Jubilee, Chapter 7: A Surrealist's Nightmare
Jubilee, Chapter 7: A Surrealist's Nightmare
"Physics dictates that it should have filtered out at least somewhat now that the door's open..."


The Sky Runner flew through the portal. It flew through null, through nothingness. And eventually the nothingness was supplanted by something else itself. It, the Sky Runner, crashed.
Klaxons sounded, indicating a forced landing. Smoke floated freely throughout the machine, wafting towards the top. However, as it became smokier, the wafting became truncated. Eventually, the smoke filled all but an area that went from a grown man's kneecap to the base of the Sky Runner.
Ness struggled up, rose into the smoke, and immediately ducked down. "Watch out, it's all smoky," he warned. "Keep low."
Taking that advice to heart, the other three remained prone on the ground. Jeff revealed where the exit was: "If we head a bit forward, we'll be at the exit. Someone will have to hold their breath and dive up to release the open-close latch, though."
"I'll do it," Paula announced. She crawled over to the exit, took such a deep breath that it would have easily been audible from fifty paces, and rose up. She immediately regretted having not closed her eyes, and promptly did so to avoid the acrid smoke that was now building up.
Blindly, she probed the door at waist level, looking, feeling, rather, for what she hoped was the open-close latch. Her heart lightened considerably as her hand slipped on a pull. She gripped it and pulled it towards herself.
It didn't work.
"Paula," Jeff called, "you have to pull the latch and push the door itself."
Why didn't you tell me this earlier? thought Paula.
She released the latch, then gripped it again. She pushed against the door, then gripped the latch and pulled it towards her. A loud click alerted her to the fact that she had succeeded. She pushed the door open fully and fell out, happy to be in fresh air.
...but she didn't fall right to the ground. She remained above the ground for a short period, then fell fully to the ground. The others crawled out, and saw this.
"Paula, what were you doing suspended like that?" Tony asked, amused by this sight.
"Do you think I would have been like that if I had known what was happening?"
"That's not the only mysterious thing about this place," Jeff observed. "Look. The smoke's still in the Sky Runner. It hasn't filtered out. Physics dictates that it should have filtered out at least somewhat now that the door's open..."
"That is mysterious," Ness admitted.
Jeff quickly checked the outer parts of the Sky Runner. "Bad news," he reported. "The scanner's been badly damaged. That means we're running blind, and can't figure out just where the painting is."
"If King were here, he'd probably find the painting," Ness mused. "Or maybe he'd just find Tony."
That brought a smile to everyone's lips. "But seriously," said Paula, "we should decide what way we try first." The four looked out on this strange place's landscape.
The tone of the world would change from full-colour, to grayscale, to black-and-white, to the tone of a photograph negative at will. One would be incapable of predicting what the tone would be on any particular patch of terrain, and the terrain also gave no predisposition to a specific tone. There were stairs coming every which way, going in any direction: some stairs would trail into the far-off horizon; in other cases, the stairs would come towards them; and in some extreme cases, the stairs were like a screw: spinning up or down until it could no longer be seen. Trees and mountains abounded as well; and the sky was perpetually cloudy, the colour of the cloud also dependent on the tone in which the part in question of the cloud in question was.
Tony closed his eyes. "I may not be psychic, and I may not be as smart as Jeff, but my guess is as good as any of yours. I select... that path!" He pointed to a staircase that led down.
Well, it was his painting that got us into this. I guess he should choose where we go, Jeff thought.


"Cyan, Anth, Tsurami, I think you should check this out," SimonBob observed. "The anomaly's disappearing."
"It is?" Cyan asked. The armour that he was wearing was now glowing.
"Yeah, and it's shrinking at a rapid rate," Simon related.
TsuramiSea looked at the video monitor that showed the anomaly's disappearance. "I doubt it'll stay open much longer."
Anthadd stood in silence for a few seconds. "Perhaps we need to try something else," he mused.
"What do you mean?" Tsurami asked.
"As it is, what we've tried so far hasn't worked. We need to find some other way to help those four."
"Well, Jeff is said to be gifted at inventing and repairing things," Tsurami murmured.
"That's right," Cyan said. "Maybe there's something at the school."
"So, we're going to the school?" Simon pressed.
"Yes," Cyan confirmed. Simon nodded, turned the Chevy around, and began to drive the Chevy to a stretch of the coast of Winters that was a short walk through the woods to Snow Wood Boarding School.
The four climbed out of the Chevy and trudged through the woods. Coming across the fence, they climbed it and were on Snow Wood grounds. Cyan, Tsurami, and Simon turned to Anthadd.
"So, what's your plan?" Simon asked.
"My plan?" Anthadd raised an eyebrow. "All I said was that we might need to try something else."
"And we're doing something else, so it's your plan." Simon smiled.
Anthadd sighed. "Jeff's a student at this school, and it can be easily deduced that he would probably maintain some sort of lab here, considering the long travel it would be to get from here to his father's lab across the lake."
"You're thinking that Jeff has something here that can help us get airborne?" Cyan demanded.
"Correct. But since we have no idea if he installed a door in from outside the school, we'll have to infiltrate the lab -- if he has one -- from inside the school."
"And how are we going to get into the lab if we're not allowed in through the school?" Tsurami asked.
Anthadd visibly bristled. "I wish you hadn't asked that," he admitted. "I guess we'd need to bomb our way in from outside. And that leads into issues with legality, liability, environmental issues, and other stuff I don't want to go into right now."
"How about this?" Simon offered. He outlined his plan as follows: "First, we have one or two people go in and find where Jeff's lab is. Then they leave and point out where the lab should be; we find a way in from outside, as well as what we want, and get out."
"Good plan," Tsurami said. "Who'll go?"


Jonathan Falken looked strangely at his boss, Donald Cornwell. He wondered why Mr. Cornwell would leave every so often, and also, why every time that he left, he seemed more on edge, more twitchy. It's quite weird, he thought.
He quickly turned back to viewing his monitor screen when Mr. Cornwell turned towards him.
If he's in on something bad, Jonathan concluded, I don't want him to think that I suspect that he is involved. His fingers rapidly punched the keys, the computer was pushed to the limit of its processing abilities.
As had been the case for some time, neither star nor constellation had underwent V-flux; in fact, the last one had been the first V-flux of Cygnus, the third recorded overall. None of the quadrantal telescopes had revealed anything interesting at all for some time.
Jonathan looked discreetly up from his computer screen: there was Mr. Cornwell, leaving again.
"Mr. Cornwell!" Linda Williams exclaimed. "What are you doing? You forbade us to leave, and I wonder why you should be allowed to leave when we can't."
"You can leave whenever you want, Linda," responded Cornwell, turning away. "All you have to do is resign, and you can leave."
Jonathan couldn't see it, but Linda was glaring at Cornwell; and had he been able to read minds, he would have known that Ken Tremblay was silently blaming him for this. Cornwell walked out; and as soon as the hissing of the pneumatic door indicated that their boss had left, the until-now silent Ellen MacGilvray voiced her dislike of the situation.
"Jonathan, you're the next highest in the ladder of authority," she pleaded. "Can't you convince Cornwell to let us go?"
Jonathan sighed. This situation had brought the vomit in his stomach up his throat; had increased his heartbeat so it was always audible; had tensed his muscles, making it a chore to even move them slightly. He inhaled deeply through his nose and began to pontificate. "Ellen, I'd love to convince Mr. Cornwell to let us go. In fact, I myself have something to go to; but Cornwell's too stubborn."
"Sure you do," Ken Tremblay said without thinking.
Jonathan turned on him in a split second. "Do you think I'm lying?" he asked, running towards Ken.
"Why else would we still be here if you had something to do?" Tremblay retorted, standing still.
Jonathan brought back a fist and punched Ken right in the chest. The air burst from his suddenly open mouth, and Ken Tremblay fell to the ground.
Jonathan spun on the heel of his right shoe and walked back to his computer. He heard the semi-clapping of rubber shoe soles on the linoleum floor of the Observatory's AVMO department and dodged to his right.
He saw Ken Tremblay preparing for a second attack.
"Can't we talk this over?" he pleaded, keeping his distance from the crazed AVMO worker.
"I tried," Tremblay hissed. "You refused to let me leave."
"Come on!" Jonathan's voice had degenerated to a squeak. "I'm only doing what Cornwell asked me to do..."
"You could have stood up for us. You could have pleaded our case. Instead, you let him walk all over you," Lisa Eliot said. She moved towards Jonathan "You're Cornwell's lapdog."
"That's not true!" Jonathan insisted. But then he felt the air go out of his lungs. He went flying, and everything went black.