Patreon or PayPal Me keeps this site and its author alive. Thank you. |
Stories from the Verse
Multiverser: The Thirteenth Story
Chapter 18: Brown 370
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Takano 162
There was a park downtown, complete with a couple picnic tables. Derek grabbed a couple rocks and then went through the maps he had gotten from the gas station. Finding one of the entire United States, he began spreading it on one of the tables and pinning it down with the rocks, and attempting to line it up so that the road through town was parallel to the same line on the map.
“I don’t suppose,” he asked Vashti, “you brought that tape measure from the manse, did you?”
She shook her head.
“Well, not a big deal.” He began studying the map. Of course, neither Yellowstone City nor Berkeley, Colorado were on it–but he had a rough idea of where Yellowstone National Park would be, and he knew that Berkeley, Colorado sat on an east-to-west line of the Rio Grande River, so pretty soon he had a rough idea of where they had been. What he didn’t have was an easy way to measure it. In the end he took a handful of arrows from Morach’s quiver (being careful to use only those not drugged) and laid them end-to-end in a straight line between the two points.
“O.K.,” he said, “now comes the tricky part.” He walked along the side of the table until he was standing in a place that put the map directly on the line that pointed to his distant possessions. “I need to shift those arrows, one at a time, to form a line on this map beginning right here where we are,” and he pointed to the road he had used to orient his map, “and continuing in the direction of that scriff sense. It’s not going to be terribly accurate, but it’s the best we’ve got.”
Vashti helped him move the arrows carefully, one at a time, to form this new line across the map.
When the last arrow had been placed, he simply stared. Finally Vashti said, “What is it?”
“It’s only a rough estimate,” he said, “but it looks like our belongings have landed somewhere about fifty miles, plus or minus, north-northwest of New Orleans. We’re going back to the land of let the good times roll.”
He scooped up the arrows and replaced them in the quiver, tossed the rocks aside and carefully refolded the map, and packed everything away.
“The question is,” he then said, “how do we get there?”
As to the old stories that have long been here:
