Perspectives

Chapter 50

Piper's new cage was almost identical to the last one, other than the fact that it was slightly smaller and opened in the back rather than the top to accommodate for the convenient carrying handle on top. She stood in the back corner, bracing herself against the two walls as Rothgard made his way through the building, her cage held carelessly at his side. 

A part of Piper felt like she should be paying more attention to what was going on outside her cage, on the off-chance she somehow escaped and needed to navigate the massive laboratory. However her growing nausea in addition to her diminished hope left her just staring miserably down at her feet during the journey. 

"Sir!" Piper heard a voice shout. She looked up to see a giant man wearing a lab coat run up beside Rothgard, looking out of breath. 

"What is it?" Rothgard asked, showing no sign of stopping for conversation. 

The man in the lab coat quickened his pace to match Rothgard's long strides. "Sir, we think we may have come up with a solid theory." He panted.

"Theory for what?" Rothgard asked impatiently.

Piper caught a grin developing on the man's face. She didn't know why exactly, but a pit was quickly forming in her stomach. "For why we have been unable to travel to the Earth dimension without retaining our size, sir." He announced. 

That got Rothgard to stop. An action that sent Piper tumbling forward by the abrupt halt in movement. "Tell me." He demanded, turning to face the bespectacled scientist. 

"Well sir, as you know the trans-dimensional teleporter is powered by nuclear energy." The man began. "In order to operate, there needs to be a nuclear power source on both sides of the teleportation, and we've been latching onto already existing sources on Earth." He went on. 

"Get on with it." Rothgard growled, causing the scientist to become even more flustered than he had been. 

"R-right sir, well I was--I was analyzing the machine readings from when the human was transported to Earth the other day." He explained stumbling through the sentence. "And--and I noticed that the power cells were only drained a fraction as much as when we send an Amasisian." 

Piper wished she could see where this whole explanation was going, but she struggled with even Earth physics, let alone the crazy advanced Amasisian variety. 

"That's to be expected, the human is far smaller." Rothgard stated, sounding unimpressed with the scientist's information so far. 

Nodding vigorously in agreement, the scientist went on. "Yes of course, but that got me thinking about the fact that we're using human nuclear facilities to power our teleportations." He was becoming more emboldened the more he spoke. "The output of a human facility is much less than what we have here, meaning the energy source we're tapping into isn't enough to transport us at our full size!" 

Piper's eyes went wide as she finally began to realized what had caused her to be transported to Amasis. Her hometown of Waterford, Connecticut. With a population under 20,000 it wasn't exactly the most thrilling place to grow up. The three things it was known best for? Being surround on three sides by water, being a two hour drive from New York City, and it's proximity to the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant. 

"Are you saying that if we built our own source of nuclear power on Earth, we would be able to teleport at full size?" Piper distantly heard Rothgard ask.

"I believe so, sir!" The scientist exclaimed. 

The only reason this trans-dimension teleporter had teleported her to Amasis in the first place was because they had been using the nearby plant to power their machine. Whether her specifically being the one accidentally transported was just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time...she could only guess.