Scientist and The Fox

Earth – 9:14 PM, MIT Advanced Physics Lab

Liam Hart hated two things: incompetence and the smell of burnt coffee. Tonight, the lab reeked of both.

“Adjust the magnetic containment field by 0.3 teslas,” he snapped, gloved fingers dancing across the quantum collider’s control panel. The machine hummed like a trapped hornet, its core glowing an eerie blue. Across the room, his grad student, Raj, fumbled with a spectrometer.

“Or maybe 0.4?” Raj ventured, sweat beading on his forehead.

“No. The harmonic resonance will destabilize if—”

The collider shrieked. A crack split the air—not a sound, but a tear, as though reality itself had snagged on a nail. Liam had milliseconds to register the artifact: a jagged crystal shard, iridescent as oil on water, materializing inside the containment field.

Then, light.

Pain.

A sensation of falling sideways.

---

Aquaria – The Great River Delta

Liam woke to the stench of rotting fish and the feel of mud squelching beneath his cheek.

“Up, star-touched! Unless you fancy becoming a crocodile’s breakfast.”

The voice was high-pitched, tinged with a mocking lilt. Liam rolled over, blinked, and found himself nose-to-nose with a fox.

Not a fox.

The creature stood on hind legs, barely two feet tall, its silver fur streaked with bioluminescent markings that pulsed faintly in the dawn light. Twin tails swished behind it, each tip glowing like a miniature galaxy. It grinned, revealing needle-sharp teeth.

“You’re… a raccoon,” Liam croaked, brain still scrambling to parse the swampy panorama of towering reeds and tea-colored water.

One tail flicked his forehead. “Raccoon? I am Wish, Sage of the Ancients, Keeper of Forgotten Songs, and apparently the only thing standing between you and a slow death by stupidity.”

Liam sat up, wincing at the headache pounding behind his eyes. His lab coat was gone, replaced by a tunic of coarse linen. The collider, Raj, MIT—all vanished. His eidetic mind replayed the accident frame by frame: the artifact, the tear in space, the—

“Quantum displacement,” he muttered. “The crystal acted as a bridge between entangled particles in parallel dimensions, but the energy required would—”

“—melt your brain to soup if you keep blathering,” Wish interrupted. She tossed a waterskin at him. “Drink. Then run.”

“Run?”

The answer came as a guttural shout from the reeds.

“There! The star-touched freak’s by the water!”

Six figures emerged, clad in blackened steel armor, their faces hidden behind snarling wolf masks. Obsidian Empire raiders—though Liam didn’t know that yet. He did understand the crossbows aimed at his chest.

Wish sighed. “Now do you grasp the run part?”

---

Liam ran.

The raiders gave chase, their boots sloshing through the marsh. Wish bounded ahead, her glow leaving faint trails in the mist.

“Why are they after us?” Liam hissed, ducking under a low-hanging vine.

“You fell from the sky in a pillar of light. They think you’re a demon. Or a weapon.” Wish leaped onto a half-submerged log, tails flaring. “Also, I may have borrowed their captain’s dagger.”

She held up a curved blade encrusted with rubies. Liam groaned.

A crossbow bolt thudded into a tree beside his ear.

“Prioritize,” Wish chirped. “First, don’t die. Second, complain about not dying.”

Liam’s mind raced. The raiders had the advantage in numbers and terrain knowledge. His own assets: a fox with a stolen knife and a brain stuffed with equations.

He skidded to a halt at a fork in the swamp. To the left: open water, dotted with lily pads. To the right: a dense thicket of mangroves.

“Which way?”

Wish sniffed the air. “Left. The right reeks of venom-spitting frogs.”

“Perfect.” Liam veered right.

“Are you deaf? I said frogs!”

“Frogs don’t build traps.”

The thicket opened into a clearing—or rather, a pit disguised by a mat of rotting leaves. Liam grabbed Wish mid-leap and hurled them both sideways as the first raider plunged through the false floor into a spike-lined trench.

The remaining five hesitated.

“Sorcery!” one growled.

“No,” Liam muttered, “basic structural engineering.” He’d spotted the pit’s telltale sag from three meters back.

Wish peered over the edge at the impaled raider. “Hm. Efficient. Brutal, but efficient.”

“I didn’t dig it.”

“No, but you used it. Resourceful, for a monkey.”

Another bolt zipped past. Liam ducked behind a tree, breath raw in his throat.

Wish’s ears twitched. “They’re flanking us. West side.”

“How can you tell?”

“I hear their armor clanking. Also, one’s humming. Badly.”

Liam pressed a hand to the tree’s bark, calculating. The raiders expected panic, not strategy. Time to flip the script.

“Distract them,” he whispered.

Wish’s eyes narrowed. “Distract them.”

“You’re small, fast, and annoying. Perfect bait.”

She bared her teeth. “I am a sage, not a—!”

Liam shoved her into the open.

“Hey, tinheads!” Wish yowled, darting between the raiders’ legs. “Catch me if you can—and bring a better bard next time!”

Chaos ensued.

As the raiders stumbled over each other, Liam scavenged the pit trap. The spikes were ironwood—harder than steel. He snapped one free, hefting it like a javelin.

“Newton’s third law,” he muttered. “Every action has an equal and opposite—”

He hurled the spike. It struck a raider’s crossbow, triggering the release mechanism. The bolt ricocheted into another soldier’s thigh.

Wish zigzagged back, tails bristling. “One left!”

The final raider lunged, sword raised. Liam braced—

—and froze as a guttural roar shook the trees.

Something massive erupted from the water. Scales glinted in the sunlight. A serpentine head, larger than a truck, hovered above them, slitted eyes locking onto the raider.

The Leviathan’s descendant.

The soldier barely had time to scream before the creature snapped him up like a minnow.

Liam stood paralyzed, the beast’s breath hot and rancid on his face.

Wish grabbed his sleeve. “Run. Now.”

They fled, the monster’s echoing cries pursuing them deep into the swamp.

---

Hours later, they collapsed in a hollow beneath a willow tree, the Leviathan’s distant howls finally fading.

Liam’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Adrenaline, he told himself. Not fear. Never fear.

Wish flopped onto her back, paws kneading the air. “Well. That was fun.”

“Define fun.”

“We’re alive. I count that as a win.” She rolled over, studying him. “You’re not from here. The stars are wrong in your eyes.”

Liam hesitated. “Earth. A parallel dimension, probably. The collider… the crystal…”

“Ah. A world-walker.” Wish’s glow dimmed. “I knew one, once. He thought he could outsmart the tides, too.”

“What happened to him?”

“The tides won.”

Silence fell, broken by the croak of distant frogs. Liam flexed his fingers, grounding himself in the tactile reality of mud and moss. His mind itched to analyze, to dissect this world’s rules, but exhaustion weighted his thoughts.

Wish curled into a silver ball beside him. “Sleep, star-touched. Tomorrow, we find the Tidecallers.”

“Who?”

“The only people crazier than us. I predict we will encounter them.”

“Why?”

Her tails flicked, casting faint constellations on the willow’s bark. “Because they want to kill the innocent. And you, my clever monkey, are going to help the folk living here.”

---