Chapter Two - The Circle
"You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd."
-Neil Gaiman
The light behind Jessi's closed eyelids was a blinding white, or so she figured. She woke with a pounding headache that made squinting her eyes painful, but when she tried to keep them closed lightly the white seeped in under her eyelashes and stung painfully.
The rest of her body was in pain, too, though it was more of a persistent ache that ran up and down it than it was a sharp stinging. She twitched her fingers and her toes, turning her head side to side, and was relieved to find she could at least move. It didn't feel as though she had any tubes running into her, so she couldn't be in that bad of shape. It was probably just a case of having been asleep for far too long, and she shifted her weight tenderly to see if anything felt broken, but that seemed fine as well. It felt as though she'd fallen a great distance, which made sense when she thought about it further. It had seemed like she was falling, back in the field.
The field. The school. Clancy. Herman.
Jessi shot bolt-upright and then cried out in pain as her back and ribs protested loudly, aching so sharply that she bent over and rested her head on her knees. Her headache was momentarily relieved due to the pressure as she pushed her forehead against her knees with force, but the ache was slow in fading and for a while her breathing was deep and she hissed through her teeth every time a throb ran through her torso. The light still stung her eyes, and she found it difficult to keep them open long enough to look around. It was like snow on a sunny day. She couldn't stand it.
Blindly, she felt around her and realized she was on a bed with metal railings along the side. Like a hospital bed, which made sense enough in her mind for some reason or another. Maybe the ground had opened up and she'd fallen in and there was a moleman civilization underneath the field and they'd taken her to a hospital. It made as much sense as anything else that had happened that day. She wished she could chalk it up to a bad dream but sometimes you just know you aren't dreaming, and you get the feeling of dread that something has happened that you can't go back from. The entire day felt like that.
If it was even the same day anymore. She figured it was daytime, because the sun was making the place so unbearable, but who knew how long it had been since the events of that afternoon.
Jessi grasped onto the railing on one side of her bed and slowly attempted to pull herself off of it, but it made her ribs and shoulders hurt just trying it and she instead sat there blinking through squinted eyes, running a hand over her face. Her forehead was sweaty and she realized that she had covers over her legs, which was no doubt contributing to the heat. She shifted them off of her and flexed her toes. She was still wearing the same outfit she'd worn before, and when she looked down through squinted eyes she was relieved to find the key was still around her neck. The weight was familiar, at this point.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" A sudden voice startled her enough to jump slightly, which her body protested. They were shouting, too, or at least it sounded like shouting in the echo of the room she was in. Her head pounded as she heard thumps against the floor and suddenly the voice was next to her bed, on her left side near her elbow. "Whad'ya think you're doin'?"
"What?" Said Jessi, but her mouth was more dry than she realized and it ended up sounding like it was full of cotton so the result was more of a garbled, "whrbfgh?"
"You need to lie down! I told Terminus to- Terminus!" The voice shouted, and then stomped off elsewhere.
Stop shouting, Jessi thought crossly, but she'd managed to open her eyes long enough to realize that her vision was very blurry and she was just trying to stay upright without giving into dizziness so she couldn't manage the words. A wave of nausea hit her just for a moment and she squinted her eyes tightly, curling in on herself more until it subsided. The pounding had spread to her ears just from the shouting of whoever had been in the room previously.
Several seconds went by before Jessi's vision returned to her enough to look around the room. She was, in fact, on a hospital bed, sitting directly opposite a long wall with large windows. Most of the curtains were closed, but hers had been opened. All she could see outside was clouds and the glaring sunlight, which explained why it had been such a pain to open her eyes. On either side of her there were more rows of hospital beds, most of which had curtains between them for privacy. The rest of the room was empty. Next to her bed there was a tray with a pair of reading glasses and a half-finished cup of water, which Jessi took and stuck her finger in (if only to confirm it was actually water and not rubbing alcohol or something else she'd greatly regret) before sipping carefully. It didn't ease the dryness of her mouth very much, but it was something.
The thumping of feet signaled someone returning, and Jessi turned and craned her stiff neck over her shoulder to watch the doorway as they entered.
The person who entered first looked briefly surprised to see her sitting up, but then it switched to a smug look of pride. He wore a white button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a red vest over it. The rest of his outfit was equally pristine, all the way down to the gloves on his hands. His mustache was curled at the ends and he wore a top hat. Jessi got the impression that he was the type to always wear a top hat.
The second person who entered was a rabbit.
Not a small, normal sort of a rabbit. A rabbit standing up on two legs. A rabbit wearing pants. Or shorts, maybe. It was hard to tell with the way its legs were shaped. They were too noodle-like, and it made Jessi's joints ache just looking at them for too long so instead she tried to pry her eyes elsewhere, though they wouldn't quite obey. She was hallucinating, surely. Or dreaming after all. Or she really was in The Twilight Zone. That wasn't even the strangest thing about his appearance, though. She could tell from looking at him that he was somehow different from the man in the top hat, and different from herself, but she couldn't explain how. Her first thought was that he was too cartoonish in the way he moved, the way he looked, but looking between the two of them she couldn't really separate them into two different types of realities. It was unsettling, that sort of strangeness that she couldn't put to words. She was spared from thinking further on the matter in the next moment, however.
"Ah!" said the man in the top hat, with exaggerated surprise, throwing his hands up into the air. "She's awake! A miracle!"
The rabbit fumed silently for a second, crossing his arms tightly. His strange, strange noodle arms. Jessi noticed blearily that his hands appeared far too large for them, something that would have looked vaguely horrific if he didn't have that cartoon-like otherworldliness to his appearance. "You were supposed to be watching her until the professor got back!" Jessi realized as he spoke that he was the one who'd been in the room previously. "And you sure weren't in here when I came in!"
"Watching her? I was under the impression I was brought in to cure her." The top-hatted man placed a hand on his chest in an offended manner. His movements were way too exaggerated and obviously insincere. He was either a very good actor or a very bad conman.
"Brought in? I didn't want you here! You haven't done a single thing to help us since you got here! In fact, you're only here because you were trying to scam us out of-"
"Foolish of you to turn down the help of a genuine, certified doctor, you know."
"Genuine?" The rabbit scoffed. "Certified?"
"Doctor, yes," the man with the mustache took the liberty of finishing for him.
Jessi couldn't be certain, but it felt as though her headache was worsening just having to listen to their bickering. But it didn't end. The man was still talking.
"-Especially considering I'm the one who cured her. With this," with a flourish, he pulled a small flask out of the pocket of his vest and presented it to the rabbit, who looked skeptical.
"No you didn't."
"Of course I did. Look," the man leaned down closer to the rabbit's level and pointed at the label of the flask, reading it aloud. "Doctor Terminus' Miracle Cure-all. What else could explain her abrupt recovery, hm?"
The rabbit stared at it for a second before swiping the flask from his hand and taking a swig, despite the man's cut-off protest. He screwed up his face and shoved it back in Terminus' (Jessi assumed that was the man's name, at least) grip immediately afterwards.
"Whiskey?" The rabbit spat. "You gave a kid whiskey?"
"I'm eighteen," said Jessi, because that was the first part of the conversation that made sense enough for her to jump in. The whiskey would explain her burning throat and dry mouth, she guessed. She wasn't really great with alcohol, not that she was supposed to be drinking it at her age anyways, though she didn't even recall being awake previously to take a sip of said alcohol. The rabbit turned to glance at her, but Terminus just puffed up indignantly.
"How dare you. First you stick me here all alone- without Hoagy- and expect me to work for no pay, and then you won't even thank me for saving a dying patient in grave condition-"
"She wasn't dying," the rabbit protested, and then he must have noticed the briefly panicked expression on Jessi's face because he quickly turned to reassure her, hands raised placatingly. "You weren't dying! You were just out for a few days."
"Days?" Asked Jessi, though it was barely a squeak as her throat closed up and her breath grew short. She fought a wave of lightheadedness. "How many days?"
The rabbit made an uncertain noise, wobbling a hand back and forth, and she just glared at him. He withered slightly underneath the gaze for a brief moment before shrugging. "Three? Four? It's getting hard to keep track of time in here."
Jessi hardly heard him after that. Craning her gaze away from the two of them, she peered out the window in front of her listlessly. Her eyes couldn't focus on anything again and her chest felt tight, even beneath the soreness of her ribs. Was this what panic felt like? She'd been panicked before, of course, when she was younger. One camping trip they'd had a bear right outside their tent in the campsite and that had been terrifying. She'd nearly been hit by a car on a few occasions because she never looked before she crossed the street and often underestimated the speed of moving vehicles. But the thought of her mother at home worrying about where she was and the fact that she didn't even know where she was and there was a shirtless talking rabbit here and Herman-
Herman.
"Where's Herman?" She asked suddenly, and panic gave way to frustration and barely-stifled fury. She'd been brought here, clearly, and she was the only one which meant that either the others weren't injured or they weren't here at all. "Where's my brother?"
"Brother?" The rabbit asked meekly.
"Yes, my brother," Jessi spat, and in her fear and anger she launched herself off of the bed, ignoring the protests of the rabbit. Terminus had long since stormed out of the room. Her whole upper body protested the movement, as well, but it felt good to be on her own two feet again even if the room did dip and turn dangerously for a second or two. "He's this big-" she held a hand out to her side, trying to judge his height. "And he's got messy hair, same color as me, and brown eyes and he's missing a tooth."
"Look, it's a lot to explain-"
"I don't care! My entire school disappeared and Herman and Clancy are missing and I want to know where they are. Tell me what's going on. Right now." It felt nice, almost, to have something to latch onto. Someone to direct her rage to. The anger clouded her mind enough to take her focus away from the pain she was in and the fear she felt seeping into her chest.
The rabbit looked guilty, or at least as guilty as a rabbit could look (and it was strange how expressive he was, given that Jessi had no prior experience in reading the emotions of rabbits). "I don't know where they are exactly," he said carefully, and Jessi felt the sudden urge to punch him in the face but she couldn't move from her spot because her feet felt like lead. "But we can help you find them. We just need you to explain everything you know, and then we'll explain, too. Deal?"
Jessi was silent, staring at him. She didn't want to sit down and hand out information when Herman and Clancy had been dragged into some kind of freaky void and were now missing and had been for days, apparently, assuming anyone was telling the truth about how long Jessi had been here. She wanted to know where she was and what they'd done to bring her here. She wanted to get home immediately. She wanted to know why he was a walking, talking rabbit and why the other man just seemed to accept that without any sort of questions.
But the rabbit seemed to read all of that behind the fury in her eyes. "My brother's missing too," he offered, and though it felt like some sort of consolation or pity to Jessi there was none of that in his tone. "And I dunno where he is, either, but I know how we can find him. And your brother. And everybody, okay? I just need you to help me. Please."
"Why?" Jessi demanded. "You do it. Or go find someone else to do it, I don't even know where I am or how I got here."
The rabbit shook his head. "We're the only ones from our world who ended up here. Me and Terminus and the professor. And you're the only one from your world who ended up here. Whoever else got taken with you- they're out there," he gestured out the window, and Jessi turned to look at the neverending clouds. "Think it had to do with that key you've got on. But we don't know everything, and we think maybe you can help us figure it out."
Jessi looked at the key, and then back to the window, and then at the rabbit. The aching in her head hadn't quite subsided but her vision was clear enough to understand that the white of the room was suffocating and the thought of it all made frustrated tears threaten to spring to her eyes, but she forced them back. Whatever was going on, he'd promised her explanations. She didn't have anything else to lose, not really. Just more time and maybe more of her sanity, but it was starting to feel like all of that was slipping away. She'd already lost so much time and all of reality seemed to be falling apart in a much more real way than it had back when the school disappeared, which felt like hours ago but had apparently been days. She took a shuddering breath in.
"Fine," she said. "But you're going to tell me everything."
Thirty-five minutes later, give or take, Jessi was seated at one end of a very long table in a very fancy dining hall. There was no food on the table, thankfully, because the thought of eating anything made her stomach churn again. The chairs were padded and all, but they were pretty short- in fact the table was just short in general, even though the ceiling stretched above them for dozens of feet. Terminus was at the other end, seeming generally uninterested. Jessi wondered if he'd voluntarily showed up or if the others dragged him in. They didn't seem to get along much at all. The rabbit was standing across the room next to a large chalkboard that was currently being written on by one more figure, the last one to enter. Said figure just happened to be a Disney character, a fact that made Jessi's head hurt so badly that she was just trying very hard to ignore him and instead focused on the grain pattern of the table they were seated at.
The rabbit had explained very little on the way there. But for one thing, his name was Oswald, which Jessi supposed was as good of a name for a rabbit as any. He'd lead her out of the medical room and into a vast hallway that seemed to be tall enough for giants, and then she hadn't been able to follow the rest of the path they'd taken because every hallway looked the same and the white walls and brightly colored rugs just made her eyes hurt. She'd thought she'd seen a walking broom at one point but dismissed it as a hallucination because she didn't want to think about how else it would be real otherwise. At one point they'd passed by a garden, the edges of which were surrounded by a bright fog just like the clouds she'd seen from the windows of the medical room. It was like the entire place was just suspended in a cloud. For all she knew, it was. He'd told her that she was in a castle- Disney castle, which Jessi had thought was a joke at first. But then he'd taken her to the dining hall and there was a duck there that looked oddly familiar and Jessi realized that, no, he hadn't been joking at all. He was serious. Dead serious.
She had a cup of tea in front of her that was too bitter to drink, but she kept denying offers for sugar or milk anyways. She just didn't like tea to begin with and somehow she didn't think she'd be able to keep anything down. Oswald and the duck were discussing something under their breaths together currently, so Jessi was focusing on literally anything else just so her brain didn't break entirely. She chose to look at Terminus, who was filing his nails down on the far end of the table and still looking like he didn't want to be there at all.
She only vaguely recognized the duck standing across the room, and the more she thought about it the more she realized she couldn't even say where she had seen him before. But his design was familiar enough that she knew him to be a Donald Duck clone- or, well, family member, whatever they went with. She knew she could have recognized Donald himself and maybe even his uncle, the rich one, but this duck didn't look quite like either of them. His grey hair (feathers?) stuck out from the side of his head in a very Einstein-like manner and he had spectacles on the bridge of his… bill? He wore a lab coat, too, as if the image of a mad scientist wasn't the first thing that popped her mind at the sight of him to begin with. She was sure she'd seen him before but most cartoons blended together in her mind. She'd never been big on Disney and neither had Herman. She got by with passing knowledge of most important movies, she guessed, but anything else was lost on her.
Jessi took another sip of the very bitter tea, made a face, and set the cup back down. Her mind had long since faded into a state of dull acceptance. Or maybe just confusion. Either way, she was grateful her subconscious was letting her roll with this strange turn of events long enough to at least gather information about what was going on. She felt somehow responsible in doing so, anyways, since apparently she was the only one who'd arrived to this castle. If nothing else she could relay it back to everyone when she got back and then get put into therapy for speaking nonsense about ducks and rabbits. She could have said it was just like Alice in Wonderland if that weren't so painfully on the nose.
"So!" said Oswald suddenly, clapping his hands together. Jessi glanced over with half-hearted interest towards the duo standing by the chalkboard, wondering if he was finally done chatting to the duck about whatever was so important they couldn't share it with the others. "I think we all have a lot to talk about and time is working against us. Professor," he glanced at the wild-haired duck, and then gestured to Jessi, who he'd exchanged names with in the hallway, "this is Jessi. Jessi, this is-"
"I know him," Jessi interrupted. She didn't even think about it, it just jumped off of her tongue as soon as the window presented itself. She couldn't stop thinking about how familiar he looked and it bothered her and she needed some kind of answer for that before she could think about anything else. "He's- he looks like a Disney character. This is ridiculous." The whole thing was just ridiculous and nonsensical and it shouldn't have been possible and it didn't make any sense. If their town was going to get pulled through a gap in space-time or... whatever was going on, it probably should've just wiped them out entirely. Not taken her to a Disney movie. It was the least probable option in the universe.
Oswald laughed a little uncomfortably, looking between the two of them with shifty eyes. The duck didn't even seem to notice that Oswald had stopped talking to him, because he was still working away at the chalkboard with vigor. "I mean, so am I, but you didn't say anything about that…"
Jessi stared at Oswald. He had the design of a cartoon, sure (that had to be why he looked so strange in a way she couldn't quite place earlier), but he didn't look even remotely familiar. Not one of the big mascots, anyways. Not a mouse of a duck or a… whatever Goofy was. She squinted after a second or two, shaking her head slightly. This was where she was, she figured. Stuck acting like a bunch of cartoon animals were like celebrities or something.
He stared in return, looking slightly upset at first and then just a tinge desperate. "What, you recognized him but not me? I was in a video game! Several of them!"
"I don't remember his name or anything, but yeah," she said, slightly awkward with how disappointed he seemed. She glanced down the table, caught sight of Terminus again, and pointed in his direction, feeling a sudden need to justify herself, or maybe just to stop Oswald from being upset because that would be wildly inconvenient when she was trying to get information from him. "I don't recognize him, either. I'm not- we just don't own that many Disney movies, just the classics." She thought that it was strange that they seemed to know about their existence as cartoon characters in another world.
"I am a classic!" Oswald wailed, disappointment giving way to frustration. "I'm Mickey's brother!"
At the same time, Terminus waved a hand dismissively (though not without an overly dramatic eye roll that Jessi could spot even from all the way down the length of the table). "No one watches my movie anymore."
At least one of them was handling the situation matter-of-factly. Jessi chose not to ask how a rabbit could be related to a mouse or how Oswald had stayed out of the spotlight for so long with a relation like whole situation felt more and more absurd as it stretched on, and she found herself just in silent disbelief over the whole thing all over again. Jessi, who was very quickly becoming even more confused and fed up with everyone in the room than she had been before, was somehow very grateful that the duck then chose that time to turn around from his chalkboard.
"Alright!" He looked at Jessi, and then at Oswald, who was tugging lightly on one of his ears out of stress. "Oswald, what are you doing up here? You aren't a part of the lecture! Sit down, go, go, sit!"
"But-" Oswald protested, still wanting to list his many media appearances to make absolutely sure Jessi didn't recognize him, but the duck physically started shoving him towards a chair.
"What, you gonna call the professor to explain the- all of the- you gonna call him to explain everything and then not listen? Is that what you wanna do?"
"I was just gonna introduce you!"
"Introduce me? I does the introducing around here! Now, let's see. You-" the duck squinted down the table towards Terminus and then scoffed, waving a hand dismissively. "Bah. I know you. You-" this time he squinted at Jessi. "You… you, ah…"
"I already told you," said the now-seated Oswald, who looked even more frustrated now that he'd been shoved into a chair. He had his legs crossed, one arm propped up on the table and supporting his head. One foot was tapping impatiently. "You wouldn't recognize her. She's from the real world."
"The real world?" Cried the professor, and Oswald looked about two seconds away from just giving the whole thing up entirely, but then the duck laughed. "Of course! Of course I know that. That's what I'm giving the lecture about. Why're you even here if you're just going to tell me all the things I'm going to tell you? Now then. I am professor Ludwig Von Drake." He turned around to his chalkboard, scrawling his name across what may or may not have been something important. "And today we- hm." He suddenly seemed to realize that he'd written his name over some of his own notes, and went about rewriting said notes down on a free space of the board, holding up one hand. "Give me just a second here."
"I already told him what you told me," Oswald informed Jessi while this was going on. She'd recounted everything she knew about the situation during their trip to the dining hall, which wasn't much. Just the school disappearing and then everything that had followed, from her first trip there to everyone at the scene vanishing in front of her eyes. "So believe me, this is already as short as it's gonna get with him."
Jessi wasn't sure if he expected her to thank him for that, but she nodded anyways, mimicking his position and cupping her chin in one hand. Sitting in a school lecture taught by a duck was one of the least strange things to happen to her in recent memory, she supposed.
Von Drake took a half-step back from the board once he was done, nodded to himself, and dusted off his hands as he set the chalk down. "Alrighty," he said, turning on a heel, and Jessi vaguely thought that the way he rolled his r's was going to annoy her very quickly. "Which of you can tell me what this is?" He jabbed a feathered finger at a drawing on the board. It was a big circle with two circles inside of it, and it looked to Jessi like a drawing of the earth, one that showed the crust and the mantle and the core.
"A circle," said Terminus from the end of the table, very unhelpfully. Jessi had half a mind to just throw her teacup at him if he spoke up again, which she supposed would truly be testament to how mad this place was already driving her. Or maybe just how exasperating he was acting. She didn't really want to pass judgement on her mental state when she was still processing that she was in a castle with Disney characters.
"The earth," she said afterwards, because Oswald was looking at her expectantly and she didn't want to let Terminus have any real influence on the lecture. The faster they got real answers, the faster she could get out of all of this and pretend it really was a bad dream.
"Wrong!" cried Ludwig, and then he laughed to himself again. "Both wrong! Here. I'll tell you. This-" he gestured to the outermost ring of the circle, and then pointed at Jessi. "Is your world. The 'real world', some people call it, which is ridica- ridic- which is just silly! But it's what it's called and so we gonna call it that."
He wrote 'real world' on the outer ring of the circle, and then skipped over the next ring entirely and instead pointed at the center circle.
"And this one right here is our world. The other world, that's what it's called, because it's not the real one. It's the other one." He labeled that one, too, and then pointed at the ring in the center. "And this one here isn't supposed to exist. Pretend it doesn't exist. You can't see it right now."
"Why?" asked Jessi, who felt like the explanation would be a lot shorter if they weren't ignoring part of the diagram.
"Why?" Ludwig echoed, and seemed confused for a second himself before shrugging dismissively. "Because I says so, that's why! Now see, these worlds are like the layers of a cake. And your world is on the top, and ours is on the bottom. And sometimes they mix because they've got a hole."
"A hole?" echoed Jessi incredulously.
"A keyhole," said the professor, but Oswald cut him off.
"How do you think our stories got there?" Oswald asked Jessi rhetorically. "Walt brought stories back from here every time he went back over there."
But Jessi wasn't listening, though she did vaguely feel her brain for up at the implication that these guys had personally met Walt Disney before. The detail pertaining to her arrival was much more important at the moment. She'd already stood up from her chair and had a hand clasped around the key hanging from her necklace. "You said a keyhole," she said, and gestured to the key. "Is that how I got here? With the key? What about everybody else?" As far as she knew, she was the only one who had found a key at the school.
"That's where it gets complicated," Oswald said. "Normally that is the only way to get here. With those keys- and don't ask me where they come from, because even I don't know. We think they're just a byproduct of the magic in this place. Maybe some part of the world wants our stories to make it back over there, or maybe our worlds are just supposed to be connected. It's what Walt used, anyway. But…"
"But!" Ludwig took the opportunity to hop back in, and used the stick of chalk to jab excitedly at the ring in-between the two worlds on the diagram. "But you see this place? You see right here? This isn't supposed to exist," he repeated. "It's a space between."
Jessi looked to Oswald for clarification, who sighed. "Look, we can't really tell you that much. There's only so much we can observe when we're stuck in here- we can't get out without a key now that we've sealed off the castle. But here's what happened on our side of things."
He got up from his chair, walking over to the blackboard, and erased the inner circle entirely so that the other world and the space between were combined into one larger circle inside of the real world. Then he drew a tiny, tiny circle again in the center of that.
"Our whole world? It got pulled into the space between. This castle," he pointed at the tiny circle, "is the only thing that's left. We-" he gestured between himself, Ludwig, and Terminus, "are the only people who are left from our world. The others are… out there somewhere, I guess." He looked at the circle for a long second, then, his eyes seeming distant before he continued. "And that's what's happening to your world. It's getting pulled in, too. Just a lot slower, for some reason."
With one finger, he started erasing some of the line that separated the space between and real world. It was just tiny gaps- gaps that represented a field in a small town, for example.
"And that's gonna be the last thing to happen to your world," added Ludwig, who still sounded far too invested in the lecture. It made him seem almost excitedly uncaring about the whole thing. Maybe he was just detached. Scientists tended to be good at that.
Oswald wince, and Jessi looked between the two of them, heart racing with a sudden urgency. It was the same sort of panic she'd felt in the hospital room. "What do you mean?" she demanded.
"We don't… really know what's going on out there," supplied Oswald carefully. "Or how everything's reacting now that it's… you know, together. But the professor has some equipment in here with him, and the readings… they're not good, Jessi."
"Tell me what you mean," she demanded again, punctuating every word. "I don't want a fancy explanation. What's going to happen to my world What's going to happen to the people in there?" She pointed at the diagram on the board.
Oswald looked pained as he glanced between the two doctors in the room, neither of which seemed inclined to answer. Terminus was studying the far wall with great interest, and even Ludwig was much more interested in studying his stick of chalk suddenly.
"Our worlds… they're really different," Oswald said, and Jessi bit her tongue to keep from shouting at him for pointing out the obvious instead of just getting to the point. "We don't think they were ever met to meet like this. Not directly, and not so suddenly. We think… I mean, if we can't figure out why this is suddenly happening and how to reverse it..."
He trailed off for a second, looking at the ground before looking to one of the windows of the dining room. The rest came out in a rush, almost faster than Jessi could process.
"We think both worlds are going to be destroyed."
AN: I lied, that was faster than a week. Also, I apologize because I sincerely hate leaving chapters on cliffhangers, but this monster was going to end up being like 10,000 words long if I ended it where I wanted to so we're just going to have to split it into two parts. Which means, unfortunately, we have a bit more exposition in the next chapter. Not a ton of it, though. We're close to the start of the action, I promise.
So, secondly, I want to thank all of you who have submitted characters thus far! There's been some really interesting concepts and I'm very excited to include some of them. A few of you did request some version of a form you'd like to use, and while I really don't have a set one in mind, here's some general things I'm looking for and some questions to provide inspiration if you want to send a character in. You can put as little or as much as you want, remember. I'm going to paste it here so anyone can use it if they'd like. Thank you for the favorites, follows, and reviews, as well! Hopefully the next chapter will be out within a couple days just so I can wrap up the exposition dump quickly for you guys.
-Name: Any nicknames?
-Age: Do they act mature for their age, or irresponsible?
-Appearance: Aside from standard appearance stuff, I'm also looking for very unique traits. Something you'd notice upon first seeing them. Do they have a large nose? An unusual eye color? A scar? A strange hairdo? Are they of an unusual height or wait? How do they move, do they walk funny? Do they have an accept or a lisp? Is their face expressive? Do they use a lot of body language? What sets them apart from everyone else in the world, in your opinion, in terms of how they look? How do they dress?
-History: Where in the real world is your character from? What's their family like? How popular are they, what interest do they have, and what had the most lasting impact on them as they were growing up? What are they currently focused on in their life? Do they have career goals? What's the one thing they'd do anything to obtain or protect?
-Personality: How do they respond to people? What are they likely to do in dangerous or unknown situations? How do they fit into a team setting? What sort of person do they get along with, and what personality traits can't they stand? Everything in this section will just help me write them more accurately to what you picture, so more information is better.
-Role in the story: Where were they living in the world and what were they doing when they were pulled into the next world? How did they handle it? Where did they end up, and who are they with (if anyone)? How do they react upon learning where they are? How do they feel about getting home, and what are they willing to do to get there? Did anything (or anyone) get pulled in with them? Are they looking for something? What's their goal in the context of being pulled from one world to the next, basically, and which Disney characters or settings would you like them to be associated with, and to what degree/in what capacity? If they're likely to form a group or team, what role would they play in that? You can give me multiple suggestions for different roles they could take and who you want them to interact with, as well. How soon would you like them to appear, and in how big of a role, and for how long? Again, these are just suggestions- in the end I'll use what I have and put them where they fit in best.
-Voice: How do they talk? What sort of dialect or unique phrases do they have? If you want to include a short sample of some dialogue they'd be likely to say, feel free to do so. What are their unique quirks?
