Warping

Chapter 1: An Involved Explanation

Anna Valerious stared gloomily out the window into the rain. The sounds of blows and thumps, accompanied by screams and grunts of varying volume and tone echoed up from the combatants in the courtyard below. The cheers and boos of the villagers watching told her uncaring ears of whom was winning at the moment. A loud cheer and a few cries of "no fair!" heralded a change in the fight. Puzzled, Anna peered downwards over the sill… and observed her brother join the other two combatants in their wrestling match. Leaning back she shook her head, "Morons." A soft scraping sound on the stones in the hall behind her warned her that she was no longer alone.

"Who's being a moron now?" a cheerful voice asked. A smiling face, rounded and youthful invaded Anna's solitude over the windowsill.

Snorting softly Anna jerked her chin downward sharply, "All three of them… Verkan's joined in now." The woman next to her leaned forward to observe the continuing fight and nodded. Leaning her elbows on the sill she looked back up at the stiff figure of the Rom princess. Seeing Anna's disagreeable expression she merely quirked an eyebrow and waited for another outburst. Anna glared angrily at the fog and rain, impartially loathing the fight, the humidity, the rain, the villagers, the castle, the village, and the entire country of Romania in general. Feeling the weight of the other woman's gaze she finally broke, "It's just so damn stupid! What are we supposed to do now? They keep fighting, and it's absolutely pointless right now! They don't even care what they're fighting for… It's just… stupid. Really Moll, I don't get why they keep…" she stamped her foot and angrily tightened her crossed arms, wanting to be angry at someone but knowing that there was no one here to blame.

"Maybe," Molly mused as she adjusted her spectacles, "that's the entire reason why they're fighting? After all they're just as bored and…"

"Cut off? Stopped short?"

"Yeah, that works. After all it's a bit of a shock to suddenly have everything stop and reverse… then go forward again in double time, then back."

"I'm still confused about what happened."

"Really?" Moll blinked and straightened up, leaning against the opposite frame from Anna and sitting on the sill. "I thought the explanations were rather… excessively detailed actually."

"For you maybe, you seem to get this stuff. Besides when I heard it the one doing the telling was Carl who was gibbering in shock, and trying not to notice Van Helsing turning into a werewolf in the background," retorted Anna bitterly.

"Umn. Want me to try again? I think I can translate it into normal English."

"Go ahead, after all you can't be any worse than Carl."

Molly leaned her head back against the wall and smiled at her new friend. Laughing softly she commented, "Oh I don't know, Van Helsing's was nearly worse than Carl's…"

Anna grinned, cheered by the quip, "If you think he was slick explaining to you what happened when Dracula summoned you, you should have seen him when I first got back and he was in his, what did you call it? When he goes all brooding and…"

"Angsting… He was being angsty."

"Yes, when he was in his angsty phase," Anna nodded, proud of her quick acquisition of Moll's particular variety of slang. "Completely useless, he could barely say a word. Kept going misty eyed… Quite romantic in it's own way really, but not coherent for an explanation of why I distinctly remembered dying and being cremated."

"Well I think I can manage to explain without the awkward hurdles of your death and random unrequited love to get in the way." Molly motioned for Anna to close the window on her side while pulling shut the pane she had been leaning against. "So Van Helsing had the sensible, even if paranoid, idea to clean out both castles to make sure Dracula didn't leave any leftover things behind to come back and haunt the region. Unfortunately Gabriel isn't that mechanically inclined… and Carl is. So Carl got the job of analyzing and deconstructing the machinery the Count had set up." She waved down the hall, and began to stroll down it towards the family parlor. "I'm guessing that you already know that Carl is… well… easily distracted… academic… naïve, what have you. And even if you hadn't known about that Van Helsing should have known better."

"But he didn't think," Anna completed as she walked next to Moll.

"In his defense he was rather shell-shocked at the time." Anna rolled her eyes. "Ok, so it's not a good excuse, but it is fairly reasonable. One way or another Carl cleaned up most of the icy fortress safely before getting to some of the more… exotic experiments the Count had abandoned."

Anna frowned, opening the door to the parlor. She waved Moll ahead of her as she thought of a reply. "That's part of what I don't get, where was all of this stuff? I don't remember seeing any machinery besides the ones to bring his children to life in the top of the east tower…"

"Ah," Molly said smiling and flopping onto the faded brocade couch facing the fireplace that dominated the left side of the room. "That's easy enough, third floor, right next to the kitchens, eastern tower."

"The kitchens? The Icy Fortress of Dracula has kitchens? What ever for?" Anna paused in seating herself opposite the door to look in puzzlement at her companion.

"Damned if I know," Moll shrugged as she made herself comfortable as she could on the stiff Victorian furniture. "Maybe it was just made that way. For all we know Vladius can't bear to be parted from his beloved cake forms and Jell-O molds." She shot Anna a wicked grin and received a laugh in return. "As far as I can tell he got very bored, and so set up his own arcane experiments, but never bothered to dismantle them when he was bored. So the entire castle is littered with strange things in even stranger places; I really don't want to know why there is an automated combination cappuccino-maker and sandblasting device next to Marishka's bedroom. The possibilities are endless, and disturbing." Molly trailed off in to a rather morbid silence with a grimace of disgust on her face.

"I'd be properly horrified if I knew what those were, I'm sure. Do try to get to the point Moll." Anna smiled to take the sting out of the prompt, and nodded to the maid who had poked her head in the room with an inquiring look, mouthing the word "tea" to her mistress.

"Right," Moll, fidgeted for a moment, trying to pick back up the original thread of her thoughts. "So there was Carl, messing about with one of these strange machines. I don't think that he's even sure what started the engine turning… perhaps one of those dwerger creatures flipped a switch somewhere. The point is one way or another it got turned on, and did… something." She stopped for a moment staring absently at the fireplace. Shaking her head she flopped sideways on the couch, flipping her legs over the armrest. "And here's where everything got very complicated. As far as I can tell it messed with dimensions, creating a pocket universe such as is speculated a black hole would create."

Anna held up a hand, "Stop right there, no idea what you mean by either dimension, or black hole."

Molly groaned and covered her face with an arm. "Right, a quickie astro-physics lesson." She uncovered her face and sighed, flipping even further, upside down with her feet now resting on the wall behind the back of the couch. "You know what dimensions are in terms of length, height and width, yes? They are directions in which you can move."

"That seems simple enough, must you be upside down for this?"

"Yes I must, it helps me think once we get to the stranger parts of this explanation. So there are three dimensions that we can see, but four that we can move in. The forth dimension is time, and we can only move in one direction in it, otherwise everything would be happening all at once. You got that?" Moll flipped her head sideways to meet Anna's eyes.

Anna shrugged, "I suppose, it makes some sort of sense."

"Goody, first hurdle over. Now for a seemingly random topic change, have you ever dropped a heavy object on a mattress? Or a single stretched out sheet of cloth?" Anna looked wary, and nodded. "Right, so you noticed that the weight pulled the shape of the sheet out of the plane… out of it's normal flat position and bent it?"

"Yes…"

"That's what a black hole does, only instead of working on pulling the sheet from two simple dimensions into a third, it pulls reality from four dimensions into a fifth."

Anna blinked, "Wait, you said there were four dimensions, what's the fifth?"

"Aha, that's why I'm upside down, this is all theory, and no one is quite sure what the fifth one really is. As far as we can tell a black hole is an object so massive, so heavy that it hits that sheet so hard that it rips a hole through it. The only problem is, the universe is nothing like a sheet, if anything it's more like a lake, or an ocean, with neither sky nor shore. So a hole forms, and the water rushes in. Going to somewhere maybe, or nowhere. I'm assuming that it goes somewhere, a place where there is a separate universe, perhaps one being created by the influx of material from the fully formed one."

"But… from what you're saying… shouldn't we have been… squeezed or something?"

"It's a possibility that you just skipped through and that the only squeezing you experienced was the time dilation. Er, the change in how the dimension of time works."

"So we are no longer a part of the Earth as we know it?" Anna asked in a quiet, deadened voice.

Moll shifted switching her gaze to the ceiling above her, and looked rather evasive, "Possibly, but unlikely, after all the sun is still there. That you haven't had the atmosphere do anything radical is another bonus. It makes my head hurt a bit, but you're probably just… Disconnected. No longer a part of the normal flow of history and time. It's possible that to those outside of the valley, that there is no valley."

Anna gritted her teeth, "Molly, it's a mountain range, it's hard to miss."

"Not if the dimensions are twisted… There's the section of land to our left, and another to our right, and they meet together, rather than meeting us."

"So we're stuck here?"

"Probably not. The universe is rather springy, it'll spit you back out at some point. Granted that might be a hundred years from now according to either our time and twenty from the out side perspective, or completely the opposite. Besides, I am slowly trying to put the machine back together from scratch."

"Depressing."

"Don't dwell on it. After all, you're alive again, as well as your brother." Voices echoed down the hall, and the maid who had appeared before quickly scurried in, placing a tray of tea things on the table with the quick jerky motions of someone who quite definitely wants to be out of the room as soon as possible.

Anna glared towards the doorway watching as Van Helsing entered, a bit beat up, but smiling. He nodded to the maid who darted past him to escape to the kitchens. "Sure I'm alive, but so," she hissed, "is he."

Van Helsing blinked at Anna's glare, and at Moll's quirking upside down smile. Turning slightly he looked over his shoulder at the smirking Count Dracula, who had entered the room behind him. Dracula gave a florid bow as Van Helsing shook his head, "Really my darling, you make a man think that you don't like him at all," Dracula commented in a mockingly sorrowful tone.

Author note: Van Helsing is just too fun a movie to not play with. Even if it does have some delayed plot holes lurking in vital areas. I'm going to try desperately not to make this an obvious Mary-Sue; I realize I will most likely fail, but am still willing try to retain some sense of reality.

On pronunciation, I do know that the proper spelling of Dracula's first name is Vladislaus, but trying to pronounce that, even in my own head seems like a crime against humanity, or at least the section of humanity trying to say it. So I've tweaked it to Vladius, with the intention of it sounding similar to Claudius.

I do hope that I haven't lost anyone with the reasoning behind how the characters have ended up in the positions they are in, but I felt it was a needed to prepare the framework of the story.