From the Parlor to the Joint (soundtrack for this scene, courtesy of EA and Jack Wall)
The rays of light shining through the tall French windows of one of the many studies in the citadel cast their warmth gently upon an old oak desk in the corner of the room. The top of the desk was covered with tall stacks of books, titles and tombs of many genres. On each side of the desk sat two figures, their white and gold robes blooming in the fractal lighting. One of them had his nose stuck in the pages of an obscure title, one of cosmology and astrophysics. Only the top of his ginger head was visible above the hardback covers and frayed pages. The other individual at the desk, a golden-haired youth with an innocent face, but deceptively experienced blue eyes, leaned across the top with his chin in behind overlapped arms. It was evident that he was bored stiff, while his companion was lost in the written words of science.
Several minutes of a still scene passed until the ginger-headed man set the book aside, carefully balancing it on top of a wavering stack of other volumes. When he was sure that the tower wasn't going to tilt and collapse onto his lap, he stretched his arms behind his neck and let out a loud yawn. "Well that turned out to be quite droll," he said in a mild British accent.
The teen across from him sat up and rub his dazedly rubbed his eyes. Lifting back the cuff of his loose sleeve, he checked the hands on his wristwatch and said, "Three hours, Darcy? I figured you were actually enjoying yourself." The youth's accent was American, but there was a hint of a foreign tongue buried the well-trained vocals. "Did you manage to find anything?"
"Yes...," Darcy said in reply, "and no."
"What does
that mean?"
The man named Darcy stood up from his seat at the desk and began to pace around the study, carefully stepping over or around several more piles of books that had been scattered in a disorganized fashion that only the man who owned them knew the pattern to. Darcy was the citadel's chief historian; and a damn good one at that, or so he prided himself as. His responsibility was to ensure the upkeep of all records for the people that he worked with. "We know that travel between one shadow realm and the next involves Sound - we've been doing it for centuries - but those are shadow realms,
not entire universes. For a long time we've always believed them to be one and the same thing, but our definitions were completely off." Darcy moved over to a stack that he had been looking for and picked up a recently read title, Parapsychology. "This book seems to be the most plausible of all the theories out concerning what we humans have come to call the 'multiverse'. Now according scientists like Tegmark and Everett, 'universes' are trans dimensional states of volume, each made up of both matter and anti-matter. Now we've come to call these shadow realms because many of them take on exact mirror images of our own reality. The reason why we can't find our target in these shadow realms, or 'universes', is because doppelgangers don't exist in these trans dimensional states. They exist in another spectrum of reality as we know it."
The youth he was speaking to was completely lost and simply returned a cute, confused look, as if he was an elementary math student that sat down in a college trigonometry lecture. "English, Darcy?" he finally mused.
Darcy placed the book back down on the stack and raised a hand to rub the stubble on his chin. "Okay... Look at it this way: shadow realms involve the material spaces that we can freely travel to and from using Sound. They're like physical rooms in a building. That
building is one reality. Let's now say that this building we are in is like a pizza parlor, and we decide that we want to go visit the burger joint down the road. Well we can't use Sound to get there, because there are no rooms that offer a similarly pressurized medium for the sound waves to travel through. Instead, we need to cause a different kind of rift; one that doesn't involve sound. Now what can easily travel through just about any medium? Light. As long as there is no obstruction that can physically block light frequencies, it can pass through a window of the pizza parlor - which will be our rift opening - down the street and into a window of the burger joint."
Jason sat up straight in his seat, now clearly more intrigued after Darcy's metaphor. "So," he began, "what does all of that have to do with psychology?"
"Well," Darcy replied, "if parapsychologists like William James were correct, then doppelgangers in these other realities will inherit fragments of memories and experiences from their other
copies across the different spectrums of reality."
"So, there's a chance that he will know who he is... or was?"
"In theory, yeah; but here's the issue with that: if you were to be able to help him
remember what he has not personally experienced, what will that do to his own psyche?
There was a moment of silence between the two. Eventually, the boy shrugged off Darcy's question and decided to address it later, changing the topic before the scene became too melancholy for his taste. "
If this is true, this whole idea of
multiple realities versus shadow realms or universes; what keeps them boxed up? Where's the order amongst the chaos? But more importantly, I should ask, can I expect these realities to be the same as our own?"
Darcy always had an answer to every question. Even if he became stumped, he would devote his attention to researching a solution and explanation, and then return with his best, most concrete answer. The historian wasn't normally one to only stick with an explanation involving the supernatural or the unknown, leaving the solution "to chance" or a "just because" theory. This was one of the rare moments, however, that he had no other choice but to leave it at that. "I don't know," he said, letting the words escape him like a dying man's last breath. "God, perhaps? As far as what you can expect to run into, sir; I'm not sure on that one either."
The boy stood up from his seat and began to walk quickly out of the room, the narrow white cape of his robe, clasped to his right shoulder flush to the seam of the standing collar, gliding low in the air behind him. Over the years, his robes and those of others like him, those known as the Sagestics, have evolved into a more modern style; exchanging elegance and tradition, for agility and tactical practicality. The new fittings still involved a sense of symbolized fashion, however, but allowed for adaptation in combat. A thin sash separated the double-layered robes that covered the upper legs and the silk vest over the torso. The robes themselves cut up the side in a reverse V, and then dipped low behind the legs to the backs of the knees. The front of the legs was left open, with the robes retracting into the sash for maximum leg movement. Pants were typical black, and only loose enough to allow the legs to breath and keep the rest of the body cool. Dark leather boots were equipped with a special light alloy on the front to act as shin guards. The toes of the boots were equipped with the same alloy for aiding in melee damage. Unlike the traditional robes of the past, the new outfits of the Sagestics had no hoods. Seeing no reason to conceal their personal identity, and noting that hoods in combat presented a danger to themselves by giving their opponent an opportunity to easily seize them by hand or take advantage of a lack of peripheral awareness, the hoods were removed from the design. The last piece of the robes, and one that was kept from the past tradition, was the use of gloves for grip and moderate protection.
When the youth approached the large wooden door leading out of the study, he stopped and let his hand rest on the knob. He turned his head over his shoulder and looked at Darcy, who already had his nose back in the pages of another book. "Thanks, Darcy," he said. "You've been a tremendous help."
Out of Character: About Horizon