TIME & TIED: ESCALATION

ARC 2.1 - From the Past

PART 29a: GROWING PAINS 1

''Dear Diary,'' scrawled Luci’s mechanical pencil. ''A lot has happened the past 24 hours. Enough to make me feel like it’s spanned six years. Which... it has, in a way. It's funny. And a good example of why you need to be careful about what you wish for, lest it come true. I hope writing things down here will help me to make sense of it all.’’

The pencil stopped moving across the page at that, fingers spinning the writing implement around idly. “It’s not like there’s much else I can do now,” came a soft voice. The voice belonging to twenty year old Luci Primrose.

Luci shook her head and leaned forward to continue writing, only to have one of her long ponytails slip around her shoulder and hide her arm under a mass of dark hair. She irritably grabbed at her tresses, flinging them back out of the way. "I should braid it, like Chartreuse does,” Luci grumbled. Then her lips pursed.

“I wonder, if I hadn't considered having longer hair in my future - would it have been altered differently?” she mused aloud. “That seems likely... I should be happy it didn’t grow out everywhere. And that the dress in the back of Mom’s closet actually fits me. And that...” Luci looked back down at her diary. “Ugh, let’s go back to the beginning."

The twenty year old resumed writing. ''It all started yesterday afternoon,'' she scribbled. ''Typical Saturday to start November. Finished my homework, then went over to Frank's house to put the finishing touches on our repairs to the time machine. Carrie was there too, being annoying. What else would one expect?''

***

"Anything I can do?" Carrie asked, bouncing up and down on her heels.

"You can stop asking that every two minutes," the young girl responded. The fourteen year old peered into the open black box sitting on Frank's lab bench - the box being the time machine device Carrie had found back in September. "Frank, are you getting a reading there yet?"

"Not yet," Frank asserted.

"Hmph. I only want to help," Carrie pointed out.

"Help by being quiet," Luci proposed.

Carrie fell silent for another sixty seconds before speaking up again. "I have been looking over the circuit stuff you guys wrote out for the machine, you know," she said. "The resistors, capacitance and all that. I may soon be capable of setting the device myself. I am trying here.”

Luci almost responded, 'yes, you're very trying', but she bit her tongue before the words could come out. Things had been easier last month, with Carrie making verbal attacks and literally smacking people upside the head. Luci had years of experience in defending against such things.

But no, ever since that incident with the drugs in her locker, Carrie had developed some sort of "rapport" with Frank and was thus being "nice", so Luci couldn't justifiably provoke her rival for his spare time. It was getting really hard to figure out how to handle the blonde cheerleader; Carrie had even switched sides from Julie to Corry in terms of school politics.

"Carrie, there really isn't much more to be done at this point," Frank chimed in. "After Luci makes these final modifications, we'll be set to go."

"Okay, I'm just saying, I want to help," Carrie reiterated.

"Which is good," Frank said. "But right now, you're being distracting."

"Okay, okay," Carrie said, raising her hands in surrender. "Backing off." She turned her attention back to the schematics on the nearby table, still glancing over her shoulder at them every now and again.

Breathing a silent thanks to Frank, Luci made a few more delicate adjustments. “That should do it," she murmured, stepping back.

"I'm getting something," Frank confirmed. "It's... yes, hallelujah, we have power!"

Luci brushed off her hands, smiling happily. "Excellent. I can’t see how these new circuits would overheat the device like before, and it should now be possible to incorporate an item that displays exact time of arrival. Give or take three minutes, nineteen times out of twenty.”

"You're done?" Carrie asked, coming back over where they were working. "We can do more time traveling now?"

"After running a few tests," Frank reminded her.

"Oh. Testing, right, sure," Carrie said, making a face. “Uh, I can try to help with that too?"

"First things first," Luci decided. "Let's double check what we've done so far." She reached out for the present day quarter sitting nearby, plunked it into the time machine, and peered back down inside the device. "Hmmmmm," she concluded.

"Hmmmmm? What's hmmmmm, good hmmmmm, bad hmmmmm?" Carrie asked, trying to look over Luci's shoulder.

"Frank, the machine's not lighting up the same way here,” Luci said. She moved aside to allow him to look.

"That's funny," Frank confirmed, glancing into the device then back to the voltage meter he had hooked up. "Yet I am getting a power reading. In fact, the charge is increasing.”

Luci again looked into the black box. "I don't understand. This should have worked fine. It must have something to do with how we reconnected the assembly to those mystery electronics inside the handle."

"Maybe. I'd still rather not probe too deeply into those," Frank said uneasily. “Since that handle controls the time jump. You didn't, I don't know, reverse any positive or negative connections, did you?"

“Frank, please,” Luci said, shaking her head. True, he was better at hardware than her, but she was above such a basic mistake.

"Maybe it's something to do with a transistor?" Carrie piped up.

"No, Carrie," Luci sighed. She paused. "Wait a minute, these wires don't seem to be fully connected..." Grabbing a pair of tweezers, Luci reached in to gingerly nudge the ends closer together.

There was a flash of light, and the next thing Luci knew, she was on the floor, halfway across the room.

"Luci! Luci, are you okay?" Frank was saying, tapping her hand.

Luci briefly squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head to clear it. "I'm fine," she said, slowly maneuvering herself into a sitting position. "Feeling a bit tingly, that's all. What happened?"

"There was a big flash and you got propelled back a few feet," Carrie explained. "You touched something you shouldn't have."

“It could have been some sort of residual static charge," Frank guessed. “Though if so, it was pretty massive.” After helping Luci back to her feet, Frank returned to the time machine. “It’s no longer lit up. Strange!”

Luci shook her head again, trying to shake off the tingly sensation. "Strange indeed. I’ve no idea why the machine's acting this way."

"Maybe we'd better look back over those technical notes we were writing up."

"The technical notes AGAIN?" Carrie said in horror. "But it's already after five o'clock! Not that I mind," she added hastily as Frank and Luci turned to her. "It's only, well, I should tell my dad I'll be sticking around a little longer than expected, yeah?”

"Wait, did you say it was after five?" Luci turned to look at the clock. "Mom asked me to pick up a few things at the grocery store this afternoon. I'd better go do that... but I can come back here right after. I don't need to have dinner with my family, I can grab a snack."

Frank shrugged. "We could probably do with a bit of a break anyway. Go pick up your groceries and have dinner, Luci. Contact me after seven if you want to come back and spend another few hours on this."

Luci nodded. "I'll be back, count on that. I want to figure out where we went wrong," she asserted. The young asian girl turned and headed for the stairs.

"I don't really need a break," Carrie remarked. “So I can stay long enough to help you tidy up a bit."

‘You don’t need a break because you didn’t DO anything,’ Luci thought. She turned around to say something of the sort, but Frank spoke first.

“Okay Carrie,” Frank relented. “If you're dead set on being helpful, want to give me a hand coiling up these wires?"

Luci watched as Carrie nodded and moved next to Frank, smiling at him. A smile Frank returned. Luci's grip on the stair banister tightened marginally. ‘If only I were a few years older,’ she thought. ‘Then I'd mean more to him.’

The tingly feeling refused to go away.