[September 23, 2042]

“Peasant, play chess with me.”

“Mmm?”

Call raised his head. It was after dinner, and somehow he had ended up watching television in the living room with Aina. They were sitting as far apart as they could on the couch, while Bridget stood patiently next to her princess. Cal had only turned on the television for background noise as he checked his emails on his phone and rested his legs, but Aina at some point had slinked into the room and sat on the couch, clearly transfixed by the unfamiliar technology. Cal had left it on the news channel, and sometimes she had interjected with a question, either about the name of a country or important figure, to which he gave disinterested answers.

“Look at this king they are showing now, all wrapped in that strange coat. Where does he rule? I see… Finland is of the north, correct?”

“That’s a weird way of putting it, but yes.”

“And it’s a nation of Asian denomination?”

“No, it’s a European nation.”

“But look at the map they are showing on this chromatic panel! Is that not the same landmass as Asia?”

“Yes, but Europe and Asia are different continents.”

“Are continents not a single expanse of land in this realm?”

“Yes, but we kind of make up the borders as we go.”

“And all of the kings and queens of your world agree on these borders?”

“Fifty… forty percent of the time, sure.”

“This is all so confusing. Luvinia is a nation that rules over the entirety of the world. You ought to adopt a similar system.”

“By all means, you’re free to start a referendum at the United Nations. They will definitely listen to you when you announce yourself as a princess from a country none of them think exists.”

“Are you mocking my lack of knowledge toward your world, peasant?”

“No, would-be-princess, just your general attitude and personality.”

“More insolence!”

Currently, the news was showing a story about a masked vigilante hero who had saved a bus full of people from a hijacker in central Extremis City. Cal had been watching this particular news with mild interest, wondering when on earth news like this had become common to see, when Aina’s question regarding chess made him lose his concentration.

He glanced over, looking at her directly for the first time. The fourth princess of Luvinia was dressed more casually today, in olive-green trousers and a softly-colored silk shirt that fell loosely against her thin figure. Her bright red hair was done up above her head, so that only a few locks fell down over the back of her neck and her temples. In contrast, Bridget was dressed in her dark-sleeved uniform, the same as always. Cal had never even seen the princess’ attendant wear night attire, and he had even begun to doubt whether she owned any other clothes.

“Back up for a second,” Cal said to Aina, after a long pause. “Did you just say chess? You have chess where you’re from?”

“Of course!” Aina said, shaking her head at him as if his question was silly. “I’ll have you know that I am a prodigious player of the game!”

Bridget leaned forward to address Cal, brushing back a strand of her brown hair so it didn’t fall in front of her eyes. “According to the doctrine of the Goddess, there are many consistent characteristics between different worlds. Fauna, flora — even cultural observations, traditions, or characteristics. To find the same game of leisure in different realms isn’t so unusual, Mr. Cal.”

“Have you been to other realms, Ms. Bridget?” Cal asked. “Besides here and Luvinia, I mean?”

“Well yes, that is, once before-”

“Don’t mind that!” Aina interjected, physically shifting her body forward on the couch so that she blocked Cal’s view of Bridget’s face. She seemed animated with a strange, childish excitement. “Face me in combat, peasant! I’ll show you the power of a royal!”

She finished off the last remark with a dramatic point of the finger, and the sudden movement of her arm made the red strands of hair laying against her temples bounce.

“No, I don’t think so.” Cal returned his attention to his phone.

Aina’s face dropped, sincerely disappointed. Her voice sounded even a little hurt. “Why not?”

“Because I have better things to do-” Cal jumped up to his feet and paced into the entry hall. “For instance… Hey Ellie, what do you have there?”

He intercepted Ellie, who he had caught a glance of walking through the entry hall towards the front door. When the girl saw him, she smiled. Her long black braids were tied up into a loose ponytail that bounced as she walked, and for once, she wasn’t wearing her fuzzy pajamas. Instead, she was dressed practically: boots, jeans over her long legs, a long-sleeve shirt with an illustration of a comet on it, and a dark green rain jacket.

Upon hearing Cal’s question, Ellie nodded eagerly and held up the object in her hand for Cal to inspect. “I was just working on some things upstairs and finishing up this energy drink, and then I got a huge wave of nostalgia. Me and my dad used to build bottle rockets all the time back home, so I thought I’d set one off on the lawn for old-time’s sake. Why not, you know? I don’t have anything to do until later tonight.”

What she held in her dark hand was like no bottle rocket that Cal had ever seen. It had been drained and hollowed out, but instead of water inside the chamber, there floated a strange orange liquid that Cal couldn’t identify. Furthermore, all around the bottle were various wires, cords, and metal instruments that he didn’t understand the purpose of.

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Instead of bringing all this up, Cal decided to keep his question simple. “That was an energy drink?” he asked, pointing at the large bottle. “Geez, it's bigger than your head.”

Ellie laughed. “Yeah, I know. I have a serious problem. I drink two of these things a day. My dentist is going to hate me whenever I end up seeing him again.”

Then her dark eyes narrowed playfully, and she gestured with the bottle again. “Hey, want to watch me set this baby off? I promise it’ll be quite the show.”

Cal shrugged. “Sure.”

“Oh, both of you are welcome to watch too, of course,” Ellie called into the living room where Aina was sulking and Bridget was standing quietly. “You probably don’t have bottle rockets in your world, right?”

Aina looked up, still clearly displeased from not getting to play chess. “What is this? Some sort of menial pagan ritual to pass the time?”

Ellie looked at her for a long moment, and Cal thought he saw annoyance cross her face for the first time. It vanished before he could be sure, and then she said: “If you wish to think of it that way, you’re free to. Either way, I promise it’ll be a treat to watch.”

“You should go, my lady.” Bridget urged, bending down to her knee to be level with Aina on the couch, though the attendant still had to tilt her head forward a little. “In the meantime, I shall begin to prepare your nightgown and room for the evening.”

“Oh, fine,” Aina got to her feet, and took the dark coat that Bridget was already handing her. “It’s not as if I have any other way to better spend my time in this dismal place.”

Ellie smiled at her, and then smiled at Cal. “This is going to be fun!”

“Is this typical for a ‘bottle rocket’ peasant? Because if so, this is actually quite impressive.”

“Um, no.”

Cal and Aina were both out on the lawn, and had just witnessed Ellie launch her bottle rocket. Instead of using an air pump, like Cal had expected, Ellie had instead lit some kind of fuse, and had ignited the orange liquid inside the bottle, creating a small fireball. The bottle rocket had then shot up straight up into the air as its insides burned, creating a small cloud of black smoke. The arc it carved through the purple-black sky of dusk was not a parabola like a typical bottle rocket, but instead a straight line up into space, burning all the while like a distant candle. It became a line, and then an orange dot that shifted slowly across the sky, blending into the canopy of far-away airplanes and stars.

“It’s going to heaven,” murmured Aina, the orange flame reflected in her wide green eyes. Her soft voice seemed almost reverent. “You did not tell me your people had the means to reach such distant theaters.”

“For almost seventy-five years,” replied Cal. “We landed on the moon but didn’t go much further.”

Aina was quiet for a moment. “That’s quite extraordinary. The people of this realm did not even have the blessing of the Goddess of Light, and yet they accomplished such a feat. To travel beyond the very vault of stars.”

“Yeah,” Cal replied, “I guess it is quite extraordinary.”

Cal descended down the grassy hill, his long dark coat and thin blue scarf being toyed with by the wind. He left Aina on the top of the hill, just a few feet from the portico of Otter Manor. The neck of the fourth princess of Luvinia was bent upward, and her eyes were full of orange light and stars.

He came down to talk with Ellie, who had temporarily vanished in a black puff when the bottle rocket took off. He now approached her, and curled his nose. Her rain jacket smelled like smoke, but she had a self-satisfied smile on her face as she watched the bottle rocket get smaller and smaller.

“What did you think?” She raised her eyebrows at Cal, in a way that suggested she was waiting for some sort of praise. “Pretty impressive, right?”

Cal nodded. “Yeah. I’ve never seen a bottle rocket like that before… um, is it ever going to come back down?”

Ellie shook her head, still grinning. “Of course not, that’s not how it’s designed. It will only get faster and faster as it breaks past the gravitational waves of the Earth. No boss, that thing will make it all the way to Jupiter in a few hours.”

“And this is your own design?” Cal did his best not to sound incredulous.

Ellie shook her head again. “No, it’s my dad’s. He built these sorts of things all the time when he was a kid, and wanted to pass that joy onto me, I suppose. So many evenings, we would build a bottle rocket together. After dinner, while my mom cleared the table, he would take me outside and we would launch that rocket together. He would put me on his shoulders and we would watch it rise — up, up, up!”

Her smile faded slightly. “Up into the sky that he cherished so dearly. That glittering dark forever.”

She extended both of her arms outward, their silhouette dark against the purple sky that was filled with lights, and positioned her fingers together in a way as if recreating the aperture of a camera. She looked at the distant orange speck of the bottle rocket through the circular frame she had created with her fingers, tracking it as it steadily rose. Then her arms fell.

I’ve never seen this expression on Ellie's face before, realized Cal, contemplation mixed with melancholy.

“You talk as if you miss him dearly.” Cal said, watching her.

“I do,” responded Ellie simply. She had tucked her hands into the pockets of her rain jacket, and was hugging it against her chest. “Mom, too. They’re good people. I got lucky. Always took care of me, always made sure I was happy. I guess launching a bottle rocket like this makes me feel a little closer to them, you know? …I was feeling a little lonely, I suppose you could say.”

“Are they far away? Your parents?”

Ellie glanced at him with an ironic smile, as if he had made some sort of joke, though there was a thin and unmistakable pain mixed into the expression. “Yeah,” she said enigmatically, “super far away.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Ellie played with one of her braids, and shifted her boots in the grass. “How about you? You never talk about your family.”

Cal grimaced. “We… don’t get along very well, I’m sorry to say.”

“Oh,” Ellie said regretfully, “I guess I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

‘No, you’re good…”

There was a long silence. Cal played with the end of his blue scarf.

“That’s not entirely true,” he finally added. “My older sister… She's really nice. She’s helped me a lot.”

Ellie looked at him with mild surprise. “Really? I didn’t know you had any siblings. I’m a single child, myself.” She frowned. “You keep to yourself a lot, boss. And hey, I respect that. There are a lot of things that I would rather never be known about myself, too. But I guess it makes me unsure of how to talk with you, you know?”

She looked at the sky again. “I kinda feel that way about all of you in Otter Manor. You all keep to yourselves. Ram is always avoiding me, the princess over there doesn’t seem to know how to communicate with others in general, and I haven’t even seen this pretty ghost girl that I’m told is hanging around the mansion.”

Ellie sighed. “I wonder if all of you find my personality pretty grating in contrast.”

Then she smiled again. “But hey, I’m glad we got to talk like this. Sort of feels like the first time me and you have had a proper conversation, Cal.”

Cal gazed at her, a little taken aback by her words. Then he smiled, too. “Yeah, I get what you mean. I hope we can talk like this more.”

“Anytime, boss, anytime.”

Ellie pulled the rain jacket around her again, tilting her head upward. The orange speck had reached the zenith of the sky, right above their heads. “You can go back inside now,” she prompted gently. “I’ll keep watching for a bit longer.”

Taking her hint that she wanted to be alone now, Cal retreated back up the hill and ushered Aina inside the manor. But before he closed the door before him, he took one last look at the young woman on the grassy hill. The sky had truly darkened now, and all he could make out was Ellie’s silhouette, floating against the expanse of the black sky filled with stars. It was as if she were about to vanish into that great expense, past planets and moons and nebulas, hitched to the tail of that strange bottle rocket.