Chapter 2

Wyld

"So, everything matches what you think it should be?" Lauren asked hopefully as we surveyed the photo album of the Gilbert family I had found.

"Elena's brunette, not a blond, and looks exactly like I would expect, so I don't see what I could be missing. In the book series Elena was a blond, and this one looked like the tan Bulgarian I expected. This is probably the television show I expected unless we did something even weirder than I thought or someone is deliberately trying to trick us." I shrugged.

"Why wouldn't it be the television show?" Lauren asked. I paused to consider.

"Alright, let's say for a moment that both of our universes existed right from the big bang, never touching. I raised my hand and telekinetically summoned a pencil and Elena's diary. "So," I went to the end of the book and made two lines on the white paper. "So, we can assume that there is an interaction between the two worlds, right?"

"Yeah, I guess. Keep going." Lauren nodded.

"So if this was based on the books, then it wouldn't require much 'bandwidth' between dimensions to work. An author named LJ Smith gets a vision or a dream of what's happening and writes it down. If it's a TV show, to the point where the actors look the same, then think of all the things that have to align. You need to find an actor who looks exactly right, who has the right voice, and then convey the right tones of voice, makes the right acting choices. The directors, costume designers, everyone would have to be influenced by the same universe."

"I see why that would be hard. So, to be a sounding board, what do you think this means?" Lauren looked vaguely annoyed, but I ignored that for now.

"Two possibilities." I turned the page over for more white space. "One is that your world is somehow influenced by or created by the TV series." I made a straight line, then in the middle of it I drew another line forking away from the main one.

"Huh. So an entire world comes into being because someone makes a TV show about it?" Lauren frowned. "Sounds unlikely."

"If the weird woman I saw was from the future, and time travel is possible, then a lot of things could happen. This could all be happening inside a computer, or be built by robots. That's not likely, but it would fit the data." I shrugged. "It's the most plausible theory to be honest."

"So, someone with incredible money, an eye for detail, and powerful technology built a theme park to exactly match a television show?" Lauren sighs. "And that's the more likely option?"

"Well, the other option breaks a lot of laws of physics. So, you know about quantum physics and the multiverse hypothesis, right?"

Lauren gave me a death glare in response. "Every time anything happens, both things happen, and so there's an infinite number of worlds, right?"

I nod. "But that doesn't make this by itself. In my world there's no magic. So let's assume the laws of physics themselves can be different, but they have to be different in a lot of ways for pure will to impact the universe. I'm not even sure if you could make a universe out of math where it happens like it does for us. And while we say 'infinite' a lot the quantum multiverse doesn't have to include everything. Like, flip a coin it can come up heads or come up tails or roll around on the floor, but there's no way it comes up in China. There's only so many variations that could happen. One of those variations making exactly the world that I saw in a television show seems less likely than some kind of robot faking it all," I explain.

"But magic is real," Lauren pointed out. "It doesn't need to be random, it's a balance of nature. If you assume all the worlds have magic in them, then one of those worlds could come up like yours."

"So it'd basically put my world 'downstream' of yours." I nod. "I've thought of that, and maybe it's true, but it's weird. Why would the one true magic system have such a small and precise impact on my world? Why is it a TV show, and not a religion or something? Sure, there are reasons I can think of, but they're stretches. Now, maybe the multiverse is just that big, but I have to think something more deliberate fits the evidence better," I explain.

"So like, a theme park built of places you would recognize?" Lauren asked thoughtfully.

"Maybe," I nodded. "I keep circling back to the idea that this is some kind of test, but what would it be testing?"

"Maybe it's more like education?" Lauren suggested. "Like, if you want someone to believe something you don't just show them facts, you make a story about it. You said she thought all humans were dead? Maybe the cat-thing used images you understood to put together the story she wanted to tell?"

"Huh." I nodded. "Still requires some weird things, but if a weird post-human has unlimited resources to try and communicate with someone who thinks very differently, maybe this is how it might do it. Or, say, if she was another really weird attempt at communication and you are the more developed one?"

"I am not an alien robot built to communicate with you," Lauren rolled her eyes.

"Hm, I believe you. But maybe Elena is that 'alien robot' I suggested you might be?" I gestured to the room. "Her whole life might be a message I am supposed to figure out. If some kind of alien were to read the internet it would find a lot of communication through stories. Maybe if some species started from enough distance this might look like neutral ground between our perspectives."

"It's not that, but maybe you're onto something." Lauren nodded. "So if there is a message here, we should look to see if we can find it."

[hr][/hr]

Lauren

Mystic Falls was not my kind of town. I missed California weather, California people, and living in a city that had an actual mall. After breaking into every store and looking through the local Walmart I started to get bored. Jeff had found one Grimoire besides Emily Bennett's in the house of a woman named Sheila Bennett, but it was a lot less interesting than her ancestor's grimoire and contained very little I didn't already know.

The worst part of the town was the food. The Gilberts had a limited fridge and pantry, as fitting a pair of high schoolers and a graduate student all dealing with the trauma of lost family. With the reset striking at 10 PM no restaurants were open and ready for scavenging, leaving me with the habit of breaking into the houses of our "neighbors" to explore potential meals. It was almost enough to envy Jeff's simplistic diet, but blood was too gross for me to ever go all the way into sincere jealousy.

While Jeff worked on his blood experiments, I started to spend most of my time in the library. The internet did work, but it worked weirdly, failing piece by piece as the day wore on until the world reset at about 10 PM every night. Books and electricity didn't shut off, so it was a lot more reliable to keep reading as I looked up local history.

The Founding Families of Mystic Falls were incredibly full of themselves for a group of people who ran all of a small town. The names of the Fells, the Lockwoods, the Gilberts, the Salvatores and the Forbes recurred again and again in the microfiche of the newspapers. It was fairly easy to figure out how the Families had impacted the history of Mystic Falls; every few decades, there would be a spree of supposed animal attacks or a string of arson that would paralyze the town before stopping as suddenly as it started and then the Founding Families would lose a few scions or collapse into marriage and baby announcements as they reacted to the stress of vampire hunting.

The biggest discovery was Jeff's. In the old Salvatore Boarding House he found dozens of journals written by a Stefan Salvatore, a vampire turned in 1864. Jeff laughed when he noted when the journals started. "Ah, after Lexie found him," Jeff laughed. "Before that he was one of the worst of them. He still relapses, too." The two of us divided the journals down the historical middle with Jeff taking the first half and my taking the second half, and the two of us read up on the long life of a vampire.

Stefan was hardly the town's secret protector, having spent several attack periods in entirely different parts of the country, but he still relayed much of the town's secret history as he wrote down his meetings with Bennett witches and ranted about the occasional depredations of his brother, Damon. The gaps, sometimes decades long, Jeff attributed to his "relapses" into preying on humans.

All the Founding Families had their secrets and vampire hunting gear locked somewhere. The Lockwoods had a dungeon complete with chains, the Gilberts had a beach house with a closet full of vampire hunting weapons, Sheriff Forbes had magazines of strangely made wooden bullets hidden in her office and the Fells had records of every vampire "outbreak" the news had indicated along with some hilariously inaccurate notes on witchcraft.

Strangely, it was the ranting speculation on witches that gave me an idea.

[hr][/hr]

Wyld

"Cut along the vein," I muttered as I began experiment #24 with my magical blood. Doppelganger blood was a binding agent for spells, so it stood to reason that my blood, the Immortal template of the doppelganger species, could be used to similar effect.

In practice I'd bled a lot to make gross and foul-smelling pieces of paper. The "floating crane" spell was the best practice one I had found, only needing direct sunlight and air to make it work under normal circumstances. Replacing the celestial event with the blood of a doppelganger was clearly laid out in Emily's grimoire. If my blood just could not substitute in for that of a doppelganger, well, that would be very concerning.

"Any luck?" Lauren asked as she entered Jeremy's room. I looked up, her face was looking pleased.

"Spill it, what'd you do?" I asked in ready capitulation. Lauren's white teeth flashed a broad smile. "Here." She put a book of maps down in front of me and opened it. The red markings in it were Lauren's blood, dribbled from a paper towel and smeared by closing the map book.

"I have it down to two spots," Lauren explained happily. "Remember when I was talking about access points? Even if you can just enter this world anywhere, you wouldn't bother. It would be a lot easier to go through in a hot spot of supernatural energy unless you have the Ascendant for this prison."

"You said the coven had that crystal, though." I frowned. "Why wouldn't they just use that?"

"I came through on the west coast, and to inspect the prison they'd need to be within eight hundred miles. I am guessing Hilliard won't bother with the road trip, she'll have another member of the coven do it close by. So it took a bit of divination, but I made the prison with my own power. Run my blood through that, and we check the entry points closest to the most persistent stains." Lauren pointed at the map. "Hart Island in New York and Salem Village in Massachusetts are the ones we need to check out."

"So we've got it down to two entirely different possible locations, hundreds of miles apart, with a lot of space around it," I muttered. Lauren sighed.

"That is supposed to be where you come in. Your so-called 'AMF' getting any closer to done?" Lauren looked at the latest failed spell critically.

"The anti-magic field happened on the show," I said weakly. "It had caveats, but..."

"Caveats of two doppelgangers, both of them the last two doppelgangers of their line, after their originators died, and produced by a powerful group of witches using unknown methods. Anything else I'm missing?" Lauren picked up the paper crane. "Any other bright ideas?"

"...none I am close to considering," I explained. "If I knew how the immortality spell worked we might have two unique Immortals, which would be a lot closer, but I don't even know where to begin on that."

"I might have something else," Lauren explained. "I've been doing some research into Projection. I think it might work from here, if we could get a link."

I frowned. "Sorry, new to this, or at least my old bits are new to this. You mean like, Astral Projection? Leaving your body and watching somewhere else?"

"Exactly. It's kind of like being a ghost. The Fell journals had some paranoid ranting about invisible witches in their house that got me thinking about the spells that could do that. I think we can at least get to the Other Side from here, if maybe not all the way 'home' to Earth. You know what the Other Side is, right?"

"Paranormal purgatory where dead supernaturals hang out alone until they find peace and 'move on' somewhere?" I asked.

Lauren nodded. "The range of this Projection might not be that good in the physical sense, but it seems like a start," Lauren explained. I nodded, thinking over the ideas. Jeff's memories of Astral Projection seemed to support the idea. One of us could anchor and power the spell, the other could be projected.

"Well, if we can make contact with the real world we can look at doppelganger blood. That might help." I gestured at my failed experiments. "If I knew what was different about my blood compared to Elena's then I might be able to know what I am doing wrong. Katherine's might be better, but I don't think by much." I smile.

"So, you want to anchor or do you want to Project?" Lauren asked.

I thought for a moment, remembering a witch bursting into flames on the show while Projecting. "I think it should be me. I'm more likely to make it out if something goes wrong."
[hr][/hr]

We decided the best place for the spell was the Salvatore Boarding House. If either Stefan or Damon were there and could notice us then we might be able to get some help from them, and we weren't entirely sure if the Bennett witches could have defenses that might harm us.

We prepared a circle of candles to present a fire hazard, and to provide some elemental energy to channel. Lauren sent me out to bring several large buckets of sand and lake water to balance out the elements while she happily smashed every window in the house to help draw in the energy of the air. I dragged a table to the center of the room and put some chairs in the right places, and we began our spell.

"Projection" was a simple matter for two witches. In between us I put the ancient photograph of Katherine Pierce; one of the most prized possessions of Stefan Salvatore. Seated in his house I visualized the face of Paul Wesley, Stefan's actor in The Vampire Diaries, and hoped the universe hadn't chosen to do anything 'cute' when it came to transporting me into a work of fiction; like confusing the boundaries of an actor and the character. Admittedly, if I somehow projected into my home dimension that would also be quite interesting.

It turned out that Projection was pretty much instant. One moment I was in the Salvatore Boarding House's echo in the Prison World, and the next I was standing in the woods next to what looked like exactly the man I was looking for; along with what was either Elena Gilbert or the actual Nina Dobrev.

"...the original Lockwood Mansion," Stefan was saying. I waved my hand in front of his face to no impact.

"The first Founder's Party," Elena replied. Given the lack of cameras or support staff nearby I had to guess I wasn't on set for a filming of a popular TV show. "Where you signed the registry," Elena went on. I waved my hand in front of her face, which also produced no effect.

"I didn't care that I had gotten something my brother wanted," Stefan explained and I lost interest in what was actually happening. Projecting into the world was a major success by itself. If we could find a way to make actual contact, then we could start gathering support. Two particularly powerful witches could offer a lot of bribery to the locals whenever a real problem came up.

This was enough of a major step forward for me to try to "cancel" the Projection and head back to explain things to Lauren.

"It worked!" I told Lauren and then noticed she was on the floor. "Lauren? Lauren!" I was on my knees. Blood was streaming out of both nostrils and she was gasping for breath, the victim of a serious blow back from the spell's energy drain. Lauren's eyes rolled back in her head when I tried to make eye contact.

A normal person would have tried to help her. An Immortal, powered by blood, always hungry for it, faced with a meal right there, was sucking on her nose and starting to bite down before either of us knew what was happening.

"FUCK!" Lauren shouted and I collapsed, feeling the agony of a headache unlike anything I had ever known as Lauren's spell burst half a dozen blood vessels in my brain.

A full minute later I got up shakily. Lauren curled up against the wall, staring at me, cleaning her face off with a blanket.

"I'm sorry," I said quietly. She glared at me. "I couldn't help it."

"You tried to eat my face," Lauren said in an even voice. I knew it was true.

"I..." I paused and tried to think out what I was going to say. "I can't promise it won't happen again. We have to be more careful, or find a way to stop me next time."

"You saw me, bleeding out and from hurt doing something because I trusted you, and your first instinct was to bite me. How can I trust you after that?" Lauren's voice was full of strain, but I knew she was actually asking me, it wasn't rhetorical.

"Do you want the long version or the short version?" I asked after another minute.

"The long," Lauren answered.

"In my life, I've had times when I wasn't well, mentally. I've snapped and I've done things I've regretted or hurt people and been unable to make it up to them because I was just that out of it. Right now there's a monster and it isn't just inside me, it is part of me. I don't know how to kill it or how to tame it. If this was a normal situation I'd just say you should leave, but it's not."

"So you're saying I need you and there is nothing we can do about your literally being a threat to my life?" Lauren asked with a hint of anger.

"Do you have a cure for Immortality lying around, or anyone else who might help get you out? Can we make chains for me that I won't be able to break with magic if I get hungry enough? Do you have any alternative?" I asked.

"I need to be alone for a while," Lauren said, no longer hiding her disgust. "Meet me at the Gilbert's tomorrow and don't go near there."

"Alright," I answered, and I left Lauren to clean herself up. I broke into a run at super speed as I headed towards the hospital; Lauren's blood was all I could think about.

[hr][/hr]
Lauren

It turned out that one thing Mystic Falls was never short of was alcohol. The premise of Beauty and the Beast had never seemed this terrifying before. I had been trapped with someone dangerous, someone stronger than I was and I was dependent on him as long as I ever wanted to see anyone who was not him unless I could figure out how to get out of the Prison World by myself.

After my hangover cleared up I spent several hours working on notes about how to break out by myself. I was hardly surprised when I came up with nothing. Even projecting to the Other Side from this place without another witch as an anchor would require an artifact or power source unlike anything I had ever heard of. Even if I went to Salem and caught someone coming in to inspect the prison, relying entirely on Jeff's theory of "jumpchain," there was no way my odds were better at succeeding if I went it alone.

I met Jeff on the lawn of the Gilbert house. He looked sad, but nothing like I felt. Jeff had gone off on a blood bender, but immortality had its perks and nothing about him was damaged by the excess.

"What have you got?" I asked Jeff.

"Well, I could help you setup a weakening spell. Drain power from me and from my immortality into you, make me less of a threat. It would also make me a lot less able to actively help, and I don't know how to make one that would work fast enough to help you if I snapped again." Jeff handed me a notebook with a few diagrams and comments on such a spell. I looked over the paper carefully and shook my head.

"If I drained enough to be safe it might kill you; and it definitely would make you act sick and useless. Got anything else?"

Jeff was silent for a long time. "Maybe;" He admitted. "It's no guarantee, and it might make you feel worse if you heard it."

"Give me your best guess; do I want to hear it?" I asked.

Jeff sighed. "No, but you don't want to find out about it any other way, either. When I worked on the jumpchain, I filled out an option for a 'companion' in this adventure, as I told you. It wasn't just an ordinary companion, either. Most of the reason I went with this jump was because of the companion option. Jumping into a young adult fantasy drama, it let you play into those tropes. The jumpchain option was a soulmate."

"A what?" I asked, feeling a sense of shock.

"It said soulmate, with all of the meaning that would apply in a drama made for The CW. Imagine filling out a quiz in a magazine that would supposedly tell you who you would marry, and then the magazine sending you that person," Jeff rambled.

"One, that's sexist. Two, what?" I sat down on the porch.

"I may not know a lot about relationships, but I do know you don't tell people that kind of thing for so many reasons." Jeff explained.

"Yeah, I get why you wouldn't. You really had no idea any of this would happen?" I asked Jeff.

Jeff shook his head. "Of course not. It was a fantasy. But if you want some assurance I won't hurt you, I can't give it, but I can tell you that if there is anything I can do to not hurt you I will."

"You're not lying," I stated. I sat on the porch and considered everything.

"Alright, tell me what we do next. I can barely sustain the spell for ten seconds and you become an intangible wraith on the Other Side. How do we use that?" I straightened. Nothing had changed, after all.

Jeff gave me a tentative, sly smile. "The thing about the show called The Vampire Diaries is that people die a lot, and they do not tend to stay dead." Jeff pulled a flip phone from his pocket. "I think our best bet to start with is a girl who is either about to die or already dead named Vicki Donovan."

[hr][/hr]
Vicki and Matt Donovan were a pair of teenage siblings who lived alone in a house that Jeff referred to as "TV poor person." Vicki's room contained a stash of pills in her underwear drawer and a Ziploc of pot hidden in one of her shoes. I agreed with Jeff that nothing would form a better link to her than her cellphone.

Jeff anchored when we projected to Vicki under the theory that what could kill me couldn't kill him. I found myself face to face with the girl in a handful of photographs in the Donovan house instantly. Vicki was in the middle of Jeremy Gilbert's room, screaming at the top of her lungs to the unresponsive boy lying on the bed. It was weird seeing one of the Gilberts in their house after living their for nearly a month.

"Vicki?" I asked and she whirled around.

"What the hell happened to me!?" Vicki shouted. I flinched back.

"You died. This is the Other Side, where vampires go when they die," I explained.

"I was only a vampire for two days and I get the vampire afterlife? That sucks." Vicki collapsed on Jeremy's bed, phasing through him without resistance.

"Life sucks and the afterlife sucks just as much," I offered. "I'm here to try and help with that."

"So you're some kind of angel tasked with helping vampires?" Vicki asked skeptically. "I've been through people telling me I needed to find Jesus before."

I laughed. "Nothing like that. I'm a witch, and I'm stuck in my own little purgatory. This is the farthest I can reach." I offered Vicki my hand. "How about you come back with me and we talk about getting me out of there and bringing you back to life?"

Vicki shrugged. "Not like I have anything better to do. I took Vicki's hand and pulled myself back to the Prison World with Vicki along for the ride.

Jeff was lying in a bloody pile, barely conscious when I returned. Vicki looked around curiously. "Hey, this is my house!"

"It was the easiest way to reach you," I explained and knelt down cautiously. Jeff lurched up and Vicki shrieked and leapt back.

"Hi," Jeff said weakly. "I need to um, go." He vanished in a blur of Immortal speed.

"Who the hell is that?" Vicki asked.

"My um, companion," I explained. "He's kind of like a vampire and a witch."

"So, witches are real now. Figures." Vicki looked with some disgust at the broken windows, piles of dirt, pockets of water and open candles. "What did you do to my house?"

"It will reset in a little while," I assured her. "When Jeff comes back we will give you some things to look for and people to look up. First, how about we have a real meal? I bet you're starving."

"Am I still a vampire?" Vicki asked.

I paused. "I honestly don't know." I shrugged. "Let's find out."

[hr][/hr]

Wyld

Vicki Donovan chewed on the roast I made as I gave her the run down on six seasons of The Vampire Diaries and two of The Originals.

"...so then the leader of the Travelers, who is a ghost, comes back from the Other Side in a spell that channels a lot of dead Travelers. The spell seemed to allow for more Travelers to come back then had died, including the sacrifices, but I'm not entirely sure how that worked. We know they don't have to kill themselves because later..."

Vicki stopped me with a raised hand. "Be on the look out for creepy European witches; got it. Can we just kill normal witches for that spell?"

I considered. "I really don't know. Travelers have a weird form of magic, but I don't know how weird it is. I know other kinds of witches can cast the spell, but so can a vampire with a Traveler father. I wouldn't want to kill a bunch of witches on the idea we can all find our way back without a lot more information."

Lauren walked into the room, carrying Emily's grimoire and smiling.

"Got it, you've got something more important to say," Vicki kicked back in her chair and looked at Lauren. "What is it?"

"You said there's a comet overhead in Mystic Falls right now?" Lauren asked excitedly. Vicki and I nodded. "Well, earlier I was trying to think of ways to get to the Other Side without practically killing one of us. I think there is a way." Lauren put the book down on a page with a drawing of a crystal and several other notes. "The comet was used for a spell that lasted 145 years already and shows no signs of winding down, right? We might only be able to call on the comet while it's here, but the spell will keep channeling it no matter how far away it goes."

"Yes," I agreed thoughtfully. "But a permanent spell would leave our bodies to decay. and break when the world resets. That is why we can't just use the full moon or something."

"The comet is still overhead in Mystic Falls right now, and almost here in this resetting dimension. I think if we had a focus that stayed active in Mystic Falls and an identical focus here we could call on that power whenever we needed to," Lauren explained. "See this crystal, maybe something like that?"

"Huh." Vicki looked at the grimoire. "I saw a crystal just like that."

My head turned to face her. "Where?"

"Bonnie had it in her Halloween costume. I saw it at the party. She was dressed up as a witch. She's been driving that whole 'psychic' thing into the ground for weeks." Vicki shrugged. "So is that kind of crystal like a witch thing?"

"No..." I muttered, thinking hard. Okay, so I could remember a talisman that Damon tried to steal from Bonnie's neck that roasted his hand for his trouble. That would have been the crystal he got from that party, right? "Lauren, we need to go to the Lockwood Mansion now." I got up. "Meet you there." I raced off, my mind racing. Emily destroyed the crystal when she possessed Bonnie to keep Damon from freeing a bunch of starving vampires. If I wanted to use the crystal and the comet I could not have much time.

Lauren and Vicki drove up in Matt's car half an hour later as I tore the Lockwood Mansion apart. "Well this is more fun than the nerd shit," Vicki commented when she found me.

"Join in. We're looking for that crystal. You want to wreck this place anyway, right?" I asked Vicki.

"Sure!" Vicki laughed, then she frowned. "But how do you know that?"

"I'm psychic," I told her, only lying a little. "Tyler and his family treat you like crap. Wreck their house for fun looking for that crystal. Got a problem with that?"

"Nope." Vicki smiled and began to look around herself. "Mind explaining why we need this crystal, though?

"Alright. So here is what I remember. Back in 1864, there was a vampire named Katherine Pierce and a witch named Emily Bennett who worked together. Emily was bribed with Katherine's magical blood that she used in spells, but as the kill count mounted with Katherine and her friends feeding on people Emily began to work against Katherine in secret."

"That bitch!" Vicki said playfully as she began to tear apart an expensive sofa with her hands. So she had vampire strength, good but worrying.

"Yeah. So, Katherine was dating Damon and Stefan at the same time. I say 'dating' in the loosest possible sense as she was using mind control on at least one of them and maybe both. After a while the town, thanks to Emily's secret help and local vampires being careless, got enough information and power to fight back. They attacked every vampire in town with the herb 'vervain' and gathered them all into one place for execution."

"Terrible," Vicki laughed. "So Damon's girlfriend died? Serves him right. You know he turned me, right? And Stefan killed me."

"It gets better," I leaned into my audience's sympathies. "Damon and Stefan went to rescue Katherine out of love and mind control, and got shot for their troubles, rising again a few hours later as vampires. Emily, meanwhile, was panicking as she realized that the town wasn't going to stop at vampires now that they knew what was coming, and she expected to be next on the chopping block. Turns out helping in secret while serving a vampire in public wasn't the best survival strategy. Damon, newly risen, went to Emily and begged her to save Katherine. Emily cast a spell on the church to keep the vampires from being burned alive like the town planned, but the barrier that defended them kept them trapped inside the church. In exchange, Damon protected Emily's children from the town when Emily was dragged off to her fate."

"Sounds like a crappy witch to me," Vicki laughed again. This one felt a bit more mean-spirited to me.

"She was skilled, but not good at raw power in the way I am." I shrugged and began to go through another desk. "So in order to undo that barrier the comet has to be in the sky and that crystal has to be used."

"Huh. So you called this a 'prison world.' Does that mean it sucked in a magical crystal?" Vicki asked, sounding a bit confused.

"No, or at least not really. When this spell was done it made a copy of Earth with everything in it but the people and the animals. Magical things have a bit more 'inertia' so to speak and when we move them or break them they stay moved or broken, but everything else resets right back to the way it was when the spell was cast every 24 hours. This happens around 10 PM every night and started a few weeks ago on the ninth."

"Okay. So you want this crystal to cast a spell so you don't writhe on the floor when you go to the Other Side?" Vicki asked.

"Again, not really. So, the problem we have is that the things we have to channel for the spells we could do on this side reset or don't work, such as the sun and the moon, so anything outside of our personal reserves can't last for long. If I bound the power of the sun into a vessel to project to the Other Side that connection would break with the reset. However, if we could make a spell on Earth then it wouldn't break with the reset. This requires a powerful focus to do on Earth, but is possible. The problem is connecting us to a spell on Earth. If we have a powerful focus here, we can make the connection to an active spell done with that focus, and that should make it a lot easier to get to the Other Side." I saw Vicki's eyes begin to glaze over.

Unsurprisingly it was Lauren who found the crystal, safely hidden inside a box in a den or office. The three of us gathered around and looked at it.

"So what do we do with that?" Vicki asked.

"Well I think step one is contacting a very dead, very powerful witch named Emily Bennett," I said. "This was her magical focus, so it has to work better than your cellphone did for finding her spirit.

"Can you anchor again so quickly?" Lauren asked. "It took a lot out of you."

"Probably, but I don't have to do it alone." I looked at Lauren. "We can do it together and send Vicki to make contact with Emily."

"Um..." Lauren frowned. "I mean, are you sure she's as convincing as we are?" I could practically feel the subtext of 'she frequently takes drugs' on Lauren's breath.

"Vicki, here's what you need to tell Emily," I explained. "She needs to check the crypt, or under the church, wherever that is. You should do it too, if you can. Look everywhere for an Elena Gilbert." I paused. "Someone who looks exactly like Elena named Katherine Pierce, that is."

"That helps us how?" Vicki asked, looking confused.

"You see, when Damon and Emily made the deal what they didn't know was that Katherine had already escaped thanks to one of the guards being obsessed with her and being promised that she'd turn him into a vampire. Emily doesn't want to let the vampires out, and Damon won't care in the slightest if Katherine's not in there. She'll owe us one, so possessing Bonnie and casting her part of the spell is how we cash that in." I paused.

"No part of that plan could possibly go wrong," Lauren said dryly.

"Bonnie won't be in danger of murder by Damon when he collects his collateral on a reneged deal. The town doesn't have to risk vampire attacks. Damon doesn't need to waste his time. Emily gets everything she wants." I paused. "Got a better idea right now? I have no idea how much longer we have before the comet leaves or Emily blows up her crystal and stops this from being possible."

Lauren sighed. "Alright then. Do we know where Emily lived, to make this spell easier?"

I paused. "Actually, maybe. So, the old Salvatores had Katherine living with her, and Emily was Katherine's slave or um, free black handmaiden witch who acted like a slave or whatever. We've read the journals, so we can find that place."

Vicki looked like she was practically asleep by now. "Crystal, comet, witch, got it," She muttered when I went quiet. Lauren and I sighed in unison.

"Go find Salvatore manor and call this house," Lauren instructed me, handing me Vicki's phone. "I'll go over everything again with Vicki." I smiled at Vicki's look of horror at the prospect of instruction, and sped off at super speed.