I didn't know what to do. I really didn't know what to do. What are you supposed to do when a crazy lady shoots you then asks how long you have been dead?
"Negative five minutes," I wheeze. Violette chuckles loudly, which fits in well with the rest of her voice so far.
"I see you're a smart-ass. No, we both know you were dead long before you walked through my door. Firstly," She reaches into my uniform pocket, pulling out a partially empty can of spray deodorant. "You wear way too much of this stuff. More than enough to mask the smell of decay even from a Faunus." Shit.
Violette takes a sharpie marker from her left lab coat pocket and sticks it right into the bullet hole in my chest. She draws it back out and points at the gunk stuck to it, "Your blood is a dark brown, barely fluid. That takes at least a week of decay." Fuck.
She reaches into a different pocket and takes out a scroll. She opens an app and shows me… Me. In my dorm bathroom. Looking at the holes in my chest where ribs had poked through.
Violette raised an eyebrow, "Need I say more?" I shook my head. She started talk-shouting again. "Even if I had been wrong in my suspicions," She held up the prototype box gun thing, "This right here shows a complete lack of pulse, breathing, and body heat. Along with lower than average neural activity."
Great. Now I'm not only dead, I'm also a dumb-ass.
"Fine, I admit it. I'm dead. Now what?" I say, standing up confrontationally. Yeah, I don't really have a lot of common sense. Taunt the lady with the gun. Luckily, I didn't gain another bullet hole.
Violette looks at me, "I want to know how long you have been dead, what your era was like pre and post disaster, and if I can have this for my collection of historical artifacts." Era? She holds up a familiar book. The book I spend decades wandering around with on Earth. The book I left in my rocket locker. Okay, so first she stalks me, then shoots me, now starts stealing my stuff? This is a mugging!
"Whatever. Take it. What do you mean era?" I put a hand over the hole in my chest, so it was a bit easier to talk now. The obviously crazy doctor grinned and walked over to her desk, putting my book who knows where.
"Obviously, the time you were from before you touched a glowing meteorite." What? She knows about the meteor? Time to play dumb.
"Time? No, I'm from the present like everyone else." Okay, that sounded suspicious even to my ears. Seriously though, how would a person say that they weren't a time traveler… You know what? Never mind. Guess I wasn't just playing dumb.
Violette sighed in exasperation. Even her sighs were loud, "Alright. You are obviously just going to keep playing dumb, so I'm just going to pretend you already stopped and asked an intelligent question." Hey!
The doctor tapped a code onto the top of her desk, and a large holographic screen appeared in front of the papers on her back wall. She tapped on an apparently invisible keypad on her desk a few more times, and an image of several colored rocks appeared, each of them with jagged edges and slight porosity. "These are samples of unstable, hyper charged matter."
The screen shifted to a black screen with three horizontal lines, one above the other. "This is an extremely simplified diagram of, for lack of a better term, existence." Alright. The universe is made up of three lines. Got it.
"Each 'dimension' as others would call them, is actually all the matter and energy in a space vibrating at a different frequency. You don't notice it because all of it moves in sync. We are here, at eight light-meters per cycle."
I interrupted her. "Light meters? That sounds kind of made up."
"SHUT UP! I invented it, I'll call it what I want! Anyway, distance is measured in light-years, so naturally light-meters would be the amount of time it takes light to travel a meter, about three times ten to the negative eighth power seconds." We're getting a little off topic.
"Anyway, slight off topic tangent." Oh, the horror! I think like the crazy lady.
The word 'us' appeared on the middle line, followed by '8 light-meters per cycle. (lm/c'
"Immediately above and below us are eighteen lm/c and two lm/c respectively." The corresponding numbers appeared on the corresponding lines. When did she set this presentation up?
"Now, one would naturally assume that each so-called dimension would be governed by its own unique laws of physics or lack thereof." I'll bet ten lien she says its wrong. "And they would be absolutely right!" Damn it.
"Our lower vibrational neighbor that I'll dub the second dimension is not governed by a fluid concept of time. The heat death of the universe could occur a millionfold for us, and not even a moment will have passed in the second dimension. This is where you were."
Okay, now I was more than a little confused. In the past fifteen minutes I've been shot, lectured on some physics concept by a crazy lady who is way too loud, and told that I'm a stupid undead dimension jumping time traveler.
"Why is this relevant?" I ask. There's probably more important information here that we could skip to.
Violette lets out a frustrated groan and walks over to the holographic screen. "You touch pretty rock," the screen changed back to the various colored rocks. "You go here," the screen changed back to the dimensions, and she points at the bottom one. "You wait millennia, oops, I mean really long time, then you go back here," she points at the line representing our dimension.
Violette backs away from the hologram, and it disappears. I know that she's mocking me, but I find it funnier than anything. Aww, she thinks I'm a baby!
She walks over and points at me. "I know you dead. I know you not from this time period. I see you guys before." This gets my attention. Other zombies? Ugh, ridiculous word. Other undead? I ask, "Others like me?"
She backs up, done mocking me. "Not exactly. The others weren't interested in having a nice chat. I didn't get too worked up about it though. They were only after my brains, didn't care about my looks or how that made me feel."
"Like a piece of meat?"
She flashes a real grin. "No, like a badass." Her face abruptly changes as she refocuses. "What I want to know is when you died, how you died, how long you have been dead, and what the world was like pre-disaster." She asks in a tone of scientific curiosity.
"I don't remember my death or anything prior, just my name. My best guess is early on, because things like power plants were still running, and there were less people every day. I died about one hundred seventy-six years prior to waking up in a dumpster in downtown Vale." Yeah, my mind had cleared substantially over the time since my aura was unlocked.
The doctor frowned. "That is rather disappointing. Do tell me if you remember something!" Why is she shouting again?
"I will," I assured her.
"Good. Now, about your aura problem." She digs around in her lab coat pocket for something, "Your aura is almost entirely dedicated to keeping you 'alive', so you won't receive its regular benefits naturally. However, eighteenium was used to create aura so it should be able to augment it." What? She pulls a cylinder out of her pocket, roughly the size of her thumb. She pulled my hand away from my bullet hole and shoved the cylinder inside.
Immediately, I feel a change. I am stronger. I am faster. I am powerful. I am…
"Remnant to Jaune!" Violette shouts even by her standards right in my face. Seriously, that deserved a second exclamation point.
"What?"
"You started to phase out of existence for a second. Must have to do with the eighteenium type. You're fine." Phasing out of existence doesn't sound fine! And what is eighteenium?
She continued talking, "Well, we have spent enough time here today. Don't forget to give me any details you remember. You are dismissed." She turned back to her desk and started digging through papers. No way to be clearer about a dismissal than that. I turned and started walking away. I started checking my newest injury. There was no newest injury. The hole was already gone. Wow, aura was awesome when it worked properly.
As I opened the door to leave, Violette called out to me. "Hey, Jaune," I turned to look at her.
"What?"
"The rock that brought you here, what color was it?"
I thought about it. "From a distance, white. Up close, it didn't glow any particular color, it just was."
Violette nodded, and I closed the door. I knew that I was going to need my scroll's map of Beacon to find my way back to my dorm, so I brought it out. As I unlocked it, I noticed the time. 4:17. Well, now it says 4:18, but still…
How?
Author Note: I will try to progressively type more for each chapter, but don't necessarily expect story quality to increase. This is entirely for practice. Disclaimer: Pretty much all of the science mentioned this chapter is complete bogus that I made up while trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about. I guess I lied in an earlier chapter, OC's will play a large part in this story because they don't constrain story flow to such tight predefined parameters. Hope you enjoyed, otherwise you are welcome to stop reading.