Chapter 1: The Ordinary World
Alice Caldwell lived in a pocket of London that had been oddly resistant to the passage of time. Here, her life unfurled with the predictability of an old clock: reliable, familiar, and faintly dull. The edges of her world were well defined by the peeling paint of her small flat, the ordered rows of desks at her university, and the routine of her part-time job at the quaint bookstore nestled in a corner of Charing Cross Road.
She had a cat named Quantum who had a predilection for Schroedinger's paradox - often curling into tight spaces where Alice couldn’t see him, leading her to declare: "Quantum is both missing and not missing until observed otherwise." It was a silly joke she’d nurtured since adopting the kitten years ago, a manifestation of her secret fascination for the world beyond the ordinary, a world where impossibilities blossomed like flowers in spring.
Outside her window, London was a bustling symphony of sirens and pigeons, a marvel of glass and steel, an ever-evolving testament to humanity's relentless march of progress. Yet Alice often found herself drawn not to the world outside but to the worlds inside the books she devoured. Worlds of magic and wonder, of impossible creatures and time-bending adventures, of brave young women venturing into realms unbound by the mundane. Each page was an escape hatch, a portal to a reality less ordinary.
One day, amidst the comforting monotony of her life, Alice noticed something unusual. Her smartphone, which usually served as a lifeline to her friends and the vast digital universe, was behaving oddly. Apps opened and closed at random, the screen flickered, and the digital clock, the corner sentinel of her device, froze at a peculiar time: 18:73. She frowned. The minutes, in blatant disregard for the laws of timekeeping, had looped beyond their limit.
Intrigued, she tapped on the absurd timestamp. The phone screen went blank for a moment, then shimmered. Colors swirled into a mesmerizing vortex, a digital rabbit hole. Alice squinted at the display as the vortex appeared to deepen, transforming from two dimensions into three... into more.
Curiosity ignited in her heart, just as it had for another Alice in another time, faced with another rabbit hole. With the reckless bravery of the truly curious, she reached out, fingers brushing the screen.
And then, with a sound like a pop and a whoosh, Alice was pulled into the vortex, leaving behind the safe predictability of her London flat. She was no longer just Alice Caldwell, literature student and part-time bookstore employee.
She was now Alice in Otherwhen, the realm where impossibilities bloomed like an eternal spring.
