i'm fighting this feeling, but it never stops
Summary: Goldie does some interdimensional traveling.
Word count: 4843
Warnings: None
1933; Yinchuan
She hadn’t tried to contact Scrooge after the Gobi Desert. Without checking, Goldie could be reasonably sure that he was pissed about what happened.
Her very full bank account and newly planned Chinese hotel made her feel better about it, though. It felt good to have her properties all over the world. Goldie imagined a future for herself where she could travel anywhere at any time and always have a nice place to stay for free. It was very different from the life she had growing up.
Plus...there was more than just gold and gems in Oyu Tolgoi. Goldie had come across some very mysterious looking treasures...treasures she didn’t want to show anyone just in case they were worth more than she knew. One in particular that caught her eye was a beautifully carved piece of turquoise embedded with (what she believed to be) Mongolian characters all along the edges. Normally she’d sell something like that (or save it to have on display at her new hotel), but there was something about it that called to her.
Like, literally. Goldie could swear she heard something come from the stone. She didn’t completely understand Mongolian, but she recognized a few words here and there, and definitely heard the words west and south. Did the rock want her to go southwest? Did that thought make her sound completely insane? Was the fact that she was really considering following those directions even more insane? Maybe. But she liked a call to adventure. And this was starting out like quite the strange adventure - something she'd get to brag about to Scrooge when she got back. Something where she could find such a rare interesting treasure that people from around the world would come to her Blackjack just to see it.
After taking a few days to think about her options, Goldie made the decision to follow what the weird talking rock wanted her to do. Why not, right? She sent letters to her other hotels and let them know she might be gone for a while (maybe forever if this was some magical deadly trap) and even wrote a letter for Scrooge that she left with Altan, who was still in Peking with her. It was nice to work with a guy who spoke a lot of different local languages. Altan agreed to send it, but only if Goldie didn’t tell him not to within two years time. Or if Scrooge came looking for her. But that was definitely not going to happen.
---
Going southwest brought Goldie to a city called Yinchuan. It was a gorgeous place that she would’ve loved to spend a bit of time in, but the stone told her to keep moving. She’d gotten this far listening to a mysterious magical voice echoing in her head, why stop now?
After a few more hours of wandering, she ended up near a large, intimidating river at the northern edge of the city. The stone in her hand was starting to shake as she assumedly got closer to wherever it was that it wanted her to go.
Goldie had wondered a few times on her journey how she’d know if she reached the right place. She no longer had to wonder as the stone floated out of her hand and hovered, shaking, over a spot near the river.
“Huh. This is definitely going on my list as one of the oddest little adventures I’ve been on,” Goldie said out loud, lonely from traveling by herself for almost two weeks.
The stone stopped shaking, which caught Goldie’s attention. She waited a few moments and then walked closer to it, reaching out to touch it and see if anything felt different.
As her fingers made contact on the edge, gently touching some of the Mongolian characters there - the characters glowed a bright white. Goldie pulled her hand back in fear and took a step away from the turquoise, hoping she hadn’t done something wrong. It shook for a few seconds and then stopped again.
Goldie frowned. “This is going to give me a heart attack,” she grumbled. With a sigh, she wondered if she should’ve just asked Altan or some locals to help her understand what this thing was. It was a dumb, dangerous game to follow a mystical voice all by herself, after all.
Then, without any warning at all, a long, goopy black tendril flew out of the stone and wrapped itself around Goldie’s arm.
“What the-?!”
Goldie attempted to pull herself out of the tendril’s grasp, but suddenly another shot out. And another. They wrapped themselves around each of her limbs and beak and ponytail, roughly pulling her towards the stone. With her beak clamped shut, she couldn’t scream for help, but Goldie could tell it wouldn’t be worth the effort. She was sunk. She was going to die and it was for a stupid reason and her last moments with Scrooge were so stupid and-
The goop from the tendrils covered her eyes and she felt her breathing restricted. Goldie took one last deep breath as she lost all sensations and the tendrils dragged her into the gemstone.
As she was pulled into it, the gemstone itself was covered by the black goop and disappeared just after Goldie.
---
Goldie gasped loudly and sat up, wondering how the hell she wasn’t dead. As her eyes adjusted to the world around her, she considered the possibility that she was dead and the afterlife was real.
The sky was a sickly green color and there were creatures flying through it she’d never seen before. They looked terrifying, mostly.
She looked at the ground she was sitting on and saw it was a bright pink color, though Goldie wouldn’t know how to refer to it exactly. Dirt? Sand? Grass? The texture was completely unfamiliar, almost like mud. It felt wet and dripped out of her hands, but it didn’t leave any residue and was perfectly solid under her butt. This could definitely be Hell. It didn’t seem as organized as a lot of text made it sound, but who could really know the truth but the dead, right?
As she stood up, Goldie finally noticed the turquoise gemstone was next to her on the ground. She stared at it curiously. If it was with her, then...she probably wasn’t dead after all.
She picked it up and saw that one of the characters was still glowing. It was the one she’d touched earlier.
Goldie looked around. She remembered on several adventures, she and Scrooge had found themselves walking through portals to other worlds. Though it would be a terrifying and borderline deadly method, she wondered if the stone was simply a way to transport someone from world to world.
Turning the stone around in her hand, Goldie grimaced. How the hell was she going to get back to her world? Did she really have to try all of these? Go through that terrifying black goopy ordeal for each symbol until she saw blue skies and green grass again?
She looked over everything. There were at least twenty symbols on the stone. On the plus side, she could just start now and try to get back to her world within a few hours. On the negative side, she had no idea how long she was unconscious. Twenty minutes? Three hours? Two days? Her watch wasn’t working and either way she had no way of knowing the accuracy of it or what day it was.
Her stomach grumbled and Goldie huffed angrily. There was no way to know what was safe to eat here. She had some supplies in her backpack, but what if the black goop tainted it all? Was it safe? Was she going to die?
Goldie decided to walk around the area and see if anything looked...not-scary. Maybe this was an advanced world with a marketplace and people who spoke any of the languages she knew. It seemed very unlikely, but she could at least give it a shot.
---
No marketplace. No food. No friendly locals.
Goldie was screaming at the stone in her hand and poking the different symbols. “How the hell do I get you to work?!” She tried to listen for the voice to no avail and wondered if running from angry creatures armed with arrows was preventing her from getting it to shake and glow again.
“Come on, come on!” Goldie cried out. “You want to get out of here, too, don’t you? Just...just GO!”
An unfamiliar creature appeared in front of Goldie and she stopped, almost losing her balance. It looked angry and hungry and she was probably its meal of choice. The creatures behind her had weapons - knives and arrows - so she supposed neither was really a good option. She glanced to the side and, as expected, saw she was near the edge of a cliff. She literally had nowhere to go.
A whisper in her ear told Goldie to move an inch to her left, so she did. A moment later, an arrow whizzed past her face and stabbed itself right into the chest of the creature in front of her that wanted her for a snack. She didn’t know the biology of all these weird whatever-they-ares, but the way blue goop seeped out of it and then it collapsed had her feeling confident that the thing was dead.
Goldie stepped closer to it, a little worried that it wasn’t as dead as it looked, when the stone in her hand started to shake again. She gaped at it.
“Wait, what?!” she screeched. “Don’t tell me you need blood to work!”
Goldie looked behind her to see the creatures with weapons still headed her way and she decided she didn’t really care how it happened. She poked at another symbol and hoped to whatever God was out there - if they were even able to hear her from wherever she was - that she was about to get back home.
---
“Oh thank God, it’s talking to me again,” Goldie mumbled quietly at the stone in her hand, which was shaking and guiding her like it did on Earth.
The world she was in this time didn’t look terribly different from her own, but there didn’t seem to be any people around. Or animals. Or any form of life that she could see.
The quiet was eerie and it made Goldie want to talk to herself, but just in case there was something waiting for her in the brush, she figured it’d be a good idea to just...find her way out as quietly as possible. As she followed the turquoise’s directions, Goldie pulled a notebook out of her backpack and made notes of the worlds she’d traveled to so far and what they were like.
She marked down the first symbol she’d touched, and wrote that it was a scary, violent wasteland. No treasure, no food. The second symbol she’d touched got the caption peaceful, quiet, suspicious.
Taking notes was helping her stay sane, since the black goop traveling system was making her feel sick and achy. If she wasn’t in such a hurry to get back, Goldie thought it might make sense to take a break between trips. But the world she was currently in was a bit too anxiety-inducing to stay in for long. Why wasn’t there any sign of sentient life? Were they all killed by something? Or was it just…how it was?
She also wondered how she would get the stone to activate again. If it needed a blood sacrifice - which was, like, the stupidest thing - then she wouldn’t be able to get one from a world with no creatures. But the stone was talking to her again, so maybe it didn’t? God, she wished she had a rulebook.
Goldie reached an area filled with oddly-shaped trees and tilted her head. The stone definitely wanted her to go in...she didn’t have any other choice, really, but she was still nervous.
Inside the forest, there continued to be no signs of life. There was plenty of plant life, for sure, though none of it looked particularly edible. But no animals, no bugs, nothing. She continued along through the trees and hoped the stone reached its destination soon because she was getting tired.
Finally, Goldie spotted something odd in the distance. She rushed over to find a spot where some trees had been cut down and there were long branches sticking out of the ground in a few places. The branches had symbols carved on them and the dirt underneath had been dug up at some point.
This taught Goldie two important things. One: people definitely used to live here (which meant something must’ve killed them and that was very concerning). And two: she was in a cemetery.
The stone came to life the same way it did on her world and Goldie let out a soft “oooohhh…” as she realized the spot where the stone must’ve taken her at first was the location of someone’s death. Not about sacrifice, just about death. She really didn’t want to have to kill anybody to get home, so she was already feeling better.
Goldie looked at the different symbols on the turquoise as it spun around slowly and shrugged, not having any hints or clues as to what might lead her home. She picked one, wrote it down in her notebook, and then poked it before closing her eyes to accept the disgusting, terrifying goop that would send her somewhere new.
---
Goldie finally felt like her luck was turning around.
“Thank you! Thanks, yes, thanks!” she said to the people that had been helping her. Well, people might’ve been a strong word. And they certainly didn’t understand any language she tried speaking. But they seemed to respond well to noise and positivity, so Goldie tried to keep it up as best as she could.
In her few hours on this world, the residents had offered her food (delicious and hopefully not going to kill her) and a bed to sleep in. Though there was a big part of her that didn’t want to stay overnight in any of these strange places, Goldie was tired as hell. The amount of time she spent unconscious during each travel apparently did not count as rest to her body.
Exhausted but happily full, Goldie accepted their offer and laid down to get some sleep. The stone wasn’t talking to her in this world, but maybe if she found a cemetery somewhere then she could get back to business.
In the morning, though. Not right now.
---
It only made sense that after a world full of kind and giving creatures that Goldie would wake up and find herself in a painful world filled with creatures (demons, more like) that wanted to torment her until she died.
They spoke English, at least. She’d be more appreciative of that if they weren’t also stabbing her and reminding her of every terrible thing she’d done and all of her greatest failures in life. It was a long list.
The moments when she could really focus on the words rather than the pain were mostly spent wondering why she had so many regrets and failures. She hadn’t thought her life was that bad, but hearing everything spelled out altogether wasn’t great. Goldie also really hated how often Scrooge was mentioned. And how did these demon things know about Scrooge? How did they know about any of it?
She could feel them inside her brain. It was suffocating and terrifying and Goldie genuinely thought she was going to die.
The stone wasn’t with her anymore. Maybe the demons took it before they started the torture. She woke up already captured, so it was hard to know exactly what was going on. She knew she wanted to leave. And she knew she’d need to calm down in order to get out. But it was so, so hard. Her sense of time was completely warped thanks to the stabbing pains and the emotional torment. Everything was topsy-turvy. Everything hurt.
Goldie wondered how long it had been since her trip with Scrooge in the Gobi Desert. Months, at least. She missed him. Every reminder of the many, many mistakes she’d made with Scrooge over the years made her miss him even more.
The demon-imp-things were relentless in their torture. There were so many of them and they didn’t seem to sleep, which meant that Goldie didn’t get to sleep either.
She didn’t know how long she was stuck there, but the moment that Goldie saw an opening to escape, she took it. Didn’t matter the risk. She needed to get out. And thanks to the stench of death all around her tormentors, the turquoise was ready to go as soon as she got her hand around it again.
---
Goldie traveled in and out of a dozen different worlds after the one with the evil imps. Some of them were quiet and calm. Some were loud and frightening. The conclusion she came to was that no world was better than her own and she desperately, desperately wanted to get back to it. She wanted to see her hotels and she wanted to see Scrooge and she wanted to go back to her room at the Blackjack Saloon and curl up in her bed and cry.
She had a feeling she’d been gone for over a year. Maybe longer. Sometimes it took ages to find a way to get the turquoise to activate, sometimes it took no time at all.
Sometimes there were creatures or people in the worlds that she could speak to. They’d tell her the name of the world - Pandemonia, Goat’hool, X, Apokolips - and through her travels she learned that all the different worlds were called dimensions which didn’t help her at all, but Goldie supposed it was nice to learn something new. After months and months of chaos and pain, a fun fact was a nice reminder that she was still alive and she would get back to her world eventually.
The next dimension Goldie ended up in was cartoonish but kind. Everyone spoke English and gave her food and hopped around and sang. She stayed there for a few days, soaking in the hospitality.
---
Goldie had written down the sigil for every single dimension she’d traveled to thus far. The ones that didn’t come with names she’d started naming on her own, thinking maybe it’d be useful information in the future. If she had an easier and not-terrifying way to travel between dimensions, then these places could be useful or interesting to explore.
Twenty-three of the thirty symbols were labeled and categorized and Goldie wondered who she pissed off in a past life to deserve this kind of bad luck. She wasn’t a good person, sure, but she didn’t deserve all of this. She hadn’t found any kind of pattern in the symbols - even the ones with names didn’t seem to match up at all, making Goldie think they were nonsense scribbles assigned at random. It wouldn’t be the most ridiculous concept considering all the bullshit she’d seen over the past twenty months or so.
Though it’d been hard to keep track of time, she still did her best. If her calculations were correct, then she’d been traveling for less than two years. If she returned soon, then the letter for Scrooge would still be in Altan’s hands and she wouldn’t have to suffer the humiliation of explaining it when she got back.
Assuming Scrooge even read it. Maybe he’d see her name and just toss it onto the ground, forever unread.
When she arrived at the twenty-third grave (twenty-fourth if she counted whoever’s death site she was at on her own world), Goldie decided to take a breather and lay down before jumping in again. There had to be some kind of system. Something that would guide her to the correct symbol.
She looked through her notebook of dimensions and symbols and locations and considered the different types of people in each one. Most of the dimensions contained sentient creatures of some sort. Rarely did they speak English or any language that Goldie could understand, and even rarer were they ducks or dogs or any types of creatures she recognized.
One dimension was filled with hideous creatures with no feathers or fur and weird fleshy ears on the sides of their heads. At least they were wearing clothes.
She stared at the stone and stared and stared and stared, trying desperately to find a pattern. Nothing seemed to be fitting together. It was like an unsolvable puzzle, destined only to be read by the person who wrote them down in the first place.
That was another mystery she hadn’t had any opportunity to look into. Where the hell had this turquoise come from and what was the black goop that transported her to different places? Was there no cleaner, less terrifying option?
Goldie laid on her back and stared up at the sky. In her current dimension, it was a light blue, but filled with black stars. They twinkled oddly and it made her wonder what they were made of. Were they stars or comets or whatever like on her world? Or something weird? Something sinister?
She held the stone up towards the sky and closed one eye to stare at it thoughtfully. Could the sunlight (was it still sunlight if it didn’t come from a sun? Where was the light coming from? These were the kinds of questions she’d been stuck on for months) tell her something about the stone she couldn’t figure out on her own?
The symbols stared back at her.
Goldie continued to turn it for a minute before finally getting too frustrated to keep it up. She growled and slammed her fist into the ground next to her, not considering the fragility of the stone after so much use.
The sound of it cracking sent Goldie into a whirlwind of panic. She sat up and grabbed the stone, resting it in her palms and looking at the newly-formed crack.
It was small, but it was certainly enough to scare her.
“No, no, no,” Goldie mumbled sadly. “Don’t do this, don’t be broken. Come on! I need to go home! I need to...I need to see Scrooge again, alright? It can’t end like this! Just...just help me out, alright? This one last time and then you can go do whatever you want forever!”
She felt tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, but before any drops could come out, the stone started to shake.
Goldie blinked in shock as it floated out of her hand. Was it actually reacting to her pleas or had it just detected its own death? That seemed too poetic to be right.
The stone swirled around a dozen times before floating down in front of Goldie’s face. It spun a few more times and then stopped suddenly, one of the symbols glowing. It wasn’t a symbol that Goldie had written down yet, but that was the first time the turquoise seemed to be pointing her in a specific direction.
She looked at her backpack on the ground next to her and frowned. She got this far listening to the creepy magical stone, so she might as well do it again. What more could it possibly do, kill her?
Goldie put her backpack on and poked the new symbol, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath as the familiar darkness closed over her.
---
There was an all-too recognizable sound of rushing water. The smell of the air. The sound of birds and other animals chattering nearby. Under her fingers she felt grass and sand. Familiar textures. Familiar sensations.
Goldie sat up and looked around her, tears finally overflowing as she accepted the reality: she was home. She was really, definitely, finally, absolutely home! There was no way any other dimension could mimic exactly the smell of the air in northern China. It felt like she’d never left! It felt like she could start over and feel good about life for the first time in a long time.
Despite feeling like absolute shit, Goldie felt fantastic. Earth had never looked so colorful and beautiful. Adrenaline was pumping through her veins and she just wanted to dance and sing and kiss someone. A specific someone, of course. But still.
She decided not to fight one of those urges and started to dance around, too nervous to try and check her reflection in the water. She probably looked like a monster with the most knotted hair and matted feathers the world had ever seen, but so what? She was alive! And she was home! And she was -
Goldie paused as she noticed a roadway not terribly far from where she woke up. That wasn’t there when she arrived, not two years earlier. The Chinese must’ve been busy while she was away.
With a shrug, she headed towards the road and started walking back towards Yinchuan. Hopefully the city hadn’t burned down or something. Mostly she was hoping to get some food and then get a flight back home. She hadn’t been lucky at all in the last couple of months, but her luck was turning around! It was time for things to go Goldie’s way!
Only three hours of walking and she found herself back in the city. There were still people, though they seemed frightened and uncomfortable by her presence. Everyone was so friendly before! Though she supposed a stranger disappearing for two years and reappearing in the same place (looking dirty and scratched and crazy) could be pretty scary without context.
Actually, it was pretty scary even with context.
With her minimal knowledge of Mandarin, Goldie learned there was an airport in the city now (certainly wasn’t there two years earlier) and that she should hide her hair under a hood because armed guards could come into the city at any time. Fun. Definitely not as terrifying as some of the dimensions she’d been in recently, but still not the nicest thing to hear.
Despite the hostility and anxiety from locals, Goldie made her way to the airport and managed to score a ticket on an upcoming flight to Iran. From there she could probably get back to Canada. According to the lady selling tickets, she couldn’t go to the capital, so that was her best option.
A lot had changed in such a short amount of time.
As Goldie made her way to the flight terminal, she passed a boy selling newspapers and happily tossed him a few jiao. She was feeling too generous to pilfer at that moment, and though she couldn’t read the text on the pages in front of her, Goldie was certain she’d be able to read a date or at least a year somewhere.
The top-right corner said what she believed to be March 5th. But after that it looked almost like it said 1949.
1949 would be absolutely impossible. That would mean she’d been gone for sixteen years, and there was no way. Absolutely no way that could’ve happened.
Goldie flipped around the paper a bit more to see if anything that looked like dates or years were printed anywhere else, but over and over again she saw those exact same numbers. 1949. 1949.
Nineteen-forty-nine.
Nineteen-forty-nine?
Her heart stopped and she looked up to see that she’d reached the gate for her flight. But...1949? Was she really gone for that long? It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch for time to pass differently in other dimensions. It wasn’t a stretch at all.
But...sixteen years.
Well, Scrooge had definitely gotten her letter. Boy, would she have some explaining to do when she saw him. And she was absolutely going to see him! There was nothing on the planet that could stop her from going to him and seeing how he’d been since the last time they’d crossed paths.
As she piled onto the plane with the rest of the passengers - mostly people carrying large suitcases, Goldie noticed - she continued to flip through the paper. There wasn’t much she could understand, though on the second-to-last page there was a small photograph of Scrooge in the bottom-right corner in the middle of an article.
She folded up the paper around that article to get a better look. Was he the richest duck in the world yet? Or was this just about him collaborating with some Chinese company? Maybe he’d bought a factory. Maybe his life without her for sixteen years was exactly the same and nothing was different for him at all.
Goldie frowned and shoved the folded-up newspaper under the seat in front of her. She didn’t care. She wanted to see him more than anything. And the look on his face when he saw her again - especially if he’d thought she was dead - would be worth the shame of learning that he hadn’t mourned her.
REAL HISTORY FACTS:
- Oh my God the amount of time I put into calculating how long it would take to walk from different cities in China to each other...why did I do that? Why? It's fine.
- Mongolian turquoise is considered a very pretty type of turquoise.
- Yinchuan is the closest city to the location of Genghis Khan's demise, which was along the river just north of the city.
- Dimension X and Apokolips are dimensions from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and DC Comics
- A white blonde woman in dirty clothes appearing in Yinchaun in 1949 would be quite the spectacle. The People's Republic of China formed in 1949 and there were a lot of wars going on. It was a scary, violent time between the Republic of China and the PRC. Not a good time for Goldie to find herself there.
DUCK FRANCHISE REFERENCES:
- Of course I had to bring up the story Goldie told to Doofus in the DT17 episode "Happy Birthday, Doofus Drake!"
- Pandemonia and Goat'hool are dimensions that were mentioned in DT17