“So what exactly do I do now?”
Dr.Summers looked up from his computer, “What do you mean?”
“Well I don’t work here, I have no idea what any of the problems you need to fix even are, and I can’t go home. So what do I do, to pass time.”
“You could turn on the Inter-Dimensional TV, there's always something new and interesting to watch.”
“Inter-Dimensional TV, first the Tardus from Dr.Who and now the TV from Rick and Morty, whats next, lightsabers from Star-Wars.”
“No, those are highly inefficient, we use Q-Sabers.”
“I’m sorry, Q-Sabers? What are those, and what does the Q stand for?”
“Quesomatic, basically means multifunctional. So a Q-Saber is basically a lightsaber with multiple functions.”
“How so?”
“Lightsabers are only ever have straight sword-like blades, Q-Sabers can be anything, swords, shields, bows, axes, blasters.”
“You mean like a gun.”
“Guns shoot bullets, blasters shoot blasts of plasma or something like that.”
“I see,” Cartis said, and after a few seconds of not knowing how to continue the conversation, sat down in one of the lawn chairs and turned on the TV.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“You know, traveling through dimensions is a lot more boring than I thought it would be.”
“Well that is in part to do with the fact that you haven't actually seen any of the dimensions we’ve travelled to.”
“Any way that we’d be able to go outside?”
“Yeah, but not right now, the jumps are pretty random, so there's no way to tell when we’ll go to a new one, and since the Soul Sync isn’t calibrated we’ll actually need to be in the building for us to be taken with it.”
The lights went out and came back on, then did it again a few seconds later.
“Seventeen, and eighteen. Should we be worried that they’re getting more frequent?”
“No, the only way for it to overwhelm the system would be if it tried jumping to two different dimensions simultaneously, and even then we have stuff in place that would prevent it from tearing the fabric of reality in half, and just make it so that the two jumps would cancel each other out.”
“Huh.”
“You know,” Dr.Summers said, looking away from his computer, “I keep forgetting that you have no idea what's going on, yet other than asking the occasional question, you’re acting similar to how everyone else in this organization would act in this situation.”
“That’s probably because I’m more concerned with if this is even real in the first place.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I woke up this morning late for a tournament only to find out I won, then I travel to a dozen different dimensions, surrounded by people who act as if this is natural. I just can’t help but wonder.”
“If any of this is even real. Well, fair enough, though I’m afraid that there's no way for me to help, because while I’m definitely not a figment of your imagination, there's no way for me to prove it. Best to just play along and see where things go at this point. Worst case scenario, you’re having a bad dream, and this will all be over when you wake up.”
“Can I at least look around the building then? I'm getting a little tired of just sitting around and talking.”
“Sure, I’ll take you on a tour of the building.” He got up out of his seat, “That is, assuming I’m allowed to. We never had to deal with someone who wasn’t part of our group seeing anything other than what we show the public, because you’re the first person to ever come into the building.”
“First time for everything I guess.”
Dr.Summers got up and opened the door, “come on, there's some less mind boggling things I can show you.”
Cartis followed him all the way back to the elevator, but instead of going in it they went around it, into a small stairway that only traveled a few floors in each direction.
They went down only a single floor, and then went through the door that was there. Cartis walked in to find twelve different doors with strange designs spaced the same distance apart from each other.
“What’s this?”
“This is how we used to travel between floors before we got the elevators running.”
“So just a stairwell, ok”
Dr.Summers went over to a door which Cartis now realized looked like it was made out of books.
“It’s not actually made out of books, is it?”
“No, this is just the door to the library, which is why it's been designed like this.”
“So all of these designs correspond to what they lead to?” Cartis asked, walking over to one which looked like some kind of weird colasse of artifacts.
“Yep, that one you're looking at goes to the museum, the one on it's right is, the hardest to explain actually, the one on the left is a warehouse, at least, sort of. All of these doors lead to different forms of ‘storage’, but also a bit of a showcase for the specific information they’re storing.”
Cartis looked over at all the different doors, now notice what the strange designs actually were. There was a door that looked like a filing cabinet, one that looked like a ticket vendor, the library, one with a jumbled mess of nature on it, and multiple that he still couldn’t figure out.
“So this is like the information area.”
“Yep, bottom floor is all the different ‘mechanical’ stuff, second floor is the two floors that you can see from outside, fourth floor is research and offices and that, fifth floor is, something you probably shouldn’t know about, the sixth floor is living quarters, and then the top floor is the ‘command room’.”
“What's the command room?”
“Good question, I don’t know, I've only been there once, and that was over twenty years ago.”
“Huh”
“Yes, well anyways, ta-da.” Dr.Summers said, swinging the library door open.
The inside of the library was, well, just what you’d expect from a library, rows and rows of bookshelves all neatly organized, except in this case, those rows of bookshelves seemed to go on forever, both vertically and horizontally.
“Woah.”
“I know, cool right.”
“Does it actually go on forever?”
“Not exactly, I mean, technically it does, but it's not infinite. If we were to walk in opposite directions for long enough we’d eventually find each other.”
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