Alexandra's Potion
Germany, 1803
Alexandra stood over the simmering cauldron in her father’s dungeon-like den, deep in the basement of the Oberlerchner family estate. A small Swiss-made watch and some green pebbles of sea glass lay on the stone table next to the cauldron. She examined the directions of the potion book carefully so far before continuing to the next step.
‘Remove three small gears from inside the watch. Stir counterclockwise twelve times. The brew should turn from cloudy to clear.’
Alexandra took a small tool and pried the little glass face of the watch open. With a pair of small tweezers, she took out three tiny brass gears, dropping them into the simmering potion one by one. She took her wooden spoon and stirred counterclockwise, counting in a whisper.
“...Neun, zehn, elf, zwölf.” The young sorceress pulled the spoon out of the cauldron, sweeping a lock of her long blonde hair which had fallen from its braid. She watched the potion turn from a cloudy white to clear as water.
Now, she had come to the point where she wanted to experiment. The recipe called for three white pebbles of sea glass.
The week before, Alexandra’s teaching sorcerer and mentor, Herr Dunkleslernen, had pulled Alexandra and her classmate Peter Schwarzaugen into his office the day before their graduation. 'I've finally reached a solution for time travel!' he'd told them.
He had managed to brew an alternate version of Zeitbiegen potion. By simply changing the color of the sea glass pebbles, he could prolong the extent and scope of time travel. The accepted version--using only white pebbles--caused a person to go forward in time for a few hours, perhaps three or four hours. Now he'd found a way to strengthen the draught.
People tended to use standard Zeitbiegen for their convenient advantage. If a wizard or witch was bored and happened to have a vial of potion on hand, he or she would drink it in order to move a few hours ahead, to skip a tedious work or school day.
Herr Dunkleslernen had decided to use blue pebbles one day. He fed it to his dog as an experiment, which unfortunately resulted in losing her forever. His little Brunhilde did not die-- she was merely whisked ahead in time and would likely never see her master again. The professor showed Alexandra and Peter what became of the lost dog through his crystal ball.
Brunhilde was now living in luxury with new owners, in a strange place where horses and carriages had been replaced with self-propelling vehicles. Her new master was a boy who wore strange clothes--blue trousers with pockets and a simple shirt. In Dunkleslernen’s crystal ball, Alexandra and Peter watched the boy with Brunhilde in a comfortable room in front of a glowing box with moving pictures. This box was almost like a crystal ball, but the boy was using it only for entertainment.
Dunkleslernen told Alexandra and Peter that the boy, Johnny, who lived in faraway America in a century at least one hundred and sixty years into the future, was not a wizard and neither were his parents. They were ordinary Nicht Magisch but somehow were able to possess and use such oracles in their future time. But how? the professor wanted to know.
Alexandra was fascinated--and determined to duplicate the experiment with her own twist.
She stood before her cauldron of crystal clear potion. Her professor had used blue pebbles to bring his dog a century and a half into the future.
What would happen if she used green sea glass pebbles. Blue pebbles were the color of lakes and rivers-- the gentle, lazy flow of time. But green sea glass pebbles? The aquamarine green of the pebbles in her hand was the color of the raging waves of tropical oceans, powerful and vast, teeming with creatures and multitudes of possibilities. Green just may cause her version of Zeitbiegen potion to be even more powerful than her mentor’s!
Alexandra had a good reason to want to sacrifice herself, escape her fate and life. She was in love with Peter.
It was a hopeless love; her father forbade it. The wealthy wizard, Heinrich Oberlerchner, had already betrothed his daughter to a wealthy, middle-aged, cantankerous bore of a wizard named Gunther Gruel. Alexandra’s wedding was in one week. The thought made her stomach churn.
The previous day, she and Peter conspired to brew the same experimental potion on the same night-- she in her elegant mansion, he in his humble cottage in the Alps near the Austrian border.
The young witch dropped the green pebbles into the cauldron and stirred three times, as the potion book prescribed. The liquid turned from clear to a light aquamarine green. She waited a few minutes for it to cool, and then-- her heart thumping in her chest-- she picked a stone mug and dipped it in the cauldron, filling it about half-full.
Alexandra drank the potion down, trying to endure the bitter taste, the way it burned as it moved from her throat down to her stomach.
That moment, Herr Oberlechner opened the door to his den. “Alexandra!” he shouted when she collapsed to the floor. He rushed forward to help her. The next moment, the young woman vanished into thin air.
Alexandra found herself lying in the grass in a scenic meadow, filled with evergreen forests and near the shore of a clear blue lake. She looked up to see a beautiful blue sky dotted with clouds. It was not a frightening place at all, it seemed. It was much like the landscape around her family mansion in 1803 Germany. At least at first.
She wandered past the forest and along the lake until she found what looked to be a carriage trail. She took one step on the hard, black surface of the trail, then screamed in terror.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! These were not carriages at all. They were not pulled by horses and they traveled at dizzying speeds. Another strange vehicle, a red one, passed her. She could see a man inside of it. He gave her a look of irritation before the vehicle made a loud, blaring sound.
She backed away. This place was strange and frightening. All of the fast-moving horseless carriages were filled with people, and whether they were wizards or Nicht Magisch, she was not certain.
Finally, she saw a person riding astride another strange-looking, smaller vehicle. It was a man riding horse-style upon some sort of wheeled contraption. He wore an odd, round helmet over his head.
Desperate for help, she waved to him. To her relief mixed with apprehension, he slowed the vehicle down and moved it towards her until it came to a stop. The contraption smelled horrible, releasing smoke with a burning odor. The rider took off the shiny dark helmet. Alexandra could see that it was a very young man in his teens, with a tanned face and forearms and messy brown hair. He squinted at her with confusion.
“I thought you were my sister for a second. You look like her. Whaddya need?” he said in a strange dialect of English which she barely understood. Something about his sister was all she could pick up.
Alexandra had learned some English as a child, being from an upper-class family of wizards. “I am lost,” she said. “What country am I?” she asked the boy.
“You’re one of those European tourists, huh?” he said with a friendly nod. “This is America, of course. Ha! Where else?” He chuckled and shook his head.
“Who is leader of city?” she asked again in broken English.
“The leader of the city?” The boy chuckled. “You mean the mayor of the town? That’s my dad!”
“You say what?” Alexandra asked in her poor English, not understanding much of his dialect.
“My father. He’s the mayor.” She now understood that the town’s leader was the boy’s Vader. Fair enough.
He pulled the vehicle to the side of the trail and dismounted. He wasn't very tall, with an average build. He wore a grey shirt of a soft fabric with short sleeves and a pair of very short black trousers that revealed his legs above the knee. “Why are you so dressed up?” he asked.
Another question she couldn’t understand, but from his gesture and expression, she could tell he was commenting on her clothing. She still wore one of her best dresses, an elegant flowing Empire waist gown in pale green organza with cap sleeves. A necklace with a single emerald encircled her neck.
“Going to a wedding?”
The word ‘wedding’ was clear. She made an annoyed face at him. The last thing she wanted to hear was anything about a wedding, the one thing she had been trying to run away from in her former life.
“Sorry, don’t mean to offend. Are you still looking for my dad? Wanna ride?” The young man gestured to his strange and foul-smelling vehicle.
Alexandra pointed to it. “What eez zat?” she asked.
“It’s a Harley.”
“Har-ley,” she repeated taking a step closer to it.
“Yeah, my motorcycle,” he said, the last word unintelligible to her. The boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a rectangular-shaped object. He moved his finger along it, and Alexandra could see that it was glowing. She moved closer to see it. The glowing face of the device had a lifelike image of people on it, other strangely dressed people like him. It was just like a magical Looking Glass! A Verzauberter Spiegel!
“You are wizard?” she asked.
His brow knit in confusion. “Dunno what you mean. I’m a student. Off school for the summer and working odd jobs. My name’s Ben.”
“Ben?”
“Yeah. I know you’re European and stuff, so sorry about the language barrier. What is your name?” he said clearly and distinctly.
She understood. “Alexandra.”
“Okay. So you want me to call my dad?” He kept swiping his finger on his rectangular-shaped Verzauberter Spiegel. To her surprise, he put it to his ear and started talking. She could hear a faint man’s voice issuing from it.
“Alexandra, want to take a ride to City Hall? My dad is there, he can answer any questions. Hop on!”
Reluctantly, Alexandra climbed behind the boy, Ben, on his ’Harley.” It rumbled with a frightening noise as it took off and raced down the trail. She clung to the metal bar at the sides for dear life.
They turned a corner and sped along next to the other large, horseless carriages. Strange sounds- was it music? came from inside them. One of the carriages was enormous, the size of a house. A giant picture was mounted on its side, an image of bread and rolls, and in giant red print, the English words ‘Harvest Grain Breads.’ She was nervous but feeling more and more intrigued every moment.
They passed houses, shops, and many other people. Most of them were dressed very immodestly, even the young women baring their legs in short trousers and what appeared to be short camisoles, no dress worn over them. Most of the men wore sloppy, loose-fitting trousers, typically in a blue fabric. She also noticed people holding and staring at their small, rectangular Verzauberter Spiegels. Almost everyone had one! Was everyone in this future land a witch or wizard?
“So what country are you from? France?” Ben asked.
“No.”
“Russia?”
“No...Germany,” she said in English.
“Cool! My brother-in-law speaks a little German. He learned it from his Babbel app. I downloaded it too, so I can learn Spanish faster. I’m taking Spanish class.”
Alexandra couldn’t make out what Ben had said, other than something about the German language, a brother, and Spaniards.
She began to think about Peter as she rode with this American boy. What year had she reached after drinking the potion? Did Peter reach the same exact year? Was he here? Any time she saw a brown-haired young man among all the people, she studied their faces to see if she could find him, but it was very unlikely he had made it to the same place, or even the same year.
Ben soon slowed down his ‘Harley’ near a neat, one-story building. “This is City Hall,” he said, helping her off the ‘Harley.’ Her long green gown had gotten wrinkled and dirty. They walked inside, Ben opening the door and letting her in, like a gentleman. There were rooms along a hallway, and each room had a man or woman sitting at a desk, looking at a glowing box. Finally, Ben led her into the corner room.
A man of about fifty with sparse salt-and-pepper hair sat at a small table. He, too, was in possession of a glowing box. He looked up at Ben and Alexandra with friendly brown eyes. “Hi!” he greeted.
“Dad?” Alexandra now assumed that ‘Dad’ was a word in futuristic American dialect for ‘Vader.’ “I found this girl, she’s a tourist. Kinda lost here in town, and she doesn’t speak English very well. Thought she could hang out with you because I have to get going.”
“Okay,” Ben’s father said with a polite nod. He regarded her with a puzzled look.
“Dad, doesn’t she look a lot like Allison? I thought she was her at first, that’s why I stopped.” Ben looked at Alexandra. “One of my sisters. I have two.” He indicated a portrait- a very realistic portrait- on his father’s desk. A young woman with long blonde hair wore a long white gown, along with a young man wearing spectacles. They were dressed much more decently than anyone else she’d seen in this future time. “My oldest sister and her husband, that’s their wedding pic.”
Wedding. There was that word again. Alexandra nodded and smiled blankly at the two, distracted by the sights in this room. There were many intriguing gadgets and knickknacks on the man’s desk, including yet another small Verzabreuter Spiegel. She wondered if she could find out what year she was now living in.
Scanning the walls of the room, the man and the teenage boy looking at her with puzzlement, she saw what looked like a calendar. She recognized it as a calendar by the English words ‘Sunday,’ ‘Monday,’ and other days in small print, with rows and columns of numbers. Written beneath an artist’s drawing of a fish was the number ‘2023.’
Alexandra gasped. The potion had whisked her forward in time 220 years!
The Verzabreuter Spiegel that belonged to the older man began to play music. Music that Alexandra recognized! It was the melody of Rossini’s ‘William Tell Overture.’ Ben’s father picked it up and started to speak into it. Apparently, it was important business for him, and he had to leave. The man rose from his desk and left the room swiftly, still speaking into his device.
“He has to run to work. Being the town mayor is his second job, you see.” said Ben. “And I hate to run, but I really gotta go somewhere too. Can you wait here? I’ll be back in an hour. You can just hang out and use my Dad’s computer if you want.” He gestured to the glowing box. “I can give you my mom’s phone number, too.”
Ben picked up a small writing instrument and scribbled numbers on a small piece of paper. “Bye,” he said, walking out the door. She could hear his ‘Harley’ rumbling outside. Alexandra was now alone, in a strange place, 220 years into the future.
She stared at the glowing box, what Ben said was called a ‘computer.’
“Computer,” she said, the English word sounding strange on her lips. It was almost like a crystal ball. All of these people must be wizards and witches. She touched the object it was connected to, and the blue color on the box turned white, the word ‘Google’ appearing on it.
Alexandra thought of Peter, the man she loved. If only there were a way to reach him.
She noticed buttons with letters on the table before her. Intrigued, she played with the buttons and learned that when she pushed them, they appeared in the box! She became intrigued with this new version of the crystal ball. It was more of a crystal box, a new creation of these wizards, apparently.
Slowly and carefully, she learned to type words and names. Any time she typed a word, English or German, an image appeared. The word ‘girl’ produced pictures of girls. She typed her own name, and many images of girls and women showed up in the box. Then, she decided to type Peter’s name. ‘Peter Schwarzaugen.’
Immediately, an image of him appeared! The light brown hair, the striking blue eyes, even the mole on his cheek he’d hated. It was him! His hairstyle and clothing looked so very odd and different, but it was her Peter! Near the image and his name was the phrase ‘LinkedIn.’
She also found the word ‘Message.’ Without further thought, Alexandra moved the little device, and after a few clumsy tries, a little box appeared where she could write in a message.
...
Days later, while being hosted by Ben and his kind American family, Alexandra learned from the ‘Crystal Box’ that Peter’s potion had taken him to the year 2019, only four years short of her. Because he arrived earlier, he’d been able to learn how to live and work in this new century.
It turned out that no one in the world in the year 2023 was a witch or wizard any longer. The trait of having magical abilities had become extinct, due to wizards marrying or procreating with ordinary people and causing the rare 'gifted' genes to die out.
Alexandra also learned, to her despair, that Peter was still in Germany, across the ocean.
′Mache dir darüber keine Sorgen,” ‘Do not worry,’ Peter messaged her through Ben’s father’s ‘Crystal Box.’ She only needed a good amount of money, for something called a ‘Plane Ticket.’
They would be able to reunite after all.
