Encounters of Interesting Dimensions
By Jaina Eowyn
Chapter 1: The Time Machine
"Come on, Danny, can't you get it fixed? I need it in time for the science fair!" Carly pleaded. Her best friend Danny was helping her fix the time machine she had built after it had busted itself on a routine check a few days before the science fair.
Danny was lying on his back on the dolly underneath trying to get the mechanics of the machine fixed. It was a wheeled affair, looking somewhat ungainly, but it supposedly worked.
Carly knew that she probably wouldn't be the only kid entering a 'time machine' in the science fair, but hers was special. She had met a strange old man who had given her a special mechanism in return for a special errand she had run for him. The old man had looked so remarkably like a wizard that Carly just about believed fully that he was telling the truth about the mechanism. He had said that it split the fabric of the time continuum and of space (and more). He said it allowed you to bring people, objects, and everything back from, not only the past, but you could travel to the future, and, the thing that intrigued Carly most: he had said that you could part the fabric of imagination (or something) and bring back characters from books. Carly was planning on using it to bring up a couple of characters from her favorite book (and movie): Lord of the Rings.
Danny shoved himself out from under the machine and wiped himself off.
"There, all done. How's it look?"
Carly cocked her head. "Hmm…" She cocked her head the other way, then nodded and grinned. "Looks great! Thanks, Dan!" She clapped him on the back, then drew her hand away and quickly wiped all the oil off of it onto the rag Danny held.
"Yuck! …So, do you think we can try it now?" She asked.
Carly had built the machine herself (with just a little bit of help from Danny and her father who was himself an engineer), but she wasn't quite as good at figuring out the problems with her machines as she was at building them and it frustrated her to no end. It seemed to her that she was constantly having to ask Danny or her father for help with fixing all of her marvelous machines. Neither of them minded a bit, but it annoyed Carly that she couldn't be totally independent.
Danny nodded and dusted off his hands. "Yep, she should be ready. What're ya gonna try first?"
Carly grinned eagerly. "Lord of the Rings. I have a couple of . . . old friends that I'd like to meet in person."
She had been looking forward to this day since she had first had Lord of the Rings read to her in parts of the chapters as a bedtime ritual when she turned seven. Now she was nearly sixteen and she had been working on machines with this goal in mind ever since she decided that she would do it. When Carly set her mind to something, she stuck through it, no matter how hard it was. Now it was finally time.
She went inside the house and ran up the stairs to her special quiet room in the attic where she kept all of her things except her bed and clothes, which were in her bedroom, and where no one but she dared to go. She grabbed her dog-eared old copy of Lord of the Rings and ran back out to where Danny and the time machine waited.
Carly flipped open to one of the pages she had marked especially for this and scanned it into the time machine's memory, then scanned the rest of the marked pages.
"You ready?" Danny asked as she hesitated over the button.
Taking a deep breath, she nodded, trying to remember to breathe. She pressed the button and waited and, after what seemed like an eternity, finally heard voices inside the time machine . . .
A/N: More to come. Please review!