10
Susie
Brad and I followed Christian on the next trip in, Cody stayed behind to time us for the two hours we would be there. An hour had passed in the real world while Christian was desperately trying to convince Cody this was a world we should be involved in. In our trip there, in the two hours we spent, Christian showed us all those allegedly amazing things he showed Cody. By the way, Cody thought I would like a red dress? I have red hair, I may dye it a different shade, but I actually do have red hair. And no girl who has red hair can rock a red dress as well as the people in that world thought I could. I mean, I did rock it, hell if I followed Christian’s example and actually fell to the temptations of that world I probably could have wrangled a prince into marriage while I was there. Wrangled a man who could have made all my dreams come true, but it would have been wrong to do, misleading, awful, downright evil when you think about it. Yes, I am talking about Christian right now, it was downright evil what he did later. I just want to say this to the men who are reading this, and for some reason if you’re reading this for the second time. It was evil, it was wrong, I don’t care what kind of defense Cody and Brad give you about how, “Oh, think about everything he’s been through, Oh, think about the position we put him in,” what he did to that girl was unforgivable, he took advantage of her, he-
I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself, I’m guess I’m sorry for being so pissed off at the worst thing I’ve ever seen a man do to a woman, and that’s a pretty high bar considering how awful the society that Christian thought he could escape from is. Let me get back on topic.
Brad and I spent two hours over there. He introduced us to all the same people he introduced Cody to. They thought it a bit odd, after introducing them to one of his friends he came back almost a day later with two others. They also thought our clothing odd, but Christian had a solution for that. Ironically both Cody and Brad were wearing Cornhusker’s shirts and that lead the people of the other world to think the symbol of a big bold and red letter N was some kind of marking of a hero from a distant land, that it was some holy symbol the grand Knights of Nebraska carried. To jocks like Cody and Brad it may as well have been, but it wasn’t, that was just another illusion that the other world put into Christian’s mind. The illusion that he was some hero, some prince, from a far-off land coming to deliver them from the evil we would soon find ourselves enveloped in.
I took my dress, my red dress that I heard Cody suggested. It was a nice dress, but when I wore it to court Somewhere Else I felt like I looked like a bottle of ketchup, not that that world even knew what ketchup was, but I still felt that way. Cody and Brad got some nice tunics that, honestly, they looked pretty stylish in. I however, got a dress that made my red hair, yes it was dyed, that made my red hair stand out even more. Women of the other world thought that hair as red as mine, again I will admit that I dyed my hair, was so wonderful and unique. They were silly girls, girls who didn’t understand the complexities of how beauty worked in the far-off distant land of Nebraska. I tried to explain it to them, I tried to tell them that their would-be savior didn’t come from some great kingdom. In confidence with a few girls I helped give blow outs to with the promise of those damn coins as a reward, I told them the truth about Christian. I told them about how, in our world, Christian was a loser. I told them how he was the last man they would ever want to grab the arm of for a dance. Some of them may have believed me, but some of them thought I was just jealous that these local girls were wooing the great champion of the Nebraska kingdom so much more easily than I could. Looking back, I could see it was a bit mean, and I live with the guilt that maybe it was that meanness that pushed him to do what he did. Damn it, here I go playing into Cody’s hand, showing myself as part of the world Cody Knew Christian couldn’t live it. I won’t fall for that, I will not become the villain of this story, this story already has enough villains even if you discount Christian.
Let me get back to what matters, so Brad and I were in the other world with Christian, he was changed into his tunic and pants right away. For a guy that seemed so shy in the real world, he had no problem just changing drawers and taking his shirt off, stressing that there wasn’t that much time to show us how amazing the world he found himself so at home was.
This was early on in our journey exploring the other world. I feel that I felt the same things Cody probably felt as Christian was buying me a dress and getting Brad an outfit. He looked so at home here, leave it to Christian to find a place he finally fit in being a messed-up backwards fantasy world. For a guy who didn’t play many video games, he sure did fall headfirst into this would-be role-playing game.
Brad was into it, and I could tell Cody was as well. Maybe Cody was just excited that Christian finally found a place he belonged, but those two idiots did look happy wearing their fine hand-crafted tunics and pants, wielding their axe and hammer along Christian’s side as they righted wrongs in that world. I will admit that I had my fun too while we there.
I didn’t say much on our second trip, just watching with as much shock as Cody probably had seeing Christian so relaxed and confident in himself. I took my dress and smiled, even tried it on. It was very well made, extremely well made. Not saying I would be rushing to wear it to prom, that would be a bit too gaudy, but it was a very nice dress. It was surprisingly easy to move around in as well, it looked formal, yet felt casual, when I did wear it over there it did the job of making me feel more in place than out of place.
Since we were going to be here for two hours and had some time to burn, Christian said he wanted to take Brad and I out for lunch. Considering those coins were worth Two Thousand dollars each, Christian sure had a lot of them. And he was spending them like it was going out of style, almost like he didn’t care just how valuable they were in the real world. Here they were just five-dollar bills at best. He dropped three of them in the town's pub to get us some stew and three glasses of mead.
“Dig in guys, trust me, the food here is all-natural, no GMO, grass-fed beef for the stew, all-natural ingredients, totally organic, so it’s really healthy for you,” he turned to me and smiled as the three bowls of beef stew were brought to our table.
Brad was already a third of the way into his mead, I had a few sips and while it was good, better than I thought it would be at least, I felt it a bit to strong considering I felt it important to have my wits about me when I was traveling to another freaking dimension. There was one night when I had a bit too much to drink, I’m not going to go into detail about it, I figure Cody might, if not him then Brad may provide some spectator's account about what happened. I don’t want to get into that right now, I tried the soup presented to us, over there they used wooden spoons which was a bit odd to get used to, but a spoon is a spoon and honestly Christian wasn’t lying. This stew tasted amazing. I care a lot about my body, and I try to live a healthy lifestyle at home. I try to avoid processed foods, excess sugars, and of course I do anything I can to keep Corn Syrup out of my system. But this beef stew, in all honesty it was one of the best things I’ve ever tasted. You wouldn’t think that such a primitive world would be able to compete to ours when it came the abundance of food that the modern world offers. Unlike the food of our world, there was no need for heaps of sugar and salt and other shit that’s terrible for you to be dumped into every recipe to make processed slop edible. The broth was brimming with flavor, and the beef chunks were tender, so tender, they almost melted in my mouth. The carrots and onions were so bright, so vibrant, so full of flavor. To think that world so far behind ours in the ways of farming an agriculture could produce something so delicious. Christian always said he found so much beauty in the simple rules of this world. These carrots, these onions, they were grown on a farm by a man whose name Christian knew, this beef came from cows slaughtered not more than a hundred yards from this very pub. Slaughtered by a man who also had a name Christian knew. I thought healthy eating just meant avoiding bread and processed foods, after how good and how light this stew settled in my stomach was, I could see why obesity is more of a modern problem in our modern world than it was somewhere like this place.
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“No preservatives? no GMO? Count me sold,” Brad said, as he lifted his bowl to his lips and downed the rest of his broth, “This is without a doubt, the best soup I’ve ever had. Usually, when my mom tries to make beef stew it’s like drinking water and chewing rubber, this is good man, I got to give it up to you, this is some pretty good stew,” he said, washing down another chunk of beef with more of mead, “And this, I mean, this certainly ain’t Budweiser, how do they make this so good? It’s like, earthy, full bodied, no head though,” Brad said, giving his review of the brew put in front of us.
“Well, they don’t exactly have carbonation here, I think it’s a testament that it’s so good even without the foam at the top,” Christian said as he took a big, confident swing of his glass.
“Foam or not, bud-lite doesn’t hold a candle to this,” Brad said, “I should know, I’ve enjoyed a good bit of Bud-lite, and Miller, and even Busch, none of them match the flavor profile I’m getting off this,” he said, “Do you know what the proof is?” he asked, “What are we looking at? 5.3 abv? 7.5? Somewhere in the middle?” he asked.
“I mean, I don’t think they have a rating system here,” Christian said, “It’s enough to get the farmer who grew the hops and barley for it on his ass, that should count for something,” Christian smiled.
“That’s a fair point,” Brad laughed, he pulled out the watch just to check, “Oh shit, we’re at 1:40, got to get back to the lake, you covered our bill? Right Christian?” he asked.
“Yeah, our tabs paid, we’re good,” Christian said, finishing his glass before getting up. It was yet another surreal moment, I watched this kid struggle to put down a 12oz can of Bud-Lite and here he was downing mead like a damn working man. We left the bar together and headed back to the edge of the lake with a scant few minutes to spare.
We all changed and put our new clothes in the special ditch Christian found by the lake. Christian finished putting his normal clothes on as I asked Brad where the stopwatch was.
“One-fifty-nine, any second now,” he said as he kept his eyes on the watch and we all joined him at the edge of the lake.
“I told you guys, didn’t I? this place is amazing,” Christian smiled.
“It’s something else,” I laughed nervously, “Umm, thanks for the dress,” I said, trying to find the right words to talk to this guy. I could tell then, and I think I was the first to see he was going a bit more native than the rest of us. Sometimes I look back on what happened as my fault, I should have been the voice of reason that the group needed. I should have done a lot of things to prevent the tragedy that devastated this poor messed up fool, I should have but I didn’t. Cody says it shouldn’t be, but I do feel the outcome of our time in this world is my cross to bear.
We came back to the real world, Cody waiting for us. We took the two times from our experiment and using man and a small notebook Cody brought with him, we figured out that one hour in this world roughly came out to about an hour and a half in the other world. Adding that to Christian’s tale of a week lasting a weekend here, the time was exponential, the more time we spent on the real side of the lake meant even more time in the fantasy world. A day was a day and a half, a week was a month, and a month was, well, a month was a long time. You’ll see how long the time difference is when we get to Morgan. I won’t talk about her yet, just another part of this story you’re going to have to wait for.
“So it’s exponential,” Christian said, “We can spend more time in this world and time will pass faster over there, but when we’re over there time passes slower here, I was there for about a weekend and got a week out of it,” he said, “This makes sense, I mean, it doesn’t make any sense none of this does, but I think we have the formula, so when we come back next weekend I can show you guys around,” Christian said.
“What do you mean, when we come back?” I asked, “I’m still not sure we should even go back, I mean, this is a big this, this is Somewhere Else,” I said, christening that other world with the term we would come to use when we talked about going there. Cody would come to me after our respective Cheer and football practices were over and say, “Hey, it’s a three-day weekend, want to go somewhere else?” Christian would approach Brad, “I hear the farmer just made a new batch mead over in somewhere else, want to go?” And then sometimes Brad would come to Cody, saying, “Good practice man, why don’t we celebrate somewhere else, somewhere they don’t card us for booze,” he said.
Eventually all three of us came around to the idea of going Somewhere Else whenever we had a reason to. I was a place could just go to escape from it all. Somewhere Else didn’t care about where your GPA was sitting, it didn’t care about who you were dating or maybe dating or thinking about dating, somewhere else didn’t care about an embarrassing blunder in this or that class. A blunder that in the real world, you might have to carry for weeks if not months if you were lucky. Somewhere else was peaceful, was nice. Above all those reasons, Somewhere Else was a way to squeeze almost a week of rest in a scant weekend. That was the biggest draw it had to me. A week as opposed to two days to rest up after constant strivings for scholastic excellence and brutal cheer practice, it had its appeal. I can’t lie. I remember that before mid-terms, Christian took all of us somewhere else and had a great study session, with a week he was able to take the time to really tutor all of us in our weakest fields. As awkward and totally clueless he was socially, he did have a good head on his shoulders, maybe too good of a head. But we all got A’s, being a week of study time ahead of the rest of the class was enough to get all of us top marks in the various classes we were lucky enough to share with him.
Seeing Christin in that world, in his element, seeing him with confidence. It was quite the sight. English was a breeze after seeing how things worked Somewhere Else. A three-day bull session with Cody over the finer points of algebra got him an A he could have never hoped to attain, and a chat with the mayor of a small town was able to teach everything Brad needed to know about the finer points of how Civics and other various social studies applied to our modern world. Brad’s midterm was an essay exam, and from what I heard in all his bragging he aced it, made a hundred and one, that’s how low the bar of a non-AP high school English class is. Just show you have common sense passing knowledge of how a society is supposed to function, even a society with an 14th century frame of mind still knows how a local government should be run, granted this test was taking place in Nebraska so I think that explains some of the leeway Mrs. Mabrey had to see fit to put a big fat A on his paper.
The weekend after Mid-terms, we had a huge party Somewhere Else, I mean of course there was a big party at Freeman’s Farm, every who’s-who in the school’s student body was there, we all drank, had fun, and being that it was a Friday night and the other three of us had fed our parents a line about staying at some such friend’s house for the weekend. Around two A.M. when the party had died down, we went back to Somewhere Else, ready to enjoy a week of fun, merriment, and adventure. We were ready to really see what this world could offer us. Christian had been visiting somewhere else way more than the rest of us, and he had been doing jobs and earning coin, coin to spend there, and coin to bring back home and bank for a good amount of cash if he could figure out exactly how to get rid of them.
Somewhere Else had been proving pretty useful for us. We started helping Christian on those great quests he kept hyping up, we earned gold, literal gold, and damn me for saying this, but we had fun doing it. This is the part of the story where things looked good for a while, where things just felt like they would work out. Where we weren’t thinking about how messed up the discovery of Somewhere Else was and how it would affect our lives.
