Highway InterReality 3x10^28
What no one had mentioned about inter-universal travel were the smells. Although they remained simple translations of the ineffable, focused through the lens of Zofie's Charge, they were still a heady, distracting affair. Palm oil, burnt wire and peony combined with mustard, mildew and latex, keeping time with the pulsing, hallucinogenic corridor walls and the cloying warble in the generated atmosphere around the Cavalier.
Zofie had decided early on to stick her glasses into her jacket's interior pocket, relieving herself of the vertigo-inducing sights as she strode through the passage. The "ground" of whirling energy patterns alternated between a cloying, muddy substance that rolled off of her skin and near-frictionless sheets that sent electrical charges through her bare soles, clamping her in place with each step as if walking on iron in magnet boots.
Every so often a large object floated by, either breaching through the passage or bumbling along the bass-thump 'jet-stream'. Sometimes a brain-crushing megafauna, sometimes a clumsy vehicle, sometimes a stray bubble of ecosystem wandered through, ambling around each other in an orbital dance before flagella-wriggling or jetting off on their old course once again. Travel in certain spots meant leaping between gravitational pulls, bounding from enormous fins to sprint across an observation deck window, and praying that at no point in the process would she have gotten turned around. When hunger gnawed, these gargantuan intruders provided the bulk of Zofie's food, skimming bolts from a ship's exterior while taking a bite from a country-sized Space Mole, not enough to register as an itch on the creature, and just enough damage to register as incidental.
To move between universes was to understand the life of a flea, or Tardigrade; a small, resilient speck bounced between titanic forces, surviving as little more than an incident or an irritant. Eventually, when the colors stopped whirling, when the noise kicked in, and when the ground chose a consistent texture, that tiny speck rejoiced, at least for a moment, on reaching anything that resembled the jurisdiction of her home's Laws of Physics.
What no one had mentioned about inter-universal travel were the smells. Although they remained simple translations of the ineffable, focused through the lens of Zofie's Charge, they were still a heady, distracting affair. Palm oil, burnt wire and peony combined with mustard, mildew and latex, keeping time with the pulsing, hallucinogenic corridor walls and the cloying warble in the generated atmosphere around the Cavalier.
Zofie had decided early on to stick her glasses into her jacket's interior pocket, relieving herself of the vertigo-inducing sights as she strode through the passage. The "ground" of whirling energy patterns alternated between a cloying, muddy substance that rolled off of her skin and near-frictionless sheets that sent electrical charges through her bare soles, clamping her in place with each step as if walking on iron in magnet boots.
Every so often a large object floated by, either breaching through the passage or bumbling along the bass-thump 'jet-stream'. Sometimes a brain-crushing megafauna, sometimes a clumsy vehicle, sometimes a stray bubble of ecosystem wandered through, ambling around each other in an orbital dance before flagella-wriggling or jetting off on their old course once again. Travel in certain spots meant leaping between gravitational pulls, bounding from enormous fins to sprint across an observation deck window, and praying that at no point in the process would she have gotten turned around. When hunger gnawed, these gargantuan intruders provided the bulk of Zofie's food, skimming bolts from a ship's exterior while taking a bite from a country-sized Space Mole, not enough to register as an itch on the creature, and just enough damage to register as incidental.
To move between universes was to understand the life of a flea, or Tardigrade; a small, resilient speck bounced between titanic forces, surviving as little more than an incident or an irritant. Eventually, when the colors stopped whirling, when the noise kicked in, and when the ground chose a consistent texture, that tiny speck rejoiced, at least for a moment, on reaching anything that resembled the jurisdiction of her home's Laws of Physics.