Chapter 9

Chapter Nine:

What Really Happened, or How Benedict and His Friends Were Mysteriously Transported to Parts Unknown

It had all occurred on a beautiful summer’s day, when the sun was shining and the sky was such a brilliant blue that sapphires would look at it and turn green with jealousy if they had eyes. It was on this day that Benedict had gone out to the forest that surrounded the village he lived in with his three friends, Sunny, Rumple, and Rosamin, in search of something to do. All four of them had tired of the usual things they did to amuse themselves, and eventually the ended up sitting on a small hill and watching the few clouds go by.
After a while, the inactivity was too much for Benedict to stand. “Gah, there has to be SOMETHING to do around here!” he said, with much disgust. He lay on his back and waited for suggestions.
“Of course there isn’t,” Sunny replied, rolling on her side to face him. She was a soft yellow color, and it was from her color that she got her name, and certainly not her personality. “If there was anything better to do than this, we’d be doing it already.”
“And probably complaining about it being even more boring than this,” Rumple pointed out. He was a practical sort, pale-ish green, and had a tendency to point out the common behaviors he noticed in his friends.
“Hm,” was all Rosamin said. She had no interest in doing anything other than what they were doing, which seemed like a perfectly fine way to spend an afternoon, especially one that was as nice and sunny as this. But she also knew that once the others, who were not as easy to please as she was, thought of something, that would be the end of her peaceful time on the hill in the sun. So she was in no hurry to give them any suggestions. That didn’t stop her friends from coming up with a few of their own.
“We could go back to my place and make some scones,” Sunny suggested.
“Nah,” both Benedict and Rumple said.
“Just proves what I said earlier, then,” Sunny said. She fully believed that few things in life were better than baking, but was rarely able to get the others to go along with her more elaborate recipe schemes.
“We could go see what my Aunt Giana’s up to,” Rumple suggested. His aunt was a self-proclaimed scientist and was always running one experiment or another. They rarely turned up anything useful, but they could be interesting to watch.
“Sounds good to me,” Benedict said, nodding.
“Might as well,” Sunny said, which sealed the deal.
Rosamin sighed, but went along with the others as they left the hill and headed for Rumple’s Aunt Giana’s little laboratory on the outskirts of the village. As they went, they sang a boisterous song about a lost coat, but only got halfway through it before they reached their destination. All the while, they had a good time, but had to quiet down once they got to the laboratory. This was hardly the first time they’d been there, and they knew Rumple’s Aunt Giana’s rules. Rather than knock and interrupt her work, they were free to come in as long as they were quiet about it. So Rumple quietly opened the front door and let his friends in, and closed the door behind them just as quietly. Being as silent as possible, they crept around the various rooms in the laboratory, looking for the room that Rumple’s Aunt Giana was in.
“Do you think she’s in here today?” Sunny whispered to Rumple.
“She should be,” Rumple said. Truthfully, he didn’t know any day when his aunt wasn’t in her laboratory, working hard at one thing or another. But they searched room after room, and no Aunt Gina.
“Maybe she took today off,” Rosamin whispered, when they reached the last room.
“Maybe she went home to take a nap,” Sunny whispered back.
“If she isn’t here, why are we still whispering?” Benedict said, though he said it quietly.
“She might still be here,” Rumple said, also quietly.
“You mean she invented something that can make her invisible?!” Sunny whispered.
“I don’t think so,” Rumple replied quietly, “But it stands to reason that if we go in one room and she goes into another room at the same time, it’s possible that she could be here and we wouldn’t run into each other for a while.”
“Wouldn’t we hear her?” Sunny asked in a soft voice.
“Not necessarily,” Rumple told her, still quite quiet. “It would depend on how many rooms separated-- what are you doing!” he called out as loudly as he dared to Benedict, who was trying to boost himself up to see a panel of controls. “You know the rules,” Rumple told him in a more quiet voice, “No touching anything without Aunt Giana’s supervision.”
“I just want to see it,” Benedict said in a normal voice. He was tired of being quiet, and since Rumple’s Aunt Giana was nowhere to be seen, he didn’t see any reason to continue whispering or even just talking quietly.
“Well, all right, but just be careful,” Rumple said, still quietly. He watched as Benedict continued to try and get up to see the controls, but his friend was not having too much luck. Worried that something would get unintentionally broken (and with Aunt Giana, intentions didn’t matter; broken was broken), he finally came over and gave his friend a push, saying, “Here.”
The boost was a little unexpected, since everything had been so quiet. With the sudden rush of movement up in the air, Benedict flailed a little, to his embarrassment. But in his flailing, he accidentally hit a switch. A light flashed, there was a kind of noise that he couldn’t describe, and then the next thing he knew, he was in a strange place, surrounded by extremely strange creatures.

When he told all this to his parents and Linae, Lynne, and Grayson (even though he couldn’t understand it, he still listened as intently as the others), he left out one particular detail, keeping his direct involvement in the transportation a secret.
“So in the flash, they all must have been transported,” Linae said, her brow furrowed in thought. Particularly, the thought that there was a good chance that she was going to end up involved with getting these other three friends of Benedict’s back, and how much she did not want to do that.
“But where they all sent to our world, or to different worlds?” Lynne wondered. Benedict’s story really had not cleared up much of anything.
“Knowing how little regard the universe holds my convenience, I’d say they were sent to completely different worlds,” Linae pointed out. “Besides, if they had been sent to just one world, wouldn’t they have all been in the same general area? And if that were the case, wouldn’t one of us have heard something about it? You may recall,” she pointed this out more for Grayson’s sake than Lynne’s, “That almost everyone was doing some kind of searching into the issue.”
“Or said they were,” Lynne couldn’t help but point out.
“Regardless, I think we need more information here. Something just doesn’t make sense.”
“We ought to go see Giana, then,” Benedict’s mother said. “If anyone would know what happened, she should.”

Which was how they all ended up trekking out to the little laboratory on the outskirts of the woods. Although warned by their son, Benedict’s parents did indeed knock on the front door, and were soon greeted by Rumple’s Aunt Giana. She was a slight kind of orange and was wearing a lab coat.
“Millie, Tails, always a pleasure to see you,” the slightly orange creature said in greeting. Then she noticed the humans behind them. “Well, well, what have we here?” She smoothed a few curly bangs out of her face to get a better look.
“Giana, these are…” Benedict’s father started to introduce them, but faltered when he realized he couldn’t remember their names. Fortunately, Linae picked up on this, and took over before it became too obvious what was going on.
“I’m Linae, this is Lynne, and that‘s Grayson,” she said, introducing them in turn.
“Quite the pleasure,” Giana said, shaking hands with the three of them. “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t invite you in. I’ve had to do some clean-up that’s taken me two days already, and things still aren’t quite clean. Seems the Lesser Vilatron got started up somehow, and simply went kabloomers! I really haven’t any idea how it happened, though. I was out to lunch, and when I came back, well, it was quite a shock, believe you me.”
“I think our son can give you an idea of what happened,” Tails said, prodding Benedict forward. Benedict, for what it’s worth, repeated what he had told his parents earlier, again leaving out the most crucial detail.
“I see,” was all Giana said once the story was over. “But that doesn’t exactly explain what these folk are doing here,” she added, pointing to the humans.
“Well, you see, ma’am,” Linae explained, “apparently your contraption sent the four children to different worlds,”
“Or maybe different parts of the same world,” Lynne added.
“Right, right,” Linae conceded. “Anyway, Benedict landed in our world, and was brought to us, as it were, and after much trials on our part…”
“It wasn’t that hard, really,” Lynne reassured them.
“After much trials on our part,” Linae continued, “We were able to get him back home.”
“But since the other children are still out there somewhere, we thought it might be useful to get a look at the scene where the transportation took place,” Millie told Giana.
But Giana had something else on her mind. “Doesn’t he talk?” she asked, pointing at Grayson, who had been following the conversation on his computer.
“I could, but you wouldn’t understand it,” he answered, and Lynne explained about his sound wave editor and the translator headsets. For the moment, she left out the reason why she didn’t need to use a mouthpiece, feeling it wasn’t really necessary to know that for the task at hand. There was something about the gleam in Giana’s eye when she asked about Grayson that made her feel like withholding information. It was a look that seemed to say she would be willing to dissect anything she didn’t fully understand, just to see what made it tick. Lynne wasn’t entirely sure that they’d get out of this fully intact, but that was just a vague feeling more than a certain uncertainty.
“Absolutely fascinating,” Giana said, indeed with a gleam in her eye. “I don’t suppose I could take a look at that?” she asked Grayson.
“Why don’t we take a look at this Viletron while you look at that?” Linae suggested.
“Of course, and it‘s the Vilatron, actually,” Giana said, and lead them into her laboratory, straight into the room with the Lesser Vilatron.
As Linae looked around at the strange contraption, which as far as she could tell consisted of a long, circular control panel, it occurred to her that she had no idea what they were supposed to be looking for. Lynne wasn’t looking at all, but was translating for Grayson as he talked to Giana.
“So this is a transporter of some sort?” Grayson asked.
“Not really,” Giana answered, “At least, that’s not what I built it for. But if it has the potential, then I can easily tool it toward transportation.”
“What is it supposed to do?” Lynne asked.
“Well, I originally made it to monitor the levels of aerinths in the area (I noticed an increase from the previous years), and I just finished upgrading it to harness the aerinths (I was going to figure out what to do with them later) when it got accidentally activated,” Giana explained.
“So how would it do that? Harness aerinths, I mean?” Grayson asked.
Linae stopped looking around for something she had no clue about to listen for what might be a potentially interesting answer. However, all that she seemed to hear was a long string of techno babble that was absolutely meaningless to her. Why couldn’t people who worked with strange technology ever talk about it without sounding like a language that her earpiece wouldn’t translate, she wondered. But in wondering that, it suddenly sparked a thought in her mind. “Wait a minute! I just remembered something.” She waited for the others to stop what they were doing and look at her, but Giana was still talking to Grayson when she made her pronouncement.
“Now, tell me more about how this works,” Giana said, watching Grayson’s computer screen in awe as the editor program put out words that she didn’t recognize as she spoke.
Linae continued on regardless, “When my client brought Benedict in to me, he mentioned that the experiment they were doing involving harnessing something, although he couldn’t tell me what exactly they were after.”
“So you think it might be the same kind of experiment?” Giana asked, intrigued by this theory. She had been listening after all.
“It’s a distinct possibility,” Linae said, nodding solemnly. Not out of an inflated sense of importance of her sudden thought, but more to keep the growing possibility of things getting infinitely more complicated out of her mind.
“That’s a hypothesis that needs to be tested, then,” Giana said, standing up a little straighter. “All right, let’s go.”
“What, now?” Lynne said. She didn’t want to be leaving so soon, as she’d hardly seen any of Benedict’s world.
“Wait, what?” Linae said. She had not even imagined that Giana would presume to come. Although the more she thought about it, the more it made sense. If her idea was correct, who better to actually test it than someone who actually knew what she was talking about?
“This is awfully sudden,” Millie pointed out.
“You’re right, you’re right,” Giana said, “Of course, we need to have lunch first.”
“I don’t think lunch is the thing we should be doing right now,” Tails said.
“We need to pounce on this opportunity,” Grayson said, although only Lynne and Linae knew what he said.
“And why, pray tell, are you so gung-ho about this all of sudden?” Linae asked, looking at him askance. “Perchance you just want to get back to where you don’t have to keep looking at a computer screen to know what’s going on?”
“Of course not,” Grayson said, but before he could add any more, Giana had somehow pushed them all out of the lab and gotten them back on track to town.
“Wait, how is this happening?” Linae couldn’t help but ask.
“It’s better not to know, really,” Benedict’s mother told them. She, Tails, and Benedict were all walking beside the humans, who were the only ones being pushed.
“How interesting,” Grayson said, watching as they moved effortlessly. “One of your inventions?” he asked Giana, with Lynne translating for him.
“Very astute of you to notice,” Giana said. “Right now it’s top secret, but when I make it public, I’ll be sure to let you know all about it.”
“I don’t think I need to be pushed along, if you’d just tell us where we’re going,” Lynne pointed out.
“Well, all right,” Giana said, and quite abruptly, they slowed to a stop. She looked a little put out, but only for a moment. “We’re going to have some lunch with my husband in town, that’s all.”
“Do you do that every day?” Benedict asked, the first time he’d felt comfortable talking since they’d gone to see Giana.
“Do what?” Giana asked.
“Leave your lab and go out to lunch,” Benedict replied.
“Most days, yes,” she admitted.
“Then how come Rumple didn’t know that?” he asked.
“Didn’t he?” she asked, a mischievous glint in her eye.
“He totally thought you were still there,” Benedict said, defending his friend.
“Could be, could be,” was all Giana said, and they continued back into town.