Creating something new, day 52

The point of no return?

It is wonderful to wake up even if it is early from the sun lighting up the room. It not just for my bed company, but waking up for the first day in my home. Here, where I most likely will live the rest of my life, with the three wonderful women lying beside me. It wasn't really my choice to have three girlfriends, but I do love and care about them, just not in equal amounts. I feel that Ciara and Kari are awake while Iselin snores, and Kari just gives me one of her wonderful warm smile and a muted "Good morning Robert" when she discovers that I'm awake. I want to slack off and not do anything, but I need to start working and continue moving in. I have ten oil lamps to assemble while I also supervise the water installation. I really want to be able to take a shower today. I also have to make sure they assemble the window blinds and put up the drapers. Fuck getting woken up by morning sunlight - I want it darker when I wake up. Maybe I should turn the bed 90 degrees so the head end is towards the courtyard? Just seems stupid with the window there.

After a quick breakfast, I hear that they have started mounting windows. Not unexpectedly, Pedr has focused all craftsmen to complete as much as possible on my mansion, and all the workers look forward to the feast and free days they will have starting tomorrow, just as I promised them and Pedr prepared. Lack of windows etc, isn't the workers fault, which I have ensured that they know. So far they have made excellent work, and they should be proud. The work proceed at a furious pace, but they have had a lot of practice, and everything is prepared. I really like that several of the windows are important stained glass windows.

I don't really love the subject of the three windows for my bedroom attic, but it is suitable for the culture here and my reputation as Sejdmann, and they are pretty and impressive. Oden on the north window, Thor on the south window, and Freya in the middle. Illuminated by the morning sun it will be impressive.

Otherwise, I am mostly glad that all the large windows for the main halls mezzanine have been completed and will be installed before dinner. We pass by them all the time, and it will make everything feel more finished. There are four high windows, with clear glass below 2 meter, and stained glass above. I am satisfied with how well it became, and from left to right, these windows tell a story. My sambos have seen three in pictures. I just stand there and appreciate it together with Kari and Ciara when Jane come to see what we're looking at. Jane looks at the motifs, reacts and surprised points:

"That is the mountain we climbed! Hårteigen."

"Yes."

"Thats the place where we both traveled into this world! That was your view the morning when you woke up here!"

"Yes."

"And thats the view of the viking houses! Gaulverboer! Where we walked out!"

"Yes. I didn't take any photos of that, but I remember that view so well. I stared at it for quite some time, trying to make sense of it and finding faults. Those four windows tell the story of how I got here. Starting on the left side with a selfie when I left my car and started my hike. That's Midgård. Followed by my little hiking tent under the lightning and Aurora, although I changed the tents color to stand out more and not look like a large rock. Its grey. Next is my view the next morning with Hårteigen in the background, and probably my first day in Alfheimr even though I didn't know it yet. And finally Gaulverboer, when I really understood I wasn't in Kansas anymore."

My joke falls flat and Jane doesn't seem to get the reference to the 'Wizard of Oz', but I understand there is other thoughts in her head. We just stand and look at it. After a couple of minutes, Jane quietly and reluctantly asks.

"Do you think that we will ever be able to return?"

"No."

Jane close her eyes, sighs and is quiet before she replies; "I have guessed so. But just like that, without any doubt or hope, just... No?"

"Do you have any idea how insane us traveling here is? A huge solarstorm and lightning strikes close by shouldn't make people travel to other dimmensions or worlds. It's stupid. One guess is that some kind of science experiment gone wrong on Earth at the same time or something equally weird. Hell if I know. We're extra dimmensional travelers so the lightningstrikes or CME - sorry, thats an acronym for Coronal Mass Ejection - might not have had anything to do with it, and it could as well be a weird cosmic alignment and being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

But it is likely that travel require a CME or atleast a strong Aurora as there is legends both here and in our world about Bifrost - the rainbow bridge connecting the worlds - and there is no way we can ever replicate it here, control it or even predict it. We don't control when a CME's happens, and huge ones hitting Earth - or here - are rare. About once per century rare, and I can't even predict them to get any forewarning. I have to invent helio centric astronomy, optics and make big telescopes and sun telescopes, to even have a chance of that, and I still won't have the required understanding. We might just get a day forewarning, and thats not enough time to make it back up north. If dimmensional travel also require a huge electrical discharge at the same time, we're even more screwed. I might be able to discharge lightning with a rocket pulling a wire, but I can't make a storm appear on command, or make a discharge even close to something like 1.21 GW." No reaction that she got the 'Back to the Future' reference. "And besides those things, something unknown had to have happened, and it might be that you have to be at a certain area at a certain time for it to work, and we don't know those variables. Add the complication that Aesir belief is about the nine realms, and we might end up in an other dimmension than Midgård, and most of them sounds really bad. I rather stay here than risk that."

Jane just stares at the windows while I probably effectively kills her last hope of ever returning, and it is partly deliberatly. It is better to abandon all hope of going back, than to forego life here. She should adapt and make the best of her life here. If something happen that change that in the future, then its another thing. She can pray for a miracle, but she shouldn't hope for it.

"The only glimmer of hope is that there have to have been people moving between Alfheimr and Midgård before, since too much is the same. But that might have been just a single incident when a large group of Elves traveled to Midgård and took their history, culture, religion, language and technology with them or something, way back when Midgård were more primitive. Before the Viking age. There are plenty of tales of elves and such in Midgård, and they might have been killed, or simply died out if there can't be children between humans and elves, or they just got mixed into the human population if they could. Truth about elves and other worlds became legends. A lot about life in the north before the middleages is unknown. There is Sagas written down many centuries later, and a few Runestones to go by. There isn't many Sagas here about humans that I have found so far, although they did know about us. In myths. Humans were myths until we showed up, and still are for all but a couple of dozen of elves. We're mythological beings up there with frost giants, dragons and their gods. Meeting Trolls are more likely than Humans. There are tales in Midgård of stone circles marking special places, which at certain times work as gateways to other worlds, including the realm of the elves, but that obviously isn't the whole truth. I've been thinking about it, and I do have a theory you might not like to hear, although it doesn't change much for us."

"Just tell me."

"It might be that travel between the worlds require a large charged electrical field or charged particles of some sort. Historically thats all been through Lightning strikes, Aurora or CME, but humanity might now be technologically advanced enough to be able to recreate it at will, if humanity knew it could be done, and how. My theory is that the nature, flora, fauna, geography and elves is close or the same for a reason, and the worlds are a form of copies of each other. Duplicates across dimmensions. As you know I was camping and staying in a tent during the whole Aurora-lightning episode. I didn't move for a long time, until hours after the lightningstrike. You did. That is an important fact. Another fact is that we both were under the same huge atmospheric charge when lightning struck close by, and that that somehow synced the worlds and made travel possible. Another fact is that during all your time in Hildifjoer, no other human arrived there, and there should have been hundreds of people in that area of Hardangervidda. Like in most of the cabins, and there's plenty of those if you include the hundreds of cabins by the road between Upper Eidjord and Dyranut. But I guess that very few humans were out tenting, or just enduring the weather like you did. Where we both were, the nature is pretty much unchanged by humans, and we were just centimeters from bedrock, and there is pretty much no active geology. No vulcanoes or big earthquakes, and the closest tectonic plate edge is Iceland, which is far away, and thats the Eurasia plate separating from the North American plate.

So, dimmensional travel might only work at certain spots that have the same geography, or else it would happen more often. Where bedrock might look the same and be 'in the same spot' in both worlds. If one spot in either world is changed too much, like there is a road, buildings, powerlines nearby or have too different landrise or geologic surface activity, it might not work there anymore. Which means areas where it can work will be fewer and fewer as time goes by, since inhabitants in both worlds will build stuff. Travel between worlds might have been far more common in the north a thousand years ago when most of it was wilderness. But I was tenting, you moved, and neither of us walked through some kind of portal, so either the area in the geography permanently changed places, or it was temporary until the charge had dissipated."

"Temporary. Do you mean that if we just had stayed in the same spot, we would still be in our world, Midgård?"

"It is possible that we walked out of the affected area and into Alfheimr, and then the area moved back to Midgård hours or days later. Or not, because it was permanent, which I think is far more likely."

"Why is that more likely?"

"Several reasons. Like, if travel one way require a big special charge of energy, what brought it back? A big area that permanently shift might be enough to syncronize a lot of flora and smaller fauna, and transport a big group of elves tenting in the wrong place. If a shift back happened the day after, the weather would be nicer, which means more people would have left the cabins, and been out walking and returned here when the land shifted back. There would be far more stories of people seeing weird shit happening or Elves ending up in Midgård. Remember that there is no way to really know, and its all just my wild ideas. I hope to hear Sagas or find books with other travelers mentioned and their circumstances. Anyway, we still can't replicate or even predict when and where it might happen again, although it might be possible to test my theory in a few years. So the answer is still 'No' even if there is a non zero chance."

"Its that why you already created electricity and telescopes?! To recreate the situation or predict the next one?"

"No. I didn't do it for that. As I said, its just way to advanced, and too small chance that it might work as I guess, but far in the future Alfheimr will be able to test that idea or try to open a gateway to Midgård, but not in our lifetimes. Its kind of interesting that the use of lightningrods might make the lightningstrike more predictable, but the act of building the structure carrying the lightningrod might prevent the dimmensional travel from happening.

We both know what happened to us is absurd, and so random its pretty much a zero chance. But Auroras are common on the North and South pole during winter, and I've actually seen many weak ones, including one in march in southern Sweden. Weak Auroras happen all the time, not just in the winter and during the night, we just can't see them in daylight, so sunlight might usually prevent dimmensional travel, or it needs to be a strong Aurora. But Auroras usually doesn't last long, and we can ignore the Southern hemisphere as a viable random travel spot."

"Why?"

"The worlds seem to be exactly the same, and its pretty much all sea until African-Australian latitudes, which is closer to the Equator than Spain or Greece. Humans might have several manned stations during winter in Antarctica, but I assume the elves havn't even explored that region yet, so anyone travelling to Alfheimr would freeze to death or starve without ever knowing, and there isn't any elves going the other way."

"Oh."

"As far as I know thunderstorms are rare during winter here in Scandinavia, although I don't know about all the coast, Canada or Russia. I think its simply the wrong weather, and you should understand that New York is actually slightly south of Rome in Italy, and on the same latitude as Madrid, Spain. Thunderstorms are common in the Mediterranean area, but Auroras are not, and they have way more active geology there too. I wonder how rare lightningstrikes during a powerful Aurora really is. In Midgård that data would be available, but here I have to start collecting it myself. It might be more common out to sea, but saltwater conduct electricity well, while rock doesn't, which might matter. Add in terrain that can't be changed to much and well, it might be relatively few events per decade, even on something as huge as Earths surface, and not in the most inhabitated regions. And most people arn't out in thunderstorms in the middle of nowhere, and those that are? People go missing in nature, never to be found, especially in bad weather, and if a few actually traveled here, the odds are that they end up in even more wilderness and die without even knowing. They might just walk a dozen kilometers, and die after a couple of days, from hunger, exposure or just giving up. There are probably few elves in areas where they might travel to Midgård, or they end up somewhere else."

"This all makes some kind of horrible logical sense."

"As I said, it doesn't change much for us. It is also probably a pretty terrible idea for us to go back and tell about Alfheimr, especially if we figure out how to go back. But the Elves now have proof that its possible to travel between worlds, and I will make sure it is saved in books. These thoughts are already saved in one of my notebooks, and my girlfriends knows it. Its up to future Elves to decide if they want to try and open that can of worms, since their tales are about the nine worlds, and Midgård can be bad enough.

Then there is the problem with time. Time here might move differently, because I don't believe they've spent 700-1000 year living with so little technological progress compared to Midgård. The problem is that we have no way to know if the timelines ever been synced. You know there wasn't much progress from 0AD to 1200AD, and in some ways, parts of Europe went backwards and lost progress and technology until the Renaissance. Other parts of our world changed less than that. It might be something similar here. Or it might be that for one year here, three to five years pass in Midgard. We just don't know, and its all speculation.

So, we ain't going back, and most likely we two will be the only humans here in Alfheimr for the rest of our lives. We just have to accept that, adapt and make the best of our future here."

Jane just looks at the stained glass windows, then she hugs me and start crying against my shoulder while we hug. She really cries, but eventually she collects herself, gives me a soft kiss on my cheek, and walk into her room and close the door. They look at me, so I explain that I've just effectively crushed the last little hope she had about ever going back to Midgård, because it won't happen to any of us. At least that makes Ciara happy, and she feels guilty for being happy about it, so I her a kiss on her cheek, and give Kari a kiss on her lips, before returning to work.