Page 25 of Monster's Mystery

“Break!” Bruce said with a chuckle. “Good plan.”

We split up and I went to find my professor in his office. I hadn’t been in the room before, and I was excited to see it.

“Come in,” he said when I knocked on the door.

At first, I didn’t see Professor Akhtar, I was so distracted by the three-dimensional model of Earth that took up the entirety of the center of the room. “What...” I trailed off, my jaw hanging open when I noticed that it rotated slowly.

“It doesn’t bite,” the professor said with a chuckle in his voice. “You can enter the image. What do you think it is?”

I took a couple steps further into the room, my gaze jumping from one point to another. “It’s the ley lines,” I whispered. “They’re beautiful.”

“Yes, quite. Anything else?”

I blinked a couple times, trying to refocus my brain, and stepped into the center of the image. Now that I was expecting it, my mind started to make sense of what I was seeing. “There are more nexus points than what we see on the surface,” I marveled. “I knew there were underwater ones, obviously. Look at all the points in the southern hemisphere. But there are more points underground where the continents are. And they don’t match up with the aboveground ones.” I spun to face him. “Why not?”

He nodded. “Good observation. Keep looking. You might see the answer.”

I felt like he was testing me. I stepped out of the image and looked for more unknown nexus points. “These ones here, and here, and that one... They’re all in the air? There aren’t mountains in the middle of the United States, are there?”

“No. The Appalachians are to the east, Rockies to the west. You’d find hills in the center, but nothing as high as those points. Why do you think they are there, then?”

“Well,” I started slowly, puzzling through the question. “Gravity might affect the ley lines?”

“Good start,” Professor Akhtar said, nodding approvingly. “Keep going.”

My confidence grew. “Okay, so if gravity affects the ley lines, the ones closer to the center of the earth would be closer together, and the ones in the air would be further apart. Why aren’t the ones under water affected the same way as the underground ones?”

“Compare the depths.”

I entered the dimensional map halfway, and used my fingers to measure the distance in the water compared to the underground ones. “That doesn’t really seem to matter.”

“Doesn’t it?”

I felt my competitive spirit rise to the challenge.

What was the difference?

Then a thought occurred to me. “What depth is the mantle?”

“There you go,” the professor said. “It doesn’t matter what distance the nexus point is from the absolute center of the Earth, only the distance from the mantle. We call the underwater ones ‘surface’ nexus points because they’re above the Earth’s crust.”

“Fascinating. What causes the ley lines?”

He raised an eyebrow. “That sounds like a thesis question to me.”

“Nobody’s discovered that before?” I asked, surprised.

“Some may have tried, but that would be the first thing you should look for. You have access to our library, and once you’ve exhausted your search there, you may have my access key to use the libraries at other schools.”

“Wow! Thank you!”

Professor Akhtar snapped his fingers and the dimensional image collapsed into a small solid globe on the ceiling. “Excellent. You have somewhere to begin researching for your thesis. Now we should discuss your duties as my teaching assistant.”

“I’m ready.” I sat in a chair and pulled out a notebook, flipping to a blank page.

* * *

I metup with Aiden outside the cafeteria. My heart did a little flip when I saw him as I walked down the stairs. He was leaning against a wall, his dark hair drooping over his forehead while his entire attention was focused on the book in his hand. It was one of his textbooks, I recognized immediately as I sidled up to him.

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