Jenny Everywhere isn't in A Game of Two
Feb. 16th, 2024 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scott_sanfordOn this Fiction Friday, the Sofiad again!
This is the fifth part in a story arc that began with Preludes & Knick-Knacks, or here for the prelude.
Professor Awesome and
Sophie Everytime play
A Game of Two
by Scott Sanford; February 2024
Professor Awesome had mail.
Not email or a message that showed up on his phone, but a physical paper envelope – and it wasn’t even in the mailbox, just tucked into the notch between his apartment door and the frame around it.
He examined it curiously, not that it took that much to make him curious about things. The envelope was creamy paper of the kind greeting cards come in, with a very strange stamp on it, but what caught his attention was the writing. Instead of a normal street address it read “Professor Awesome, his home” and for some reason the date and “1400 local time.” If that were right he’d missed the visitor by over two hours – but if someone had come by, why write down that the letter was left at his place? Peculiar.
And it was for him as Professor Awesome not Eric Whittaker.
He opened it curiously and read:
Sophie!
Sophie wanted to see him! And knew how to find him, apparently. He had no idea how but that was the least of his questions.
Tomorrow would be Saturday; he could get up early.
He didn’t even mind getting up before dawn.
It was horribly early but for this he didn’t mind a bit. Working out the bus schedule had been easy, and when the Number One passed the stop for Temple Emanuel he started counting paying attention to street numbers. It seemed to take a long time to get to thirty.
He was afraid he was early but when he got off the bus he saw Sophie there, wearing a green hoodie against the morning cold. A few strands of her dreadlocks had escaped. She smiled at him and the whole trip was worth it.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hi. I got your letter,” he said, feeling himself grinning. Obviously he had, otherwise he wouldn’t be here, but the words had come out of his mouth.
“I’m glad you could make it,” she said. “It’s nice to see you again.”
“Yeah, you too. You’re in town for a thing, huh?”
“Yeah. Walk up the hill with me?”, she asked.
“Okay.” As if he’d mind going places with her.
They hadn’t gotten far when Eric remembered something.
“Oh, I need to tell you, Tiny says hi.”
“I heard he ran into you,” she said. “Did you really have a mechanical dimensional shifter in a backpack?”
“Yeah. I figured if I couldn’t find you right here, I could ask nearby. So I built a shift engine. But I didn’t go where I expected and I ran into Tiny. Is he really called Tiny?”
“No! Not by everybody, I just called him that when I was little. If stuff gets formal, remember he’s Lord Thymon the Green, Embodiment of Time in the Void Between Worlds.” She shrugged. “I don’t think it’ll be a problem. I mean, you’re not going to be at all that many formal events together, right?”
“And you… know him?” That title sounded important.
“Shifter, remember? The better question is how you built a shift engine.”
“Shifter again, a different one,” he said, shrugging. “Have you ever heard of Jenny Everywhere?”
Sophie coughed briefly.
“Uh, yeah, I’ve heard of Jenny Everywhere,” she agreed when she recovered. “There’s, like, one of her in every universe. That’s what they say.”
“Yeah. The one in this universe lives in the same apartment building I do. I’ve seen a few shift engines so when I wanted to build my own it was no big deal.”
“No big deal, huh?”
“I’m… kinda good with machines.” He hoped he wasn’t boasting too much. Or too little. How much was enough to impress her without sounding like it was too much?
“I was hoping you would be.” She gave him a hopeful look. Her eyes were unusually bright in the early morning darkness, and Eric noticed again how very blue they were. “It sounds dumb but I need a button pushed. It’s a little more complicated than that, but you’ll see. Did you bring any tools?”
“A few, yeah.” He suddenly wished he had brought more than he had. He didn’t even know what the problem was yet.
“That’s good. I’m sorry to drag you all the way out here, but I figured it wasn’t really a good idea to show up at your place.”
“You can if you want to,” he found himself saying. “I mean, if you wanted to.”
“Maybe not yet… Oh, watch your step.”
Eric had lost track of how far they’d gone until a broad stairway loomed in front of them and he realized they were already at the park. If it were a clear day they’d be able to go over to the cliffs and look out over the water to see the bridge and the headlands – but with the morning’s fog he couldn’t even see all the art on the steps themselves.
Sophie didn’t slow down but went right up the stairs. It wasn’t as if there was anywhere else to go. Soon they were on the path at the top, walking through trees that were only wooden trunks in the fog. They passed a few small service sheds.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been up here so early,” Eric remarked. “What is there to do here at this hour?”
“Nothing, I hope,” Sophie said, eyeing a golf cart someone had left parked beside the path. “I left something up here. People don’t golf this early, do they?”
“I don’t think so. Not in the fog, anyway.” He’d never paid much attention to golf.
“Good. That would be embarrassing. Did you know that from above the round patches on golf courses look just like landing pads?”
“I never thought of it,” he said, wondering but also extrapolating wildly. If she’d come in from the air, what had she flown? A helicopter or something more exotic? It would be hard to fly in this weather and hard to see anything – had it been blocking the golf course since before she’d sent the note on his door?
“Ah, here we are.”
“Ew,” Eric said without thinking. Ahead of them the fog turned into an ugly dark gray splotch, and he wondered what was fouling the air.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she told him, then added, “Or it’s worse than it looks but not in an obvious way. You’ll see.”
Sophie walked forward and Eric followed her into the dark cloud, which turned a dense toxic looking black until they went through a small doorway and they were, with very little warning, inside a cramped room full of technological doodads.
“What is this?”, he asked. None of it looked like the machinery he would have expected to find on a golf course.
“This is my problem,” Sophie said. “It’s a void ship, a dimension traveling vehicle. I can’t take it home, for a lot of reasons, and I shouldn’t just leave it laying around somewhere. So you can probably do the math on that.”
“If you meant it literally, yeah; I’m good at math.”
She laughed and said, “Lucky you. My dad’s trying to teach me math, and he’s way ahead of me on way too much.”
“Can I help?”, Eric asked hopefully. He was good at math…
“I don’t so. I don’t think it’s anything you’ve gotten at your school.” Sophie smiled at him, as if knowing something he didn’t. She handed him a book, he didn’t see from where, and said, “This is what I have to deal with. Does any of it look familiar?”
Eric only glanced at the title, something about block transfers, and opened it at random. He flipped through the pages.
“I don’t recognize this. I mean it’s math, yeah...”
“Yeah. Don’t worry about it, I’ll ask my dad about it later. Anyway, so here’s this void ship, and it’s kind of a problem.”
“So what are you going to do with it?”, he asked.
Sophie grinned the way Jenny Everywhere did when she was thinking about doing something irresponsible, and her eyes sparkled blue.
“I’m gonna blow it up!” She stepped over to one side of the cabin, where there was a wooden crate. On the side was stenciled the word DYNAMITE.
“Dynamite? Is that really dynamite?”
“Uh-huh,” she confirmed. “I know someone who knows a guy.”
She lifted off the lid and showed him a red cylinder that looked just like cartoons had led him to expect.
“Whoa.”
“Yeah. So that’s why I asked you over here. There’s a big red button over on the control panel – don’t touch it yet – and I want something that will push that button first and then set off the dynamite a few seconds later.”
“Oh. That’s easy.” Eric wasn’t entirely sure why those words were coming out of his mouth, but the mechanisms were easy and most of his brain was still processing the idea of blowing up anything, much less a dimension traveling vehicle. He was afraid something like this was expensive.
“I was sure you could do it.” Sophie crossed the low-ceilinged space and handed him a small metal box with a handle on top. “You can rig up something to push this down, right?”
“Well, yeah, sure, if I have parts.”
“That cabinet behind you has the smog conditioning system, there should be motors you can use in there. And we won’t need the flight stabilization system, you can take that apart.”
He opened the access hatches she indicated and made an approving sound. “I can do something with this, if you’re not going to need it later.”
“Nah, not any of that.”
Eric experimented with the blasting machine briefly and assured himself that the battered metal box labeled Thor Mining Company worked the way he’d expected; the handle drove a generator – a high tension magneto – which would send high voltage electricity to blasting caps at the dynamite end of the wire. Then he put it aside and reached for the most convenient of his multitools.
As he pulled bits out and assembled them into new shapes, he asked the obvious question.
“So the big red button is the shifting control, right? That gets pushed and the ship leaves for another dimension?”
“Yeah, exactly,” she confirmed. “The ship will go somewhere else and when it explodes it’ll be a long way from anything we care about.”
“Yeah, I figured you’d already planned out that part.” He glanced up from his work and saw that Sophie was watching him work. He smiled shyly and looked back down at the machinery.
Eric thought it was obvious, at least to someone mechanically inclined, that the blasting machine could get strapped into one of the oddly tiny control chairs to hold it steady and the rest of the device could be built up around it, along with a dropping arm to push the go button.
Not many minutes later he had this assembled, and was carefully testing those parts of the process that could be tested without actually doing anything.
“This was way easy,” he remarked. “There was a lot more clockwork than I would have expected.”
“Oh, yeah, some people build stuff that way.”
“So, does the dynamite just explode in the box or what?”
“Oh! Sorry! I got distracted watching you…” Sophie brushed her waving dreadlocks in a way he thought cute. “It’s supposed to be put into confined spaces, let me get it into someplace useful.”
“Hey, take your time.”
“I always do,” she giggled.
Sophie gathered up some dynamite and set about concealing small bundles in various spaces.
Eric watched her for a few moments before realizing that he could get distracted watching her too, which led to confusing feelings. He looked away, glancing around the cabin, and noticed Sophie’s math book.
It was still laying out and he thought he had a minute, so he laid it flat on one of the control panels and opened it up; then he pulled out his phone and called up its camera function. What he didn’t know now he could read up on, if he had the text.
He was most of the way through the book when Sophie crawled back out of the last machinery space.
“Okay, that’s all the dynamite,” Sophie announced.
Eric took a few photos of the ship’s interior, put away his phone, and handed her the math book. She put it back into her hoodie somewhere, he didn’t quite see where.
“I hate to blow up something like this,” he admitted. “But I can’t take it home with me. You don’t have anyplace to keep it either?”
“Nowhere that it would be safe to leave it unattended,” she said.
“I guess we have to, then.” He sighed. “Want me to wire up the last part?”
“Sure,” she said, handing him the last bundle of wires.
Eric gathered the wires together into the two leads he’d need and put them aside. He carefully adjusted the mechanism so that its mallet arm would come down on the big red button on the console, and that the geared vertical pusher was aligned with the blasting machine, and that there was no residual electrical charge across the machine’s contacts. Then he took a deep breath and tenderly attached the last wires.
“Okay,” he said. “Pull that lever and we’ll have sixty seconds to get out before the button is pushed and another sixty seconds before the detonators go off, in case something goes wrong and we have to fix it.”
“Sounds good to me. Thanks for building all this, Eric.”
“Hey, no problem. I like making things.” He smiled at her and added, “But I’m kind of nervous being in here with everything wired to blow up.”
“Yeah, let’s do this. You want to pull the lever?”
“A little, but it’s your plan. Do you want to do it?”
“You built it, go ahead and start it,” she told him.
He did, and the clockwork mechanism started ticking.
“Time to go!”, Sophie cried, and they both ran out the door of the doomed vehicle, and kept going across the grass for farther than was probably necessary.
Sophie stopped to look back at the fog bank, giggling.
Eric admired how her dreadlocks waved like branches in the wind, staying in motion longer than most people’s hair.
Nothing much happened for a while and Eric briefly worried that it might not leave the universe, but then a multicolored aura shone through the fog and shrank to nothing, just like the shift light he’d seen around Jenny Everywhere. As easily as that the fog around them was the natural light gray it should be.
“We did it.”
“It really is handy having a mad scientist around,” she said. “My mum says that too, sometimes, but she’s got her own reasons.”
She gave him a sideways glance, and he remembered how little time they’d had together before.
“The last time you were here you couldn’t stay long,” he observed, hoping he didn’t sound too nervous. “Do you have to go away again right away?”
“No,” she said, playing with her hair. “I know, I ran off really quickly last time, but I don’t have to now. I can stay if you want.”
“Really?”, he said hopefully. “I’d like that. It’s Saturday, I have all day.”
“Really,” she said with feeling. “I was hoping you’d say that. I had to come a long way to get here, and now I really am here, and we’re going to have all day if I have to take time from other days.”
“What?” He didn’t think he’d heard right.
“Sorry, never mind. So, um… It’s still early. What do you want to do?”
Read other Jenny Everywhere stories
The character of Sophie Everytime, created by Aristide Twain, is available for use by anyone. All rights reversed.
This is the fifth part in a story arc that began with Preludes & Knick-Knacks, or here for the prelude.
Sophie Everytime play
A Game of Two
by Scott Sanford; February 2024
Professor Awesome had mail.
Not email or a message that showed up on his phone, but a physical paper envelope – and it wasn’t even in the mailbox, just tucked into the notch between his apartment door and the frame around it.
He examined it curiously, not that it took that much to make him curious about things. The envelope was creamy paper of the kind greeting cards come in, with a very strange stamp on it, but what caught his attention was the writing. Instead of a normal street address it read “Professor Awesome, his home” and for some reason the date and “1400 local time.” If that were right he’d missed the visitor by over two hours – but if someone had come by, why write down that the letter was left at his place? Peculiar.
And it was for him as Professor Awesome not Eric Whittaker.
He opened it curiously and read:
Hi, Eric!
..... Sorry it’s been so long, and it’s probably going to be longer before I can drop in on you regularly, but I have a thing happening and I’d like to see you tomorrow.
..... Can you meet me at the bus stop at 30th and California early in the morning? I’ll be there at 6:30.
..... It will be nice to see you again.
.................... – Sophie
..... Sorry it’s been so long, and it’s probably going to be longer before I can drop in on you regularly, but I have a thing happening and I’d like to see you tomorrow.
..... Can you meet me at the bus stop at 30th and California early in the morning? I’ll be there at 6:30.
..... It will be nice to see you again.
.................... – Sophie
Sophie!
Sophie wanted to see him! And knew how to find him, apparently. He had no idea how but that was the least of his questions.
Tomorrow would be Saturday; he could get up early.
He didn’t even mind getting up before dawn.
It was horribly early but for this he didn’t mind a bit. Working out the bus schedule had been easy, and when the Number One passed the stop for Temple Emanuel he started counting paying attention to street numbers. It seemed to take a long time to get to thirty.
He was afraid he was early but when he got off the bus he saw Sophie there, wearing a green hoodie against the morning cold. A few strands of her dreadlocks had escaped. She smiled at him and the whole trip was worth it.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hi. I got your letter,” he said, feeling himself grinning. Obviously he had, otherwise he wouldn’t be here, but the words had come out of his mouth.
“I’m glad you could make it,” she said. “It’s nice to see you again.”
“Yeah, you too. You’re in town for a thing, huh?”
“Yeah. Walk up the hill with me?”, she asked.
“Okay.” As if he’d mind going places with her.
They hadn’t gotten far when Eric remembered something.
“Oh, I need to tell you, Tiny says hi.”
“I heard he ran into you,” she said. “Did you really have a mechanical dimensional shifter in a backpack?”
“Yeah. I figured if I couldn’t find you right here, I could ask nearby. So I built a shift engine. But I didn’t go where I expected and I ran into Tiny. Is he really called Tiny?”
“No! Not by everybody, I just called him that when I was little. If stuff gets formal, remember he’s Lord Thymon the Green, Embodiment of Time in the Void Between Worlds.” She shrugged. “I don’t think it’ll be a problem. I mean, you’re not going to be at all that many formal events together, right?”
“And you… know him?” That title sounded important.
“Shifter, remember? The better question is how you built a shift engine.”
“Shifter again, a different one,” he said, shrugging. “Have you ever heard of Jenny Everywhere?”
Sophie coughed briefly.
“Uh, yeah, I’ve heard of Jenny Everywhere,” she agreed when she recovered. “There’s, like, one of her in every universe. That’s what they say.”
“Yeah. The one in this universe lives in the same apartment building I do. I’ve seen a few shift engines so when I wanted to build my own it was no big deal.”
“No big deal, huh?”
“I’m… kinda good with machines.” He hoped he wasn’t boasting too much. Or too little. How much was enough to impress her without sounding like it was too much?
“I was hoping you would be.” She gave him a hopeful look. Her eyes were unusually bright in the early morning darkness, and Eric noticed again how very blue they were. “It sounds dumb but I need a button pushed. It’s a little more complicated than that, but you’ll see. Did you bring any tools?”
“A few, yeah.” He suddenly wished he had brought more than he had. He didn’t even know what the problem was yet.
“That’s good. I’m sorry to drag you all the way out here, but I figured it wasn’t really a good idea to show up at your place.”
“You can if you want to,” he found himself saying. “I mean, if you wanted to.”
“Maybe not yet… Oh, watch your step.”
Eric had lost track of how far they’d gone until a broad stairway loomed in front of them and he realized they were already at the park. If it were a clear day they’d be able to go over to the cliffs and look out over the water to see the bridge and the headlands – but with the morning’s fog he couldn’t even see all the art on the steps themselves.
Sophie didn’t slow down but went right up the stairs. It wasn’t as if there was anywhere else to go. Soon they were on the path at the top, walking through trees that were only wooden trunks in the fog. They passed a few small service sheds.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been up here so early,” Eric remarked. “What is there to do here at this hour?”
“Nothing, I hope,” Sophie said, eyeing a golf cart someone had left parked beside the path. “I left something up here. People don’t golf this early, do they?”
“I don’t think so. Not in the fog, anyway.” He’d never paid much attention to golf.
“Good. That would be embarrassing. Did you know that from above the round patches on golf courses look just like landing pads?”
“I never thought of it,” he said, wondering but also extrapolating wildly. If she’d come in from the air, what had she flown? A helicopter or something more exotic? It would be hard to fly in this weather and hard to see anything – had it been blocking the golf course since before she’d sent the note on his door?
“Ah, here we are.”
“Ew,” Eric said without thinking. Ahead of them the fog turned into an ugly dark gray splotch, and he wondered what was fouling the air.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she told him, then added, “Or it’s worse than it looks but not in an obvious way. You’ll see.”
Sophie walked forward and Eric followed her into the dark cloud, which turned a dense toxic looking black until they went through a small doorway and they were, with very little warning, inside a cramped room full of technological doodads.
“What is this?”, he asked. None of it looked like the machinery he would have expected to find on a golf course.
“This is my problem,” Sophie said. “It’s a void ship, a dimension traveling vehicle. I can’t take it home, for a lot of reasons, and I shouldn’t just leave it laying around somewhere. So you can probably do the math on that.”
“If you meant it literally, yeah; I’m good at math.”
She laughed and said, “Lucky you. My dad’s trying to teach me math, and he’s way ahead of me on way too much.”
“Can I help?”, Eric asked hopefully. He was good at math…
“I don’t so. I don’t think it’s anything you’ve gotten at your school.” Sophie smiled at him, as if knowing something he didn’t. She handed him a book, he didn’t see from where, and said, “This is what I have to deal with. Does any of it look familiar?”
Eric only glanced at the title, something about block transfers, and opened it at random. He flipped through the pages.
“I don’t recognize this. I mean it’s math, yeah...”
“Yeah. Don’t worry about it, I’ll ask my dad about it later. Anyway, so here’s this void ship, and it’s kind of a problem.”
“So what are you going to do with it?”, he asked.
Sophie grinned the way Jenny Everywhere did when she was thinking about doing something irresponsible, and her eyes sparkled blue.
“I’m gonna blow it up!” She stepped over to one side of the cabin, where there was a wooden crate. On the side was stenciled the word DYNAMITE.
“Dynamite? Is that really dynamite?”
“Uh-huh,” she confirmed. “I know someone who knows a guy.”
She lifted off the lid and showed him a red cylinder that looked just like cartoons had led him to expect.
“Whoa.”
“Yeah. So that’s why I asked you over here. There’s a big red button over on the control panel – don’t touch it yet – and I want something that will push that button first and then set off the dynamite a few seconds later.”
“Oh. That’s easy.” Eric wasn’t entirely sure why those words were coming out of his mouth, but the mechanisms were easy and most of his brain was still processing the idea of blowing up anything, much less a dimension traveling vehicle. He was afraid something like this was expensive.
“I was sure you could do it.” Sophie crossed the low-ceilinged space and handed him a small metal box with a handle on top. “You can rig up something to push this down, right?”
“Well, yeah, sure, if I have parts.”
“That cabinet behind you has the smog conditioning system, there should be motors you can use in there. And we won’t need the flight stabilization system, you can take that apart.”
He opened the access hatches she indicated and made an approving sound. “I can do something with this, if you’re not going to need it later.”
“Nah, not any of that.”
Eric experimented with the blasting machine briefly and assured himself that the battered metal box labeled Thor Mining Company worked the way he’d expected; the handle drove a generator – a high tension magneto – which would send high voltage electricity to blasting caps at the dynamite end of the wire. Then he put it aside and reached for the most convenient of his multitools.
As he pulled bits out and assembled them into new shapes, he asked the obvious question.
“So the big red button is the shifting control, right? That gets pushed and the ship leaves for another dimension?”
“Yeah, exactly,” she confirmed. “The ship will go somewhere else and when it explodes it’ll be a long way from anything we care about.”
“Yeah, I figured you’d already planned out that part.” He glanced up from his work and saw that Sophie was watching him work. He smiled shyly and looked back down at the machinery.
Eric thought it was obvious, at least to someone mechanically inclined, that the blasting machine could get strapped into one of the oddly tiny control chairs to hold it steady and the rest of the device could be built up around it, along with a dropping arm to push the go button.
Not many minutes later he had this assembled, and was carefully testing those parts of the process that could be tested without actually doing anything.
“This was way easy,” he remarked. “There was a lot more clockwork than I would have expected.”
“Oh, yeah, some people build stuff that way.”
“So, does the dynamite just explode in the box or what?”
“Oh! Sorry! I got distracted watching you…” Sophie brushed her waving dreadlocks in a way he thought cute. “It’s supposed to be put into confined spaces, let me get it into someplace useful.”
“Hey, take your time.”
“I always do,” she giggled.
Sophie gathered up some dynamite and set about concealing small bundles in various spaces.
Eric watched her for a few moments before realizing that he could get distracted watching her too, which led to confusing feelings. He looked away, glancing around the cabin, and noticed Sophie’s math book.
It was still laying out and he thought he had a minute, so he laid it flat on one of the control panels and opened it up; then he pulled out his phone and called up its camera function. What he didn’t know now he could read up on, if he had the text.
He was most of the way through the book when Sophie crawled back out of the last machinery space.
“Okay, that’s all the dynamite,” Sophie announced.
Eric took a few photos of the ship’s interior, put away his phone, and handed her the math book. She put it back into her hoodie somewhere, he didn’t quite see where.
“I hate to blow up something like this,” he admitted. “But I can’t take it home with me. You don’t have anyplace to keep it either?”
“Nowhere that it would be safe to leave it unattended,” she said.
“I guess we have to, then.” He sighed. “Want me to wire up the last part?”
“Sure,” she said, handing him the last bundle of wires.
Eric gathered the wires together into the two leads he’d need and put them aside. He carefully adjusted the mechanism so that its mallet arm would come down on the big red button on the console, and that the geared vertical pusher was aligned with the blasting machine, and that there was no residual electrical charge across the machine’s contacts. Then he took a deep breath and tenderly attached the last wires.
“Okay,” he said. “Pull that lever and we’ll have sixty seconds to get out before the button is pushed and another sixty seconds before the detonators go off, in case something goes wrong and we have to fix it.”
“Sounds good to me. Thanks for building all this, Eric.”
“Hey, no problem. I like making things.” He smiled at her and added, “But I’m kind of nervous being in here with everything wired to blow up.”
“Yeah, let’s do this. You want to pull the lever?”
“A little, but it’s your plan. Do you want to do it?”
“You built it, go ahead and start it,” she told him.
He did, and the clockwork mechanism started ticking.
“Time to go!”, Sophie cried, and they both ran out the door of the doomed vehicle, and kept going across the grass for farther than was probably necessary.
Sophie stopped to look back at the fog bank, giggling.
Eric admired how her dreadlocks waved like branches in the wind, staying in motion longer than most people’s hair.
Nothing much happened for a while and Eric briefly worried that it might not leave the universe, but then a multicolored aura shone through the fog and shrank to nothing, just like the shift light he’d seen around Jenny Everywhere. As easily as that the fog around them was the natural light gray it should be.
“We did it.”
“It really is handy having a mad scientist around,” she said. “My mum says that too, sometimes, but she’s got her own reasons.”
She gave him a sideways glance, and he remembered how little time they’d had together before.
“The last time you were here you couldn’t stay long,” he observed, hoping he didn’t sound too nervous. “Do you have to go away again right away?”
“No,” she said, playing with her hair. “I know, I ran off really quickly last time, but I don’t have to now. I can stay if you want.”
“Really?”, he said hopefully. “I’d like that. It’s Saturday, I have all day.”
“Really,” she said with feeling. “I was hoping you’d say that. I had to come a long way to get here, and now I really am here, and we’re going to have all day if I have to take time from other days.”
“What?” He didn’t think he’d heard right.
“Sorry, never mind. So, um… It’s still early. What do you want to do?”
The Sophiad:
0) How Sophie Met Professor Awesome → 1) Preludes & Knick-Knacks → 2) The Doll’s Source → 3) Treat Counting → 4) Session of Mystics → 5) A Game of Two → omake
0) How Sophie Met Professor Awesome → 1) Preludes & Knick-Knacks → 2) The Doll’s Source → 3) Treat Counting → 4) Session of Mystics → 5) A Game of Two → omake
The character of Professor Awesome, created by Scott Sanford, is available for use too, but please don't break continuity.
