Aunt Edna

Chapter 2

This chapter is dedicated to Ella_White for the amazing cover she made!

Chapter 2

The lawyer led me into a small office on the second floor of the mansion. It was imposing, with a large wooden desk, and old furniture that looked like it could have belonged to a king, but also had a lived-in look to it. Everything was worn, books lay haphazard on the desk and covered the shelves along the walls. It looked like any minute the owner would return, and curl up behind the desk to work.

"Was this Edna's office?" I asked.

"Yes," the old woman responded, gesturing for me to sit in a chair in front of the desk, while she remained standing behind it. "Now that we've got all that fuss out of the way, my name is Lillian Eldridge, pleasure to meet you."

She extended her hand to me across the desk, I shook it gingerly. Her grip was firm and warm.

"I'm sure you have many questions, so let me just jump right into it." She said, sitting down again and opening a file she had been carrying with her, it contained Edna's will, and various other documents that I did not recognize. "This isn't a joke, Edna actually did leave all of her possessions to you. This includes her house, all of her valuables, but mainly, her... business." Lillian enunciated the word business as if she really meant anything but a business.

"Edna is - excuse me - was head of the English branch of the IRA. No, not the IRA you expect." she clarified, seeing as I was about to speak. "IRA stands for Inter-Realm Affairs. Now, bear with me here this is the tricky part."

"The IRA deals with all relationships between realms. Realms are what science would refer to as parallel universes." At this point, Lillian stopped to gage my reaction. My brain seemed to be functioning slower than usual because it took me a while to fully register what she had said. By that point, taking my silence as her queue to continue, she was explaining further.

"Although the term parallel universe is not fully accurate as these are not worlds where a single different choice was made, but sometimes different worlds completely, which is why we named them realms. There are infinite realms, but we have only had contact with a few as of yet. For example, there are magic realms, creature realms, alien realms, afterlife realms - but those are locked to humans - meta-human realms. Our job is to find doorways between these realms, guard them, and deal with anyone, or anything that attempts to cross. Basically it's a diplomat's job, only slightly more complicated."

That was when I started laughing. It was a small giggle that built up into a full blown laugh to the brink of asphyxiation. We spent a good five minutes like that. Me, laughing, Lillian, standing frozen. When I finally calmed down, I suddenly felt like crying. NO! I instructed myself, She already thinks you're crazy enough as it is.

But isn't she the crazy one? Going on about parallel universes, and magic, and portals? Another voice in my brain countered. I studied Lillian, she didn't look crazy. In fact, she looked just as grandmotherly as always. Especially now that she was crouching in front of me, a worried look on her face.

"Are you alright, my dear?" She asked, "It is quite a bit of a shock I know."

I continued to stare at her, my brain still working at a snail's pace until finally, a synapse must have fired because I suddenly proclaimed.

"I'll need proof in order to believe you." Lillian smiled a genuinely kind smile.

"Of course, you will, but you must understand these are precious secrets I am telling you, and I need to protect the IRA before showing it to just anyone. I promise that you will get to see as soon as you agree to a few things." Lillian stood up at this point, satisfied that I was going to be fine, and returned to her place behind the desk. "This is what you need to understand. Because of its secret nature, IRA leadership is a family business. Traditionally, Edna's post would be given to her son, Wilfred, but Edna believed that the IRA had become corrupted, that Wilfred and her sister, Maura, were conspiring to use technology from other realms to their own advantage. In order to prevent this, Edna and I planned to appoint her successor as someone outside the family, something that hasn't been done in over a hundred years. That was the plan, until you entered the picture."