Chapter Twenty-Six - Late Night Time Travel

Charlotte glanced up when something struck her window. A pebble? She abandoned her homework--easy to do since she wasn’t terribly fond of it to begin with--and walked over to the window. A quick flick of the clasp and she tugged the wooden frame up so that she could stick her head outside.

The dorm was nice, in that it was a clean and well-maintained building in one of the more patrolled areas of Five Peaks. Still, the rooms were small, pretty expensive, and they weren’t far enough from the all-male dorm for Charlotte’s liking.

She liked a bit of flirting, but not so early. She was very ready to give some poor starry-eyed idiot an earful about hitting the wrong window when she noticed who was waiting for her below.

“Dreamer?”

“Hello Charlotte,” Dreamer said. She waved one of her little hands and a few tentacles up at Charlotte. “I need help.”

Charlotte glanced back into her room, then back out. “Okay. Is this the kind of help that will require me to be wearing pants?”

Dreamer thought about it, which was enough of a yes for Charlotte to step back and shuck off her pyjamas.

As soon as she had both of her favourite boots on, she snuffed her light and then went back to the window while grabbing her trusty whip and her short sword. She grabbed Web--her spider familiar--from her terrarium and let the spider sneak into the crevice at the front of her shirt. Then she sat on the windowsill and waved Dreamer closer. “Can you grab me, carefully, then lower me down to the ground next to you... carefully?”

Dreamer nodded, and soon little rifts opened in thin air. A tentacle grabbed Charlotte around the waist and another couple grabbed her legs and arms. Had a boy grabbed her this way she’d have added her handprint to his face in a permanent fashion.

She was passed from tentacle to tentacle until she was let go, both feet on the ground. She started to strap her sword to her belt. “Alright, so what’s going on?”

Dreamer nodded. “It’s very serious,” she said. “I want to get a gift for Abigail.”

Charlotte paused. Had she overreacted, with the sword and all?

“But the person who makes the gift I want to get is dead, so I need to go to the past to get the gift before they die.”

Charlotte continued to strap her sword on while congratulating herself on her foresight. “And how exactly are you planning on going into the past?”

“That’s the easy part,” Dreamer said. “I could go there with some timetacles, but when I did, I couldn’t figure things out, so this time I want you to help.”

“That sounds both fun and very dangerous. More dangerous than fun though,” Charlotte said.

Dreamer nodded, then she placed her hand in Charlotte’s and pointed down the road. “I made a thing.”

Charlotte grinned. “Well then, show me this thing you made.”

Dreamer guided her by the hand all the way to an alley not too far from the cafe. Fortunately, the cafe wasn’t all that far from her dorm. The alley was mostly empty, save for a few tin trash cans, some discarded papers, and an Inquisition signalling box.

The box was a good three meters tall, with frosted windows and a label on the top that read INQUISITION. “What’s that doing here?” Charlotte asked as they approached the box. It was a dull red, with a few instructions on the door for how to use the magical communication device built into it.

“This is a box,” Dreamer said. “With doors. I needed a place to put my stuff to make this a thing.”

“How very enlightening,” Charlotte said.

Dreamer stepped up to it, then tapped the box with her hands. “This is the Tentacles and Relative Dimensions in Space machine,” she said.

“A mouthful,” Charlotte said.

Dreamer shrugged, then opened the door.

Charlotte stared. She walked up to the box, then into it, then back out. She went around, poking at the box before stepping back in front of it. “It’s smaller on the inside,” she said.

“Yeah, my stuff’s pretty big, so I made the inside smaller,” Dreamer admitted.

“Alright, so what’s the idea?” Charlotte asked.

“We go to the past, then we find the person I’m looking for, and then we get the plushie I want.”

“A plushie?” Charlotte asked.

Dreamer nodded. “Yeah, there's a plushie-maker at... Daphne said to the north.”

“We’re going back in time to go visit a dead plushie maker so that you can get a gift for Abigail?” Charlotte asked.

“For the Winter Solstice,” Dreamer confirmed. “Is that okay?”

“Oh, it’s more than okay, that’s brilliant,” Charlotte said. “I’m in, as long as you can promise me that I’ll be more or less fine.”

Dreamer nodded. “More or less is something I can do. Now get in the box.”

“You’re not going to be in it?” Charlotte asked.

“I can be if you want,” Dreamer said.

“It’ll be my first time doing time travel, I think it’d be a little more comfortable with someone’s hand to hold along the way,” Charlotte said.

Dreamer shrugged, then extended her hand to Charlotte. They squeezed into the police box, then Dreamer closed the door. “Shut all of your eyes. And don’t look outside of the box. Time’s not like physics, it’s a lot more angry about stuff doing things it doesn’t like.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Charlotte said.

Charlotte wasn’t sure what she was expecting. Maybe a count-down, or at least Dreamer announcing that they were off, somehow. She wasn’t expecting the box to start spinning around like a top while infernal screeching sounded out, only partially muffled by the wooden walls around her.

She grit her teeth and worked hard to keep her lunch in, even as Dreamer hummed while bouncing off every wall inside of the box.

It ended with a lurch and a bang, and suddenly the world stilled.

“We’re here,” Dreamer said.

“Really?” Charlotte asked. She picked herself off the floor, feeling every new bump and bruise.

The door opened, and she found herself in the morning of a brand new day, the sun shining, the city alive, and the world seeming as normal as ever, or at least what she could see of the world from the alley.

“We’re eight months ago,” Dreamer said. “Let’s go?”

***