Bake and Shake

Valorie found the kitchen largely from memory and from memories of her early days as a Walker, when she had to rely on imagination as much as the Unreal to guide her. in the watercolor dreamscape through which she floated, she could no more than imagine walking, assume she was succefully moving her feet in some reality that related to the TADPOLE if to nothing she could sense. In as much as it was possible to feel color or sound, she felt her way around surfaces that she hoped were bulkheads and hatches, ducked the more solid shadows of what she suspected were projections of NDMs onto dimensional space, and finally sensed some quality she was certain related to metal and sharpness though her seeming-eyes detected only chimes and the fingers she couldn’t find curled around-
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“Val, Val!” Honorr’s face leaned close. “What’d you do, attack them single-handed?”

“That would be you,” Fisian pointed out, apparently floating above him until the world began to right itself into something almost real.

“She said to follw the bits. i could do that much. i attacked to distract them when i saw a bit of Val close to a bit of one of them.”

“She meant follow with the whole TADPOLE.”

“Did she? How do you know? She probably didn’t herself.”

“What append?” Val asked as she sat up, breaking into the impending arguement.

“Their second test. it looks like it was premature so there wasn’t as much damage as their could have been, but it was deep, deep and powerful enough to shake the planet to its core. I’m trying to calculate where the third test is likely to be but so far way north and some distance west is all I’ve got.”

“California?” Honorr asked.

“No, maybe aftershocks from the tremor but the terra firma fissures don’t hold a candle to the Sol Cascade for power effects.”

“Japan, then.”

“Very likely. Or something in the Pacific basin. We;ll head that way and continue monitoring for further signs.”

“Why are you monitoring in here instead of outside?”

“our trip through N-Dimensional space carried us a bit under the surface and the earthquake knocked us deeper.”

“A bit?” Honorr objected with a raised eyebrow.

“Twenty miles is not far. We traveled thousands to get here.”

“up is not over, especially through planetary crust.”

“TADPOLE won’s care, nor Val.”

Val rose and her head, until then sagging wearily, lifted. “We’re sitting here because i was fool enough to get knocked unconscious?”

“We’d have prodded you if it had take more than the time we needed to get the necessary readings. Are you feeling well enough for some local Unreal time? With the whole ship?”

“Size doesn’t matter. But you’ll have to turn off the safeties. TADPOLE’s brain has enough imagination to pull us of course if it gets alarmed.”

“What will it be?” Honorr asked with a grin.

Val stood and patted his bottom. “Nothing that exciting or the ship won’t be the only one alarmed and distracted. Just stand at the consoles and watch for Japan surface. Don’t try to predict the course. let me choose it r the tug of war will knock us out of the Unreal before we can get there.”