Chronological Order

Franklin Salisbury

“I had *the* weirdest weekend”, a young woman says, hanging up her trench coat and putting down her sunglasses.

“Ordinary weird or end-of-the world-weird?”, replies the dark-skinned man sitting in the corner of the tea house.

“A bit of both, I guess. Oh, the tea smells delicious.”

“They picked a fine blend today” he says while pouring her a cup. “It goes great with honey, too.”

“Just plain for me, thanks. How have things been for you?”

“It’s hard out there as usual, but we’re managing.” The man pauses briefly, and the tea house subtly goes quieter, more distant. “But weird, you say”.

“The start was normal enough, I guess”, she says, taking a sip. “Slept in until 7 saturday, had a quiet morning. My colleague insisted I needed a new dress – apparently mine weren’t stylish enough – so we went shopping.”

“I didn’t think your type went for store brought dresses.”

“Well I don’t – they’re hard to armour – but she insisted. And she did pick a nice dress and shoes.”

“Quite the weekend so far”, he says, offering the woman a plate of refreshments.
“Oh hush, I’m setting the scene” she says, taking one. “So we’d been away most afternoon, and it turned out our resident mad scientist had been busy. When I got back to the construct, I was greeted by, well, a hoover.”

“One of those robotic ones? Now those are useful.”

“Yes, except apparently this one was a new defensive system he was testing. Which, of course, I noticed when it was trying to blast my face off with some kind of sonic blast.”

“Ah, the old surprise defense” he muses. “Back when I was young I once got my eyebrows burned cleaned off by a fire spirit one of my group’s *Chela* had summoned for defense – forgetting to tell us.”

“Always nice coming home to that, right? So, out all day and partially deaf, we went to my room for a quick break. And that’s when I noticed my cat was missing.”

“Your black familiar?”

“No no”, she replied, “Jane’s is a companion, but mine is just an ordinary fluffy cat. It’s also not supposed to get outside of my apartment.”

“I take it from your telling me this that it wasn’t just hiding behind the couch.”

“Not quite. I thought so at first, but it didn’t come when I put out its food. And Jane’s was missing too. All the other cats – “

“All the other cats? How many do you have?” he interrupted.

“Yeah, Franklin’s army of laser cats – don’t look at me like that, they’re not mine – they were all still in the building. But mine and Jane’s were gone.”

“And from what I remember, you two can *look*.”

“They weren’t on earth, that’s for sure.” The woman makes a mental note that she still had to take out the cat’s GPS tracker that her colleague decided to plant. “And they weren’t seen going out on the camera’s either.”

“You found out when they got missing, then?”

“All the way in the morning, as it turned out. I was pretty stressed, but you can imagine Jane was feeling a tad worse.”

“Losing a familiar is no small issue,” he nods.

“Searching for it had to wait, however. Levi decided we all had to go to a nice dinner and have normal non-weird dinner conversation. So that we did. Luckily we’re trained to stay calm in stressful situations…”

“You used a Mind rote to calm yourself.”

“*Trained to stay calm*, so we could have a nice dinner, and re-evaluate later. The whole enlightened team was there, so we could catch up.”

He pours two new cups of tea. “So, one nice dinner later, you all went back to looking?”

“Well I had a background search running, but even sweeping the milky way didn’t find any signal. So that pretty much ruled out conventional space, and looking in the Umbrae is a bit harder.”

“A bit.”

“Jane had another approach, though. We did notice someone had overwritten the camera loops – and that had to be someone with general clearance. And that’s a small list. So she went through the list.”

“Interrogating them? That can’t have made her many friends.”

“Well, she went with the mild approach – for her, anyway. But she didn’t get far either. She figured Levi was the most likely suspect.”

“He must’ve loved that” he chuckles.

“Long story short, we weren’t getting anywhere, and by now it was past 2 in the morning. So I called it a night – Jane protested, but she was getting tired quick too, so she agreed a night’s sleep could give us some clarity.”

“It’s often best to sleep on difficult problems, yes”.

“And it worked. Next morning, I went to Levi’s with some fresh cups of caffeine. It hit me in the night – our chrononaut never actually said he didn’t take the cats. And Levi had been busy too – he found out that it was the chrononaut that altered the cameras to show a loop.”

“So time for a second chat.”

“Indeed”, she says, “Although I figured I’d go at it with Levi alone at first. Jane was probably still a bit strung up, so better to get the story out first and then figure what we’d do.”

“So he took the cats then?”

“It took a while to get it out of him, but yes, he took them. Although he was unclear about the reason – as it turns out, he was trying to protect the kittens.”

“Kittens? I thought you had your cat for a while. And what was he protecting them from?”

“From ‘her’. And yes, that puzzled me for a bit. But, then it hit me. Only mine and Jane’s cats were missing. And they’re the only female cats in the building.”

“Aaah,” he says. “Kittens.”

“Right. Protip: don’t get your cat spayed by a Progenitor. Anyway, at that point, we got Jane into the discussion. And that’s when it came out – Matrim knew Jane.”

“Knew her how?”

“Turns out Jane went to school with Matrim – not in the same class, but there nonetheless. And that’s why he wanted to get the kittens away from her.”

He shot a disapproving look. “She used to hurt kittens?”

“Well, that’s what he remembered. Luckily, that’s not what happened – he saw her with a kitten when they were young, but the kitten was hurt, badly. And she helped ease its suffering.”

“Ah. Regrettable, but sometimes necessary. And he was too young to understand?”

“Exactly.”

“So, he’s a chrononaut,” he says. “Is that why you couldn’t find the cats?”

“Right, they had a little trip into the past.”

“The future, you mean” he asks with a surprising look.

“No, he said the past. With his sister.”

“That’s… odd. How’d he do that?”

“No idea” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “I’m not the chrononaut. Anyway, just until they’re born and safe, he said. Jane wasn’t having any of that, though. So she took Matrim along to her own room, and showed him her side of things.”

“Luckily yes”, she says. “And he was right – it was hard to see, but Shadow managed to get herself pregnant. And Charlotte, too.”

“So all’s well that ends well?”

“Well, the cats were back and healthy, so all well so far.”

“So to recap, your cats got abducted and send back in time because they got pregnant from roaming laser cats, until you convinced your colleague that your other colleague didn’t torture a kitten?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, that’s certainly a story. But surely that’s not the *weirdest* weekend you had.”

“Oh no,” she says. “I’m not done yet. I told you, the start was normal enough. But now it gets really messed up.”

The woman sighs, and takes another piece from the plate of baked goods. “Say”, she continued, “Would you like one of the kittens? I know some people that want one, but I still need to place a few. There’s some nice black ones, too.”

“Oh. Well yes, I’d be happy to take one.” He pauses briefly. “You know that I’ll have it checked for safety first, though.”

“Oh naturally.”

There’s another brief pause in the conversation. “You were telling me about the rest of your weekend?”

“Right. So. We were looking into Jane’s past as part of the whole thing. And at one point, we got to talking about her time in that school – the one where she met our future Chrononaut.”

“And you found something?”

“Quite. The topic shifted to her recruiter. There was an old professor there. Doctor… Brandon? I think. It doesn’t matter. He’s the one that recruited her – or started the process, anyway. She’s still in contact with him, so she and Levi got to talk about him.”

“Old N.W.O. recruiter in England – I take it Levi knows him?”

“*Knew* him. Turns out, he died. Thirty years ago” she says, locking her eyes to his with a grim face.

“Thirty? Your colleague isn’t that old, is she?”

“She is not. She was recruited a few years after his death. And he’s been sending her Christmas cards every year.”

“So, is he a ghost? Impersonator?”

“Oh, way worse. Way worse. See, Levi got a hunch when we found that out, and he asked me who my recruiters were.”

“This’ll be interesting. Who were your recruiters?” the man asks.

“Back in the MET, I came across some… strange events I couldn’t explain. During one particularly harrowing event, I ended up in some sort of ghost realm – or at least, that’s what I thought at the time.” The woman gets a pained look on her face. “I’ll save the details for another time. Suffice to say, a couple of Void Engineers on mission in London found out what was happening, and got me out.”

“And they taught you what was ‘really going on’” he says, with a hint of sarcasm.

“Something like that. Except. There were no Voidies on mission that day in London.”

“And the ones you met that day…”

“Never spoke to them again. I got the occasional message and back, but never in person. And… I never had a reason to check before, but they don’t exist.”

“I’d like to see your report on *that* security breach.”

“Funny, old man. And I already checked…”

“Of course you did” he interjects.

“… I didn’t discuss any sensitive data” she continues.

“But you said Jane was in contact with her… ‘recruiter’.”

“She is. She even has his phone number. So we did the obvious thing.”

“And?”

“He answered. Seemed quite friendly. And meanwhile, I was tracking the call.”

“Go on…”

“It took a while – there was some Dimensional interference. A lot of it, actually, but I’m an expert on that. And that’s when I got a fix – the Quantum Dimensional Shadow of Time.”

“That’s what you call the Shard Realm, I take it?”

“No”, she replies. “That’s what we call the Shade Realm.”

He lets out a faint whistle. “That’s… That’s officially weird.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I can’t think of many things that could casually call from there…”

“Neither could I. But I got on the phone with him. Turns out, we met before.”

“Where?”

“Back in Antwerp, just after the team got together. There was an… anomaly. A temporal anomaly. Wasn’t our doing, but we met with a certain Paradox Spirit. Wrinkle.”

“Wrinkle? *Wrinkle* recruited you?”

“He was cryptic even back then. And he was cryptic now. But he said it clearly – today was the day we’d find out he was the one that got us in the TU. And we should start fixing the timeline.”

The man slowly takes out a bottle with a clear liquid, and pours two shot glasses. Taking one, he muses “At least you acknowledge his spirit-ness.”

“Oh it’s just us two, we both know it’s the same thing” she sighs.

“What about your other colleagues?” he asks.

“Most of the team were recruited normally – relatively speaking, anyway. So we don’t think he had a hand in those. As for Franklin – well, we always knew a paradox *EDE* was involved with hís recruitment.”

“Why does that not surprise me?”

“Right? So, weirdest weekend, deserved or not?”

“Well, I have to admit. It’s a good contender for the top 10. Let me tell you about this one time back in Zimbabwe…”

See also: Chronological order: aftermath