The Treasure Hunter and The Mirror
Chapter 10

“God damn it!” Willow said as she sat up after coming out of the darkness. Willow started to sob vigorously she felt extremely frustrated. She was clearly doing something wrong. Maybe the monkey-man was not the clue as to how to get back home. Willow however was not sure if that was not the clue then what was it? Willow had to go back to the mural room and look at them and look at the mirror.

Willow seemed like she had sobbed for a good few moments before she worked up the courage to try again. Willow looked around, it didn’t seem different than the last time she was Willow. But she noted that here Willow was wearing a very nice green dress, and she seemed like she had olive skin. The last times she had been Willow she was sure her skin was lighter than this.

Willow was glad she was not that robot thing anymore, and at least when she was Willow, she had the privilege of being in the body of a very beautiful woman. This cheered up Willow a bit when she got started to think how pretty Willow was in all the dimensions, she had been Willow. She came out of her reverie when she heard a loud growl of what sounded like a bear off in the distance somewhere.

“That’s exactly what I needed!” Willow said sarcastically.

Willow had ended up in the catacombs beyond the shrine that contained the mirror again. In this dimension however, it seemed like the catacombs were under some sort of cave or something and in the cave was a bear roaming around. She thought it best that she had to get the mural room and figure out what to do from there.

Willow made it to the mural room. She looked around and saw the woman drawn up on the mural above the mirror, she was wearing a red dress like last time, this time her skin seemed a different color, she could have been wrong, but she at least noticed that this was different. Willow looked over at the Monkey man and his mace. The mace had a new number on it 356 it read.

Willow looked at that curiously

356? She thought. Wasn’t the last one 178?

Willow thought about that for a while before she remembered that yes it was 178. It had doubled. Willow started to think of all the times she had jumped had it doubled any time? Willow half-wished that she was still that robot she could have figured it out faster. She only vaguely remembered some of the numbers.

Willow cursed herself when she realized she had not paid attention to these numbers when that giant man was after her. So, she didn’t see what the original number in her original dimension was. Willow had a fleeting idea that this number signified what dimension it was. So, if you entered that number into the mirror it doubled the dimension and you ended up in the numbered dimension which was twice that one.

She then concluded something else. If she went up the stairs it went up. She remembered it had gone from 1879 to 33489 the first time she went in. So, if you don’t enter something it probably throws you into a random dimension which is higher than yours. She remembered that when she went that down one it had taken her from 33489 to 178. So, she decided to test it out to see if it increased this number if she went in, so she did just that.

Walter sat up as he came out of the darkness. He knew he wasn’t back the second he saw this black mist all around him.

“What the hell?” Walter looked down at his hand and saw this solid black mass underneath a mist that came out of his pores. Walter remembered back on the Fakir home world there was this legend about on the dark side of his planet, there lived these creatures that were called the Shades.

This is what Walter thought of when he first looked at himself. But Walter had no time to lose he had to see if the number had gone up if it did then that meant that his theory that if the stairs go up the number will increase and if the stairs would go down the number would decrease.

Walter ran through the catacombs and reached the familiar mural room. He looked around. In this dimension, the woman and man were replaced but a black mass with platinum eyes. That made Walter curious for a moment before he turned back to the monkey-man. He of course had not changed. On his mace were the numbers 444.

It had gone up! Walter felt himself get excited. So now the question was could he use this information to be able to get back to his original dimension? Walter started to think if he remembered correctly, the first time he had seen the numbers was after when that man was after him.

1874 was the number he remembered

33489 was when he was Willow again

178 was that robot Walter

356 was the one he was just in

444 was the dimension now.

Walter started to think over the circumstances leading up to when he was in dimension 1874, he had gone up the stairs twice at that point. So, his original dimension was less than that number. That’s were things got complicated for Walter. Somehow from dimension 1874 he had jumped to dimension 33489. So, the mirror was able to throw you at random to a random dimension at times.

There was a way to control this. From learning when he was the robot, he knew that the numbers around frame around the mirror had significances, perhaps on an up mirror it went up the times that he entered on the frame. So, if he touched the number 1 that meant he would go up only one time. So, he could control how many he could jump up or how many dimensions he could jump down. The problem, of course, was there a way to figure out where he came from?

Obvious that dimension he first paid attention to would have been a higher dimension than the one he was from originally. There was no question about that. Which meant that it was a dimension that was less than dimension 1874. He had only eliminated 178, 356, and 444 as possible ones he came from. This meant that he only eliminated three dimensions under the 1874 that he could have originated from. He wished he was a robot again, he could probably figure this out easily.

Wait, he could go back to be the robot again, he realized. He knew what dimension it was, that was dimension 178. That number was less than the one he was in now, which meant that he had to the alternate one, the one that goes down. DDD was what these numbers translated to, so this made him look way down. Walter peered as far down as he could see from the grand stairs and way down below the mural of the monkey man there was an opening.

This was obviously the one that led him to the set of stairs that lead him to the mirror that took him down dimensions. So, Walter started heading towards it. It was not hard to get to, but it took Walter a while to climb down the wall in order to get there safely without plummeting down to his certain death. Once at the bottom he entered the opening and he started heading down.

Walter eventually made it to the other side of the catacombs and he found the set of stairs that lead down like the ones he had seen earlier. Walter was anticipating this if he figured out exactly how he could get back to where he was a robot then he could use that robotic mind to be able to make a calculation on how to go back to his original dimension.

Walter looked at the frame around this mirror just like the others it had numbers on them. He was quite nervous about this, but he decided that he was going to be right about this, if he entered the dimension of that robot then he would be back in that dimension. Walter walked to the frame and entered 178 on it. The ripple in the mirror started to swirl in a different manner than it had before. Walter was nervous. He wasn’t sure if this would work. Well only one way to replace out so he reached out.