A new chapter, somewhat late on Sunday. I considered publishing it tomorrow evening, but... no.

Thanks loads to Night's Flower, the Bluegayle, SpiritMusician, HarryPotterForLife7, hurricaneclaw, Aquarius-Otter, Oniongrass, seenlee93, Verachime, Petaltailify97, WildHeart, and Person for your lovely reviews!
Thanks as well to silvernight01, flying-chipmunk, , it's pronounced 'lowlight, and again to seenlee93 and Verachime for your favorites and alerts!

Chapter ahoy!

1846

"Looks like rain, Al."

Shrugging on his warmer winter coat, Alfred stepped out the cabin door, and was greeted by the fresh, damp smell of a coming storm. The air was cold, however, and crisper than normal, biting his cheeks in a way it didn't normally.

"Do you think it'll snow?" he asked George, who had paused just outside the cabin. In their four previous winters in the Willamette Valley, it had snowed fairly little, something Alfred found himself liking after so many years of east coast blizzards. He still shivered every time he recalled Valley Forge.

George just shrugged, and pulled his scarf tighter. "Maybe. I dunno. The cabin'll hold up either way, an' we've got enough food for awhile at least."

That was certainly true. After the first year of land clearing and struggling to get any more than a meager number of plants to actually grow, Sam had gotten the hang of farming, and now the Atkins land yielded a fairly generous harvest every year. True to his earlier promise, Alfred had stayed on with the little family, and helped them build the cabin they still lived in.

It was a modest building, made only of logs, mud, and wooden pegs, and it still only had two rooms. But it had a sturdy roof and enough space for three beds, a table, and a hearth, so they called it home.

Alfred and George set off for the town, an ever-growing settlement on the banks of the Willamette River that everyone called Oregon City. With only a few mills, stores, and a post office, it wasn't much of a city, but it was the next-best thing.

The population of the area certainly had increased since they'd first arrived, and even in early January, just after Christmas, people were out in full force. Particularly, Alfred supposed, because the courier from the Dalles had come earlier that day.

"I'd best be gettin' that fabric Luce wanted… meet ya back here in a half-hour?"

Alfred nodded absently as George waved and hurried off toward one of the town's stores. As he grew farther and farther away, Alfred squinted to try to see him, and was vaguely alarmed to realize that he couldn't, that George represented only a gray smudge in a sea of similarly-colored smudges.

This lack of vision was something fairly new. He had started to notice it last spring, with things just getting a bit fuzzy around the edges, but by Christmas Alfred found himself unable to see anything more than ten feet away.

Am I getting old?

Shaking his head, Alfred tried to dispel the thought. Of course he was old, but he certainly looked no different, so what exactly was causing his sight to abruptly fail?

Pushing his way into the familiar store of Westcott and Sons, he was greeted by a red smudge behind the brown smudge that was the counter. It neared, solidifying into a grinning Donald Finnegan.

"Mr. Jones! It's nice to see you again!"

Alfred laughed at the title, which had become something of a running joke, while looking around to ensure that Marietta Westcott wasn't in. She still hadn't gotten over his "miracle," and gushed about it every time she saw him. It was all rather embarrassing.

"You too, Donald. What's got everyone in a tizzy today?"

"You haven't heard?" the redhead exclaimed, sounding incredulous. "Just look!" He waved an arm at the bulletin board behind the counter. Clearly, there was something important there, but Alfred couldn't make it out. Leaning over the counter, he squinted, willing the posters to become clear, but they continued to waver until he gave up.

"What's it say?"

Donald gave him an odd look. "Can't you read it? We've got a new state! Our government up and decided to annex that Texas place down south!"

It was Alfred's turn to be incredulous. "A new state? We just… took part of Mexico?"

"Yep! I don't know what's so special about it, just a lot of sand in my opinion, but our government seems to want it. Apparently, negotiations have been going on for a while, but it's official as of December 29th." His enthusiasm tapered off a bit as he saw Alfred, still squinting to no avail.

"You really can't see that?" Donald inquired softly. Alfred shook his head, and ran a hand through his hair.

"Yeah… I don't know what's wrong."

"Have you considered getting glasses? I think Harris down at the general store just got some from back east. Maybe you should go try some on."

That was sounding better and better to Alfred. "Yeah. Maybe I should." He turned, a new purpose in mind. "I'll see you later, Donald!"

The redhead waved, his figure distorting as Alfred walked away, and made for Harris's shop down the street. Entering, he greeted the man and wasted no time.

"Glasses? I think I do have some," Harris said, stroking his bushy red beard in thought. "They're kept in the back, to prevent people from breaking them, you know. But since when have you needed them, Alfred?"

Alfred smiled ruefully but didn't answer as Harris presented him with several pairs to choose from. One round pair did almost nothing, another made his head hurt, and a third felt so fragile in his hands he was sure they'd shatter if he so much as put them on. Then he chose a thin-rimmed square pair, placed them carefully on his nose, and bit back a gasp as the world resolved around him into a place much clearer than before.

"I'll take them!"

_V~-~-~V_

One winter day in 1848, Alfred woke, blinking sleepily at the rough-hewn beams of the cabin ceiling from his homemade mattress was unprepared for the sudden, undeniable urge to go to California that hit him before he even had time to form a coherent thought.

When he mentioned it during breakfast shortly after, Lucretia had peered at him with that reserved suspicion she'd developed over the past few years, Sam looked faintly amused, and George had told him he was bonkers.

But the urge wouldn't go away. Alfred recognized it from years ago as something he'd gotten used to, a feeling in the pit of his stomach and his chest and the back of his mind, directing his every thought south to the territory that was still, technically, a part of Mexico.

So he badgered George for weeks, because George was crazy and George was his best friend and George would eventually agree to a new adventure, especially once planting season came along and Sam started getting antsy. But judging by the way he glanced in Lucretia's direction every time Alfred approached him about it, she'd gotten to him first.

"But it'd be fun," Alfred said, trying very, very hard not to whine. "It'd be a new place, and you always say how much you hate planting corn. Wasn't adventure what you came out here for in the first place?"

George's opinion was unchangeable until two months later, when confirmed word of gold finally reached Oregon territory. Excited, the younger Catron had run back to the homestead from town, brandishing the latest news wildly over his head.

"Al, buddy, you were right all along! California's the place to be!"

"Excellent," Lucretia snapped. "When are you leaving?"

George looked mildly alarmed at the venom in her voice. "Luce…? Who said anythin' about leavin'?"

"Oh, don't you joke with me, John Madison Catron, junior. You know as well as I that when you get an idea in your head, you act on it without thinking of the consequences… especially when he's involved." She jerked her hand in an abruptly aborted gesture towards Alfred.

"It's not like that, Luce! Sure, Al's got grand plans, but who said I was in on 'em? I just said he was right all along about California, an' that maybe we could consider… investin', in a place where there's gold?"

Sam was glancing helplessly between them as Lucretia burst, "But what about here?! Haven't you invested enough in this place to even care that you'll be leaving it? That we'll have no one to help Sam in the fields if the both of you go? It's probably all a hoax, and you'll be throwing away everything you have for it!"

"It's not a hoax!"

The three others in the small cabin all turned to look at Alfred.

"And why," Lucretia asked icily, "is it not a hoax?"

"It just…" Alfred paused, wondering how to explain it. "It just isn't, I know it's not."

"And how are you so certain of this?"

"I just know," Alfred said, quietly now, looking anywhere but at Lucretia Atkins.

"You just… know. Fine. My brother is going to leave to California, hundreds of miles away, on a whim and a probable rumor, because you just know." Alfred winced.

"Then," she continued, her voice rising in pitch, "should I just chalk that up as another part of your unnaturalness?"

Shocked, Alfred's gaze whipped back to the woman, standing with her hands on her hips in her forest-green dress for winter wear. An altogether unimposing figure, but it was her words that did the damage. George and Sam looked just as surprised as he, staring at Lucretia as well.

"Why are you so baffled?" she asked, turning on her family. "Don't tell me you haven't wondered yourselves! He claims to have traveled across the country before, but his apparent age is far too young, and he survived being crushed under a wagon without even a scar to show for it! I'm even willing to bet that you two haven't even noticed that he hasn't changed a bit since we first met him, and that was nearly ten years ago!"

Lucretia spun slowly back to face Alfred, who knew his face was utterly devoid of color. "You may have Marietta fooled into thinking you're some kind of miracle," she said, her words bitingly cold, "but I am not so easily deceived."

"For all we know, he was cursed by some witch to remain a child, or is some sort of sorcerer himself!"

"Why don't you get older, Alfie?"

Knowing gray, piercing blue, chocolate brown, and eyes the exact color of his own, all studying, all wondering.

"Fine," Alfred heard himself say, but his mind was far away. "I'll just… go then. By myself." Like always.

Moving almost in slow motion, he gathered his things, tossing them together in a leather satchel and shrugging on his coat. Throwing open the door he'd helped build, he marched away from the cabin and firmly out of the lives of the Atkinses.

At least, he thought so. But at the edge of town, he heard someone shout his name.

"Al!" George ran up beside him, jacket dangling off one shoulder, bag in hand. "Wait up, buddy!"

"George? What're you doing?"

"I'm comin' with ya, stupid."

"Didn't you listen to your sister?" Alfred snapped. "She doesn't want me here, and she doesn't want you following."

"She didn't mean all that, ya know," George said. "Luce can sound awful sometimes, but she doesn't really want ya gone."

"Really? I think different."

George paused. "Okay, so maybe she does. She's always been the superstitious type, an' ya know that, but there's no way I'm lettin' my best bud run off to California without me! I've always been wantin' an adventure, after all."

Alfred found himself grinning in spite of his dampened mood. "An adventure, huh?"

"Yeah! We'll find loads of gold, an' we'll bring it back an' never have to want nothin' ever again! Heck, we could even buy out that idiot Westcott!"

Alfred's grin widened. "Sounds like a plan!"

_V~-~-~V_

It was a few months before Alfred and George reached their destination: the rapidly expanding city of San Francisco.

They'd taken the Siskiyou Trail south from Oregon City, traversing rugged mountains on horseback for part of the way, on foot the rest, before George finally exclaimed, "Water! I see water!" and San Francisco Bay appeared over the hill, glittering and blue and so very close.

They'd had to take a boat to get to the city proper, which had sprung up on the hilly outcropping between the bay and the ocean. The people who walked the dusty streets were all men, grizzled and worn, hailing from anywhere nearby, hoping to get their hands on some gold before the rest of the country showed up. Hastily erected stone and wooden buildings littered the slopes, housing stores and inns and bars, all serving the growing population and recently arrived prospective miners at exorbitant prices.

"This's madness!" George exclaimed. "Crazy nonsense!" He stormed out of one of the stores to where Alfred was waiting in the street.

"We don' have enough money with the both of us combined to buy squat! How do they expect ta get anythin' done if they're robbin' ya blind?!"

So Alfred had gone in to talk to the shopkeeper, a gruff man who clearly was in the wrong line of work, and wheedled the price down to something more reasonable. He blamed it on his natural way with his people when the man almost immediately warmed up to him.

"I like you, kid," he said, "and this gold business is for idiots. Interested in working here instead? Selling to gullible people is where all the money's at."

Alfred politely declined, saying that he'd like to try his hand at mining first, maybe later?

He still left the shop with a pair of spades and gold pans for far less than the advertised price, greeting a gawking George.

"How'd ya do that, Al?"

Alfred grinned. "People just like me. You, on the other hand…"

George punched him in the shoulder, but was smiling ear to ear. "Off ta the mountains then, are we? The gold's a-waitin'!"

As they marched confidently away, neither with any idea where exactly they were going (but confident that first sleep, and then gold, would be there), a steamboat pulled into a San Francisco harbor filled with sails and masts, belching black smoke into the clear sky afternoon sky, carrying the latest group of people down from Sacramento to the capital of the gold-hunting world.

_V~-~-~V_

Miles away, on the other side of the mountains from Gold Country, an enterprising young man greeted his latest customers, arriving at his shop weary from the months-long journey they were so close to completing. Part of the Mormon settlement in the foothills, the young man, whose name was James, was proud of the success of his business thus far, achieved with little spending on his part. All he had to do was pick up the various articles wagoners left behind, and the rest took care of itself.

A young lady entered, looking around with the air of someone at a particularly fascinating tourist spot. James thought she was rather pretty, even the small mole to the right of her nose.

"Excuse me," she said, "but I was wondering if you had any handkerchiefs? Mine was lost a ways back, and I haven't had the opportunity to replace it."

James's brain took a moment to catch up. "Oh, erm, handkerchiefs? Yes, we have those, just over here…"

The lady picked up each of the handkerchiefs individually, rubbing their fabric between her fingers and muttering about quality and fringes and stitching all the while.

"This one's rather nice," she finally said, in a louder voice now.

"What?"

She smiled at James, which only made his thoughts get even more jumbled. "I said, this one's rather nice. The fabric is of fine quality, well-cared for yet not heavily used, definitely owned by someone of the upper class, not even to mention the monogramming…"

James caught sight of the initials, a looping MW in the corner. He remembered finding this one, a few years before, yet he'd been unable to sell it precisely because of the rather uncommon set of initials.

"Are those yours? Your initials, I mean."

"Oh, no," the lady said, smiling again. "My name is Olive Rush. I just have a particular fondness for pretty and useful things. How much would you like for it?"

"Eh? Oh…" James paused for a moment, considering for just a bit longer. "You can have it," he finally said, "I've been trying to sell it for years, but you're the first who's shown interest."

"Truly? That's lovely of you. I'll be off now!" She swept out of the shop so fast James wondered faintly if she'd actually been there all. Shrugging himself into motion, he moved back behind his counter and wondered faintly where that lady was going.

"Olive, huh?"

It would be a few days before he realized that two additional handkerchiefs were missing, and another week before he admitted it was probably she who absconded with them.

_V~-~-~V_

"Got anythin'?"

"Nothing. You?"

"I found a rock earlier that was kinda shiny, but it was just wet."

Alfred set his shovel down and rolled his eyes. "You're standing in a river, George."

"Don't ya think I know that? I'm soaked clean to my skivvies! An' it's not really a river, it's more of a creek sorta thing—"

Alfred sighed. "You sure you're not just doing it wrong?"

"How can ya sift through water wrong?!"

"Fightin' already?"

Alfred and George both looked up in the direction of the voice. A rather rotund, bearded man stood there, fitting every mental image Alfred had with his flannel shirt, jeans, and pick slung over his shoulder.

"Fightin's no good, 'specially among friends!" he grinned toothily through his red beard. "And yer problem with yer findin' gold is there's no gold here to be found, didn't ye know?"

"No, we didn't," George retorted. "How'd you? You've been here for less'n a minute!"

The man hefted his pick off his shoulder, approaching Alfred with great booted steps, until he suddenly swung his pick down, whooshing straight by Alfred's face as he scrambled backwards.

"What was that?! Are you trying to kill me?!" he exclaimed, but the man paid him no mind. Instead, he pulled the pick from the ground and began licking it around the edges in a motion that looked very well-practiced.

"Nothin'. See?"

George's mouth dropped open. "Ya can taste gold?!" he burst incredulously.

"O'course! I'm the greatest prospector the world's ever seen! I know gold when I taste it!"

"The greatest?" asked Alfred.

"Well… the greatest in a five-mile radius, give or take a few," he said, frowning faintly. Then he grinned again and said, "The name's Cornelius! What's ye say about a little business proposition?"

_V~-~-~V_

Across an ocean, the news of gold on the American continent reached the ears of a certain black-haired man.

"Of course, I discovered it long before that stupid Spain," he muttered, a bit resentfully. "But why would I care about someplace far far away when I have everything I need right here?"

His boss looked up from the pile of papers before him, studying him through narrowed eyes. "Exactly. Why would you want to go anywhere when our great country has everything under the sun of any importance at all?"

"Except giraffes."

"Excuse me?"

The younger-looking of the pair looked back at his boss. "They brought a giraffe to the palace several years ago, all the way from Africa. We had parades and everything." Quieter, he added, "It was fun. I never get any fun anymore."

His boss gave an exasperated sigh. "Didn't you go to the mountains to see the pandas just last month? Wasn't that fun?"

"Yes, but no one came with me, aru. Kiku always loved the mountains, but now he won't see me. And you chased Hong Kong away too, and gave him to that stupid England!"

"Stop whining about your so-called siblings!" his boss exclaimed. "You're always complaining about them leaving you, every single day!"

"You never had your siblings all leave without so much as a goodbye."

"That's because I'm the Emperor, and my siblings are all ungrateful leeches, spending my money without a thought. Maybe I should just order them all killed…"

"Like you killed Prince Yiwei?"

"I forbid you from mentioning him!"

The younger-looking man stuck his tongue out at his country's leader.

"Stop being childish, Wang. You are far too old for such plebian actions." He paused momentarily. "Maybe you would fit in with all the peasants leaving the country after all…"

"Yes, yes I would. And I wouldn't be bothering you anymore, and I'd be able to avoid Russia, and all those stupid Europeans with their illegal imports, and I could have fun."

The Daoguang Emperor waved a dismissive hand. "If you really wish to go that badly, go. But you'd be leaving your country and your people behind in a time of struggle…"

"I've lived four thousand years, aru!" the younger-looking man exclaimed. "Believe me, this is no struggle at all. And if you don't get through it, one of your descendants will, it's all the same to me."

The Emperor looked mildly offended at this, but waved his brush again. "Off with you, brat. Explore this new continent with its gold, and you will come to see that I am correct: these foreigners mean nothing but trouble, and China already has all it needs."

V/~-~-~\V

Chapter complete, and history first!

The annexation of Texas by the US government was formally agreed to by the government of Texas on December 29th, 1845, though the plan had been in the works for months. The annexation, as you can imagine, made Mexico quite upset, and prompted the Mexican-American War, which lasted from 1846-1848.
Gold was first discovered in California by James Marshall at Sutter's Mill on January 24th, 1848. Confirmed word of gold reached various places in California, Oregon, and Hawaii first, prompting a mass influx of people from there before the East Coast even figured it out. The Siskiyou Trail went from what is today Portland to San Francisco, and is today known as Interstate 5.
Gold mining equipment was sold at ridiculous prices to miners all hoping to strike it rich in the mountains, and in the end, the real winners of the Gold Rush were not those who actually got gold, but the shopkeepers and various middle men.
San Francisco went from a sleepy place of only about 200 people to over 30000 as a result of the Gold Rush, with San Francisco Bay becoming one of the most prominent ports in the world thanks to its natural harbor.
Many Chinese peasants traveled to California in search of gold as well. We'll have more on them later.
The Daoguang Emperor was the eighth emperor of the Qing Dynasty and ruled from 1820 to his death in 1850. Under his reign, China had major issues with the opium trade, which had grown to 30,000 chests a year. Technologically and militarily inferior to the European powers, lost the First Opium War and surrendered Hong Kong in 1842.
Daoguang also struck and killed his 23-year-old son in 1831. In the same year, an attempt was made to usurp the throne, but was unsuccessful.

I told you the handkerchief would be back!

And that's about it. Please look forward to the next chapter, featuring a continuation of the Gold Rush and an encounter with China!