Section Two, Part Two

Archer probably didn't look very surprised, as this was what he had been thinking the entire time. The castle has looked like Arendelle. The women looked just like Elsa and Anna from the movies, if they were real people and not animated. The talk about ice magic and the clothing the women wore, and most of all, the fact that they were in a fjord in Norway in the 1840s. This was what he'd suspected since he looked at the map. He bowed to the women, as not doing so would probably be disrespectful to the Queen and ex-Queen.

"Your Majesty," he intoned. "It is a pleasure to meet you." He looked at them, dead seriously.

"But we need to talk. There's something going on that only you might be able to help us with."

Elsa looked at him and nodded. She seemed to understand what was going on.

"Whatever it is, we must discuss it. But not here. There is a garden in the Royal Castle that we can speak in. Come, Archer. Come, Emma. Follow Anna and I. We will show you the way."

They hiked up the beach, through the kingdom and through the gates to the castle.

The garden they had mentioned was large and beautiful, with a long central table that was made of Norway spruce wood. The garden held mainly juniper and maple trees that gave off an odd, mysteriously unnatural scent. Elsa and Anna led them to the table. Archer sat down with the rest of them. Elsa was the first to talk.

"Well, first I must thank you for getting rid of the vatnavaettir."

Emma suddenly looked confused. "The what?"

Elsa opened her mouth to speak, but it was Archer who answered, "They're water spirits from Norse mythology."

Elsa looked impressed at his knowledge.

"They're real, then?" Archer inquired. "I thought they were just a myth… well, so was magic, and I'm sitting right across from the living embodiment of it."

Anna cut across him. "How d'you know about the vatnavaettir?"

Archer tried to stay inquisitive. "I've read a lot about them. But I thought they were horses? All the old stories describe them as watery steeds that live underwater, but when a human comes near them, they surface, adhere to their skin, and drown them. The only similarity I noticed was the bodies of pure water. Why are the stories inaccurate?"

Elsa shrugged.

"Spirits May take on many different forms. I've only ever seen one that was a horse, but that was a-"

Without thinking, Archer interrupted, "A Nøkk."

Again, Elsa did a double take at Archer's intelligence. "You know about them?"

Archer nodded. "Everything is backwards. In the old Norse myths, the vatnavaettir were the horses, and the nøkks were the humans of water, though they carried violin-like instruments that played music so sad, it would literally kill the audience with broken hearts."

Anna looked revolted at how casually Archer addresses this. He said it like this because he'd read about them so many times.

"Wait…" Anna questioned. "How did you know that Elsa met a Nøkk?"

Ah… they didn't know… or did they? He studied their faces closely.

"You really don't know?"

They looked confused. "Know what?" Elsa inquired.

Oh, boy, Archer thought.

"Well I guess you wouldn't know, these won't even exist until 2013, but still…"

"What doesn't exist? And… wait, what do you mean 2013! None of us are even alive then! How could you know anything that happens then?"

Emma seemed to have found the ability to speak at last.

"That's why we need to talk. Archer and I… we're not from this time period. We were both born in 2005."

Elsa and Anna gasped in unison.

"You-w-what?"

She looked at Archer to see if he would deny this impossible statement. He nodded.

"It's true. We live in the year 2020. We had just gotten off of school for the summer, and well, I still don't fully understand what happened."

"Me neither," Emma said decisively. "I don't understand it either, but we were just talking, not really about anything in particular, when a… a bright white rip in space opened up, and I… heard… I heard voices… voices of…"

She could not say anymore she had broken off. Archer finished the sentence for her.

"Voices of the dead. People we'd… we'd k-known that have died, they… they called to us. My grandfather… Leila's friend Annette… J-J-Jarenne…"

His voice broke. He could not speak anymore, her memory was still too painful to think about. Elsa seemed to understand. Her expression softened and she tried to change the subject.

"Then what happened? How did you get here?"

Emma was the first to respond. "We just… stepped toward the light. It sort of… sucked us in a wormhole of some sort, and I couldn't move, and pain raced through my body, it felt like I was on fire or something.

"Then it all stopped and we were deposited up the mountain over there," and she pointed where they had come from, "in the year 1844."

They seemed to take this story very easily. To their credit, Archer thought, They did grow up with magic. Maybe this kind of thing isn't as much of a shock as to a regular person.

Anna cleared her throat. "So, you came here, and there was the vatnavaettir. How did you destroy it? I didn't see properly, but it looked like…"

"Magic," intoned Archer. "I don't know how, but some sort of magic seemed to course through me, telling me what to do, and… well, the vatnavaettir is gone now… but I don't understand what happened really… I thought, once I got here, that Elsa was the only one in the world with magic powers…"

"And how do you know that? How do you know us if we don't even live in your time?"

"Well, this might come as a bit of a shock, but… well, in the modern world, everyone knows who you are. They just think you're not real. You're fiction to the modern world."

A look of shock at this news shot across Elsa's face.

"Why would they know who we are? How do they know? And why would they think we're fake?"

It was Emma who broke the news.

"Because you two are the main characters in two animated movies… you do know what movies are, right?" She asked because they did not seem to understand. They shook their heads in unison.

"Well, a movie is like a really long video, with a story and characters and music and sound, it's kind of hard to explain, but animated movies are just movies that consist only of drawn frames over the whole movie, so they take a really long time to make. Bet anyway, there are two movies about you, assuming they are accurate somehow, that's why everyone knows who you are."

He described the plot of the two movies, asking if this was true. They confirmed that both movies were extremely accurate.

Archer could not stop himself from asking, "So if the movies are factually correct, does that mean that you guys will randomly burst into song?"

After saying this, Archer expected them to reprimand him, because he realized he had been a little rude, but they did not. On the contrary, Elsa actually laughed.

"You know, I don't really know how to explain that. Yes," she said, noticing the astonished look Archer gave her, "we actually do. We don't really know why, but some sort of instinct inside us makes us sing at important parts of our life."

They did not show signs of joking, so Archer assumed they were a hundred percent serious. Hopefully, this odd instinct to sing never touched Archer, as he knew his singing voice was in competition with that of a dying goat with lung cancer, and he would try to spare his friends from that excruciating earrape, which was hardly noble, it is just simple manners not to torture people.

"So anyways," Elsa broke the silence, "you said there was something you needed to talk to us about. What is it?"

Archer took a breath.

"Yes, and this has to do with the magic, because I've never been able to do this before, never felt like anything strange was going on… and now…"

He studied his hands as if waiting for residual magic to show itself. While nothing strange happened to his hands, he could still feel the slight power and electricity in the muscles and bones through his body, with the focus point being the hands.

"The thing we need to discuss… well, something made us come here, and I don't think it was to destroy one spirit. There's a reason we were called here, a reason I can do magic now… I thought, you know, since you two have witnessed magic for your whole life you might be able to help us."

Elsa studies him for a minute, as if trying to figure out how best to tell him he had a potentially deadly disease.

"I'm sorry, but I don't really know how to help with this. I think there is definitely a reason magic brought you here, but as to why, I could never guess accurately…

"My best guess is that something important is about to happen, something … threatening, that we could only succeed with your help. It's strange… for a while now my powers have been telling me almost nothing, and it used to never stop talking to me, it got a little unbearable. Now, it just feels empty, but it seems as if magic isn't ignoring me for a reason. Something is forcing magic apart from us. Today, though, about thirty minutes before you showed up, I felt a single… force of some sort, a feeling as if something was giving a single word through a prison, but this time, it's like a breath, as if magic had been imprisoned and reached out one last time, giving as much power into its breath as possible. That may be magic choosing you two as it's rescuers."

Emma swallowed. Archer understood what she was feeling, and he felt the same way. The fact that magic - out of billions of people - chose them, two middle schoolers, one of which was the least popular and most hated kid in the school to rescue it… it was too much to fathom, and definitely too good to be true. It also put a huge weight on their shoulders. They were not responsible for the date of reality as they knew it, and would determine if their future would even happen. If the world ended, if it came to that, it would be their fault.

There was a clear minute of silence before Archer broke it by saying, "So, what we're guessing is that we need to… rescue magic? How exactly does one rescue magic? And, this is a serious assumption, so if we have this wrong, everything will go wrong, and we'll all be responsible."

Elsa nodded. "It's a long shot," she agreed, "but if we are correct, there is little time. I know we just met you, but if there's one thing my magic's telling me, it's that we can trust you. I can't ask that you throw yourself on one of our deadly quests, we couldn't ask that of you-"

"We'll do it," Emma interrupted. "At least I will. I don't know about Archer but…"

She looked at him, waiting for an answer. She sounded casual enough, but the look she gave him said, I need you. Come with me. Please.

"Of course I'll go," he intoned as if it were obvious, "the only question is whether you two are okay with joining two teenagers you just met from 200 years in the future on a potentially deadly quest to gods know where to save reality?"

Elsa smirked and seemed to fight an urge to laugh. "No," she replied, "but us three are okay with joining two teenagers we just met from 200 years in the future on a potentially deadly quest to gods know where to save reality."

Emma frowned. "Three?" She asked hesitantly.

Elsa nodded. "Three," she repeated, "We're not going anywhere without the King," she said.

"My husband," continued Anna. "and not only would he be extremely annoyed if he didn't come, he will be really valuable to the team. Is that okay, that Kristoff accompanies us into our… 'journey', I would say?"

"That's fine," Archer agreed, "but there is one thing we have to do first."

"And that is?" questioned Anna.

"We have to prepare. Do you guys have an armory in Arendelle?"