Chapter 2: I went ... but it was no 'Garden Party!'

My body alternated between tingles of fear and rage when I heard Astrid say:

“No, no, no, no, no! You’ve got it all wrong, my love!”

Her tears had long since abated. We had overcome the thoughtless ramblings of her peers in school. What was I thinking, she did not have any peers at ‘Cretin U’ and I told her that. Now this, was this the beginning of the end for us?

She continued in a way you might scold a child. “You can tell them about the other things in the big battle scene but Ragnarok is not like that; not like that at all.”

‘Whew’ I thought, at least another chapter or two of ‘War Maidens’ is saved, but, I asked, “What is Ragnarok like then?”

“In simplest terms, it is unlike anything you have experienced or might imagine.”

“First you must grasp that there are 19 dimensions being held in check like sheets or paper dangling on a clothesline. Imagine now each doing their own thing, never bothering or shall we say ‘impinging’ on the other.”

“One day a breeze blows in ans one or another of these sheets touch. All Hell you would say breaks loose with that touching. Reality changes for them, in an instant, portions of one become portions of the other.”

“Now that sounds pretty serious, doesn’t it?”

Without a pause for my reply she continued. “As it might be, it is but happens all the time you see! I’m not talking about the object ‘Sedna’ or the Oort Cloud itself; nor any comet or distant planet orbiting this solar system every 20, 30 49,000 years or more’ They do not matter.”

She was on a roll now and tucked her feet under her but continued.

“The Solar System orbits the center of the ‘Milky Way Galaxy’ every 250 Million years or so. That one ‘Milky Way Galaxy’ scientists estimate may contain as many as 100 billion solar systems in it alone. So this touching is not only possible it is probable, just not occurring very often.”

“For a planet that is estimated at 4.5 Billion years, even once every Billion years is often enough, don’t you agree?”

Again I was mute on this.

“Come-on here, we are talking things that each are 100,000 to 1,500,000 light years across and there are Billions of them. What do you think?”

“May I ask you a question?”

“You can ask me anything excepw ‘How old I am?’, and that I will not answer.”

“What exactly are you studying in school?”

“Well, English Literature, specifically Chaucer.”

“So... ?”

“Well, you tend to pick up a bit of this and a bit of that as time goes on. It’s your fault you got me started with Ragnarok!”

I’m sorry, come here!”

And so we cuddled a bit.