Author's Note

This story is written by @jae5086, one half of the Scratched and Burnt team, as part of the Xpilar Writing Competition. The plan is to make every subsequent challenge entered a new chapter in an ongoing story. Obviously there is no way to know what the next picture will be so this is a very fluid, unplanned thing. We'll call it a challenge inside a challenge. So meta!

Now, on with the show. We hope you enjoy!

Credit - @xpilar

Chapter 3: Traversing Time

Sandy Arquette was never a large man. In school, he was often bullied for his slight physique and thick glasses. Sports were never one of his interests and, as such, Sandy spent much of his time alone. He hated school because of the bullying but he loved to learn and he loved his teachers, especially Mrs. Livingston, his 8th grade science teacher.

Mrs. Livingston wasn't a classic beauty, nor was she particularly young, but she was regarded as pretty for her age by most students and more than once had to ward off the unwanted advances of her fellow teachers. She had a manner about her that captivated the young Arquette. The way she used her hands when explaining simple scientific theories would lull most students, bored by the subject matter, to sleep. As other's in the classroom slowly drooped, heads on desks waiting for the bell to ring, Sandy would be fully engaged, mesmerized by her swaying arms as she taught the day's lesson.

He found himself fantasizing about her. In a classroom full of student's, he imagined her lessons were tailored specifically for him - that she would ignore the other students who clearly didn't want to be there and look him in the eyes while teaching him the finer points of scientific theories he, as a 12 year old, didn't even know existed. She would be so impressed by his ability to learn that she would fall in love. They would marry and she would help him become the greatest scientist of all time. All the other students would be jealous.

Of course, these childish fantasies never came true. Mrs. Livingston was married and many decades older. Sandy would move on to high school the following year and only encounter her a few times before graduating, never even having the nerve to speak to her. He would marry, eventually, though not a fellow lover of science. He would graduate with honors and work through a graduate program at the University of Connecticut as well, earning multiple degrees.

What Sandy never did seem to earn was the respect of his peers. Even now, a physicist of some renown, his theories were anything but mainstream and his well-known love of science fiction and time-travel more often made him the butt of jokes than considered a serious scientist. Despite numerous papers published across a variety of esteemed journals, few would work with him willingly. Few but Dimitri Balakin.

Dimitri was a large man who easily dwarfed Sandy. Side-by-side in the lab, the two made quite a comical pair, their sizes so opposite one another. It was a popular source of "water-cooler" talk and they loved to let Sandy know about. Rarely did they say such things to Dimitri. Born in Russia to a family a little too outspoken against the USSR, they emigrated to the United States after a second family member went missing. Dimitri was too young to have known them and, even after arriving in America, it was years before he found a home.

His father had them travel, often moving them hastily to a new city. Dimitri would learn later that, while they gave up living in the motherland, his father had never given up on his vision for it. He wrote for newspapers and attended meetings, carrying on the work that saw him sequester his family far from their home. He also grew paranoid, certain spies of the Russian government would eventually find him. Certainly his life's work exposed him and they would eventually find him...his family. Perhaps he was right, perhaps the constant moving from city to city...state to state...would keep them hidden.

The constant moving, in a country so foreign to the young Dimitri, did little to help him create a social life and he often yearned to travel back to a time when he had his friends and his home. Now, like Sandy, he turned to books. Books could come with him when they packed in the middle of the night to make a clandestine escape from the perceived threats of his father's paranoia, friends could not. Over the years though, his father began writing about the homeland less and stopped attending meetings of like minds. Having slowly become more acquainted with their new country he would shift his attention to local politics instead of those abroad. He would settle down after all those years. He would make a home for his family and new friends. Dimitri would read.

Now, sequestered in a lab toying with the mechanics of the universe and grappling with questions and theories that seemed too large for their colleagues, both Sandy and Dimitri felt home. They both had a friend. They would change the world...

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The satellite, once a small, forgettable moon was now an pioneer traversing the quantum unknown, carrying it's tiny inhabitants through space and time to a destination that, given even the smallest error in mathematics could be wildly different than intended. Ice melted and covered the ark as it twisted in ways physics don't allow for. The smaller stabilizer ships stretched and twisted. To the inhabitants, consciousness was more like a hallucination than waking reality. Colors and sounds distorted like their surroundings and thoughts were unretainable. It was as if they were in a stupor and would remember nothing. Centuries of detailed planning created the most ambitious project they would ever know and yet, there was no preparing for this. How long would they exist in this state? Would the project succeed? These were questions they were incapable of asking.

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Chapters

Chapter 1: They Came From The Deep of Space
Chapter 2: Fate Mismanaged