After passing the first row of coats, Sharp found himself encountering a second row.These were all made of fur and reached down to the hollow wooden flooring he was crawling on. Some coats where so long, they gathered in a pile. He pushed them aside as he passed.

“Can you please put your video feed on?” his friend said with his typical annoyance.

“Yeah, yeah, but you’re not going to see much besides long coats.” Sharp flicked his eyes over the video icon in his virtua display and began streaming.

This will be an interesting test of my quantumband channel. I took for granted it could reach from my car all the way down to the WMD lab, but through a dimensional doorway? Talk about your field tests.

Sharp looked around the closet, and AR data continued to pop up. Temperature, humidity, signal strength, material analysis…even Novell’s puzzled face was streaming with no glitching or lag. His system was working optimally, much to his surprise.

Ahead was light from two open doors, and in the middle of the doors was a dark shape with a swishing tail. The analytical data showing on his screen was being broadcast to Novell and Darity. Sharp laughed when he thought about the surprise they were about to experience.

Now that he was away from the red emergency lights, he could see that Lady Primguard’s bathrobe was actually white, and her tail came out of a slit in the back. Her hair between her horns caught the light with an iridescent sheen. A coat sleeve was caught in one of her dark brown horns. The other ended with a pearly white tip. He then noticed how polished her horns were.

No wonder they gleamed so much in the red light.

In his earpiece, he could hear both Novell and Darity gasp. He came up closer to her from behind and hoped she didn’t kick like a mule.

“Cosplay?” Novel asked with a great deal of doubt. If Novell was paying attention, he’d see the temperature readout for the horns, evidence that they were filled with healthy blood vessels. Sharp didn’t blame him for being overwhelmed. Lady Primguard was a lot to take in.

“No. I’ll send you a bioscan later.”

“That’s what all this data is? Sharp, I want your tech!”

“Shh,” he whispered, then louder he said, “Hey, uh, Nancy Drew, it’s not polite to snoop.”

She turned her head towards him quickly, and he ducked away from her horn.

“You aren’t in any danger of my horns hitting you. If I wanted to gore you, I would have done it before when you informed me that helping me wasn’t in your job description.” She seemed more irritated than scared at the moment. Sharp found that oddly comforting. “Besides, my name isn’t ‘Nancy’. Are you making fun of me?”

“Of course! I always make wisecracks when I’m hiding in a coat closet with a beautiful woman. You have no idea how often this happens to me.” Her face was screwed up in confusion. Sharp could tell she didn’t get his sarcasm, but he wasn’t worried about it.

“See anything familiar? Mind if I look?” Lady Primguard scowled at him in response, but shifted her body to the right.

Outside of the double doors was an empty room. They were above the floor, which would mean the “coat closet” was in reality a wardrobe. To the right was an open doorway, and to the left there must have been a window since sunlight painted a bright yellow square on the wooden floor. Sharp’s virtua screen updated his display with cooler temps, higher humidity levels, as well as the air quality, which was surprisingly clean, and the temperature of the patch of sunlight. The room had a general feeling of disuse but seemed dusted and swept. Judging by the moulding where the floor and wall met, the choice of wallpaper, and the ornate coving, the house was decorated in a bare, Victorian style motif once popular in England.

“Waitaminute… We’re in a wardrobe. A wardrobe filled with fur coats. A wardrobe connected to the WMD lab with some kind of dimensional rift, and the terminus is a British Victorian room that looks like it was decorated over a century ago. Back! Back! We’ve got to go.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“What?”

“Is this your home?”

“No,” she said with disappointment.

“Then don’t argue. Hurry! We don’t want to be stuck here!” It made no sense to him, but then none of this made any sense. All he knew was that his instincts weren’t usually wrong, and if his instincts were correct, he’d find himself free of the WMD lab, but trapped on the wrong continent if the portal shifted again.

Sharp backed up and turned himself around, then made his way back through the coats. Soon he could see the red emergency lights up ahead.

I never thought I’d be so glad to see those things.

“Sharp, what’s wrong?” Darity asked in concern.

“Later,” Sharp muttered, hoping Miss Nancy didn’t hear him talking to his invisible friends again.

With a final push, he was clear of the wardrobe and overcoats. Sharp turned around to help his companion come out of the closet.

“Let’s go!” He shouted at her, then looked back at the wormbox nervously.

“I’m hurrying, you pushy brute!”

The intercom was filled with the sound of the technicians crowding the observation window to get a look. Cries of “They’re back!”, “Something’s wrong!”, and a loud rabble of questions and exclamations filled the lab room. Their voices echoed and filled the space along with the dust and smoke. Sharp impatiently scooped the air towards Lady Primguard, but she was still several feet back from the entrance. Behind him, the wormbox began to give off sparks again.

“Nownownownownow!”

“I can’t. My horns are stuck!” She was still a few feet from the portal’s opening struggling to free her horns from one of the fur coats.

Sharp reached in, gave her a perfunctory “Excuse me”, then wrapped his arms under hers, clasped his hands together behind her back, and pulled her out with a hard yank. The room was wailing with the distorted sound of a rusty hinge again as Sharp pulled her free into the WMD lab. A fur coat was dangling over both her horns.

“I lost my slipper,” she said stupidly.

“You were wearing slippers this whole time?” Sharp laughed.

“You can be kind,” she said in surprise. They stood for a moment with their arms wrapped around each other for support, their faces inches away from each other, as the portal entrance rippled and suddenly changed to a scenic beach. There were large, dark mounds at the water’s edge that absorbed the light while the water around them reflected the bright green sunset. A warm breeze played with her hair, and Sharp noticed that she smelled of butterscotch and spices as they stared, stunned, into each other’s eyes. Sharp suddenly had no words.

“Sharp? Hello? She’s a bit close to the camera”

“Novell!”

“What?”

Darity groaned in embarrassment as Sharp composed himself and stepped back, releasing Lady Primguard from his arms.

She hopped over to her pile of belongings by the portal entrance and fished around for another slipper, finding a mismatched one that would do the job. Sharp took that time to walk to the back of the room where his tool bag had been deposited by the initial wormhole’s whirlwind. His tablet was over by the bathroom, banged up along the edges, but without cracked glass. It booted up, and he transferred his friends call to the tablet and fired up the video connection.

“You look horrible.”

“Novell, if you don’t knock it off, I’m going home.” Darity scolded him, but Sharp knew she wasn’t going anywhere.

Novell sighed, but their bickering made Sharp give a sincere, hearty laugh. No guile. No snark. No cynicism. He hadn’t felt this relieved in a long while, though he couldn’t figure out why. He walked over to Lady Primguard and handed her the tablet.

“This is a computer tablet. Right now it is video conferencing with my invisible friends. Say hello, to Novell Jackson, the CEO of Bloop, Inc.—the company which owns this building and machinery—and Darity.” Sharp paused to plan his next words carefully. “My boss, and good friend.” There were murmurs coming over the intercom, but Sharp didn’t see anyway to hiding his relationship with the CEO and his secret girlfriend when they reached out to him personally while the lab staff watched on.

Lady Primgurad took the tablet from him and held it cautiously. Her eyes were wide as she recognized the moving image on the screen was real.

“Oh, my name is Sharp Hikoboshi. I’m a Japanese American from the United States, and I’m human, probably like those Travelers you’ve mentioned.”

She gave one last look at Novell and Darity’s dumbfounded faces, then stood up at smoothed out her bathrobe. “I am Cattleya Ori Primguard, the Duchess of Feld, and currently fifth in line to the throne. I am a minotaur.” She reached out her hand for a shake, but it was still clutching the tablet. Sharp took her fingertips gently and welcomed her.

“

I hate to be a downer, but the portal isn’t showing your closet or my hallway. That means we’re both stuck in this room now, so lets make the best of it.” Flicking his eyes over the dropdown menu in his virtua display, he selected a timer, then pointed to the top corner of the portal. The timer became pinned in space a few feet away from him on the portal.

“What do you mean we’re stuck in this room now? Explain yourself,” Lady Primguard demanded.

Ah, yes, she did just tell me she was a duchess. No wonder she’s been so regal and pushy.

His friends tried to get her attention from the tablet, and Sharp looked away to take in the scenic vista on the other side of the portal.

Traveler’s Doors, huh? It’s a one way trip unless we figure out how to control these things.

He brushed his disheveled hair back as the warm sea breeze evaporated the sweat on his brow and his stomach growled not for the first time that evening.