#avery watson

The sky in late spring strokes of red, gold, grey against watercolour blue

Avery stared down at the chemistry test. They hadn't studied much; the new Legend of Zelda game had come out last week and, well, it was a much more entertaining alternative to trying to memorise electron orbitals.

Solid sulfur and oxygen gas react to produce sulfur trioxide as shown below. In a particular experiment, 5.0 g of O2 are reacted with 6.0 g of S8.

S8 (s) + O2 (g) → SO3 (g)

Okay. So there's eight S's on one side, but only one on the other. So that needs to be an 8, which means–fuck, it was too early to be doing math–there are now 24 O's on the right side. Right?

“Yeah, that's right, which means there's 12 O2 on the left”, said a voice nearby with a Scottish accent.

Avery jumped, prompting a loud “Quiet!” from the examiner and annoyed looks from the other students nearby. Had nobody else heard that? They looked around for the source of the voice, and saw a young person standing just to the left, looking over their exam paper with mild interest. She–they?–had reddish-brown skin, flame-like hair, and was casually shouldering a baseball bat covered in strange symbols and markings.

“You need to find the limiting reagent. Start by calculating how many moles of each reagent you have, and how much product you can create using each of those amounts.”

“What. Who?-”

“Avery Watson,” the examiner stood up and walked over to the desk. In a low voice he said, “If you continue to not follow the simplest rule of examinations, I shall have you removed from the exam hall.”

Avery nodded. The stranger was gone. Am I losing it? Avery wondered.

“Fuck,” Naeris muttered. The elf was backed into a corner, three goons between them and their gun. “Looks like this a dead end, Dick,” the smallest of the goons quipped. The other two laughed. “Wow,” Naeris said. “Just hurry up and shoot me so I don't have to listen to your 'jokes'.” “You're out of tricks,” the medium goon said. “No gun, no holy symbol. No spells worth writing home about. We did our homework, see?”

“You're all standing awfully close together,” Naeris said in a voice that wasn't entirely theirs. They felt detached, separate from themself. A half-elf was standing where they had just been, a flour-spotted apron around his waist.

“What's that supposed to mean, elf?” the biggest goon asked.

“Oh, just that it means I can do this,” the half-elf said, and a bead of fire erupted from Naeris' fingertips and blossomed in the midst of the goons.

Naeris blinked, and was suddenly themself again. The limp, slightly charred bodies of the goons collapsed into a heap. Had that been a divine intercession? It hadn't felt like one, but Naeris offered a prayer of thanks to the Traveller anyway. Whatever had just happened, their life had been spared. Explanations could happen later.

Tenzin sat in his favourite park, overlooking the ocean, and thought of home. It was something that had been happening more often these days, longings for a return to the monastery and the brotherhood of his fellow monks. He exhaled deeply.

“You seem troubled,” a friendly voice said. Tenzin opened his eyes and saw a stranger dressed in plain robes. His skin was the colour of sunset, and covered in ritual scars that seemed to glow with an inner fire.

“I long to return home,” Tenzin said, smiling softly. “But my duties prevent it.”

“I know the feeling well,” the stranger sat. “I was just thinking the same thing, and was about to start my daily meditations. You don't mind if I do them here, do you?” He paused, and looked around. “Where is here, anyway?”

“We are in a park near London, though I suspect that name means little to you.”

“You'd be right. I'm Brandr, by the way,” Brandr said.

“Tenzin.”

When Tenzin opened his eyes again, the stranger was gone.

Seb grumbled. She didn't mind doing house-calls, but Nathaniel lived in the remotest corner of the valley. If he hadn't busted his cart, she should have forced him to come to the forge, but instead, here she was, carrying a new wagon wheel half-way across the damn forest.

Ari grumbled. She didn't mind doing house-calls, but the Baker's were antagonist towards her at worst, and silently judgemental at their best. They disapproved of what they called her “lifestyle choices”, but she was also the only person in town who could fix their dishwasher. Making them uncomfortable was just one of the perks of the job.

“Fucking assholes,” Ari muttered to herself.

“Pipe-cloggers the lot of them,” Seb muttered to herself in agreement. Then stopped and stared. A young woman in strange clothes, with vividly purple hair arranged rather lop-sidedly was walking alongside her.

“Who the fuck,” Ari yelled as she noticed a stranger walking alongside her. She was wearing rough, homespun clothes spotted with soot and burns and carrying a wagon wheel.

The two woman stared at each other.

Seb looked around at the small town that surrounded them in amazement. The buildings looked so different to her village. The sheer amount of glass everywhere must have cost a fortune!

Ari stared at the thatched wooden houses and open fields. It all looked so… quaint. So… medieval.

And then they were both back where they started, alone.