After Pascal's death we hung a picture of him in a prominent place in the workshop, and we thought of him often. But as he would have wanted, we got immediately back to work, planning for the construction of our portal.
Amelia had grown into a creative, enthusiastic member of the team, and she picked up where Pascal had left off: Grandfather and I continued to come up with conceptual notions grounded in magic or science, and she managed to somehow translate them into prototypes and models that actually worked.
We hadn't as yet built anything full-sized, but she was doing an outstanding job testing and modifying materials in ways that I never even thought of. I think that maybe I was
too well-versed in typical lab protocols. I tended to overthink things and talk myself out of them before I even tried them. Amelia, on the other hand, was supremely confident as an inventor, and far more willing to take the kinds of risks we needed to take in order to make the kinds of incredible intuitive leaps we were going to need to make to bridge the gap between science and magic.
Of course, sometimes her confidence got her into trouble...
And sometimes all of that intuition and creative thinking made her seem a bit eccentric. But it usually worked out in unusually useful ways. Like when she decided to build a giant yellow monstrosity of a machine, for instance, and spent weeks digging around in the backyard, pulling up all kinds of debris and making an unholy racket that the perception charm thankfully kept from disturbing the rest of the neighborhood.
Between the two of us, we had built an incredibly efficient, self-sustaining greenhouse to keep our collection of exotic plants alive in Aurora Skies' harsh climate. And she even built a machine to help harvest them, by tugging them gently off their vines and stems with a finely tuned vacuum -- nothing I would have ever dreamed up myself.
Of course, it was the vacuum, combined with her aforementioned eccentricity that got it into her head that the easiest way to gather more raw materials for her experiments would be to blow the items in the in the local junkyard into scrap.
The next morning, she was off on her usual rounds to the various thrift stores and consignment shops in town, looking for more strange treasures to use in her inventions. And perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a policeman across the street from the junkyard, looking for witnesses to whatever had happened there the night before.
Amelia made a quick dive for the consignment shop door, but she wasn't quite fast enough.
"You there! Stop where you are!"
She put on her best innocent smile and turned around to greet the officer. "Good morning!" she said cheerily, stopping just short of vacuously batting her eyelashes. "My goodness, what happened over there?"
"Don't even try it," the officer said with a frown. "Security camera caught you in the act."
"Well it was just garbage!" she argued back, dropping the act in an instant. "It's not like I blew up anything anyone wanted."
"Oh, no...There's no denying it. You blew up--" The officer stopped, perplexed by the sudden admission, and not sure what do in the face of Amelia's defiance. He frowned at her for a long moment. She frowned back, arms crossed, foot tapping.
"Listen," the policeman said, regrouping. "You can't go around blowing things up. It's not safe."
"Ohhhh! Ha!" She laughed -- or, more accurately, snorted. "Is that what you're worried about? I was perfectly safe. It was a small charge, and I was behind the brick wall in back." She waved a hand, dismissively. "Couldn't have hurt me."
The officer had cocked his eyebrow at the sound of the snort, and he didn't seem to find Amelia's nonchalance very endearing. "If you're going to wander around town setting off explosives, I could care less what you do to yourself. It's the innocent bystanders I'm worried about."
"Hey!"
"What?" He tilted his head, mimicking her earlier innocent expression.
"I wouldn't wander around town setting off explosives! They're dangerous!"
"Oh, you think?" Now he was sarcastic. "Listen, lady--"
"My name's Amelia."
"Listen, LADY," the officer said again, gritting his teeth. "I can't arrest you for blowing up the junk. Turns out you're just outside the town limits, and the owner's not pressing charges."
"Of course not," Amelia shot back. "I did him a favor. He hasn't cleared that place out in years."
"HOWEVER," the officer continued over the top of Amelia's interruption. "If I catch you in town with anything that even looks like an explosive -- and I mean fireworks, firecrackers, bottle rockets, propane tanks," he was counting things off on his fingers as he listed them, "pressure cookers, gasoline cans, car batteries, fire extinguishers, hot peppers...
"Oh, come on!"
"You'd better not pop a balloon," he continued without pause, "shake up a soda can, put mints in your Coke..."
"Diet Coke," she interrupted again.
He stopped and glared at her.
"I'm just saying," she said. "It won't work right with regular Coke. It has to be diet. The aspartame makes the reaction bigger, and... the mints have to... they have to be bumpy, and..." She trailed off, as he was still glaring her way.
"WHATEVER," he roared. "Just stay out of trouble."
"Yes, SIR," she said with a mock salute, but she was saluting his back as he stalked off, so she couldn't see the smile he had been trying to hide.
A few days later, Amelia was lounging on the thrift store's ugliest couch, paging through her latest list of pieces and parts required for inventing. "You don't happen to have a tractor tire lying around do you, Wilson," she called to the clerk at the register.
"Does this look like the kind of place that would have a tractor tire lying around?"
"Do you want an honest answer for that?" She didn't look up from her phone as she made additional notes. "I guess I'll try the junkyard again. Hopefully the stormtrooper will have moved along by now."
"Well this is awkward," drawled the aforementioned stormtrooper. He'd come in while she was typing, and now he was eyeing her with a raised brow. "But I had a feeling I'd find you here…"
"Oh, I suppose now you want to arrest me for loitering?"
"No, now I want to know if I can take you to a movie."
"What?"
"A movie," he replied. "Actors. Actresses. Plays in a theater."
"I've been to a movie," Amelia scoffed. "Not usually with a police escort though."
The officer laughed at the wary response. "I think we got off on the wrong foot the last time we met, but I'm completely different out of uniform," he promised.
"What makes you think I want to see you naked?" Amelia's tone was sarcastic, but it drew another laugh from the officer, who held up his hands in surrender.
"Stop! OK -- it was a bad choice of words. But I'm a lot different off duty," he tried again. "Come on. Give it a shot…" He smiled eagerly, and despite herself, Amelia was charmed.
"Fine," she said as she shook his hand. "But I'm not going to call you 'Officer…'" she peered at his name tag and badge "'Gooden.'"
"It's Jake," he said with a grin. "And I'll see you Saturday."
That weekend, though, she was standing in front of the theater, typing furiously on her cell phone.
…waiting here for an hour and u didn't even bother to come and I'm standing alone on the sidewalk and some scruffy looking guy in a terrible sweater has just walked up to stare at me so thanx for nothingShe hit send, and looked up with a frown. "WHAT?" she demanded.
The scruffy looking guy opened his mouth to reply, but then held up a finger, and dug in his pocket for his phone as it beeped. Then he started to laugh. "Scruffy?"
Amelia's eyes got wide and her cheeks got pink as she realized what had happened.
"I happen to like this sweater," Jake added as she reached out for her hand. "And I told you I was a lot different off-duty."
"What do you do with your hair?"
"Tuck it into the hat."
"Huh." She tried to think of something caustic to say, but was completely at a loss. Jake's smile was too enchanting.
So they walked in together, and by the time they were out, they were a happy couple.
And few months later, after a few more dates (and a few more arguments)…
…they were in a hot air balloon over the waterfalls of Aurora Skies.
And in no time at all, their unlikely first meeting had turned into a proposal.