The technicolor web encompassed them as it did every time they used the
quintessence drive. They faded into blackness before the stars and other
celestial bodies reappeared. It didn’t look like anything had changed,
though. They seemed to still be orbiting Dardius. Had something gone wrong?
“Has something gone wrong?” Marie asked. “It looks the same.”
“Not exactly the same.” Her sister pointed through the window, at the
terminator line that separated night from day. “We should see lights from
the cities.”
“Lee-Lee?” Mateo asked.
She looked at her watch, knowing what he wasn’t saying. She stared at it for
a moment before dropping her wrist, and regarding the group. “It’s June
30...2082.”
“I’ve never been to this year before.” Mateo shut his eyes, and
concentrated. “I can feel her. She’s nearby. But...it’s weird. She’s
still...”
“In flux?” Ramses guessed. “I feel that too.”
“What was this world like in this time period?” Olimpia asked.
“It wasn’t populated yet,” Leona began to explain. “I think these are the
beginnings of something known as The Sanctuary. I suppose the whole planet
ends up being thought of as a sanctuary, but back then, it was just one
hotel. There could be no one down there besides Romana, or only a handful of
people. If Meliora’s around already, she’ll be able to help us figure this
out.”
“I can figure it out,” Mateo decided. “I’m just going to teleport down to
her.”
“Don’t be reckless,” Leona warned.
“Helping or hurting, honey. Helping or hurting.” With that, he disappeared.
He was standing inside of a construction site. By the looks of the
architecture, it appeared to be a hotel, but it was nowhere near ready for
people to move in. This probably was indeed Sanctuary, just in its very
early days. There could be enemies nearby, or not. There was no way to know,
and the only rational reaction was to be cautious and quiet. He was standing
in front of a door, which was where the tethering signal was coming from. He
reached for the knob when one footstep gave him pause.
“What are you doing here?” Holy shit, that was a face he hadn’t seen in a
good long while. It was Dave, a.k.a. The Chauffeur.
“Where should I be, if not here?” Mateo questioned.
Dave sized him up and down. “You hold yourself differently. You seem more
comfortable. You’re not the same man you were when we last saw each other.”
He was right. It had been centuries.
“You didn’t notice the spacesuit I’m now wearing?”
“That too.” Dave looked around for other threats. “I don’t know what you’re
doing here, but if you have plans for that young woman in there, I’m afraid
I’m gonna have to ask you to take a step back.”
This surprised Mateo. “You’re protective of her?”
“She needs protection.”
Mateo flicked the door open. Romana was standing in a lit reading nook of
the hotel suite. She was surrounded by a swirling swarm of dark particles.
They made her disappear for a couple of seconds, only to return her for a
couple more before sending her away again. It was unending. Her eyes were
closed, as if trapped in some form of stasis. “That’s my daughter. I’ve been
looking for her.”
“Are you lying?” Dave asked.
“Don’t you know me well enough?” Mateo asked him. “I’m the good guy. No, I’m
not lying. Her name is Romana Nieman.” He watched as she disappeared and
reappeared over and over and over again. This was Buddy’s doing, just as he
suspected.
“I’ve been trying to get her out of there for years,” Dave explained. “Every
time I get close, those black fly things attack me, and send me somewhere
else. Sometimes it’s just to the other side of the room, but I have had to
claw my way back from decades in the past. I’m afraid they will one day
zoicize me.”
“This is my fault. The man who has her captive and I did not part ways
well.”
Dave lifted his chin in realization. “That sounds about right. Can you help
her?”
“Tell me where Buddy is.”
“I’ve never even heard of him.”
“Yeah, he’s new, for whatever that’s worth in our world.”
“There’s been no one at the construction site, besides me, The Builder, and
Meliora Reaver.”
“Rutherford,” Mateo corrected. “Her name is Meliora Rutherford.”
“Indeed.”
“Give me a second,” he said with a finger up. “Why has no one come down here
with me?” he asked through comms. “To stop me, or help?”
“We don’t see Dave Seidel as a threat,” Leona responded. “Do you need help?”
“I may. I’m going to try to take her by the hand. Come find me if I end up
back in dinosaur times.”
Leona appeared from the other end of the hallway. “I’m here. We’ll battle
the dinosaurs together.”
“A lot of changes with you too.”
All three of them stepped into the room. The dark particles menacingly
expanded from Romana’s body, like bees protecting the hive, but they weren’t
attacking yet. “I keep forgetting the rule,
don’t antagonize the antagonist.”
“Not everything is about you,” a voice came from nowhere. A second swarm of
dark particles appeared in a corner from which Buddy materialized. “The
truth is, I didn’t even know you knew this woman. I took her to test Dave’s
resolve.”
“My resolve?” Dave asked. “I don’t understand.”
“You’re special,” Buddy claimed. “Your powers are special. And I need them.”
“He wants you to get him a fruit,” Mateo said, jumping right to the end of
this dumb spiel. “A citrus, to be exact.”
“Oh,” Dave said, knowing the limitations of time travel. “I can’t do that.”
Buddy laughed. “Temporal Citrus Explosion Syndrome is just another time
illness, except instead of a person getting sick, it’s a fruit. You can
protect organisms traveling through time. That’s your whole deal.”
“I’ve already tried,” Dave contended. “That was, like, the first thing
Meliora had me attempt after she turned me into this. She too thought I was
a loophole. And she didn’t have to kidnap anyone for it. She just asked,
asshole.”
“As I said, it was a test. You failed to free her from her prison, and so
here she shall remain forever. Sorry, Mr. Matic. I harbor no ill will
against you, or her. I am aware that you had nothing to do with
Superintendent Grieves’ betrayal a few years back. You weren’t even there!”
“Wait,” Dave said. He really needed to save the girl. “Perhaps there’s
something else I can do for you. Let the girl go, and I’ll try my best. I
can make no promises, but I may come up with an alternate solution that you
haven’t thought of. My powers are not all that define me. I’m pretty
clever.”
Buddy considered the offer. “You’ll have to do everything I say, no
arguments. You have to make a genuine offer to get me that citron, even if
it’s not exactly pleasant.”
“Okay,” Dave conceded.
“Thank you, Dave,” Mateo said sincerely.
“Just take care of her.” The way Dave said that, as if it was personal for
him. He had never met Romana, but perhaps she reminded him of someone else.
Buddy reached out, and shook a reluctant Dave’s hand. “We got a deal.” He
moved his hand over towards Romana. The dark particles broke orbit, and sped
towards their master.
After he had reabsorbed them all from her, Romana’s knees buckled, but Mateo
made a short jump, and caught her in time. “It’s okay, I got you.” She was
still unconscious. He lifted her up in his arms, and looked over at Buddy.
“If she doesn’t recover, you’ve become a real enemy, and that is not
something you wanna be.”
Buddy titled his head and shrugged, apparently accepting the possibility.
“Dave,” Mateo went on. “Don’t lose yourself.” He exchanged a look with
Leona, then they both disappeared.
“Get us out of here as fast as you can,” Leona ordered.
Ramses was hovering over the console, ready for this, having been listening
to the brief but charged conversation. He engaged the machine again, and
sent them away. It was a rocky trip this time. The technicolor web engulfed
them on all sides, as usual, but it was uneven. The whole ship shook like it
was experiencing turbulence. When it spit them out at the destination, they
were sent tumbling through space, and were still feeling it here on the
inside. Ramses first made sure that there weren’t any objects nearby that
they might collide with. Then he shut off the viewscreens, so they wouldn’t
be so dizzy anymore. The internal inertial dampeners were still shuttering a
little bit, but holding together.
“The watch is having trouble calibrating,” Leona announced, bracing her hip
against the wall. “Something went wrong.”
“All that matters is we’re together,” Mateo said. “I’m taking her to the
realspace infirmary.” There were three infirmaries on this vessel. Two of
them were in pocket dimensions, but one was just built on the ship itself.
“Good idea,” Leona replied to him before addressing the group. “No
teleporting, and stay out of the pockets. They may be compromised.”
Ramses worked on the console to stabilize the ship. After a minute, it was
still having attitude problems, but the shaking stopped. While he was trying
to fix the rest, Leona sat down, and fiddled with the watch. She tapped on
her comm disc. “June 30, 2182. We only jumped a hundred years.”
“That’s not where I was trying to take us!” Ramses complained.
“We’ll figure it out,” Leona assured him.
They did figure it out, and it didn’t take them very long either. The
slingdrive was very sensitive, and could only make one jump before it needed
some time to rest. It was all too technical for Mateo to understand, and he
didn’t care to learn the details anyway. It needed a break in between uses.
Whatever. That changed nothing about Romana’s condition. She was okay,
though, and he needed Olimpia’s comfort to remember that. According to the
medical pod’s diagnosis, she was only sleeping. Her EEG suggested that she
would wake up on her own, and it was safer to just wait for that to happen
than to try to wake her up some other way.
There was a little bit of news while Mateo sat by his daughter’s side. While
seemingly random at first, their arrival at this particular point in
spacetime led them to a discovery. The Insulator of Life was just floating
in the middle of space. There was no telling what it had been through, but
Ramses seemed to think that someone’s consciousness was being stored inside
of it. He was forced to put the investigation on the backburner while he
sorted through the slingdrive issues. They must have solved the issue one
way or another, because by the end of the day, they were able to make
another jump. Leona announced that they were where they wanted to be,
orbiting Castlebourne on June 30, 2482.
He never left the infirmary, and neither did Olimpia. He ran through the
past couple of weeks in his head, replaying the events that led him here.
What could he have done differently? Could he have handled the Buddy
situation differently? Could he have urged Ramses to exercise caution, and
wait on trying to tether the group. It seemed like a good idea at the time,
to prevent any of them from getting lost, but their plan backfired, and this
may have lasting consequences. One of those consequences was staring him in
the face. Rather, she would have been if her eyes were open. “Have you
noticed?” he asked after a long time in the silence. “She looks older.”
Olimpia cleared her throat. “I believe she is. If she’s been off of the
pattern since she disappeared, it’s been five years for her.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Leona said, stepping into the room to check on
them. “I didn’t stop to make precise calculations, but just working from
memory, I would say that she existed in the timestream for about four
seconds at a time before jumping forward two seconds. I don’t know if it was
exactly that, or what, but I did notice her being present for around twice
as long as she was gone. I think Buddy knew more than he admitted. He
obviously did this to disable our tether’s ability to track her location.
She never had to jump forward very far in the future; just enough to clear
the last ping before it reset.”
“So, how old is she?” Mateo pressed.
“At a two to one ratio, that’s about three and a third years.”
He looked back down at her. “She’s eighteen.”
“Her body is,” Leona clarified. “I don’t know how it subsisted this long in
the dark particle temporal bubble, but we don’t know what happened to her
mind in there. Age isn’t about how long you’ve been alive. It’s about how
much time you’ve experienced.”
“I wish I could look at it that way, but all I see is five more years that I
could have spent getting to know my daughter.”
They wanted to keep talking it through, but he just wanted to return to the
silence. A couple of hours later, while Mateo and Olimpia were eating their
feelings out of a dayfruit that was programmed to taste like chocolate cake,
Romana finally woke up. It seemed, however, to be a double-edged sword. He
was relieved for a moment when the EEG alerted them that her brain activity
was increasing, then very concerned when she opened her eyes, and several
dark particles wafted out of them before fading into nothingness.
