CHAPTER 31: EVELYN AND THE INTERN

St. James’ Cathedral, Seattle, Washington, September 1st

A tall youthful-looking woman with jet-black hair tied in a short ponytail, wearing a black dress and heels, left the cathedral. Even though she hadn’t seen them or even been to the area since she graduated university, Evelyn Wiskell knew that it would be disrespectful to not come to the funeral of Ryan and Terry, her last non-estranged living relatives. However, since she is now the last living Wiskell, that means she ended up being the only person there aside from a couple of Terry’s coworkers who, of course, she didn’t know. Tomorrow she would have to fly back to Virginia and go back to work at her job with Dimensional Munitions Research, a military contracting company that also researches interdimensional travel, as if nothing had happened. Although she didn’t really enjoy her job – in fact at times she hated what she was doing – it paid well and had good benefits, and in the end that was what mattered most to her. And yet… there are many times where she wished she had done something else with her life, like music or social work…

For now, however, she headed out to her rental car, first to her hotel to change into more comfortable attire: a lavenderish sleeveless crop-top, short shorts, and a pair of converses, as well as lavender bracelets and a moon necklace, and then went to her uncle’s house. The door was locked but she knew he kept a key underneath the doormat. She went in to have one last look around, for old time’s sake, taking out her phone to use as a flashlight.

“Ryan… I know you can’t hear me because you’re… gone… but I do love you… even if we haven’t really talked that much in the last few years…”

She gathered up some things of his that he had left behind for memories’ sake, such as his plushies, his desktop PC, his pokemon card collection, and various other keepsakes of his. She knew in a couple of days anything she didn’t take would be taken to the dump as Terry, in his infinite wisdom, forgot to write her into his will. Since she had no intention of moving to Seattle she had opted to sell the house rather than rent it out. She managed to get a very solid cash offer on it that she could use to buy a place back in the DC suburbs instead of continuing to rent, and closed the sale a couple of days before the funeral with until the second of the month to take furniture. She told herself this, trying to find whatever silver lining she could to the fact she now believed herself to have no living relatives. As she went through Ryan’s stuff to decide what to keep and what to leave, she peeked out Ryan’s window, which opened into the backyard. She noticed that the shed was gone, and she presumed that Terry must have removed it since she last saw him, though she wasn’t sure how she hadn’t picked up on that before when the sale closed.

After packing up the car to take the keepsakes to the post office to mail back to her apartment, she looked back at the house where she had spent many wonderful days in her childhood one last time before departing.

–

Dimensional Munitions Research: Main Facility, Langley, Virginia, September 3^rd

As Evelyn arrived for her first day back at work since the funeral, she was taken aside by her supervisor.

“Evelyn, I need to talk to you about something.”

This unnerved Evelyn. She just returned from a funeral on the other side of the country and now something is about to happen at work? She braced herself for whatever her supervisor had to say as she led Evelyn into her office.

“…have I… been doing poorly?” Evelyn asked as she took a seat opposite her supervisor on the desk. She’d been compromising her morals for a six-figure salary for five years now and was seriously hoping it wasn’t all for nothing and that she wasn’t being laid off.

“Oh, no, quite the opposite! You’re doing a great job! In fact, you’re doing so well that I have a… special assignment for you!”

Evelyn took a deep breath. So she wasn’t being fired after all! “Well, what’s the assignment?”

“We’re taking in students from various universities across the country and pairing them to work with our best employees as interns, and you have been selected as one of the employees!”

Evelyn’s eyebrows shot up. “I’m going to be instructing an intern? But I don’t have any experience teaching!”

“That may be true, but you’ve proven yourself to be a fast learner before… after all, didn’t you graduate from Stanford with a 3.9 GPA?”

“…yeah, but that doesn’t-”

“Shush! I don’t want to hear it,” the middle manager said, lifting a finger. “You will be paired with one…” she squinted at the page in front of her. “…Rudy Murphy, a quantum computing student who’s studying at Georgetown.

“That will be all. For today you will continue with your interdimensional portal project, but starting tomorrow, Rudy will be on your team, whether you want it or not. Unless… you want different extra responsibilities?”

Evelyn waved her hand defensively; the last thing she wanted was more work hours, especially as she is salaried so wouldn’t even be paid extra. “No, no! I can do that! I will do that! Promise!”
The supervisor smirked. “Good. You are dismissed.”

After closing the door behind her, Evelyn sighed in disappointment. She was not looking forward to this experience. Hopefully, Rudy is a good student at least and not a total nuisance… she thought to herself.

–

Georgetown University Campus, September 3^rd

“So… this… is who I’m being paired up with for my internship,” Rudy muttered to himself, seated underneath an oak tree reading a sheet of paper. He really wasn’t a big fan of the fact that he needed to intern at a military contractor- he knew what they did and he hated it- but it paid well which was essential since his parents were stubbornly refusing to help pay for his college. Besides, the lady he was being paired up with seemed nice enough, plus the ‘what you will do’ section mentions an interdimensional portal, which in his eyes isn’t the worst outcome for interning at a company like this, and in fact could be very interesting. Still, he couldn’t help being a bit nervous, as this would be his first real job in his field, as opposed to the soul crushing worlds of fast food and retail.

–

The next day, Rudy arrived at the facility he had been directed to go to for his internship. In fact, Evelyn was already there waiting for him.

“Ah, you must be Rudy!” she said, clasping her hands together. “I’m Evelyn Wiskell!” She extended her hand out, a fake smile on her face. Okay Eve, pretend you love your job, the kid is clearly a nervous wreck… I suppose at least he won’t be a nuisance so it could be worse, she thought to herself, noting that Rudy was glancing away from her to try to avoid eye contact. He shakily extended his hand forward to hers and shook her hand slowly.

“Nice to meet you, now let’s head inside…” Rudy went in first, and when she knew he wasn’t looking, she wiped her hand on her labcoat. That kid’s hand was so sweaty… the poor guy must feel like he’s under so much pressure.

After using her keycard to open up an elevator the two descended down to the lowest basement level where the company’s interdimensional portal was. Any nerves Rudy had immediately faded and were replaced by wonder when he saw it.

“Whoa… so this is an interdimensional portal…” Rudy said.

“Yup!” Evelyn placed her hands on her hips. “Built it myself. Well, not exactly, I wrote the code to make it work but other than that I’m just the project lead, I have subordinates who actually engineered the portal and built it. But… it can be programmed to go to a variety of universes! Theoretically anyways, it hasn’t… actually been tested yet.”

Rudy’s heart leapt at the thought. He wondered if he could use the portal to go to a different, better world… one where he wouldn’t have to choose between his morals and his financial security, perhaps…

Maybe I could try to see if fictional worlds exist as alternate universes, but which one should I try… he thought as Evelyn explained other information that he was not listening to at all. Then he remembered one particular world, one from his childhood that he had wanted to go to then, and still felt a desire to from time to time… ooh, maybe I could try accessing that one? He glanced over at Evelyn who was still explaining the process with which she built the portal. Of course, I’d have to do it when she isn’t looking…

Then, as if it was meant to be, Evelyn felt a sudden sensation out of nowhere. “Oh.”

Rudy looked back at her. “What is it?”

“I… I need to use the restroom,” she blurted, rushing out of the room. “Don’t touch anything while I’m gone!”

Before he even had a chance to respond she had left the room, leaving him all alone. Now was his chance to make his move. He went to the computer that activated the portal and started trying to activate it by typing commands that had been written on a sticky note into the command line. He tried the following two commands as a complete shot in the dark:

-portal activate connect earth2

He had no clue how to specify which world he wanted to connect to or even if the syntax was correct, but he pressed the enter key on the keyboard anyways. However, nothing happened. Instead, he then tried using ‘portal activate’ and ‘portal connect earth2’ as separate commands. This time, a swirling blue mass of energy materialized in the portal frame, and he fist-pumped. Soon, he may well finally be free from all of his current worries, including his intensely difficult schooling and his family life, among other things.

“RUDY!”

The young man blanched, then turned around to see Evelyn, who was furious as she stormed towards him.

“I specifically told you not to activate that portal while I was gone! What have you done?”

“W-well… I… I…”

“Do you have any idea how badly this could end up turning out? The thing’s not ready yet! If you leave it on for longer than thirty seconds then it could-”

Evelyn ended up being unable to finish her sentence before the portal did exactly what she feared it would do, explode. The explosion, which, notably, was more like a pulse of energy than an actual explosion, didn’t cause any structural damage thankfully, but it did use up so much energy that it plunged everywhere in a twenty-five-mile radius into a blackout. Once the laboratory’s backup generator kicked in and the lights came back on, it could be noticed that both Rudy and Evelyn had disappeared without a trace; not even burn marks remained on the floor where they were standing.

–

???

Mew floated towards the pair of unconscious humans, whose bodies were severely injured, as they drifted in ultra space. She rolled her eyes.

“Don’t tell me the humans were trying to tamper with interdimensional travel without my go-ahead again!” they complained before looking at the woman’s nametag. “Wiskell, huh… where have I heard that name before…” Suddenly her eyes lit up and she snapped her digits. “This must be Ryan’s sister! I remember him mention he had another sister besides Riley! I should bring her back to the pokemon world, and I may as well bring that other guy too rather than let him rot here in Ultra Space. But, first I need to transform them…”

Mew closed their eyes and formed two pokemon bodies, both eeveelutions. One looked like a sylveon, except it had deep, regal purple fur in the places that a sylveon would normally have pink fur. They did something more unique for the other one however, as it had the general body shape of a leafeon, but the fur colors and patterns and eye color of a shiny umbreon, with its leaf-like ears and tail ending in blues, most of its body being a very dark gray close to black, and its belly fur and paws being an ashen gray with very pale blue paw pads. The pink cat then pulled Rudy and Evelyn’s souls out of their human bodies and transferred them to the bodies of the sylveon and the leafbreon respectively, moved Evelyn’s moon necklace to her new body and stuffing the other non-clothing belongings of both into a newly materialized burlap knapsack, and sent them through a rift into the pokemon world to be given a second chance at life.