Museum Core Chapter 4: The Change

12 hours Earlier

It wasn’t a question of if your kid said “I hate you”, or even how often they said it was about how long they meant it for.

In Jaclyn’s experience, waking up a six-year-old absolutely determined to sleep in and miss first period with the expectation that achieving this would mean getting to skip the entire school day … she gave it until tonight, tomorrow morning at the very latest before Eve would talk to her again.

Well, either then, or when Jaclyn caved and decided to feed the kiddo some ice cream. But that wasn’t happening. Start bribing kids into good behavior and pretty soon, they’d only behave if you paid them to.

Unfortunately, this morning didn’t get any better as it went on, and by the time Jaclyn pulled the car up to the front of the school, Eve was utterly convinced that she had not only invented the very concept of school, but it was also her fault that it was mandatory.

The only thing that could have made this worse was if the little miss had decided to conflate Jaclyn’s job as a police officer with being a truancy officer and blaming her for the existence of the entire concept of “school is mandatory”.

However, as always, things could always get worse. And not even someone whose work regularly brought them into contact with the worst of humanity could have imagined how bad.

She barely even realized what had happened when she grabbed Eve and put her right back in her car seat, closed the door, and jumped back into the driver’s seat, driving off at a slow speed until she was no longer right next to the school, where there were a ton of kids on the road.

And then, things really went off the rails.

First, the ground had rumbled like an earthquake, which was rather unusual for London, but did happen sometimes. That alone might have been worth a day off from school for his daughter while he had to work around to clock to clean up the mess. It would have been complicated, but eventually turned out fine.

That feeling of knowing the overtime was coming while having to scramble for a babysitter only lasted for a few seconds, vanishing under the existential dread imposed by the very sky-shifting.

Iridescent, scintillating colors burst from what could only be described as a “crack in reality”, tearing through the world.  

The sky split in half, the clouds and the location of the sun twisting, warping, as if a titanic lens had appeared as energy burst from it, looking like an insane lightshow viewed through the lens of an acid trip.

… not that she’d ever had any experience of that sort, of course not, not at all.

Something flickered at the edge of her vision, before vanishing. That couldn’t be good.

As for the thing in the sky, she didn’t know what that was, what was causing it, or if it was even dangerous, but that didn’t matter. It was going to be a problem regardless.  

Now that it was no longer a matter of “feeling off”, she reached over and flicked on the switch controlling her car’s blue lights and siren. Now officially and visibly designated as an emergency vehicle, she tore down the street, heading straight for the precinct.

Of course, it didn’t help much. The people of London showed a high degree of disdain for both traffic lights and emergency vehicles at the best of times, which this most certainly wasn’t. Where normally, traffic lights were obeyed until a sufficiently large crowd had gotten annoyed that crossing the street together seemed “safe”, now, they might as well not exist.

If … whatever was happening could be fought, stopped, or even just slowed, she couldn’t do it on her own.

“Mommy, what’s happening?” Eve asked from the backseat, seemingly unsure whether she should be upset or happy.  

“You’re coming to work with me, school is canceled for today.” She said, too focused on the road to turn around and give her daughter a reassuring smile.

Even if all the things she’d just seen turned out to be utterly harmless, the panic that was bound to follow would cause all sorts of trouble.

She’d drop Eve off at the precinct and have the desk sergeant watch her, that was a lot safer than leaving her in school while the world burned down. Hopefully, it wouldn’t happen, but Jaclyn had seen people go nuts over something far less scary than a titanic rent in the sky.  

Continuing to fix his eyes on the road, she retrieved his radio and clicked it to the relevant channel without having to look at it. At the speeds he was traveling at right now, that would have almost certainly caused a crash.

She didn’t say anything, didn’t report what he’d seen. She didn’t have to. Everyone else was already doing it for her, to the point of completely overloading the channel. 

Of course, they’d all been trained to not do that and most people were obeying said training, but a few weren’t and those were loud and over the top enough that they were seriously messing with comms.

“This is Inspector Abrams, silence the channel.” She ordered. Panicked or not, if no one spoke, there was no chaos. She took a deep breath and gave new orders. Her rank of Inspector wasn’t that high, but if no Superintendent or higher was giving out orders, someone else had to. It wasn’t like she was planning to create a full deployment and response plan that someone else would inevitably have to work around.

“For those of you who haven’t looked outside yet, there is a giant glowing rent in the sky, with no apparent cause. There is no need to report it again. If there are any other things that appear, report those along with their location. Prepare to deal with panicking people looking for support. Do not depend on 999 to report issues, phone lines will be bogged down soon if they aren’t already. Pay attention to anything that looks off, we don’t know what we’re dealing with here, or what is a symptom.”

She was about to say something else when someone else cut in.

“This is Superintendent Owens. Thank you, Inspector Abrams. Switch to channel five after this.”

As ominous as that sounded, Jaclyn knew Owens, that private conversation was probably not going to be for a bollocking.

“Like Inspector Abrams said, we’re about to deal with a lot of panicking people and the phone lines are going to be useless. Coordinate with each other, make sure you stay on top of where issues develop, and try not to report issues that have already been reported.

“Finding out what is going on has the highest priority. You’ll learn more as the situation develops. We’re also receiving reports of things going on overseas, but those are not clear.

“Everyone, sound off, reporting any anomalies that haven’t already been reported.”

And everyone did so. There were only a few new issues reported, such as new plants appearing in the middle of the street in several locations near central London, shooting straight up from beneath the pavement. Alarming, but it was nothing compared to the fact that the bloody sky was broken.

However, the most alarming issue wasn’t something spoken out loud. How few people were calling in, all near the outskirts of the city. Nothing from downtown, nothing from parts of the city that lay other side of downtown. 

Owens asked several more pointed questions and managed to at least confirm that downtown was still there, but not much more besides.

Something was rotten in the state of Denmark, but they couldn’t tell just what was wrong, or what the cause was.

With that done, Jaclyn switched her radio over to the desired channel for her conversation with Owens.

“Abrams, when will you get here?”

“Fifteen minutes, assuming nothing goes wrong. I’ve got my daughter with me, I’ll drop her off at the precinct, collect my gun, and then I’ll be available.” She said. As an Authorized Firearms Officer, she was one of the few police officers who was, well, authorized to handle firearms. She wasn’t allowed to have her gun at home, though, so until she reached the precinct, she was only half as useful as she might otherwise be.  

“Yeah, I’ve got half the squad’s kids in the precinct already, and most of the rest are being brought in.” Owens said, “I’ll make have your gun issued to the desk Sergeant, grab it from him and head straight to my office.”

“Wilco.” She said.

Jaclyn continued to drive through the streets of London, seeing people lining the sides of the road, staring at the sky in amazement, confusion, or horror. The first were already starting to panic, running towards their cars or back inside to grab some stuff. That was not her issue to deal with, though. Not yet.

Part of her wished that she could run as well, take Eve as far away from everything as she possibly could before she started helping, but she knew that wasn’t going to fly.

The precinct was maybe ten minutes away when the situation really went to the dogs.

People were running away from something Jaclyn couldn’t see yet as it was around the corner of a building. Normally, she’d have taken a look and reported what she saw, but not with her daughter in the car.

She took a left turn to pass the phenomenon at a greater distance as she lifted her radio to her mouth.

“This is Inspector Abrams, there is something going on near Normand Park, people are fleeing something, I can’t see where the origin is from where I am.” She reported.

As she crossed A3218, she finally got a good look at the source of the trouble. The local trouble, at any rate. 

“Inspector Abrams, I have eyes on the problem, a huge jungle is growing from the ground, trees sprouting up in a matter of seconds.”

“Mommy, look, can we go to the jungle?”

Jaclyn had to hide her utterly inappropriate chuckle. At least the kiddo wasn’t scared.

In some places, the trees even tore through buildings as they grew, blasting apart concrete and bricks. And then, things got even weirder as materials began to fall far faster than before, and the growth of the plants in that area sped up exponentially. It was like watching a movie in Fast Forward, but in real life.

Overall, there was the occasional spot of plant growth in the road, but there were only a few big impediments that one could not simply drive across. However, in that one area, the streets had turned into an absolute jungle.

“Time anomaly, corner of A3218 and Fulham Palace Road.” Jaclyn radioed it in.

She floored the accelerator, causing her car to jump like a startled puppy and roar down the road. That damn field of impossible weirdness was blocking her normal path forward, she’d have to take the long way around.

“This is Inspector Abrams, there’s a temporal anomaly where time passes vastly more slowly on A3218 and Fulham Palace Road.” She clarified, breathing heavily and feeling as though she’d run a marathon.

Eve fidgeted in the backseat. She’d probably looked at everything that had happened today through the lens of a child’s innocence and wonder, but seeing her mother stressed had clearly been enough to start to stress her out.

“This is Chief Superintendent Owens. Abrams, continue to the precinct. Lawrence, Gillet, tape some stopwatches to your batons and head over there, figure out where the field ends and what the rate of acceleration is.”

Another flurry of conversation followed, continuing until she reached the precinct.  

She rapidly unbuckled Eve and grabbed her under her arms and lifted her out of the car, pausing for a moment as they were eye-to-eye with each other.

“Mommy has to work now, ok? There’ll be a bunch of other kids in there for you to play with, though, and I have some coloring books.”

Then, she set down her daughter and kissed the top of her head. Then, Jaclyn took her by the hand and led her into the precinct.

“Hell of a day, huh Jaclyn?” the desk Sergeant said as he pulled a gun in its holster from beneath the reception desk “I got your gun right here.”

That was most certainly not regulation. In England, only one in three police officers was even allowed a gun, a group of which Jaclyn was one. However, even then, the guns were kept in the armory, and the only person allowed to check them out was their owner. Someone grabbing them to speed things up was normally not ok, but the situation wasn’t exactly something that would go away just because they slavishly obeyed every rule in the book.

Then, the Sergeant came around the table and crouched down to be at eye level with Eve.

“Hi, I’m Hector, I work with your Mom, and I’ll be taking care of you for the next few hours.”

“By the way, Hector, can you ask around the people with kids if anyone has anything to keep the kids occupied? There’s a bunch of coloring books in my desk, right side, third drawer from the top.” Jaclyn rattled off as she hurried into the precinct proper, attached her holster to her belt, then fiddled with her phone, sending Hector a text that he should get a doctor to look Eve over. All that stress couldn’t have been good for her

That done, she entered the main area of the precinct, walking straight into utter pandemonium.

Now, on any given day, there was always some degree of busyness. This was a police precinct in a city of millions with a fairly high crime rate, after all.

But this was one of the smaller precincts, normally, people went to the bigger ones in central London.

Normally, those precincts weren’t buried in mountains of weird, preternaturally fast-growing foliage.

And no matter how prepared she’d thought she was for weirdness after literally getting stuck behind a bubble of dilated time when she saw the chaos she’d just walked in on, she froze mid-step.

The most prominent thing in the room was the tree creature whose head scraped the ceiling, with surprisingly human body language revealing that it was incredibly upset.

However, should things go pear-shaped with it, there were enough officers already around it that her help wouldn’t be needed.

Or it could be immune to pepper spray, tasers, and bullets, in which case her help wouldn’t have been particularly helpful in the first place.

Either way, her orders were to head straight to the Superintendent’s office, so that’s where she headed, observing her surroundings all the while. With every step, her unease grew.

The tree creature used to be human apparently. Or it thought it used to be human. She wasn’t entirely sure which option was more terrifying. And now it was demanding that they “fix it”. As if they could. As if they had any idea what had happened to it. As if the whole world hadn’t just gone insane!

There were multiple other people there sporting various new features, such as weird eyes, scale-covered patches of skin, fingernails turned into claws, and in one case, a half-snake person that she was pretty sure was called a Naga. A creature straight out of mythology, though she wasn’t entirely sure which mythology precisely.

And then there was the dog. The yappy kind. At least she was sure that’s what it was, based on its behavior.

But it didn’t look like a dog. In fact, it looked like a bloody dragon. The yapping ruined much of the intimidation that came with the creature’s draconic nature, as was the fact that it was clutched to the chest of a large, middle-aged woman who was wailing about how someone needed to “fix her poor baby”.

What in the name of all that was holy was going on?

At least there would hopefully be something productive for her to do soon.

She had her gun at back her side, Eve was safe, and based on the conversation she’d had with Owens, there was an important task waiting for her.

When Jaclyn reached the Superintendent’s door, it was open, revealing the man himself sitting amidst a sea of chaos. Three laptops being used at the same time, a phone was clamped between a shoulder and an ear, and two radios lay on the desk.

Two more officers had been squeezed into a room that was a bit too small for three people to work together, taking notes, and Jaclyn was pretty sure that the young man standing at the coffee machine with three mugs and a stressed look on his face was serving as a gofer for the group here. 

Files lay on the ground where they’d carelessly been pushed off the desk to make some space, and the entire room screamed of the place being converted into a command center in a hurry.     

“Ah, Abrams,” Owens said, only looking at her long enough to recognize her.

“Sorry I’m late, there …”

“Temporal anomaly.” Owens cut her off, clearly having heard her earlier “As if this day wasn’t bad enough. I need you to liaise with the orcs, I told them I’d send my second in command to them. They speak perfect English, somehow, and apparently, they value honesty above all else, they have magic, and they’re willing to assist us with this mess if we promise to speak on their behalf when dealing with our government. But I only talked with them for a minute, I have to coordinate half of London right now!

“Promise them whatever you need to, but don’t give away the farm if you can help it. But we need the help. Sergeant Bajya has been placating them so far, but I need you down there.”

He turned to one of the other officers in the office with him “Evens, show Abrams where our visitors are.”

Jaclyn nodded. Orcs? Yep, considering how the day had gone so far, that tracked. As did getting thrown out of the office so quickly, today was a day where everything hit the fan at once. 

But why was Owens in charge of half of London … oh hell. She’d seen the jungle spread. If it had gone far enough, all of the biggest precincts, which held the highest-ranking members of the force, would be covered. Even if they were still alive, something was fucking with communications in that place. 

And what about the government? Their political leaders might not do much commanding during the day-to-day, but right now was the exact situation where someone needed to make decisions from a position of authority.

Owens might have the skills needed to coordinate this mess, sort of, but he didn’t have the rank. Any decision he made could be undermined, any deal he made nullified, and that was a problem. A big one.

But this wasn’t her issue to deal with, she had a different part to play, a vitally important one.

Evens jumped up and practically ran out of the room, only turning back once to make sure she was following.

Jaclyn hurried after him and less than a minute later, they were in the precinct’s carpark, which was located behind the building. Where there’d normally have been a dozen police cars now stood fur tents, with large humanoids standing between them, immense in both width and height.

Their skin tones ranged from lime green to dark grey, small tusks pocked from the corners of their mouths and dangerous-looking weaponry hung from their belts. Yep, those were orcs alright.

“… and here’s the precinct’s second in command, Inspector Abrams. She has the knowledge and authority to make promises on behalf of the Superintendent.” Bajya said and retreated to a safe distance once Jaclyn was a couple of meters away from the orc he’d been talking to.

Then, the orc spoke, “I am Gula Worldstrider, and your world is in danger.”

… of course it was.