🥚 worlds / aToA
WORLDS: A Theory of Anything — Siobhan and their brother Henry are reaching that age where the pressure of nigh adulthood is staring them down. The stress of whatever life awaits after university graduation, though, is thrown wayside by a new friendship and the revelation that their fathers — Faruk Mustafa and Donovan Ventris — seem to have vanished without a trace... possibly almost a year ago, as the twins sit down together and finally shuffle through their memories. How is that something someone just doesn't notice?
Rifling through Donovan and Faruk's effects raises more questions than it answers — what is 'cryptophysicality'? — and Vonny and Henry do not return to campus in the winter to finish their degrees. Instead they set themselves to the task of digging up anything and anyone that might make some sense of their fathers' apparent secret lives, determined to figure out the circumstances of their disappearance.
What they find with their fathers' colleagues — truths going back both to the strange events following their fathers' meeting 25 years ago in graduate school, and to inconceivably earlier — answers far, far more than they ever thought to ask. And what to do with the unfolding realization that their fathers' absence may be only the first event in a much more catastrophic process...?
'modern day'
'~25 years ago'
Ashenfeller University 199X
Arborem non sibi sed posteris serit
London's stalwart ash tree, the many buildings of Ashenfeller University find their home in the streets of England's capitol city, the breadth of the campus straddling the Thames. Established 1814, Ashenfeller's blue-and-white have become synonymous with a research institution of admirable renown, and each year students from not just the UK but the world at large flock to its halls.
September 1991 marks the start of a term not particularly unlike any other. As momentous an occasion as it may feel to the next cohort of young PhD hopefuls arriving in town, the comfortable-if-hectic rhythm of the academic calendar is as it's always been in the halls of Ashenfeller. Were it not for the buzz of nervous excitement, it would be almost easy to drift off once gathered into the grand hall for opening address; there's nothing remarkable about a speech heard a hundred times before:
"The people you sit among today as strangers will be for the next four, five, more years not only your peers, but your closest companions. For some of you, far from home, they will be your family; for all of you, they will be the most frequent presence in your lives. The long hours you spend together will be demanding, excruciating, exhilarating — you will know each other's deepest hardships, share in one another's greatest triumphs. Now, look around you, and remember well the faces you see... "