Megan's Dorm Room

Overview

Megan's dorm stopped being a bedroom somewhere around the second week of research and never went back. A whiteboard streaked with formulas has replaced whatever decorations came before it. Printouts, yellowed notepads, and half-assembled circuits scatter the floor like fragments of a galaxy. A half-burnt soldering iron rests on a plate that was never meant to hold one. The air carries the bite of solder and burnt dust, undercut by the dry smell of paper and ink—the particular smell of a room where someone stopped sleeping regular hours a long time ago.

The Hope Wall

Above her desk, a cluttered collage of clippings, sticky notes, and handwritten reminders—not history-book tragedies, just the small, easy-to-miss ones. Local teen struck by hit-and-run. Apartment fire claims one life. Bridge collapse injures three. Lives that flickered out quietly while the rest of the world kept scrolling. It's the wall that first drives her research, and later, the wall that tempts her with a question the device was never built to answer: how small a jump would it take to fix one of these, quietly, with no ripples and no headlines?

Nibbles

A hamster, a wheel, a water bottle, and a food dish that occasionally runs low when Megan disappears for days at a time chasing the device instead. Nibbles doesn't understand any of it—the jumps, the guilt, the growing distance between who Megan used to be and who the machine is asking her to become. He just trusts her anyway, which somehow makes it worse.

Role in the Series

This is where Megan's investigation actually begins—the floor covered in printouts and clippings, the laptop glow at 3 a.m., the slow build toward a prototype that shouldn't have worked. It's also where the story quietly checks whether Megan can hold onto the ordinary things—a hamster, a roommate's voice through the wall, a full water bottle—while carrying something as heavy as the device. Not every test in this series involves a jump.