"Waet, wait, you're drunk."
"What…?" Waet, waiting, replied to the voice. He attempted to lash out at the speaker, but he found his arms swinging around instead.
"Well, Waet, what were you drinking?"
"Well indeed… just some water, thanks. And put some wine in it…" Waet was now sitting on the floor… exactly what he had intended to do, he was sure.
"Waet, can you see me?"
"See you…"
"Yes?"
"I see… double-you…" as the figures faded into blackness.
- - -
The first thing Waet thought when he woke up was, Yikes, my face is oily. The morning sun was blazing through the window, and he tried not to imagine that he was being cooked by it. Fortunately, it was only the first-quarter sun. On Eldomen, there were two proximate stars, but only one of them shone visible light; the other shone with anti-light. One could not see this sun, but it did have the effect of blocking out the visible, "prime" sun in small degrees at a time, which made the prime sun appear in cycles. In a few days it would become a crescent, and eventually there would be a day with no prime sunlight at all.
Waet's bedroom seemed overly regal for that of a mere physicist, but currently he was housed in the Guest Wing of the castle of King Reudiant and Queen Kossa, the rulers of the Atheist Church of Eldomen. Across from his red canopy bed was an armoire, which included all of his clothing he'd brought from his home planet Guratha, as well as royal attire endowed with the Eldomish crest: a single small planet contained in deep, deep blackness, which represented knowledge.
Deciding it was best not to be cooked by the half-circular sun, Waet heaved himself out of bed and found himself in white nightwear.
"When did I put that on…" he muttered sleepily to himself. He couldn't remember much of the night before, and obviously a royal maid or butler had changed him. He really didn't want to think about that.
Making sure the solid wooden door was locked beforehand, he went to look in the armoire for a suitable outfit. Not today would he wear his familiar Gurathian clothing… today was the day, he knew. He put on some official-looking solid blood-red slacks with black boots, and a black-and-red overcoat. He regarded himself in the uncomfortably huge mirror on the adjacent wall before taking a brush from atop the armoire and hastily straightening his smooth brown hair back, and tying it at a point.
Startlingly, he heard a knock at his door. After briefly considering feigning absence (was he nervous?) he took three large steps and opened it. Beyond it was a man with curled black hair, unnaturally shiny, and wearing a black butler's uniform.
"Their royal Highnesses will be seeing you in an hour, I expect" he said.
"Yes…" Waet replied, "I'm looking… forward to it."
"That will be all then." The man concluded, before turning back and heading off to the left somewhere. Waet closed the door, looked in the mirror and burst out, "Well, that was pointless!"
Feeling a new and unwelcome rush, he scooped up his study papers, documents and such from the desk by the fourth wall and put them in a bag, carrying it out the door and heading off to the right. The hallway was all red with velvet, with portraits of previous Highnesses on the stone walls in between the identical wooden doors.
Waet soon reached his destination, the library. He briskly walked past the various alarmingly tall bookshelves in sections, adorned with signs like "Atheism and its Teachings", "History", "Psychology", and "Reasons why Theism is bad and You Should Never Ever Believe any of it". The last particular one had especially small letter size.
Eventually he reached the "Physics" section, a fairly large one. There was a circular table amidst the boundless shelves of Knowledge, with a man sitting at it. He was only slightly shorter than Waet himself, with neat blonde hair, and nearly the exact same royal outfit. He looked impatient.
"Where have you been? You know you'll be seeing the Highnesses in fifty-four minutes?" the man nearly shouted in anxiousness.
"Yes, I know, but let's get start--"
"And you were drinking last night! Do you even remember?"
Waet blinked. "Oh, that makes sense. Now tell me what you think of--"
"Waet, the only reason I decided to become your apprentice is because I thought you had the right idea about this. According to our calculations, there must be multiple dimensions, but it takes a certain amount of ability to be able to express that idea, and you have it! You're always a breath away from messing up your chances." The man exhaled heavily.
Waet wanted to sigh and honestly apologize, and work harder to change his ways, and listen to what his apprentice had said and take it to heart, but he also wanted to make sure his proposal sounded alright, so he just replied, "You're right, I'm sorry, I'll be better about it next time.", and brought the bag of papers to the table and began sorting them out. "Listen here, Rold, I'm worried about paragraph B-4… it seems too biased in the Theist favor, where I talk about the possible existence of a dimension where the laws of physics don't even apply…"
Waet honestly considered himself as a pure atheist, and in the eyes of the Church, this was the mindset of an ideal citizen (the opposite of "ideal" being "punished"). However, he was also a physicist, and these two titles did confront. This particular paragraph B-4 was one such example, and by now he was wondering why he even put it in there in the first place. The answer came soon, however, that it was apparent that even such strange possibilities as a god were, well, possible, under the current known laws of particle theory. Waet had no problems with these laws, and neither did the current atheist community, but the implications found in his studies were startling… would the Church understand that he was merely the messenger of these particle-theoretical flaws, or would they believe him to be heretical in their perfect system?
"Hmm, yes, that does sound troubling…" Rold responded, rather unhelpfully but forgiving Waet all the same. "Well, if it's a dimension where physics don't apply…" he said, squinting, looking upwards, apparently in deep thought, "then is it even your grounds do be covering it, as one who studies physics?"
"Hey… hey, that's true…" Waet said, as if the problem was deftly solved, but he was still uneasy about it. He took the paper with the worry-provoking paragraph and made a careless "X" over the thing. These were just his notes; after all, nobody was allowed to read them except him. Rold, with a raised eyebrow, looked at the paper, then at Waet, who got the message and figured it was best anyway… he forcedly crossed out the paragraph at length with his pen, certain to make every, single, sentence, unreadable.
Soon, he would speak in front of the Royal Highnesses of Atheist Eldomen. If all went well, his experiment would take place tomorrow.