Once Upon a Second Chance

(40) - Let's Take a Step Inside

"That makes so much sense," Gil muttered as he poured over Henry's storybook that he had borrowed—the original one. There were so many storybooks in Storybrooke now, it was becoming confusing to tell them apart.

"What?" Carlos asked as he looked up from the notes he and Gil had been taking in the library along with the many books they had been borrowing from the shelves for the purpose of their study.

Gil looked up. "Why we aren't able to get to Auradon. Inter-world travel is hard enough with the people of the Enchanted Forest and all the other realms mentioned in this book. But it's not impossible—not like getting back to Auradon is for us."

"So what are you implying?" Carlos asked, folding his arms.

"I think that all the realms here: the Enchanted Forest, Wonderland, Neverland, Oz, the Underworld, the Land of Untold Stories—they're all connected to each other while other realms with different versions of them are connected to each other in the same way," Gil explained.

Carlos still didn't understand. "I don't get what you're trying to say."

Gil sighed. "You know how the different realms here are different version to ours right? We have different Wonderlands, Neverlands, Underworlds?"

"Yeah," Carlos nodded. "But those are their own realms. Just like Auradon is its own realm."

Gil shook his head as he bagan to explain his theory. "I don't think that's the case. What if the Enchanted Forest was the main realm, and all those other realms are just its pocket dimensions? That's why the people who live there are able to travel back and forth between those worlds, because they're part of the same macrocosm, just in different domains. But parallel versions of these realms of story they can't get to, because they're on other planes of existence entirely."

"I see what you're getting at," Carlos said in thought of Gil's words. "You think that the separate realms are only separate in their own jurisdiction, but alternate realms have their own jurisdictions that they have no access to?"

"Exactly."

"I mean, I guess it makes sense, but how are we supposed to back this up?"

Gil asked after a moment of consideration, "Can I see that hat you borrowed from Jefferson?"

Carlos handed over the hat he had borrowed from his current guardian for the purpose of his and Gil's research into the science behind alternate worlds. After reading about how to operate it fairly simply from the storybook, Gil placed the hat on the floor, and spun it.

The two boys took a step back as the hat began to twirl faster and faster on the ground, emitting a hurricane of purple smoke as it did. That is when the hat began to rise into the air, creating a portal into the very hat in the object's place.

Carlos and Gil looked at each other with wide grins on their face as the wind from the portal blew in their faces. Without a word, the two jumped into the portal.

Belle reentered the main room of the library with Gideon, having gotten back from the bathroom to change his diaper. "So, boys, find anything interes-" But she was cut off as the room was completely empty, no sign of any life besides the scattered books and sticky notes on the reader desk and something Belle's eyes didn't catch—a hat sitting in the center of the floor.

Meanwhile, the two VKs landed in the interior of the hat. They looked around in amazement. They were in a large cylindrical room with a black and white damask-patterned wall and a card-themed, mandala-styled floor. And surrounded them as well were several doors with wall lanterns in between them. The two went in separate directions to investigate.