Chapter 10

Pandora stood in silence. Before her was Lewis, standing with a childlike grin on his face in front of a car that looked like it had two wheels in the junkyard. The whole thing was comparable to a three year old with a crayon drawing, showing the “masterpiece” to their parents.
“So. Let me get this straight. You want to go to the beach.”
“Yes.”
“Which is more than a thousand miles away.”
“Yes.”
“In that?”
“Yep.”
“And you claim you can do it in five seconds, without portals.”
“Indeed.”
“Lewis, you’d need to travel at…” Pandora paused, running the math through her head briefly. “…at least Mach 1,200!”
“Actually, with some well placed time manipulation we could make it at Mach 20, easy. Of course, it would be five minutes from our perspective, but that’s still five seconds to a good couple dozen billion people.”
“Lewis, that’s really beside the point… And there are only 7.1 billion people on Earth.”
“Well, I was counting the other realms.” Lewis paused. “And didn’t you just instantaneously travel 5 miles underground? Why are you doubting me now?”
“The closet portal wasn’t made of junk, held together with duct tape, and powered with propane.”
“Actually, it’s made with an old television, a microwave, and a box of paper clips. Oh, and a closet, of course. It’s held together with chewing gum, and it’s powered by an overly excitable gremlin on a hamster wheel.”
Pandora prepared to respond, then stopped. He made a good point. If you could pull off instantaneous travel with a… Wait… “A gremlin on a hamster wheel…?”
“Yeah. Little guy really loves the thing. Runs until he trips and dies, revives, grabs a cookie, then dashes off to the hamster wheel again. It provides more than enough power for a simple portal system.”
“…You sure it won’t explode?”
“We already tested for that. If it was going to explode, you would have heard about it from NASA a week ago.”
Pandora sighed. Lewis seemed dead set on getting her to come along, and she was running out of reasons not to trust the machine. “Alright, fine… We’ll go to the beach…”
Lewis’s tail swiveled in delight, as he did a little dance. “YES! Grab the portal rig and gather some scrap metal guys, we’re going to the beach!”

A note from the author ninja:

Lewis really has a way of instilling confidence into people, doesn’t he?

On a different note, I’m surprised Pandora didn’t comment on the time manipulation thing. Maybe the mention of a time portal earlier softened the blow?