There are upsides and downsides to inter-dimensional transportation. Upsides include getting a new lease on life, finding yourself suddenly in possession of a healing factor strong enough to make you functionally immortal, and making new friends. Downsides include losing ten inches of height and having your anatomy get shifted around in such a way that you can no longer quite tell whether you look good in any given outfit or not.
On one particular morning, nearly three months after my arrival in Selene, I was confronted by that last downside. I had an appointment in about an hour with a Dr. Nika Tersine, noted expert in bio-electro-magnetics at the University of Alderburg, one which had been set up for me by a mutual friend of ours, Dr. Amina Charcharias. I’d been to balls, on dates, even to diplomatic functions; but something about that appointment made me incredibly nervous about my appearance. Maybe it was just my PhD student’s heart still at work. Offending politicians and nobility is nothing, but disappointing a professor? Unthinkable.
I was wearing charcoal grey, from the pants that despite my best efforts still managed to be tight around the hips, to the long coat whose cuffs were still stained with ink from when I’d knocked over an inkwell onto them. The only break from all of the grey was my undershirt. It was white. But even with my excellent color-coordination, nothing I could do could make the outfit seem anything less than boring. Not even wearing a corset—an article of clothing to which I’d developed a growing weakness—did much, though I wasn’t sure how to feel about the way it made my curvature very obvious. Finally, after having stood there for nearly ten minutes, I broke out the nuclear option.
“Anna, help me. My outfit sucks and I don’t know what to do about it.”
Anna Plurabelle had been in the room with me, but hadn’t said a thing the entire time, instead devoting herself to embroidery. It was a minor miracle that she’d managed to ignore me like that, considering the room was about twelve feet on a side, but she’d done it. She looked up from her needlework, crossed her legs, tossed her long blonde hair, and said, “Sucking… I’m trying to remember, that means it’s bad, correct?”
“Yes,” I said. “Help.”
Anna was a lot of things. Technically she was my servant, or at least a servant of the household to which I belonged, but her practical role was somewhere between roommate and replacement common sense.
“You look like you’re dressing for a funeral,” she said. “You could afford to be more casual, you know.”
I turned around, blinking at her. “Anna, have you looked at yourself lately?”
She was wearing a full dress, complete with collapsible bustle, all in pastel pink and sea-foam green, decorated with frills and ribbons and all around looking like she was about to go to a tea party with the queen of the fairies. “Looking respectable is part of my job. You, Emma, are unemployed. To be serious, you’re meeting with a professor at a university so she can perform experiments on you and see what makes you tick.” Anna sighed. “But if you really wished to look your best, might I suggest adding a splash of colour, perhaps somewhere you wish to draw the eye.”
“A splash of color… Maybe just a little bit,” I said. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, so as far as I knew Anna was right. A splash of color was all I needed, but I didn’t want to have to change undershirts again. I went to the trunk.
It was a big leather square, nearly three-quarters the size of my (admittedly tiny) body, and it contained literally everything I owned. I’d been in Alderburg for over a week, and only about a third of its contents had been excavated and brought out into the light, so I started digging. Most of it was worthless: romance novels, technical pamphlets on analytical engines, spare revolver bullets, more clothes. Eventually, I did find what I was looking for.
It was a bit of white cloth, folded up to form a little pouch. Inside the pouch was a necklace on a silver chain, bearing a disk-shaped pendant, also silver, in the image of an ouroboros—a snake swallowing its own tail. The eye of the snake was inset with a tiny but expertly-cut emerald which glittered in the gaslamp light with an evil intelligence.
“Anna, could you help me put this on?”
She stood up instantly, crossing the room with awkward, uneven steps, the extended amount of time spent seated having exacerbated her limp. I’d never asked about what had happened to her leg, but the reminder made me want to ask. It wasn’t the appropriate time.
Anna got behind me and had the chain around my neck in a snap. I turned back to the mirror. Technically, most of the pendant was of a similar greyish tone to the rest of my outfit, but it shone beautifully, and the emerald definitely drew the eye. It drew the eye to my chest, of course, but I didn’t think about that at the time.
I frowned as a thought occurred to me. “Silver tarnishes. Anna, did you polish this?”
She shook her head.
“Maybe Unity, then?”
Unity was my other servant/assistant/roommate. She and Anna couldn’t have been more opposites; she had grown up on the streets of Amrinval, in the poorest districts, until I had saved her life and gotten her a job with the Halflance household.
“It’s possible,” Anna said. “And if she did, that shows great diligence.”
“Oh, definitely. Erm. Where is Unity right now?”
“Last I heard, she was out taking a class. Poetry, I believe it was.”
“Poetry, really?” I said. “I didn’t expect that. Maybe she’s just making up for lost time. Does Amrinval even have public education?”
“Theoretically.”
What Amrinval did have was workhouses for the poor and homeless. If you couldn’t find a job, you’d be conscripted for one. Before I could start thinking too hard about the social ills of Bluerose, I remembered that I had an appointment to get to.
“I should get going!” I said, already moving to the door. “Thanks for the help.”
“Whenever you require it, Emma,” Anna said, just as I shut the door behind me.
The room which Anna, Unity, and I all shared was up on the fourth floor of a big brick housing complex in the middle of the commercial district, a ways from the university, our rent being paid for by a regular stipend courtesy of Lady Sarah Halflance, the Count Leedreather. I dashed down to the ground floor and, to my relief, found that there was a streetcar waiting for me. I leapt onto one of the sideboards just an instant before the wheels started turning, and I was off.
New Alderburg was a much younger town than the ancient city of Amrinval. Whereas Amrinval had been dominated by the core of ancient spires and Archopolid constructs, New Alderburg—named for a city in the core regions of the Cassandran Empire—was entirely unburdened by age. It had been built barely a century earlier by a group of Blueroser intellectuals interested in turning a hitherto-unimportant village along the Rass river into a center for learning. This meant that, at least for the main city core, it was all laid out in a perfect grid, with structures consisting almost entirely of the newer Cassandran style, all stone and ribs of black iron, high gothic spires and looming heights, all shrouded in smoke from countless liquid-coal steam engines.
And the women of New Alderburg—the people, the two words being strangely interchangeable in a world with no sexual distinctions—seemed to absorb the city’s youth, young and old alike. There was a sense of propriety to Amrinval, the Lords going around with retinues in tow, the businesswomen crossing the street with eyes locked straight ahead, even the servants focused on their duties. You would hear brief snippets of conversation and the occasional polite “good day”, but that was it. Alderburg was alive, vibrant, almost casual by the standards of the pseudo-Victorian Blueroser culture.
The streetcar carried me through the busy commercial district, making stops out by department stores and at the end of bustling farmer’s markets, but I, along with the majority of the passengers, were bound for the University. New Alderburg was, after all, a university town, and a university town in the old sense, more Princeton than Isla Vista. The University radiated age. It was built in a different style to the rest of the city, lots of delicate construction and high archways, brass domes long since gone green with patina, and fruit trees along grassy walkways. There was something vaguely eerie about it, as though it were built by fey creatures unlike those who currently inhabited it, though the students seemed perfectly comfortable to sit on benches in the shade and argue about the exact sorts of things only college students argue about. It almost reminded me of home, University of Chicago, albeit substantially warmer.
My destination within the University was the old Natural Motions building. It took me a while to get there, given that there was no map, and my only directions were to look for the building that was shaped like an Archopolid. To my shock, though, when I got there, I found the description almost accurate. Obviously no building could capture the lurking menace of an Archopolid in motion, the pumping steam vents and clicking compound eyes, but the shape was on point: a central block, just a big rectangular prism, with a domed outcropping on one end and series of flying buttresses down either side.
Dr. Tersine’s lab was on the ground floor, behind an unassuming oak door marked with her name on a brass plate. I knocked three times, then took a step back. The hallway was almost silent, aside from the sound of one or two lectures being held on the far end of the building. I waited for Dr. Tersine to respond for what felt like a couple of minutes, and got nothing, not even the sound of movement from inside her lab. Then, just as I raised my fist to knock again, the door burst open.
The woman standing before me, slightly bent, her hand on the edge of the door, was barely taller than I was, and her whole body had the fragile appearance of a scarecrow. Her face was oddly pinched, tight, a bit small for her skull, with a button nose and wide brown eyes. She had dirty blonde hair, just barely long enough to form a tiny ponytail at the nape of her neck, and heavy bags under her eyes.
We stood frozen for several seconds, her eyes slowly sizing me up as one might a new outfit. “Emma Farrier?” she eventually said, in a voice shockingly deep for her body.
“Dr. Tersine?”
“Yes, that is I,” Tersine said, suddenly straightening her back. Her tone changed instantly from a gentle inquisitiveness to absolute confidence, as though projecting herself for a wider audience. “Welcome. My apologies for my lateness, I was engrossed in my work.”
“No problem,” I said.
“Please, do come in.”
Dr. Tersine’s lab was huge, almost comparable to a lecture hall in terms of sheer size, and yet it all felt very empty. There were tables, shelves, equipment, reference texts, all of the things that you would need for a laboratory, but not nearly as much as I might have expected of a lab this big. Dr. Tersine was also the only person in it.
“So Amina told me you were an expert on bio-electromagnetics?” I said, needing to fill the silence.
“The absolute foremost,” Tersine said.
“What exactly is the plan for today, then? I assume Amina told you about my… unique ability.”
“You mean, your enhanced EV field? Yes, she filled me in on all of it, at least as much as she could fit into an envelope. You know, I spent so many years in Amrinval studying EV and getting nowhere, I nearly gave up. And yet, almost as soon as I move to New Alderburg, suddenly the case study of a lifetime falls into my lap! Incredible, the jokes fate plays on us, don’t you think?”
That explained it, then. She must not have fully restocked after the move. “Wow, yeah,” I said. “Sorry for being an inconvenience, I guess, but it’s not like I got to choose when I got shot for the first time.”
“You were shot?”
“Yep. The bullet popped right back out in under a minute, like,” I made a little ping with my mouth and flicked my finger to represent a bullet flying out of my stomach. “That’s how I found out. But anyway, what are you going to do?”
“A few preliminary tests,” Tersine said. “Dr. Charcharias already began some of this, but I want to know more. We’ll be taking blood samples, measuring skin conductivity, testing your reaction to magnets…”
Immediately, my stomach started to churn, the memory of my usual reaction to magnets rising up from my subconscious. “Do we have to do the magnets? They make me sick.”
Tersine frowned, shooting me a quick glare. “I’ll give you the small magnets.” There was a moment’s hitch before she returned to her serene expression. “Normally I’d have my assistant to help me, but she’s unavailable, so I’ll need your help. Do you see my tool case?” She gestured to a far table, and a microwave-sized wooden case sitting on it. “Would you mind bringing it over while I look over my notes?”
Tersine was all business from that moment onward. She did indeed take a blood sample, fighting against my magnetic field the entire way, and a series of other baseline measurements of my lungs, heart, eyes, all those other things that doctors care about. It turned out that the magnets didn’t suck quite as much as I’d been worried: the procedure was to start with the magnet at the far end of the room, then slowly move it toward me, noting down the distance at which I felt queasy, then repeat with a bigger magnet. After that were some more esoteric tests, where Tersine strapped various devices to my limbs and made me run laps around her lab, or took photographs of me through strangely colored lenses. This went on for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and by the end of it Dr. Tersine had an entire pile of notes sitting on one of her tables.
She retreated, then, to examine her pile of papers, cross-referencing something with a pair of heavy black-bound tomes. I wasn’t sure whether she was going to need me again or not, so I stayed, sitting on a low stool and fidgeting intensely. After several minutes of that, however, Dr. Tersine seemed to come to some kind of revelation.
“That can’t be…” she said to herself. Her eyes suddenly snapped up, and the same transformation came over her that I’d seen just after we first met. She stared at me with an intensely analytical eye, taking me apart like a mechanical device. I stared right back at her, discomfort scampering up and down my spine.
“Dr. Tersine? Is there something wrong?”
She didn’t even hear me, instead holding that piercing look. Slowly, her expression changed from irritation to awe. She saw something new in me, something she had never seen before, but I didn’t know enough about the context to understand what. Just when it seemed that she was going to shout her discovery from the rooftops, though, she snapped back to normal.
“Sorry, Ms. Farrier. Just an unexpected result. I’ll have to come back to you about it next time, if I’m not simply misinterpreting something, that is.” Tersine raised an eyebrow. “There will be a next time, yes?”
“Of course,” I said. “You said these were just some preliminary tests, didn’t you? I assume we’ll need to do some more in order to get to the bottom of it.”
“Get to the bottom of it…” Tersine repeated, eyes drifting back down to her notes. “Yes. I’ll need one week to formulate some theories, come up with appropriate tests. One week from now, same time. Is that good for you?”
I agreed, and within a couple of minutes I was standing back in the hallway outside of Tersine’s lab. There was a feeling of dissociation, like I’d spent an hour being swept up in a whirlwind and only just then had I been set back down. Perhaps I should have expected that Dr. Tersine would be strange; she was a colleague of Amina’s after all, and Amina was part shark. Still, it felt like there was more to what had happened in that laboratory than just Dr. Tersine being a strange personality. Something I didn’t know.
I dismissed the idea, having had more than enough of mysteries up in Urcos. There was probably some decade-long academic dispute I wasn’t aware of. I shoved my hands in my pockets and got to walking, this time to a building whose location I knew: the Engineering Hall. True, Dr. Tersine and the secret of my regeneration was the primary reason for my being in New Alderburg, but it wasn’t as though I was going to sit around and do nothing else. What was the point of spending an unknown number of weeks or months in a university town if you don’t take advantage of the University? This was the greatest concentration of knowledge in all of Bluerose, supposedly. If the wall clock in Dr. Tersine’s lab was accurate, then I had just enough time to get to the lecture on new analytical programming structures before I missed anything important.
Awesome.
Welcome back and good to hear that you recovered well from your surgery. Maybe thanks to your EV field?
I thought she was to meet Dr. Tolva (*Snows*, ch 39)
I’m glad we get to continue to read Emma’s adventures!
Look, that character has gone through approximately nineteen different names and every time I think about it I start coming up with a new one, this is the best it's gonna get
@SaffronDragon
So going back into the prior books to see if Amina’s wife’s name was mentioned and whether it matches Dr. Tersine would not be a fruitful endeavor?
@AndreaWiggin Yeah not the same person at all.
@SaffronDragon Oh no! One of my suspicions is wrong!
Or is this just misdirection?