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Spring in Massachusetts can be a time of chaotic weather for those who have lived long in New England's climes, but there are worse days by far than today. The air is buzzing with the work of bees, and birds are winging lazily overhead. A handful of scattered trees dot the grassy, well-kept landscape in all directions, but buildings rise taller than the majority of the trees in the distance.

Somewhere, a not-very-well-tuned carillon is ringing.

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They'll lead her upwards to the third floor, where the light is brighter but the atmosphere more tense. "Most of the science books are up here," says the russet-haired man. "And the Restricted Section. Dr. Armitage keeps a close eye on that."

"That he does," says a woman's voice- a stout, no-nonsense woman in her fifties, pushing a hefty book cart past. "When he's in, anyway."

The men's faces fall. "He's not here, Mrs. Long?" says one of them.

"Sorry, boys. Dr. Armitage is meeting with the trustees right now. What do you need him for?"

"Well," begins the dark haired one, "this young lady-" The woman turns to consider Suzi. "-was talking about... some very strange things, actually, and we thought..."

He trails off and looks a bit helplessly to Suzi. The russet-haired fellow steps up and says, "She's lost, Mrs. Long, and she said she disappeared and reappeared here somehow."

"Hm," says Mrs. Long, peering closely at Suzi. "Try his assistant, then. I haven't got time for anything funny today."

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Suzi's response to Mrs. Long is to peer back at her with much the same expression that a very small mouse has when faced with a very hungry cat. "Thank you." she manages, and taking a step behind the russet-haired gentleman.

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Mrs. Long nods once and sets off with the book cart. "Don't mind her," says the russet fellow. "She's the head reference librarian. She's like that to everyone."

The doors they're heading for are towards the front of the building, on the third floor. Even without people necessarily being present, this place feels creepier than everywhere else they've been to so far- as if something here was not right, not right at all, and only lay lurking in the shadows. It's behind the door marked Restricted Section, but the two men breeze past it and the next door alike, and rap at the third door instead.

"Who's there?" calls a voice that Suzi might possibly recognize.

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Voice? No. Not so much. Nager? Yes. "RAY! RAY RAY RAY RAYRAYRAY!" waiting for the door to open? That would be silly. She's going to toss it open and go flinging herself at the owner of the voice.

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The looks of surprise on the Miskatonic students' faces are nothing compared to the one on Ray's face as he suddenly has a Sime wrapped around him. "What the- gaack! Suzi?"

"You know this woman, Mr. Stantz?" says the russet man incredulously.

"Yes, it's a long story- could one of you get a chair or something?" There's a flurry of discussion and a chair is pushed forward. "Thank you. Suzi, you'd better sit down- thank you, boys, I'll take care of this from here-"

"All right, Mr. Stantz," says the dark-haired man. "I'll be by later, all right?"

"All right," says Ray, and the two students head out.

Only then does Ray (who's dressed almost perfectly appropriately for the period, in brown trousers and red pressed shirt and suspenders and even glasses) turn to Suzi properly. "Suzi? What the heck are you doing here? And now? Are you all right, do you need to throw up?"

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"Thank you." Suzi informs the two young men from the depths of Ray's shirt-front. She does not actually have to be pried off of Ray's chest, but it comes fairly close. "You know about the disappearing? Like you did? This is the second time it's happened to me. And this time I'm here. I'm done throwing up, mostly. I'll probably do it again when I wake up after sleeping."

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Ray nods and does his best to ease Suzi into the chair before plopping himself down on the corner of his desk. His office, such as it is, is thronged with papers and books, not all of which are in English. "Suddenly I wish I still had my PKE meter," he says. "I had to disassemble it for parts last year. Something very strange is going on if you've been punted backwards twice. Me, I just walked out the door with an obligation I hadn't fulfilled yet and the door did its usual thing and opened on the wrong universe. This is the first time it sent me back in time, though. That was kind of unnerving."

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"Ninteen oh eight." Suzi agrees, "I've never been this early either? I'm wondering if it's because I keep looking for reasons people are disappearing? Poking my nose in? I don't know, though. Just that it's a, um, a thing that keeps happening? I have nineteen days ten hours sixteen minutes and forty-five decreasing seconds of selyn."

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"For you maybe," Ray says. "Me, I've been here since nineteen-o-six, and working my butt off to try and get out. This isn't a universe you want to be stuck in, Suzi. The walls are thin here- thinner than any other universe I've ever been to, and that's including the animated continuum."

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"I'm sorry." Suzi says, quietly, "I can't imagine being stuck anywhere alien that long." She doesn't bother pointing out that she can't be stuck anywhere longer than a short month. They'll either find a way to get her back to Milliways or they won't. "What do you mean by thin?"

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"It's not like I haven't done more time than this in other worlds before. At least this one's Earth," Ray says. "It's just- Suzi, there are things that- all right. At Milliways, you know how we have gods and angels and things among the patrons?"

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"Uh huh." This is important stuff, so Suzi leans forward with her hands on her knees to listen. Important things are far too often frightening ones.

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"For the most part, gods and angels and their adversaries come from dimensions closely linked to our own world, or from the same plane as the spirits of the dead, or somewhere very close to it," Ray says. "They're usually separated from the everyday world of the living, though. There are definite barriers between the dimensional levels of existence, preventing too much overlap between the spirit world and the everyday one. In some places the barriers are stronger than in others, and you get fewer visits from the spirits no matter what time of year it is or what you do. In other places the barriers are weak, or nonexistent. It varies, from place to place and world to world."

"In some worlds the barriers are exceptionally thin and it's very, very easy for the beings from other dimensions to make the crossing into the world of the living. Which, you know, wouldn't be so much of a problem if it were just the gods or the angels showing up. Unfortunately, that's not the case here. I don't think that any angel's ever so much as cast a shadow over Arkham."

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Suzi is very, very quiet for a while, "Bad things come here. Very, very bad things. Is that what I'm getting? My world doesn't have any magics, gods, or anything like that."

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"Worse than the usual run of bad things," Ray says quietly. "Things so different from everything that human consciousness is made of that they can't interact with us without things falling apart. What they want from us I don't really know, although I have my suspicions. All I know for sure is this: under the right circumstances and at the right times, things too alien and too powerful for humankind to face without going mad or worse are fully capable of entering this world and wreaking havoc just because they can."

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Suzi says several very pithy things that would cause her father to scrub her mouth out with soap if he knew she knew them. Then, just to be certain, she repeats them in English. "And you've been here for years."

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"Since early in 1906, yes," Ray says. "I've been building a machine that should be able to return anyone or anything who passes through it to Milliways, if they've ever been to the Bar before. It's hard, though. We're a hundred years before my own time, and the vast majority of technology that I used the first time I built such a machine hasn't even been invented yet."

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"I'm not a scientist," Suzi says, "let alone one like you. But I can pass a wrench with the best of them, and I've got strength to spare." Not time, but strength, "Anything I can do, just let me know."

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"I'm almost done with it, actually," Ray says. "I was hoping to test it sometime later this week. I-"

He stops mid-sentence and peers over Suzi's shoulder. There's a window there, albeit a very small one. Outside, there's a knot of people growing steadily larger as they pour out of one of the other nearby buildings.

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Suzi glances out the window as well, "Do you...we? Need to go see what happened? Do you have a coat I can borrow? My arms..."

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"That one there," Ray says, pointing at a coat-rack behind the door. "The Inverness cape should do you just fine. It was always a childhood fondness of mine..." He fidgets a little. "Tell you about it later. We should go check that out. It looks like it might be a gas leak."

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"Okay!" Suzi says, reaching for the cape and tossing it on. It doesn't take much to get herself hidden in the mass of fabric, she's quite a bit smaller than Ray. "Just show me where to go."

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"Follow me," says Ray, and fairly catapults himself out the door and down the stairs.

The sunlight is bright out here, for a place whose ambient is as tightly wound as Arkham's. It falls clean and bright on the drawn, narrowed faces of the strongest men in the Economics department; they're carrying a sagging, gangling burden-

"I think that's Dr. Peaslee," says Ray, who's standing on tiptoe to see over the heads of some of the taller students.

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Suzi has no chance at all of ever looking over the head of anyone older than ten. She looks under their arms, instead, and then backs up into Ray. "He zlins weird."

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Ray blinks, looking down at Suzi, wide-eyed. "What do you mean? Weird how?" he asks quietly; around here, 'weird' can mean any number of things, none of them good.