Wordcount: 358
Rating/Warnings: PG
Summary: A new POV and some backstory on how Atlantis came to be.

NOTE: This is a very rough draft with no editing at all (per National Novel Wiriting Month rules) and is presented for amusement value only. Think of it as a periscope into my writing process rather than a coherent story!

There will most likely be spelling and grammatical errors afoot as well as flat out bad writing, info dumps, plot holes, contradictions/retcons, uneven characterization and pacing. These snippits are also posted out of order, so please refer to the Outline to figure out where it’s supposed to fit.

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In The Beginning

I was there when it all started and I’m here now, where it’s all ending.

My name is Madeline, and this isn’t my story.

A long time ago in a city far, far away there were five people sitting around talking and drinking and being the best of friends. It was late at night or early in the morning, depending on which way you were counting. It was that magical time and space where people can say ridiculous things and have them make total sense.

And that’s when Red said if I couldn’t go to the stars then he’d bring the stars to me.

Faster than light travel was a nut we could never crack and that meant even the closest star was too far away to visit. I’d spent my whole life chasing that hope, which wasn’t much time at all, really, and I’d hit the end of things. Nice hard math that said my dreams would stay just that.

And Red wanted so very much to be my Prince Charming.

He had an idea, a crazy idea, born from the failures we’d hit trying to bend the laws of physics. The equations that would have let us hop from point to point in space only worked if you went from this timeline to another timeline. The magical black box of multiple universes that always popped up when we hit a problem that this world couldn’t solve.

It was late, we were drunk, and it all made perfect sense. We’d filled page after page with hectic scribbles, in five sets of handwriting and one general delusion. What if became Why not faster than anyone would have dared dream and the next morning we had a plausible theory on how to travel from our own timeline to someone else’s.

That rough jumble of paper became a shared cause, spearheaded by Red who made a living turning the impossible into the improbable. We were all caught up in the madness, the unreality of it all, and I think now that we were all expecting the city to fail.

Only it didn’t.

Which is why scientists should never have parties.