Far away from the school, on the other side of town, two figures appeared on a quiet street. DTH Jon and DTH Karyn had set the controls on the Dimensional Time Hopper to a random dimension and it had brought them here.
They both took in their tree lined surroundings. "We're still across town." Karyn said, a little disappointed.
"Yeah." Jon said as he put the DTH into his backpack.
"Can't you use that recall thing?" She asked.
"The recall will only take me back to my bedroom in my universe. The other Jon is waiting there for us and I thought you wanted to avoid him."
"I do." She agreed.
"Otherwise spatially, it puts us roughly where we left. In this case, on the other side of town."
"That sucks. We just walked across town to get here. Now we got to walk all the way back?" She wasn't pleased.
"It's a dimension hopper, not a portable teleporter." Jon said as he started walking.
"We're getting one of those too, then." She said as she noticed Jon was now walking off. She ran briefly to catch up with him and then matched walking pace with him.
"You know I don't like using the stone besides don't you think we've got enough magic gizmos?" He asked her.
"What on Earth is a gizmo?" Karyn had never heard that word before. A car passed them on the quiet street. It slowed down as it passed them, honking it's horn, before speeding up again. "Rude!" Karyn shouted as the car went off down the street.
"Maybe it is someone who knows this dimension's version of Karyn." Jon suggested. Karyn shrugged.
"I looked at the driver, it was some woman I didn't recognise."
As they walked on, they reached a house with a mother and two small girls in their front garden. The mother was sitting in a lawn chair. She was wearing a long flowery dress. The girls had very long blonde hair and like their mother, were also wearing flowery dresses. As Jon and Karyn walked passed, the girls stopped playing and stared at them. The mother looked up from her magazine and stared at them too.
Being friendly, Jon said "Good Day!" to the family in a loud voice as the two of them walked slowly by on the pavement. The mother suddenly stood up, throwing down her magazine on to the lawn. She grabbed the girl's hands and started ushering them towards the house. "Come on boys, lets get inside." The mother said quietly. All three entered the house. The door shut with a slam.
"Is this rude world or something?" Jon asked Karyn as they continued to walk down the street.
"They looked like they were frightened more than being rude." Karyn said.
"I don't know what's intimidating about me. I am the least threatening person ever." Jon said.
"That's true, I've seen bigger muscles on a chicken." Karyn joked.
"Thanks." Jon replied. "Still, it's kind of strange."
"Do we know anything about this timeline?" Karyn asked. Jon shook his head.
"This dimension is far away from the usual divergences we tend to travel around. We should really be more cautious." He took a look up and down the street. "I'll try to pay more attention to what's going on around us." That reassured Karyn somewhat. Thanks to Jon's enhanced intelligence, he was really good at putting things together in his head.
"We might find out more when we get to your house." She said.
"Hopefully before then." Jon said as another car tooted its horn at them.
