nearest Rogorians—as gently as possible—and deposited them on the table near Lee.

"Make a shield, or something," she demanded.

"Skye, help me out here!" Though she had almost no idea what was going on, Skye knew that things were dying, and she generally liked to avoid death. She followed Harley's example and very gently scooped the nearest Rogorian off the ground, putting it near Lee, who was rapidly assembling a sort of enclosure made of mana barriers to shield them from the elements.

Once the Rogorians realized that Harley and Skye were trying to save them from the dangers of the hell-world they had found themselves in, they more willingly complied with the attempts to snatch them up. There were a few broken limbs, and a few more Rogorians lost to the gusts of wind, but all the aliens were corralled in a few minutes. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Okay, I think that's everyone who hasn't been vaporized," Harley said.

"Excellent work, Hara-Lee," the Rogorian Chief said.

"And you as well, Skee."

"Yeah, thanks, you too," Skye said. She was too tired to question their weird name pronunciations right now.

"What next?"

"Just need to keep them alive long enough to get them home," Harley said.

'They usually... hey, little dudes, what do you usually do to send me home?"

"We activate the Theta Wave Resonator!"

"Great! Who has that?" The Rogorians pointed their pincers at one of their vaporized comrades, and a tiny pile of metal scraps sitting next to his remains.

"Of course."

"Slowly, slowly." Hawke, Samson, Harley, and Kim had each taken one corner of a very large pallet bearing the Rogorians and were slowly shambling it across campus. Every jostle came with the risk of breaking the incredibly fragile aliens, so they moved slowly and with purpose. And with sore backs.

"Almost there," Kim said.

"Freddy better be fucking ready for this." Since none of them had any idea how Theta Wave Resonators worked, or even what exactly a Theta Wave was, the loopers had called on Freddy Frizzle. His entirely nonspecific brilliance was their best hope of getting the Rogorians back home to their safe, entirely harmless planetoid. Even with the entire looper team standing safeguard, every minor impact was still potentially lethal. Hawke had stumbled a few steps back and the resulting tumult had killed three Rogorians.

Harley pulled out her phone to check on the preparations.

"Ready Freddy?"

"Ready," Freddy saidy. He had his lab prepped and a secure holding cell prepared for the Rogorians. As a sci-fi enthusiast, he was all too eager to play host to alien life forms, even though the diminutive Rogorians weren't quite as impressive as some sort of blue-skinned ace pilot space babe. He would've preferred the babe, but Freddy's life just wasn't that kind of story. He had Goldie helping out, but she wasn't much of a babe.

"Alright, we're just around the corner, so we'll be... roughly ten minutes, at the rate we're going," Harley said. Moving safely was a slow process.

"Hold down the fort, Freddo."

"Guys?"

"What up, Hawke?"

"I have to sneeze." His broad face was already twitching with anticipation of the blowout to come. He stood in place, as did every other looper carrying the pallet, and tried his hardest to resist an irresistible biological urge. Even the slightest twitch of his fingers threatened a massive shakeup to the pallet bearing the Rogorians.

"Okay, nobody panic," Harley said.

"Hawke, I am going to slowly rotate to be more on your side. Just stay there." Vell was off the field, working on some runes that might help keep the Rogorians alive, and Lee was maintaining the protective field, putting them relatively low on manpower. Harley started inching her way over to Hawke's corner, trying to split the difference and keep the platform balanced.

"As soon as I get in the middle and give the all clear, start running," Harley advised. Given how fragile the Rogorians were, the force of a simple sneeze might completely obliterate them. Harley didn't even want to think of how badly their immune systems might be ravaged by a single rogue microorganism from a sneeze. As Harley inched her way sideways, Hawke's nose started to twitch more and more, and he had to take several deep breaths to keep the sneeze contained.

"Just hold it in," Kim said.

"Think about potato soup."

"Why the fuck would that help?"

"It's literally anything else but sneezing," Kim said.

"It'll work!"

"Well now we're just back on sneezing," Hawke said.

"I- I-" The pallet bearing the Rogorians trembled as Hawke's sneeze crossed the point of no return.

"Shit, hold on tight," Harley said. The Rogorians dug their pincers tight into the pallet as Harley started to shuffle more rapidly.

"Hawke, run!" Hawke let go and tried to get as far away as he could as fast as he could. He only managed a few steps before the overpowering biological imperative took hold and he sneezed harder than he'd ever sneezed before. Harley could see a shockwave travel through the Rogorians, in spite of Lee's shielding spell. For all Lee's magical acumen, she probably hadn't thought to make the barrier sneeze-proof.

"Everyone alright?"

"I think I've ruptured my shegongaloob," one of the Rogorians squeaked.

"Right, and what's that do?"

"It keeps my galoob in."

"Right, and what's galoob?" The Rogorian bent forward and vomited out a tiny pile of glowing green fluid. Harley narrowly stopped herself from recoiling in disgust as Hawke resumed his position at the corner of the pallet.

"Okay, great, learn something new every day," Harley said.

"Do you need the galoob to live?"

"No!" Which was good, because the Rogorian immediately vomited up even more of it. Harley leaned in Lee's direction.

"Could you call Vell and tell him to bring some wet wipes?" Harley asked.

"And a geiger counter. I don't like the way that shit's glowing." After making sure the galoob was within acceptable levels of radioactivity, Harley and the gang deposited the Rogorian aliens within Freddy's secured containment unit, and got to work. Some of the smarter Rogorians were helping them put together the pieces of the Theta Wave Resonator, but Freddy and Goldie still had to fill in a lot of gaps.

"This is a lot of things I don't really understand and probably never will," Vell said.

"You getting this, Kim?"

"I am getting it as in recording it," Kim said. Her digital brain stayed intact between loops, so she made sure to save blueprints and research notes for next time.

"Do I understand any of it? Fuck no." As Freddy was preoccupied actually calibrating the device, Vell leaned towards Goldie.

"Goldie, any chance you can explain any of this in simple terms?"

"Does the phrase 'quantum-braided spacial anomalies' count as a simple term?"

"No."

"Then no," Goldie said.

"Mr. Frizzle, any chance you can help put this in layman's terms?"

"The most basic explanation I can give is that there's a sort of common resonance between a point of space here on Earth, and a point of space near wherever these guys are from." Freddy pointed to the Rogorians as Vell nodded.

"The anomalous energy makes it easier to open something that's sort of like a wormhole, except that runs on entirely different principles," Freddy said.

"Basically just an easy form of teleportation."

"If we've had that kind of weird space hole on campus the whole time, why is teleportation still so hard?"

"Because teleportation, very importantly, is ideally a two-way process," Freddy said.

"We could use this technology to launch ourselves anywhere, yeah, but it's not particularly useful unless we could get back. That's apparently not a problem for our alien friends, but going anywhere else would be a one-way ticket." The longer the explanation went on, the more Vell's forehead started to wrinkle.

"That's not a complete wash, is it? One-way teleportation could still come in handy," Vell said.

"I haven't even gotten into the power draw problems," Freddy said.

"We've barely got enough power on the school's grid to make this work, and that's doing things the easy way. Going anywhere but the other end of the anomaly would require a power source bigger than anything we've got on Earth."

"Makes sense. Thanks, Freddy," Vell said.

"You need my runes for anything? I think I just thought of something, I want to follow up on it."

"We should be good, I think I can reconstruct this just based off the technology we have on hand," Freddy said.

"Okay, great." Vell wandered off in a contemplative haze. Kim shrugged her shoulders as he left, and continued recording the proceedings.

"I look forward to seeing how that thread gets pulled," Harley said. When Vell put on his thinking face, some impressive shit usually happened. Eventually.

"As am I," Lee said.

"Freddy, I've charged the third arcanomatrix, but I'm feeling a bit spent. Is there much more to do?"

"Not on your end," Freddy said.

"Take a break, grab a drink out of the minifridge. I'll handle the assembly." Freddy put on his gloves and grabbed the charged matrices to place them within the larger housing they'd assembled. He had been in the process of recreating a vintage model teleportation rig—though he refused to explain why—so he had most of the parts already pre-assembled and ready to go. It only took some slight reconfiguration to make the Theta Beam Resonator a reality, at least in theory.

"Okay, I think this should work," Freddy said.

"In theory. No real way to know until we test it."

"So, can we send a signal probe through, like Luke did with a butterfly wormhole?"

"Not unless you have one-hundred and seventy-five million years to wait for the signal to bounce back," Freddy said.

"This isn't a proper wormhole, we won't be able to get a signal through the open anomaly the way we did with the butterfly wormholes."

"Ah, I see where this is going," Lee said. She'd lived through these dilemmas often enough to read the room.

"Someone needs to go through it, and then open the anomaly from the other side and return, yes?" Freddy nodded. Harley started to pick up what he was putting down. She could guess where this was going, but she asked anyway.

"So, just for the sake of informed consent, what happens if the resonator whatever doesn't work?"

"The molecules that make up your body will be individually separated into their component subatomic particles and scattered across a three-hundred lightyear radius."

"Well, that'd be the second time an invention of yours has done that to me, so no worries," Harley said.

"Wait, what?"

"Don't even worry about it," Harley insisted.

"I'll be back in a second."

"Whoa whoa whoa," Freddy said.

"You can't just step into an unstable spacial anomaly completely blind."

"Well I'm going to do it anyway." And then she did.