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This is the list of preliminary, visual variables that he can confirm at first glance:

Open, barren road (paved but unmarked).

Open, nearly barren fields on either side -- weedy-looking grass is the only thing that classifies them away from truly barren.

Open, clouded sky.

It's not much to go on, but, as Charlie would point out under better circumstances, he's gone on much less before. Of course, "better circumstances" is almost never defined as getting knocked off of your feet by some kind of blinding flash, watching L.A. vanish all around you, and being greeted with the above three variables once the spots stop swimming in front of your eyes.

The only thing that's stopping him from outright panic right now is focusing on them, and, as he pivots wildly and wide-eyed, trying to seek out more that could point him in the direction of getting his bearings. Even that's not doing the best job.

Charlie cups both hands around his mouth and calls out, a little shakily, "Hello?"

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Here's a variable for you, Charlie.

It sounds like an echo of the bang that just sent him here.

It looks like a duplicate of that same blinding light.

It disgorges, after a moment, a disgruntled five-year-old girl with a large backpack on her back.

Blinking her eyes to clear away the afterimage, Matilda squints at Charlie.

"...hello?" she asks, cautiously, curiously, and keeping tight hold of the straps of her overstuffed schoolbag.

Okay. Okay. This is --

What was that?

The short answer that immediately follows is is that how I got here? The next one is, that's a broad leap of assumption, it's not one you should be making yet, the first one is to figure out where you are and then we can continue on to how you arrived --

This is impossible.

Charlie's breathing speeds up for a minute before he closes his mouth, swallows, and forcibly tries to reign it in. "Hi," he says, forcing a grin that only bothers to stick around for half a second. "Um. I'm aware this may come across as a foolish question but, uh, you don't -- " Quickly, he scratches a spot above one of his eyebrows. "Happen to know where we are, do you? Or where everyone else is?"

"No," responds Matilda with a great deal more cheer than the situation warrants. "Other than an empty field somewhere, of course, but that was sort of obvious. I'm Matilda!" Subdued beaming, and if you don't think a beam can be subdued and still beamlike, you haven't spent enough time around Jennifer Honey's adopted daughter. "What's your name?"

"It's, I'm Charlie. It's nice to meet you Matilda, I -- "

He glances up at the sky, half-expecting (and half-hoping for -- the larger the data set, the easier this will be) another flash.

"You honestly have no idea?" Charlie looks back down at her. "Not even how you got here?"

"...no." Frown. "I was on my way home from the library, and then there was a loud noise and a bright light, and I was here instead. Like something out of a poorly researched science fiction novel."

"You've got that right," Charlie mutters, distracted and mostly to himself. "If this wasn't reality, the, the sheer number of logical fallacies in being transported out of downtown L.A. by this kind of method, Larry would have a fit if he could -- "

Beat.

With dawning horror, "Am I hallucinating?"

That seems like a much more logical explanation, if an even less reassuring one.

"No you're not," she says promptly. "I think I'd know if I were a hallucination."

Headtilt.

"On the other hand, there's no way for you to verify that if you can't take my word for it, really. Goodness. I wish I'd brought some Descartes."

"No, not really, it's a subjective variable beyond multiple verific -- "

Wait.

One of these things, Charlie, is not like the other. He's staring fully at Matilda. "You've read Descartes?"

His smile's faint, and pretty disbelieving, but there's nothing forced about it now.

"Yes! He can be rather abstruse. I prefer Nietzche, who is at least funny. My mum says she'll try to get me language classes so I can read them in the original French and German respectively. I'm sure they'll be much improved."

Tilda beams proudly. Miss Honey is wonderful. Language classes! Imagine!

It doesn't strike Charlie, even for a second, that she might be lying or exaggerating. Charlie never lied or exaggerated about his own work when he was her age; he hadn't needed to.

The smile keeps growing as he says, "What about his discussions on the tangent line problem, have you read those, too?"

"Oh, of course. I got into the philosophy through the mathematics - I prefer the latter to the former, to be honest."

Proud beam becomes shy, delighted-to-be-discussing-the-maths beam.

"It's so much easier to pin down."

Having a savantlike ability to manipulate figures in one's head helps with that.

"Exactly," Charlie enthuses. Kindred spirits! Yes!

...Kindred spirits still stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no explanation as to how, but it's like stumbling across another American in a foreign country: having someone around who speaks Charlie's language will make it much easier to stay calm.

Probably.

"I'm a math person myself," he goes on, gesturing to himself (and, by extension, the FBI consultant badge hanging around his neck that he's completely forgotten he's still wearing). "I got started in it when I wasn't much older than you -- how old are you? And we should, uh, probably start walking to see if there's anyone else around, once there's a -- do you have any paper in there?"

He points to Matilda's bag.

(This is the problem with Charlie: his trains of thought either stick to one track no matter what, or jump wildly between multiple tracks at the slightest provocation.)

She can keep up!

"Five and three-quarters," she says promptly, "yes we should, and of course I do. One moment."

Matilda digs around in her backpack, producing with remarkable alacrity a notebook with a mechanical pencil shoved through the ring binding. The blank page to which she opens it is opposite a scribbled derivation of Pascal's Triangle in base thirty-six, with marginal notes on combinatorics.

"There you are."

"Thank you," he says, flipping the notebook over for a second to look at the --

Whoa.

The look he shoots Matilda is both impressed and very proud. "This is good work," he says, approvingly, before flipping it back over to the blank page. Deep breath. "Okay. For now we just want some basic variables on point of origin, if at all possible, just so we can..."

He squints up at the sun, or what's visible of it behind the clouds, then checks his watch and gets to scribbling. (Even if time's somehow been altered as well as distance, it's a fixed unit of measurement, and it's the best they've got right now.)

"It'll be something to start with."

'Futility' and 'math' are two words that never go together in Charlie's vocabulary.

Oooh, back to the proud beaming. Matilda is always delighted to hear someone compliment her mathematical talents, even if she usually doesn't believe them.

"What's this?" she asks curiously, watching him write. Her education so far hasn't covered many of the truly practical applications of mathematics. The equations are understandable, but their end goal not immediately apparent.

"It's, ah..."

Charlie's not a tall guy, but he's also not an (almost) six-year-old. He glances over his shoulder, then takes a seat on the pavement so he's more on Matilda's level.

It'll just be for a minute, and then they can start walking.

"Well, neither of us know where we are. Or how we got here. Or, by extension, how to get back. We also don't have much to go on in terms of determining any of this, so what I'm doing is constructing an -- " He scratches the back of his head with the pencil, eyeing his notes. "Admittedly very basic model of our present location, but we can elaborate on it later and we can also use as a point to either work backwards or forwards from once we have more data. And if nothing else, once we start walking, it'll make it easier to judge how far we've walked."

Assuming this all isn't a hallucination, anyway.

Of course, even if he knew for certain that it was a hallucination, it's likely Charlie would be doing the exact same thing he's doing right now.

"Sensible," she declares, nodding as she reviews his equations. "Here--"

Without thinking, Matilda gives the pencil a look, tugging it telekinetically out of his grip so she can pluck it out of the air and add in a few numbers here and there.

"If we want to make a good estimate of the distances we're traversing, providing we're planning to walk for a while of course - and I see no reason why we shouldn't; goodness knows there doesn't appear to be anything here worth staying for - we should make an estimate of our average walking speed somehow and record our time of departure." Scribblescribble. "You have a watch; I've got a ruler if we want to try for a more precise estimate. Or we could try a calculation by average stride length and steps per minute. Which d'you think would be more efficient?"

This applied mathematics thing is fun!

....

Give him a minute.

Actually, it'll probably take more than a minute to stop staring at Matilda like she's sprouted a second head.

Did she just --

"Did you just -- ?"

Yep. Hallucination. Panic: edging back.

She finally winds down enough to notice his shock.

And blushes.

"Oh dear, I'm sorry. Here, you can have the pencil back."

...

"...oh. Oh! Sorry-- that must really make believing this isn't a hallucination a difficult prospect. I assure you, I've been doing it for quite some time and nothing's ever led me to believe it's a sign I've lost my grip on reality."

Cheerful, rather penitent Matilda.

Without letting up on the staring, Charlie takes his pencil back.

"Yeah," he says, matter-of-factly and rather weakly, "it's really not helping too much."

What else is he going to say? His entire brain has just gotten stuck into a fixed loop of wait, WHAT?

She pats him on the elbow comfortingly. "It took Miss Honey some time to adjust, too. You'll get used to it. Promise."

...wait.

Miss Honey.

Not here.

"--oh dear," says Matilda, looking around and frowning. "She's going to be terribly worried; I doubt I'll be home in time for dinner."

"She, uh..."

Come on, Charlie, even you can unstick your brain from contemplating the sheer impossibility of what you just witnessed for a few seconds here. You'll have plenty of time to think about it later.

(And think about it later he will. At great length.)

It still takes an enormous effort to wrench his thoughts back around to the newest matter at hand, and it's clear in his tone when he finally manages to say, "Is she your teacher?"

Of course, none of this stops a new train of thought from forming and skittering off in its own direction: If I don't know where I am then Don and Dad almost certainly don't know where I am, there were over thirty-seven thousand people reported missing in California in 2004 alone, only a small percentage of missing persons cases are ever solved, Don and Dad might think I'm dead --

He tries to stamp down on it, without much success.

"She's my adoptive mum," says Matilda, then adds absently, "took me in when my biological parents ran off to Spain to escape the law. She was my teacher, but I'm not in school anymore. I was jumping up a class a week, and it got silly."

She's not quite a sufficiently oblivious five-year-old to fail to notice Charlie's face taking on much the same expression hers just got, only worse.

"Nobody we know knows where we are," she says, looking rather lost.

Everything else sort of follows logically from that.

"...No."

He swallows again, staring off into the middle distance.

"But we, we can -- " And then Charlie's scrambling back to his feet, the pages of the notebook flapping with the sudden movement. He slaps his notes with the back of one hand as he says, "This is why we're doing this, o-once we have a point to work from, we'll be able to find our way back."

There's a desperate certainty to his words, that of a man shaken in everything except his faith. He tries to give Matilda an encouraging smile; it falls short by an inch or two.

"It'll be okay. We'll get back home."

She believes him. She's five.

"Okay," she says, nodding. "So-- what's your preferred method for estimating distance travelled?"

Yep, Matilda can effortlessly pick up where she left off. It's maths. Maths are easy.

This is probably for the best, because if she hadn't believed him, Charlie would've had no idea what to do.

...Well, possibly the same thing he does to Don and all of his colleagues, which is to hammer home the point over and over again that no, really, the math will work, but that's a moot point.

Charlie exhales. This is going to require another quick wrench of all of those diverging thoughts back onto the same track, but it's a little easier this time.

"Right. Um." Aware he's holding the notebook too tightly, he consciously loosens his grip. "Since it'll be easier for me to match your stride than I think it will be for you to match mine, we can set up a quick estimate of, uh, let's say the, the time it takes for you to cover fifty-three feet, I'll time it and you can measure it -- "

He fumbles for his watch, juggling the notebook into place under one arm.

Fifty-three feet. Right. Matilda grabs the ruler out of her backpack.

An apologetic glance is cast Charlie's way. This will be much easier to do with telekinesis.

Roughly thirty seconds later, the ruler has leapfrogged exactly fifty-three feet down the road, each jump marked by a small pebble or loose chunk of asphalt, and Tilda is carefully lined up at the beginning of this waiting for Charlie to start with the timing.

In the same far too calm and matter-of-fact voice as before, Charlie informs her, with a very forced grin, "I'm going to pretend for now that I didn't see you do that."

One thing at a time. His mind really, really can't afford to latch onto that right now when he's finally gotten it good and fixed on the matter at hand.

Charlie sticks the pencil in his mouth long enough to reposition his hold on his watch, then continues, the words a little garbled by said pencil: "Okay, and...start."

Beep.

"Sorry," she says absently as she starts walking.

Matilda has a pretty quick stroll to her. All that walking to the library and back has done her some good in that regard. She covers the fifty-three feet admirably with no sign that she'd slow down if she kept the pace up for hours. At the end, she picks up her ruler (with her hands!) and trots back.

Even so, as Charlie gets to work on the math, he runs the equations several ways: one that's a pure, straightforward expression of distance traveled at a constant speed, and another that factors in a very generalized downward slope from exhaustion setting in.

Hey, even if she's not going to slow down, Charlie might. He's in pretty good shape -- especially for a mathematician -- but there's no telling how long they'll be at this.

(Possibly pretty long, if the landscape's any indication.)

He's finished by the time she returns. Puffing out another breath, Charlie says, "Okay, that'll at least give us an estimate for..." He makes a slight face, flipping a page of the notebook. "I wish it could be a more precise estimate, but that's pretty far outside our current capacity with the tools we've got on hand, and a rough start's better than none, I guess."

Imprecise math. Blech. All the more reason to work faster on a way to get home.

"It'll have to do for now," she says, shrugging. "Hopefully we can find something resembling civilization soon. Until then, we'll do the best with what we've got."

The eternal optimism of a five-year-old who has known very few disappointments in her time, and overcome most of them afterwards by a combination of tenacity and cleverness, is not to be sneered at. Beaming, she takes a look around, picks a direction, and sets off down the road.

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