Chapter Two - Roadside

The road was a mess.

Sure, the gravel road leading out of the trailer park wasn't well-maintained, but Alice imagined that it had never been well-maintained to begin with. Seeing weeds poking out from between patches of loose asphalt and gravel wasn't anything unexpected.

The highway, however, that was another story.

The road was covered in cracks, some wide enough that she imagined someone could break an ankle walking down them. All sorts of plants were poking through, and it seemed pretty obvious that nature had long ago started to reclaim this patch of civilisation.

"No, that isn't good," Alice muttered.

She was never someone who considered herself an expert in the study of history, but Alice knew enough to tell that roads were the veins and arteries of a civilised world. They made travel, trade, and movement possible. They allowed the countryside to feed the city, for goods to move across nations.

This was a four lane highway that hadn't seen maintenance or probably much traffic in at least a couple of years.

She knelt, slipping her hand into one of the cracks in the road then tugging out a large chunk of asphalt with minimal effort. A squeeze of her hand and it was crushed. "This place feels... dead."

"Kinda spooky, yeah," Crystal agreed. "There's a sign way off over there."

Alice looked up and followed Crystal's pointing finger. There was a roadsign out ahead, covered in too many plants to see what was written on it, and bent by time.

"Nice catch," Alice said.

They started that way, walking in the middle of the deserted road in a way that felt somehow terribly wrong. Pedestrians weren't supposed to occupy the middle of such a wide road. It should have been covered in traffic, not be so quietly empty.

Crystal tilted her head back and started to sniff at the air.

"Are you okay?" Alice asked.

"Smell the air," Crystal said.

Alice did so, then shrugged. "It smells natural? Or is that the point?"

"Yeah," Crystal said.

Alice nodded along. "No stink of gas. None of the burning oil smell around cities and towns. No food smells... no garbage either."

"I don't mind that last one," Crystal said with a smile, a smile which quickly faded. "Still, it's a little weird, right? Even back home, which was pretty nice, had some smells to it. This smells like deep in nature, not along a highway."

They made it to the road sign, and Alice flicked her power out. Thin shadowy blades slipped out of the shadows cast by the greenery stuck to the sign, and soon it all came tumbling down. It was just directions to a city some fifty kilometres down the road.

"Pripyat," Alice read. "Why does that sound familiar?"

"Sounds fancy," Crystal said. "What's it mean?"

"I have no idea," Alice said. "The sign's only in one language."

"Okay?"

"Most signage in Europe has the local language above, then sometimes for big cities some English text below."

"Why?"

"Tourism, I suppose," Alice said. "That's from what I remember seeing in Europe. But we might not be in a world too similar to our own. The writing definitely looks Cyrillic, and the style of the sign, the homes, the cars, it would all fit into our own homeworld."

"So this isn't as big of a divergence as the world you were stuck on," Crystal said. "So, should we, uh, continue down that way?"

"Seems like as good an idea as any," Alice said.

Crystal grinned. "Oh, good, because I wanted to look at the weird air over there."

Alice followed her pointing finger again, and then squinted. She didn't see anything this time. Though now that she was looking for something, she focused her magic onwards and could feel a very faint stirring.

The two continued down the road. A minute or two later, Alice was starting to see what Crystal had noticed. "You're observant," she praised, which had Crystal smiling all the harder.

There was a shimmer in the air. It was right off the side of the road, between the roadside and a ditch. The shimmer was roughly spherical, though Alice couldn't make out its exact shape, not when, at best, the shimmer was weaker than a heat haze.

"I wanna throw a rock at it," Crystal said.

"Before we know anything else?" Alice asked.

"We'll know something once we throw a rock at it, won't we?"

"I suppose. I'd rather the rock than trying to walk into it. What if it's something technological?" Alice asked. She could imagine some governments wanting to install invisible cameras along the roadside. Or it could be military equipment. A stealth field of some sort.

Or an active weapon.

The shimmering space wasn't warm from where they stood some dozen metres away, at least.

"Toss it underhand," Alice suggested.

Crystal bent down, picked up a loose chunk of asphalt, then underhanded it over to the shimmer. It passed right through, but in a way that was a little strange. "You saw that, right?" Crystal asked.

Alice nodded. The rock had sailed in a simple arc, the parabola somewhere in the middle of the shimmering space. But it's arc had shifted in speeds. At first moving quickly, then slowing down for about half a metre, then moving faster as if to make up for the lost time. The rock came out the other side and tumbled down into the ditch as if nothing had happened. "It looks like it was slowed down, then sped up. Just a little, however. And without changing trajectories."

"Which is weird-weird, right?"

"Meagan can speed herself up, or slow the world down around her," Alice said. "We might be looking at something similar. Localised, and going both ways, but fundamentally the same." She picked up a small handfull of rocks and chucked them through the distortion.

With more projectiles in the air, it was much easier to see how some suddenly started moving slower or faster. Some merely sailed right through, undisturbed.

"And the shimmering?" Crystal asked.

"Light travels through time, same as anything else," Alice said. "It could be a sort of lensing effect in the air? Darkening where the light slows, growing brighter where it moves faster. I'm just speculating."

"Smarter than what I'd do," Crystal said.

"And what's that?" Alice asked.

"Well, I was thinking I could make a long stick..."

Alice chuckled. "No, let's not touch the weird magical bubble if we can avoid it. It just doesn't seem like a wise thing to do."

"I was never really big on doing wise things," Crystal said. "Should we fling some magic at it anyway?"

Alice considered it, giving the thought more weight than the immediate dismissal she was inclined to give. There was some merit to trying. Magic was finicky and fickle at the best of times, but before all of this, she was definitely one of the magical girls with the best control over her magical abilities.

"Let me try something. Just to see if it affects our control."

Alice reached out, and from the shadows of the grass and uneven ground came a few seeking tendrils of darkness made solid. They climbed upwards, twisting and searching through the air until they reached into the strange space and started moving through it.

"Huh," Alice said as she felt her control slipping, but only in parts. It was jarring, like watching a television screen where a band across the middle was playing something a few seconds behind the rest. Still, it didn't wrestle her control away, merely... delayed it.

The spaces where her control was sped up felt slick and strange, her magic acting faster than she was used to, but it wasn't playing against her control as much.

"That would be frustrating to fight in, but it's not too bad," Alice said. "The real concern is... well, this thing's very existence."

"Oh. Yeah, weird magic bubbles shouldn't be a thing. Let alone next to the road. Maybe that's why it's closed?"

"It would be a danger to motorists," Alice said. "But I think if this were a unique thing, then there would be... something around it."

"So there's more?" Crystal asked.

"Let's find out," Alice said.

The city was some fifty kilometres away still, at least according to that sign. That was further than Alice wanted to walk, but not so far that it would be too annoying. She stretched a little, even if it might not have been needed, then took off at a quick jog with Crystal skipping along at her side.

Alice was once again secretly thankful that her magical girl outfit came with pants. It made running so much less awkward.

What felt like an hour later, the highway slid out of the woods and into an open space, with uncultivated fields all around, and a few farms in the distance. The road climbed up a ramp, meeting another equally broken road along a turnpike.

They discovered two things there.

First, the strange space they'd discovered wasn't unique. And second, this other road, as unkept as it was, was still being used.

***