1-06 Two Weeks Notice

Augusta Constantine folded her arms. Her face held a smirk prophesying one of her classic eye rolls. "Let me guess. It's bigger on the inside. You know, you really have to stop ripping off Doctor Who."
"There's that physician you keep mentioning," frowned Horatio. "I don't know who this fellow is, but I think it is he that is 'ripping off' us because I've never heard of him."
"STEVE! HAS PRACTICED DWARVEN BATTLE MAGIC THAT SPANS THE CENTURIES BEFORE YOUR PUNY DOCTOR."
"Well, you knew what you were getting into when you hired me." Augusta stepped over to the doorway and looked all around it. It appeared to be just some old wooden doorway that was slapped haphazardly onto the side of one of the nigh-century-old brick buildings in the historic downtown area of her suburb. And since both the suburb and the particular street this door was on was hardly ever traveled, nobody ever questioned why it was there at all when it wasn't just two weeks ago. She pointed at the door's bottom. "Not wheelchair accessible, I see."
"DOES LADY CONSTANTINE CONTINUE TO MOCK STEVE!?"
"I'm just teasing," she chuckled. She and Horatio shared a wink. "It looks very nice and...well...blue. But it does seem to be a bit off spatially."
"A good eye for detail, my good librarian," said Horatio with a flourish of the arm as if presenting a work of art. "Indeed, there is a need for a little folding of space. But, I assure you, we are well within Potter's 9¾^th Law of the Conservation of Quantum Dimensional Physics."
"STEVE! TAKES SPATIAL BORROWING VERY SERIOUSLY." The dwarf nodded with great pride glittering in his eyes.
"You'll have to enlighten me," sighed Augusta. These last couple of weeks had been very exciting but also very confusing for her. When she handed in her two weeks notice at the library, she almost recanted and had this desire to disappear into the stacks of books hidden in the back that were used for sorting returns. The tug-of-war between her curiosity and her desire to use as little energy as possible that every introvert knows felt epic in her soul. But, in the end, she couldn't stop thinking about the wonders she was seeing every day. Who in this entire universe knew that there were other universes and that it was somehow possible to travel among all of them? It was one thing to want to see other worlds and galaxies in this universe, but to be able to see ones with entirely different sets of laws was just too great an opportunity to pass up. Yet, this also required a lot of catching up.
Professor Booper-Snoot gestured to STEVE! who used his staff to knock on the door twice. A shimmer of light later, the door swung inward revealing the space inside. "It appears to be bigger on the inside, but in a three-dimensional universe, which is the vast majority of them, we can borrow from a non-temporal fourth dimensional plane by quantum balancing a given space's enlargement with the ensmallment of the objects inside, cross-multiplied by the magi-quantum flux ratio."
Augusta's eye-rolling prophesy came to pass. "I'm sorry I asked."
"MAYBE STEVE! CAN EXPLAIN USING LESS FLOWER LANGUAGE. ROOM GETS BIGGER BUT STEVE!, PROFESSOR, AND LIBRARIAN GET SMALLER BUT ONLY FOR A SHORT TIME. BORROWING."
Augusta rubbed her temples. "So kind of like the Conservation of Mass or Energy, but for justifying the existence of a T.A.R.D.I.S. Tell me, do you have copyright laws where either of you come from?"
Horatio and STEVE! shrugged at one another and walked in through the door.
Augusta picked up the cat carrier beside her feet and spoke into it. "Don't worry, Itchy. You can run around STEVE!'s imaginary room and climb his imaginary curtains. Okay?" She walked through the doorway as confidently as she could, but it was still a strange feeling, like one of those dreams where you walk towards a door on the other end of the hallway, but that door keeps getting further away. At the same time, there was this sensation of getting smaller while everything around her got larger. She had done it several times before, but it was still hard to get used to. Poor Itchy mewed pitifully in the carrier.
"WELCOME TO STEVE!'S LAIR OF AWESOME!"
"Do you really have to say that every time?" Augusta smirked.
"STEVE! NEEDS VALIDATION. LET STEVE! HAVE STEVE!'S MOMENT," he smirked back.
Augusta put down the cage and started to unlatch it. "So, here I am with two weirdos dressed like a flamboyant steampunk Indy and the other like a short D&D Thor. Is this where you tell me just how we are going to start exploring the multiverse?" The door swung open, but the orange tabby still mewed pitifully inside. "Aw, don't worry, Itchy. Fligbug is more afraid of you than you are of them."
Horatio delightfully flattened a large map on the large medieval-looking table in the middle of what appeared to be a stone room of a castle. At a motion from Augusta, STEVE! invoked a spell to brighten the medieval-looking candelabras for more light. "Delighted, my wondrous mathematician!"
Augusta cringed at another of Horatio's affectations, but came over and peered at it anyway. "Wait, this is the multiverse?"
"Yes!" Horatio tapped his fingers together gleefully as he hovered over the square meter of paper. "Isn't it just fabulous?"
"It just looks like a honeycomb. I was expecting something a bit more..."
"Mandelbrot? Barnsley fern? Koch snowflake?"
Augusta shrugged. "Maybe. But I guess a map is a map, and what I'm more interested in is how we are all going to get to these other universes. Safely."
Horatio just kept looking at the map lovingly. "Yes. Niiiice map." He rocked back and forth on the heels of his leather boots.
Augusta's eyes peeked over her spectacle frames. A single eyebrow raised. "You...do have a way to get to these other universes safely, don't you?"
Horatio drew back defensively. The look of hurt on his face was palpable. "Of course I do! How do you think I got here?"
Augusta smirked and gestured at Horatio's breast pocket. "When I need to walk across downtown, I walk. And when I need to go into the city, I take a bus. But if I want to go somewhere really off the beaten path, I need something else, like my own car or bike or something."
Horatio looked up at her silently.
Augusta persisted and pointed again at the pocket where he kept Fligbug, the Five-Dimensional Banana Slug. "At best, our poor friend is like a bus."
"A SHORT BUS," STEVE! added, nodding knowingly with gleeful ignorance.
Augusta nodded in agreement, somehow keeping a straight face. "What you're looking for is your own ride, isn't it?"
Horatio gave a sheepish shrug. "Cup holders would be nice, too. Is that so wrong?"
Augusta shook her head. "Not at all. I'm just wondering what your next move is."
The professor's eyes lit up. "We need two things, you clever collector of card catalogs: said 'ride', which I am in the midst of procuring, and..." He made a rather dramatic gesture, pointing to the periphery of his map. "...a mechanic."
"Mechanic?" Her eyebrow quirked.
"A tinkerer, actually, but we need more than mechanical aptitude. The only way we can utilize the power of the fifth dimension, is to procure someone with a unique ability. The apple of my eye requires something else entirely."
Augusta folded her arms. Finally her patience ran out. "Alright. Out with it."
Horatio winked at her. "I need a musician!"