The team was sitting around their table. It was the end of the engagement
party, and only a few people were still around. Darko was in the middle of a
seemingly flirtatious conversation with one of the android waitresses whose
self-awareness and agency were in question. Mateo was about to ask if there
was any way of determining whether she could provide consent when a black
hole suddenly appeared on the opposite wall. A woman stepped out who looked
moderately familiar. The first words out of her mouth were, “okay, I’ll do
it, but I want something in return.”
“What?” Leona questioned. “Were we in the middle of a conversation? You’ll
do what for us? Who are you again?”
“I’m Magnolia Quintana?” she reminded them. “The Overseer?”
“Oh, right, yeah, we met,” Leona remembered. “Is there an operation here, or
something? This is just Party Central.”
“Yes, if this is where you’re gonna have the wedding,” Magnolia said. She
looked around the room. “Little small.”
Leona did her best impression of Mr. Spock’s eyebrows. “We’re gonna have it
outdoors, and not tonight, and...this is only one room in an entire city of
party venues.”
Magnolia pulled out an old fashioned pen and notepad set. She took notes out
loud. “Okay. Outdoors. Party Central. At least one year to plan.”
“Are you offering to be our wedding planner?” Olimpia questioned.
“Not offering,” Magnolia said. “Got the job. Very excited. Already have some
great ideas rolling around up here.” She tapped her head with her pen.
“Madam Quintana,” Mateo began. “We were just gonna plan this ourselves. It’s
not gonna be as big as our last wedding. Only family and close friends.”
Magnolia dropped her hands in disappointment, and sighed. “I need your
help.” She was very uncomfortable. “I obviously need you more than you need
me.”
“Well, we might be able to just help you,” Leona offered. “You don’t have to
do anything for us. What do you need?”
“I need you to find my son,” Magnolia requested, averting her gaze
awkwardly. “I can find anyone in the world, but he shares the same gift,
which makes him a blindspot. I know he’s in this time period, but I don’t
know where. Honestly, because so many planets have become habitable now, the
Great Pyramid Shimmer actually serves a meaningful purpose, so he might not
even be on Earth anymore.”
“Is he in trouble?” Romana asked.
Magnolia hesitated to answer. “He’s...mad at me. I just want the chance to
apologize. I think he’ll be receptive if I say the right thing, but I have
to find him first.”
“Well we can’t really find people,” Leona tried to explain. “I’m sure you’re
asking us because you have been made aware of our slingdrives, but they
don’t operate on magic. We have to know where we’re going. We’re no better
equipped than you with your, uhh...”
“Hither-thithers,” Magnolia finished for her. “That’s what our dark portals
are called. And I didn’t come for your slingdrives. I can harness Shimmer
myself, and go anywhere he might be. I need his dark particle power
to track his location.”
“Not that I won’t agree to that,” Mateo started, “but you just used a
special word. Have you not reached out to a genuine Tracker, like Vidar
Wolfe?”
“They have the same limitation as me. We can conceal ourselves from such
people. I believe that you are the only person in the universe who can see
through the shroud.”
“All right.” Mateo wiped his lips with his napkin, then dropped it down on
the table. “I’ll see what I can find.” He leaned over and kissed his wife,
then leaned over the other direction to kiss his bride.”
“Wait, we have your bachelor party after this,” Ramses reminded him. They
decided to get all the traditions out of the way, so the separate
celebratory events are falling on the same day as the engagement party,
instead of being spread out across 12 to 18 months. Leona will have her doe
party, and Olimpia will have a separate bachelorette party. They’ll then
reconvene for a bridal shower. A bit out of order, but who cares? “Or no,
we’re calling it a bull party.”
“Come with us,” Mateo suggested. “Hey, Darko!” This was Mateo’s chance to
not worry about what an encounter with the android would mean, ethically
speaking. “Time traveling bull party!”
“I’m in!” his once-brother exclaimed. He turned back to the waitress. “Catch
you later, gorgeous.”
“I shouldn’t go with you,” Magnolia decided. “I have some initial work to do
to plan your wedding, and Garland may still want me to stay away. I don’t
wanna ambush him, so if you could, please tell him that I’m sorry, and ask
him if he wants to see me. If he doesn’t, I’ll understand, and I’ll trust
that you did find him, and are telling me the truth either way.”
Mateo nodded. “Don’t break your back planning, though. It’s gonna be
intimate and low-key. Thanks!”
“No. Thank you.” She was a little too mousy and contrite for someone
called The Overseer. This whole thing with her son must really be
messing her up. And that wasn’t how she came across a few minutes ago when
she first arrived. Maybe she didn’t realize how receptive to her request
they would be, and decided to rein in her energy after the deal was done.
The three men stood next to each other in a vague line, and regarded the
women still sitting at the table. “Three to beam up.” Dark particles swarmed
around them, and sent them away to unknown lands.
As the darkness faded away, the nature of their destination twisted into
focus. “Oh, not again,” Ramses groaned. They appeared to be in the middle of
a tundra. It wasn’t Tundradome, though. It couldn’t have been. They were
standing in what must have been a park, or a town square. There were
buildings on all sides of them in the middle distance. This was some kind of
city. People were milling about, enjoying the day. No one seemed to have
noticed their arrival until they turned all the way around to see a young
man sitting on a bench.
He did not have a look of shock on his face, but minor annoyance. “I put a
time block on this world,” he said. Still nettled, he closed the cover over
his e-reader, and set it down next to him. “No one else should be able to
come through. Now I have to check the wards.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Mateo tried to explain. “My power is a bit of an
exception. I doubt anyone else can come here if you did anything to prevent
them.”
“Who would want to?” Ramses jabbed.
“For that.” The young man looked up towards the sky with his eyes as he
pointed with a finger.
It took them a moment to possibly figure out what was going on. Scale was a
bit hard to determine with this out-of-context problem. It looked like a
ceiling of ice that stretched all the way across in every direction, down to
the horizon. The fractures and imperfections glimmered in the light from the
ground, and maybe even from above as well? Vaguely-shaped circular blobs
were hanging in the background, perhaps pulsating, or perhaps they were only
illusions. This whole thing might have been a hologram, but it was a good
one; reminiscent of something they might find on Castlebourne. Had this
frustrated stranger not claimed to be somehow preventing others from
traveling here, they might have guessed that it was indeed one of the domes
on Castlebourne, which they just so happened to have never heard of before.
“Wait, wait,” Darko began. “I think I’ve heard of this. Epsi...Epson...”
“Epsilon Eridani,” Ramses said. “Roughly eleven light years from Earth. No
habitable planet, but a gas giant like Juputer, and a couple of ice giants,
similar to Neptune.”
“We’re orbiting the gas giant, AEgir,” the stranger added. “This moon is
called Kólga. The surface is inhospitable, so they built a giant hanging
city-structure, attached to the ice. What you’re seeing up there is several
hundred meters of ice, followed by the daytime sky, in which we can
currently see both AEgir and E-E.”
“Where are our manners?” Mateo extended his hand. “Mateo Matic, Darko Matic,
and Ramses Abdulrashid.”
“Married or related?”
“Brothers across different timelines,” Darko clarified. “You’ve never heard
of us? You’ve never heard of Team Matic?”
“I try to stay out of the whole time travel industry. That’s why I came
here. People keep to themselves. They’re as immortal as anyone, but they
don’t want to explore. They don’t want to learn. They don’t want to build
worlds. They just want to live their lives day by day, century by century.
They don’t ask questions, and without them even knowing it, I protect them
from the likes of you. I try anyway.”
“We’re not here to cause trouble. We’re just looking for our friend’s son,
who we are guessing is you?” Mateo asked.
He nodded. “Garland Dressler. She sent you to take me back to her?”
“No pressure,” Mateo said to him. “She says she wants to apologize. I don’t
know what for. I don’t need to know. You don’t have to come with us. If you
want us to leave, we will.”
Garland sighed. “You might as well stay a while. You look like you’re in the
party mood, and there’s one down the street tonight.”
The three of them looked at each other, narrowing in on Darko, who was
wearing a glow necklace that was inert when they came here, but was now
twinkling, probably triggered by the time travel event. They
were supposed to be partying.
“I’ll think about whether I wanna go back or not,” Garland went on.
“Let’s go get chocolate wasted!” Ramses suggested. He literally started
running towards the street.
“Other direction!” Garland called up to him.
Ramses didn’t stop running. He just teleported to the other side of them,
and started moving that way instead.
“Do you have a jacket?” Darko asked as the rest of them followed Ramses at a
normal pace.
“It’ll be warmer inside,” Garland promised.
They had to call Ramses back again when he passed the entrance to the party
venue, but once inside, they had a lot of fun. The other residents took no
issue with shifting focus of the festivities to being more about Mateo and
his upcoming nuptials. They didn’t go there with a particular reason to
party in the first place, so it wasn’t like they were stealing attention
from someone else. Garland had been a little inaccurate about why he came
here, and didn’t let anyone else. He didn’t only want to protect the Kólgans
from time travel, but also to have them all to himself. He was the life of
the party, opening up hither-thithers left and right. He helped party-goers
throw sports balls at their own asses as fast as possible. He let one guy
fall down an endless loop of portals on the ceiling and the floor. Mateo
wowed them with a swarm of dark particles before he and Ramses entertained
with a holographic lightshow. Darko met a man with combat training, so they
sparred in the middle of the floor as the crowd cheered.
They would find out later that the chocolate they were eating was laced with
some kind of local drug, which Garland didn’t even know about. They reawoke
at some point later with no memory of how the night ended up, but they had
some clues to work with. First, they were not likely on Kólga anymore as it
was pretty hot here. Secondly, Darko was missing. And finally, passed out
next to them was the last person they expected to find. He actually looked
rather peaceful there, and they didn’t get the sense that there was any
lasting animosity between them. It was Bronach Oaksent.
