Page 18 of Her Highland Prophecy
“Whatever for?” he asked. What she was describing sounded fantastic, but he could not see how it could be useful inside a house. She grinned at him.
“Many, many things that do not exist yet. Once they discovered how to use electricity, then more and more inventors started creating new things to do with it. We no longer have candles inside our homes. Instead, we have small glass globes that we can light with electricity on our ceilings. You can turn these on and off by pressing on a button as often as you want.”
He shook his head in disbelief. It was impossible to imagine such a thing. He did not have much time to react though because she was still speaking.
“There are so many different machines that have replaced things that were once done by hand. There are machines that wash our clothes, keep our food cold and a whole variety of different things to help in the kitchen from mixing our food to baking. We don’t use fire in the kitchen to cook anymore. Our ovens use electricity to generate heat and we can choose what temperature we want it to be.”
“That sounds–”
“Crazy,” she finished. “I know. My world is very different than the one you know.”
“What other things can yer machines do?” he asked curiously.
He realized with some surprise that he was starting to believe her claim that she was from the future. The things that she was describing were very bizarre, but they held some sort of odd logic, and the more she spoke, the less likely he thought it was that she was unstable. She was simply too logical for that to be true.
It was also highly improbable that she was able to dream up everything she was talking about and he was interested to hear just how much different things were.
“Okay,” she said and paused in thought, and he startled at the unfamiliar phrase.
That was another thing he had noticed. She did not speak like anyone else he had ever met. Even the other Sassenachs from England. She used phrases that he did not know the meaning of when she spoke, like ‘okay’. She nodded her head when she said it, so he assumed that it meant she agreed with what he asked, but he had never heard the word before.
He watched her as she thought, a line forming between her eyes as she narrowed her eyebrows in concentration. He noticed with amusement that her nose also scrunched slightly. It was adorable.
“I think the easiest to explain would be transportation. You use carriages or horses to go from place to place,” she stated vaguely gesturing at Taranis.
“Aye,” he answered slowly. “Ye dinnae mean to tell me that there are horses that also use electricity.”
“Close enough,” she giggled. “There are two different types of machines that do that. One of them is like a horse and the other more like a carriage. We call the first kind a motorcycle and the other an automobile.”
She pronounced the two unfamiliar words slowly and clearly for him.
“What do they do?”
“I don’t know exactly how they work, if truth be told, but they are both made of metal and they use a form of electricity to work. Motorcycles look like a…a saddle suspended between two carriage wheels. There is a metal bar in the front that controls the wheels like you control the reins of a horse.”
“And the other one?”
“The automobile?” she asked. He nodded in confirmation.
“They look remarkably like carriages, but lower to the ground. The wheels aren’t as large, and they are made out of metal like motorcycles. Instead of horses pulling it, there is an engine in the front that moves the wheels.”
“That doesnae sound too different from a carriage,” he said. She nodded, but her smile was mischievous.
“When I describe it like that, no, it isn’t. The difference is that an engine will not get tired like a horse does, so you are not limited on how far you can go before it needs a rest or how quickly. The automobile my father just bought can go faster than one-hundred-miles per hour!”
“One hundred miles? In one hour? Surely ye are jesting, lass.” He could not fathom crossing such a distance in so short a time.
“It’s true. I was touring the countryside in Scotland with my sister and my friends when we came to Ballachulish. The ride from London to Edinburgh took a little over two days to accomplish.”
Two days. Two days to make a journey that would take weeks if he were to go on horseback, let alone a carriage that was likely to get stuck in the muddy roads. He could not fathom that sort of speed being available to him. How small the world must seem to her, and how slow the ride on his horse!
“There also many, many other things that I wouldn’t even know how to explain to you,” she said as her eyes took on a faraway look.
He was starting to understand that he would never be able to fully grasp what the world she came from was like and realized that his world must also appear strange to her in turn. What would she do, all alone in a place with no one to help her?
She could not repeat the story she had just told him. He was not one to believe in magic and witchcraft, but others…even he had questioned whether she was a witch for a moment. They would not be so keen to believe her story and provide her with assistance.
An idea sparked as he tried to figure out where they should go from there. Maybe, just maybe, they could help each other.
