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Charlotte returned on a monstrous autumn night. The wind howled through the London streets and carried with it all the debris and refuse that had carelessly been thrown into them by its hapless inhabitants. The rain had been relentless in the last few days and water stood high in the Thames. The streets too were ripe with water and it was not a pretty sight to see the people trying to make way to their destinations in the downpour.

My landlady opened the door after the third, most urgent, series of knocks on the door. She gasped when she saw the drenched figure of my good friend Charlotte on the other side. Half in tears she helped the poor girl inside and urged her to get out of her clothes. She insisted that Charlotte would accompany her into her quarters and receive a dry set of clothes of hers so that she would not catch her death.

Charlotte tried to explain that the package she was carrying under her arm was the result of several months of work and that I would urgently want to see it, but to no avail. Mrs Threattle simply told her that if I had waited several months for that package, I could wait a few more moments while she Charlotte changed into some dry clothes and the girl could no longer refuse.

Once into some, somewhat oversized, but considerably less clammy, clothes she quickly made her way up the stairs into my quarters. She threw open the door, much to my and my land-lady's dismay and placed gently upon the table on top of my work, which I was transcribing into a book, in front of me her well protected brown paper package.

I had failed to notice any of the actions that had taken place below and was quite surprised to find myself staring into Charlotte's lovely smiling face.

"It's done." She beamed at me. It took me a few moments to understand what she was talking about.

"Really? It is?" I could scarcely believe her words.

"Well. Open it!" she said and looked at the package. I was transfixed by the possibilities of the contents of the box and found it hard to make a motion for it. But after a thousand years of hesitation I reached out and started untying the rope she had wrapped around it.

"Oh, you tiresome man" she said and ripped the package out of my grasp. Within a few seconds she had removed all the packaging and on top of ripped paper and strings of rope on my desk it stood, glimmering in the flickering gaslight. It was indeed as wonderful as I could ever have hoped.

It was box-like in shape, about the size of a normal clock. Each corner was a cylindrical bar and the top had a glass bulb inside which you could see the spokes of the flywheel with the weights to keep the balance and speed exact. On the front there was an intricate face with several hands in several positions pointing out all the variables of the machines function. On the back was the levers and the handles for winding the mechanical parts.

From each side you could look through the green-tinted glass into the workings inside and thought he machine was still now, I shuddered in anticipation of watching it revolve and hum with energy as I activated its main function.

I must have spent several minutes admiring the machine before I realized that Charlotte was waiting for me. She expected me to do something with the machine or at least tell her what it was for.

"As I started explaining three months ago, there is an infinite number of parallel universes." As I spoke I started winding the machine. "Each one unique but closely related to an infinite number of other universes. These universes exist and occupy the same space at the same time, separated by the thinnest dimensional barrier. Of course quite impenetrable by any normal means." I shifted the gears, turned the hands on the front into positions that I had calculated since I had finished my thesis. The machine started humming and the flywheel started spinning.

"But this machine is more than normal. It's design is so intricate, so fantastical, so amazing, that it enables the user to bend the dimensions to his will, rendering him immaterial to the barriers that separate the universes. He becomes able to travel to these parallel dimensions."

I could see the same glow in Charlottes eyes as I no doubt had in mine. She was starting to realize the potential of our machine.

"Look inside." I had already directed my attention to the small window on the front which should be showing only the insides of the machine, but the clock was directing light through a complex moving system of mirrors and coloured stones and thus projecting an image onto it instead.

The image on the glass was that of an island, during the day, with sunlight dancing on the waves. The sky above the island was clear of clouds but full of birds of all sizes circling and diving into the ocean for fish. The shores of the island were rocky and inhospitable, except for in one place where a white sandy beach showed the island's softer side. On the top of the island was a structure of blue and green, covered in many places with vegetation. Bulbous towers and huge stain-glass windows made it look almost like a part of the jungle surrounding it.

"What is this place?"

"This, my dear Charlotte, is where we are going first."

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