Beatrice/Open
Beatrice couldn’t say how long she’d been away from home this time. Or what year home was, precisely. Time worked differently for her, somehow both clear and muddled all at once, her present overlapping with past and future in equal measure.
This absence from everyone else’s present had been a relatively short one – a year, at least, while Beatrice studied the great scientific women of history face-to-face. Half a year with Hypatia of Alexandria in the late fourth century, a season with Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth, a few weeks jailed with Martine Bertereau in the 1640s (how ironic that her jailers accused her of witchcraft and promptly locked her up with the world's most powerful wizard!). The list went on and on as Beatrice accomplished what she set out to do: gathering all the knowledge that had been lost to history, sometimes innocently and sometimes purposefully, for the great library in her school that she’d had yet to open.
Or had it already opened? Beatrice looked up from her writing desk, suddenly unsure. The year was 1901, and Annie Jump Cannon had just published her new system of star classification and changed astronomy forever. Beatrice was staying in the astronomer’s spare room, acting as the near-deaf woman’s assistant. The hour was late and the candlelight was low, but for Beatrice it might as well have been mid-morning. Astronomers did all their work at night; that alone was enough to befuddle Beatrice’s sense of time even without her frenetic time-hopping.
“‘S’pose I ought to check,” she said to herself, removing her spectacles and setting them on the desk with a sigh. It’d be a real shame if she missed her own opening – though, of course, she could always fudge a bit and redo it. But where was the fun in that?
Standing up, Beatrice picked up the pencil she’d been writing with and gave it a little wave. Instantly, it transformed back into Merlin’s long and plain wooden wand. She waved it again, and a note appeared on the desk, sealed in an envelope with Ms. Cannon’s name written on it. An apology, of sorts, for her assistant’s sudden disappearance, should Beatrice not return. Too bad. Studying the stars was peaceful compared with what she was about to go back to.
“Domum iterum, domum iterum.” A small smirk alighted her face as she twirled the wand in her fingers. “Jiggity jig.”
A smoky poof filled the room and followed Beatrice into the future. She appeared in a most inconvenient place – in the great hall of Camelot Castle, standing atop a long table filled with food and looking for all the world like she’d just stepped out of an early twentieth century portrait. Beatrice raised an eyebrow and looked down at the hem of her skirt, which was slowly soaking up quite a lot of punch.
“What – oh, hang it all, this is just typical,” Beatrice muttered under her breath, hitching up her skirts and hopping down to the floor. She landed in front of someone who was clearly not related to her, as his mouth was hanging open and a poor, abandoned prosciutto rose hung frozen in the air, halfway to his gaping jaw.
“Oh, hello.” Clearly unbothered, Beatrice plucked the hors d’oeuvre from his fingers and popped it into her mouth, then asked him with mild curiosity, “What year is this?”
“Er.” The man blinked. “2020?”
“2020! And it’s Midsommer, is it?” She looked around the room for confirmation rather than at the unfortunately hors d’oeuvre-less man. The decorations never changed, not in all the years she’d been alive nor in the years she’d visited in the past. Camelot disposed of some traditions with the times, but never the ones that made this place really feel like home. She smiled again, relieved that she hadn’t missed what might very well turn out to be the most important day of her life. In fact, she was early. How lovely.
But something still wasn’t quite right. She looked down again at her sodden clothes. The height of fashion in 1901, they were; in 2020, not so much. “Oh, this won’t do at all.”
Another wave of her wand, and the period clothes and Edwardian hairstyle disappeared, replaced by a fashionable green velvet suit and a choppy bob. The wand lengthened into a cane and Beatrice leaned into it, perfectly comfortable despite the stares all around her. “Mm. Much better.”