After what seemed like forever but perhaps in reality was only fifteen minutes, the explosion of the Order’s research Transportal died down and the heat from the explosion dissipated.

In the hallway outside of what was left of the Transportal laboratory, a large, hard-shelled, dirty black sphere remained intact. It sat wedged into the broken, collapsed rock floor underneath it. The black sphere shuddered a bit and then it cracked into thousands of tiny pieces which crumbled and fell to the ground. Viviane and Luc who were tucked inside opened their eyes and looked around at the smoking devastation. They had survived!

Viviane’s first thought after being released from the personal personnel bomb shelter was about Dr. Renard.

“Oh my god! What happened to Dr. Renard?”

Viviane was not hopeful. Dr. Renard’s body was undergoing decoherence from teleportation when the supercomputer nodes exploded. Without the supercomputer’s ability to control the decoherence sequence, it was unknown if Dr. Renard’s body ever returned from entanglement or, even if it did, whether he could have survived the explosion. More likely, Viviane theorized, Dr. Renard’s reconstitution may have been only partial meaning that his body would be disfigured and deformed due to missing body parts which never made it out of teleportation. Deformed or not, he certainly could not have survived.

Viviane rushed back into the destroyed Transportal laboratory where the doors had been blown off and blackened and burned. Luc followed her in. As she picked her way down through the debris strewn laboratory to the broken pieces of the smoking Transportal machine, she hoped she would not find anything gruesome. Maybe the explosion incinerated everything to ashes she hoped.

As she got closer, she realized that the Target chamber appeared to be intact! There did not seem to be any damage to it at all.

The Target chamber must have been at the center of the overload explosion! Viviane surmised.

As she approached the Target chamber, she noticed no obvious signs of life. She braced herself before looking inside, expecting a horrific sight. Luc was right behind her.

Viviane peeked into the Target chamber to see what was inside and what she saw shocked her beyond belief! She reared back and raised her hands to cover her mouth while her awestruck eyes stared forward wide open and scared.

“What is it?” Luc’s voice was sharp. “What do you see?”

Luc came up from behind Viviane and had a quick look inside for himself. Inside the Target chamber, he saw an infant boy alive and well! By the look of it, the boy could not possibly be more than one year old!

Due to the Fountain of Youth Effect, Leandre Renard traveled back in time and returned to his infant self. He had survived, but at a tremendous cost.