Chapter Text
Museum nights for the staff that worked there seemed like they could stretch on for too many hours. As the moon’s pale white light was cast on the grand building, the darkness of the night still loomed all over, with the faint amber glow of the street lights offering a slight sense of warmth and safety, no matter how fleeting. It was around this time in the museum, when it had all closed down, that most of the staff were leaving for the night. Security guards swapping out with the night shift men, tour guides turning in for the night. Even the museum’s curator was packing up to head home.
In the storage unit of the museum, a young woman walked down the featureless and rather bland halls. In a white coat, a soft coloured shirt, with a clipboard in hand, trainers covered in plastic bags and her chestnut hair in a ponytail. On her was a keycard that read “ELODIE SINCLAIR” and under her name was “Museum Conservator”. As she approached one of the doors in the hallway, she scanned her card, with a buzz and the light on the panel going from red to green, she opened the door and entered.
The room was covered in old wooden boxes, some marked with recent labels. Others with labels worn to time and some with old stamps and markings. Elodie looked around and at her clipboard when she heard the door open up and saw another member of the team enter the room.
“Oh Elodie? Still working?” Her colleague asked.
“Yeah, always busy I guess…just a few things to catalogue and I’ll be out of here.” Elodie answered, soft and quiet as she usually is, “Who knows, might get Micheal to give me overtime for this.” The two conservators let out a small chuckle as they thought about it.
“Come on Elodie, you’re young. You should be having some fun out with friends, leave the overtime to us old geezers.” Her colleague tried to convince her.
“Samantha…I’m 25 and you’re 30. I’d hardly call a 5 year age gap the difference between ‘young’ and a ‘geezer’. I’ll be done here quickly, don’t worry.” Elodie dissuaded Samantha.
“Alright, well…see you whippersnapper.” Samantha chuckled as she noted a few things down on a clipboard in the storage unit and left. Elodie resumed her work and checked off the boxes in the storage unit and their content. Until she got to an unmarked box, no labels, no stamps and no emblems to denote the content, location or time. The only indication she got was that it was very very old.
Elodie looked around and found a crowbar to pry open the wooden lid. With the lid and nails off, she looked inside and found, wrapped in a deep red cloth, was a dark green opaque gem. Elodie took it out of the box and put it on the workbench, there, she shined the desk lamp on it. She grabbed a few books on rare stone to see if she could identify it from the outset.
“Doesn’t look like Jade or Emerald…maybe Tourmaline?” Elodie looked over the gem and noticed something strange about it, as she ran her fingers over it, she noted how it seemed like the gemstone was in two halves that were put back improperly. The cuts didn’t line up with each other. As Elodie fiddled it with, she noticed the top segment turned, and so she realigned it.
As the gem became one cohesive object, it began to glow and shimmer. Elodie fell off her chair in shock. This gem was now levitating and the light began to intensify, filling the whole room. It causes various electronic equipment to start acting strange, lights flickering on and off, machines buzzing or sparking out of nowhere. Elodie tried to run out of the room, but the door had become locked due to the object interfering with the technology around it.
Elodie had to do something, she grabbed a pair of hard-worn leather gloves and grabbed the crystal, as her hands wrapped around it she could feel its pull against wanting to be grabbed but she held on tight and turned the gemstone so that the object was no longer one piece. The portal closed up and the unit area seemed to be operational again. Elodie scrambled as she put the crystal back in the box and covered it back in the cloth. She tried the door again and found it opened up perfectly fine now. She ran out of the storage room, not quite sure what she saw. As she took off all the protective equipment, she headed for the entrance, ready to head home and just have a drink and calm down about it all.
Before she made it to the main hall, she was stopped in the hallway, beside three terracotta soldiers and four figures in the dark. Elodie was in shock…who were they, why were they in the shadows. Stunned by today’s events, she could barely articulate the desire for them to step out of the shadows or even ask for their names. As she stepped back, they stepped forward until she saw them…they were her…in most detail they looked exactly like Elodie. Fair skin with a slight tan and the hint of a natural flush, the chestnut hair, hazel eyes. However, they all looked slightly different in some way. Some various obvious, one of them had ears not of a human, but more akin rabbit, one of them had strange tattoos along her arms and neck, another had clothes that was torn and scars along her face, and the last one was more robot than human, with a red eye that seemed to be scanning her.
“W…w…who are you?!” Elodie yelled out, past all the shock as she fell to the floor and tried to crawl away. Scanning the other Elodies that were in front of her. Shock can do all sorts of things to the system, maybe she was hallucinating. This could all be a dream.
“Don’t worry…Elodie…we’re all here for you. And we are you!” The scarred Elodie stepped forward and made claim to the young woman crawling away on the floor, she then signalled the other to move forward. The bunny Elodie, true to her look, jumped over her and towards the doorway, blocking any means of escape. The tattooed Elodie started muttering something but as she ended, metal chains erupted out of the floor and bound the regular Elodie to the ground.
“Please…if you’re really all me…we can work this out…you’re all not like this!” the regular Elodie begged.
“Sadly, we are not ‘really all’ you!” The scarred Elodie then brandished an ornate and well crafted dagger, straight edged and finely made. With jewels on the hilt and guard and the whole thing almost emitting an aura…as if it were alive.
As the scarred Elodie made her way to her captured prey, then they heard a yelp from bunny Elodie who was then seen flying towards them, crashing into the terracotta soldiers. As the other Elodies looked over, they saw a man. Wearing a robe that looked like he had captured the stars, nebulas and galaxies of the world and put them into his robes to make it look like it was outer space. In his hand was what looked like a staff, complete with an ornate dragon’s head, with emerald eyes. Along the length of the staff was what appeared to be markings or even possibly words in another language, the staff looked like it was radiating the same emerald glow as the eyes of the staff.
“4 Shifters against a flatblood…seems unfair if you ask me,” the man boasted as he entered a stance of strength, feet firmly planted, one arm across his chest and his staff in his other hand, looking just as intimidating as the man holding it, “now 3 against a Mage Master…that’s more even.”
The cyborg Elodie scanned the man up and down and whispered something to the others, before they then grabbed the bunny Elodie and ran down the hallway. The man stood there still watching it all and the regular Elodie, still chained to the floor, was wondering if this man was a new friend or something more. As the other Elodies vanished from sight, the man got out of his stance and took a deep breath.
“Well…that was lucky.” He exclaimed, “Oh, three of them at once, nah, not happening.”
“Umm…could you help me here please?” Elodie asked, trying to break out of her chains.
“Ah yes, sorry.” The man moved closer and moved his fingers in a strange fashion over the chains, but as he did, they rescinded back into the earth and even the floor seemed to heal and formed back together, “all good now?” The man asked as he approached the broken terracotta soldier.
Elodie got up and looked over the statue too, broken and fragmented. Then something snapped in her, past all the unusual things that had happened today, it was pure anger. She glared down at the man and started screaming at him, “Do you have any idea how old that was?! There are Qin Dynasty Terracotta Soldiers, over 2200 years old!! It will take-” Before Elodie could finish, she saw the man wave his staff in front of the statues and it repaired them at once.
“It only takes a moment. For an anomaly with a Mage Dimension doppelganger, you sure don’t know how the mystical arts work.” the man chastised Elodie, who was in stunned shock and awe as the man pranced around her.
“Who in the world are you?!” She finally asked.
“Name’s Angelo, and just like you, I’m an anomaly.” The man who saved Elodie introduced himself, he bowed and smiled as he then took his staff and let it slide into a pocket within his long and starry robes. Despite its size, Elodie saw it almost fall in and just vanish into the pocket into an unknown space. Elodie then just fell to her knees and passed out from this all. The last thing she saw was Angelo rushing over to her before she blacked out.