A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

Epilogue – 4

Melissa Verianna looked at the counter, as a familiar darkness clawed at her mind.

It had been a week.

An entire week since her daughter, Alice Verianna, disappeared from her bedroom in the middle of the night. Several other parts of nearby houses and streets had gone missing as well - much to complete and utter confusion of the police. Nobody seemed to understand what had happened, or why so much of their environment had disappeared while everyone was asleep. The official statement was that there must have been some kind of gas leak, which led to an explosion and damaged nearby structures.

Nobody could explain what gas could have possibly caused the incident, or how the pattern of disappearing materials - and people - could have possibly been the result of gas. Several houses had lost seemingly random support beams from inside, while every other part of the house remained completely untouched. The official explanation made no sense, and plenty of people were annoyed, but since it was a relatively minor issue most of the neighborhood had already started moving on with their lives.

Except for one family.

Her own.

Because there was only one person that had gone missing or hurt in the entire incident, and it was her daughter.

Melissa rubbed her aching head. She didn’t know what to think, or what to do anymore. The police didn’t know where her daughter went, or even where to start looking - and Melissa was just as clueless as they were. Nothing she investigated made any sense. The situation didn’t make sense. Everything felt hopeless and meaningless now that the little light of her life was gone, and she had no idea how to get her daughter back or where was. Sometimes, she dreamed that her daughter had been kidnapped by some sinister people and was calling for help.

Melissa didn’t put much stock in dreams, but the idea that her daughter might be out there somewhere and might need her help remained stuck in her mind. She was tired of running in circles, trying to find a clue that didn’t exist.

She heard the kitchen door open again, and a moment later, a tall man with black hair and brown eyes entered the kitchen. The slight tension in her shoulders disappeared as her husband walked into the room and gently wrapped her in a hug.

“Any word from the police yet?” He asked.

She shook her head.

“They still don’t know where she is. No word on whether it was a kidnapper, or if she got thrown into another area by some kind of shock wave or something… even though an explosion still makes no sense.” Melissa shook her head. “Whatever happened last week, they still don’t know where she is, or even if she’s still alive. If she’s dead, they still haven’t found her…” Melissa’s voice broke off as she felt the familiar, swirling sense of emptiness rise up in her stomach. If her daughter was dead, she didn’t know what she would do. She didn’t even know when these questions would be resolved, because the police still had no clue what had happened! They couldn’t coordinate rescue attempts, or apply medical assistance to her daughter if she needed it, or do anything at all. She felt a wave of impotent rage wash over her, before her husband patted her on the back. She took a few deep breaths to calm herself down. The police were doing their best. Getting angry at them wouldn’t solve the situation, or help her daughter, or do anything at all.

“Sit down for a minute, dear. You haven’t been sleeping well. If an emergency that you can help with does come up, you need to be in your best condition,” said her husband.

His words made sense, and Melissa really wasn’t in a great mental or physical condition at the moment. She started looking around for a chair to sit in. Just as she located one in the corner, she heard a faint popping noise. It sounded strangely similar to the hiss of an airlock being opened, letting the air pressure between a sealed space and the rest of the world normalize.

Then, a moment later, Melissa heard the voice of a surprised girl speaking.

“What is that popping noise - oh, air pressure difference. Well, at least it worked. The disease-scrubbing seems to be working as well. Looks like I also arrived, unlike my predecessor. I’m back!” 

Melissa blinked in shock, and tried to understand what was happening. Whether her ears were playing tricks on her or not. Whether she was imagining things.

That voice sounded… an awful lot like her daughter.

She looked at her husband. His eyes were wide with shock - just like hers probably were.

So she wasn’t imagining things?

A moment later, loud thumping sounds emitted from upstairs. It sounded like someone running through the hallway of the house. A moment later, she heard a loud knocking sound on one of the doors, followed by the sound of someone yanking open a door with just a bit too much force.

“Are they gone?” said the voice that sounded more and more like her missing daughter.

There were several more thumping sounds, before the door to the kitchen swung open. A moment later, a girl walked into the room. She had a head full of messy brown hair. She was a bit on the shorter side, although she looked a bit different than when Melissa had last seen her. It was as if in a mere week, she had aged a few years. Of course, her physique hadn’t changed that much - she was older and more mature looking, but not that much. But the look in her eyes had changed. It was no longer sparkling with enthusiasm, innocence, and naivety. Instead, there was a hard edge to the look in her eyes - a certain willingness to reciprocate violence, and a certain guardedness. It was a look that should have felt foreign on her daughter’s face.

But even though Alice had changed, there was still no way Melissa would ever mistake her daughter.

Alice’s eyes brightened as they alighted upon Melissa.

“Mom! Dad!” She yelled, before she rushed towards them.

Melissa finally felt the pieces click into place. She wasn’t dreaming.

Melissa surged towards her daughter and then folded her into a crushing hug. She wasn’t quite sure why her daughter looked a few years older now, or why the look in her eyes had changed so much. But right now, the most important thing in the world was to give her daughter a hug. Everything else could wait.

Alice giggled in her arms, and gently hugged her back.

“What happened to you? Where were you?” asked her husband. “Are you okay? Do you need medical attention? Hold on - I’ll call 911 right away. Now that you’re back, we need to get you checked out for -”

“Relax, I’m fine,” said Alice. To Melissa’s shock, as her husband tried to punch numbers into the phone, the phone suddenly floated above his head, just out of reach.

Melissa blinked in surprise as the phone defied gravity for a moment, before a familiar, heavy weight crashed into her thoughts.

Of course she was dreaming. There was no way her daughter would just show up after a week, safe and sound.

Alice glanced at Melissa’s face, and Melissa’s eyes, which were locked onto the floating phone.

“It’s a long story,” said Alice. “But the first thing I should probably tell you about might take a bit of convincing. So… long story short, magic is real.”

A moment later, before Melissa could react, she realized that her feet were no longer touching the ground. Instead, both she and her husband were now hovering a few centimeters off the ground, as if someone had simply tampered with the local gravity.

She waved her arms and legs in midair, and realized that they had no power to propel her around the room. She couldn’t change her position or move at all. There were no wires, or other obvious ways she could have been lifted into the air. She pinched herself. It hurt.

She wasn’t dreaming. Then her husband’s phone actually had started floating in midair? They had joined the phone? Her daughter was really back?

Melissa’s brain crashed.

Everything she knew about the world, everything that she had studied, rejected the notion that magic was real. She had spent her entire life believing this. She enjoyed stories with magic in them, of course - several fantasy series had a prominent place on the bookshelf in the living room. But she had never really believed that they were real. And yet, she was now floating in midair while her daughter, who was a few years older than she had been a week ago, looked at them.

“Put me down please,” said Melissa. Her voice was shaky.

Melissa felt her feet touch back onto the ground. A moment later, her husband joined her.

“What exactly happened in the time you were gone?” asked Melissa.

“A lot,” said Alice. She had a strange, nostalgic expression on her face. “That was… gosh, nearly fifty years ago for me now, I think? Right after I got teleported out of my bedroom by an… unfortunate interdimensional accident, I was dumped into the middle of the Illvarian wilderness. Ah, Illvaria is the country I’ve been staying in, by the way. Oh, I almost forgot - before I return, I need to go find that village that got teleported here a few decades ago. I should ask them whether they want to return home, first. Sorry, I’m getting distracted.

“Anyway, after my teleportation incident, I got some lucky breaks, got a few magic tutors, and eventually went to a magic academy. After that… well, the giant life support enchantment that kept the entirety of humanity alive in that world broke down, so I had to go fix it. That was a whole mess in and of itself, but it let me grasp some opportunities I might not have otherwise had access to. I even reached Immortality, which, uhh… I can see that I’m overwhelming you. Do you want to sit down?”

Melissa paused for a moment, as she considered Alice’s question. Did she want to sit down? The entire foundation of her understanding of reality was crashing down around her.

Did she want to sit down?

She very much wanted to sit down, in fact.

She finally made her way over to her chair and took a nice seat. Alice moved a bit closer to her, and then gave her another hug. This time, Melissa noticed details she had previously overlooked. Her daughter’s motions were very delicate. It was like Alice thought her mother was made of porcelain.

“Ahem. So, rewinding a bit - magic is real. Whatever happened within the past few days or weeks for you, for now, we will assume was caused by magic. We can sort through the exact incidents later and talk about it in more detail. But the very short explanation is that I got teleported to another world, saved the world, and came home with my magic intact. I am now… sort of like an archmage, if I wanted to super oversimplify things.”

Melissa nodded. Alice’s words were finally clicking in. There was a lot more to unpack. A lot more to think about. But her daughter’s words made sense.

“Can other people learn to use magic?” asked her husband, the biggest fantasy nerd out of the three of them.

“Oh, yes! If you’re interested, I can now give you a totally safe mana baptism to make you a mage. That’s been working for ages now - just needs some specialized equipment. We can talk about that later, though.”

Melissa felt all of the words finally connected in her mind, but they weren’t what was important.

At the end of the day, there was only one fact that mattered to her. Regardless of whether magic was real or not, regardless of what had happened - her daughter was finally home.