Curiosity

The Regent had a video game machine in one of the rooms. I started playing it. It was called the Wastelands. Guess what.

It's not a game.

I've been trapped here in the desert for almost a month now. I'm not sure where or when this place is. Nobody here does. It's a bunch of ruins all jumbled together. Caledonian, Aztec, Suffugium, 20th century America, dinosaur bones...I think this place is one cosmic ash heap where memories of fallen empires go.

Blazing hot in the day, freezing at night. I've never been so hungry. Even a New Babbage rat sounds good to me now. You wouldn't believe what passes for food out here. Still trying to find any scrap sturdy enough to make into a weapon.

But at least I'm not alone. There are kind folks. Other kids. Some I even recognize.

Kira's here. She must have reincarnated. There's a shack down in the slough where I caught her scent. Everyone here knows her, but I keep missing her. She must be scavenging on the other side of the desert when I'm out. I will find her. I will...

Wren's here. She says she ran out out fuel and woke up centuries later after someone repaired her. Gotta admire your handiwork, Doc.

I teamed up with this girl named Bleue. We're meeting at Kira's and forming a tribe. NPAK Runts I think we're calling it. Pooling our resources. Protecting ourselves.

Did the Regent set me up on purpose to get me off his time machine? I don't know. I hope someone finds this message. Back to the hunt.

a first chance at a second impression

I sat and watched from the holographic monitor as Qlippothic lifted the neko to his feet.

"It is not your fault, Koen. I pushed you too hard. Unlike Ash and myself I should have allotted you time for food and sleep."

I savored the last spoonful of caviar and placed the glass back on the silver tray my Companion was holding beside me.

"She's right, you know..." I cast a glance at the brown-haired boy in the butler's outfit, who earnestly nodded in agreement.

 "And I wouldn't have taken it..." he grumbled as he wearily punched a line of holes with his can opener. "So we launched too early...did we prevent the chain reaction?"

I looked away while she removed her metallic shell and put on one of the Doc's lab uniforms from the cabinet I didn't rip open."We did absorb the initial shockwave. In fact...the chain reaction was much stronger than we had anticipated. Had we attempted to launch on schedule we may well have disintegrated."

"What about the rest of the blast?"

"Shunted forward in time to the same spot...in 1908. The authorities will have several years of preparation to evacuate the area."

"If we get back to warn them!"

"True."

I stood up and leaned down to address my young Companion.

"I don't expect too much trouble from these guests, Brian. But fetch my galvanic staff just in case."

"Yes Sir!" And off he scurried with the tray. I refocused my attention on the hologram.

"Why aren't you still in the power core, Qli?"

"Something is wrong. We seem to be...stuck."

"Stuck? Did we land somewhere?"

"Not quite...more accurately I would say we are contained inside another time machine."

"Oh crap...we hit a TARDIS?"

Brian passed my staff, and with it I rapped on the outside of large plate that had been hastily welded to their vehicle. "I'm afraid you did!" I shouted. "You've materialized in the middle of my library!"

"Oh Bast! We're sorry! Ummm I guess we need your help in getting unstuck?"

With a tap of my staff the welding dissolved and the plate fell with a crash on the carpet. I used the staff as leverage to hop over the jagged tear in their orb. I adjusted the ruffles in my collar as took a closer look at their machinery.

"Oh yes...classic Mason galvanic tesseraction principles. Unrefined yet functional. That's the advantage to something this simple, you see. Far less factors to what can go wrong... Unless you try something like jump-starting it with a geothermal explosion, of course..."

"Koen? Isn't that the same staff you used to close the Demon Wasp portal?"

"Astute as always, Qlippothic. Oh my apologies, I don't think we've been formally introduced. My name is also Koen. But you may call me the Regent."

"NO NO NO this isn't possible! You looked like an old ME! Now you look like a white tiger with green eyes in a pastel fop suit?"

I huffed in disapproval. "The strain of shifting my Earth into a dimension that wasn't collapsing was too much for that old body, so I regenerated. This shouldn't surprise you. And seriously, the whole chimney-sweep look you've got going now is just embarrassing!"

"NO! NO [expletive deleted] WAY! I'm not going to look like that! You dress dorkier than our DAD and I didn't think that was even POSSIBLE! Prove it! Prove you're the Regent I met in Seraph City!"

"You have seventeen stitches on your left ankle from Wren's bear-trap."

He slunk back to the floor in resignation. "Crap...crap..." He reached in his pocket for a small device and began typing furiously.

I called out into the library. "Brian? Two servings of catnip please..."

He glared back up at me. "YOU POSTED ON MY BLOG?"

"OUR BLOG, young man!"

another fine mess

Now where was I? Oh yeah...

We launched a major assault on Baba Yaga's Siberian base. Oh you shoulda seen it. Hell the snowstorm was so heavy I barely saw it myself. But I sure heard it. And felt it with each explosion. Qlippothic and Ash were crushing robot huts right and left. Bloodwing and Zavael were counterspelling like crazy and generally unleashing cosmic whoopass on undead witches. The Jagers were shooting anything that moved and stomping on them when they were done just to make sure. Those glowing Digital Knight guys that Ash rescued from that other Grid were buzzing around slicing robots with their frisbee-things.

No, I'm not on medication. This really happened. This is pretty standard as far as Mason adventures go. You must be new here?

Well anyway, I was in my inframask suit darting around slashing mummified witches and robot tentacles. Eventually we ran out of things to smash and we generally agreed that we won. The only problem was that the witches set their reactor to self destruct. Instead of panicking like I normally do, I figured out away to hook the reactor up to Qli's galvanic tesseractor and reconfigure the chamber as a time machine, using that explosion to start the engine instead of leaving a huge crater in the middle of Mother Russia.

The Knights knew circuitry like the backs of their hands (which had circuitry on them actually, so it makes sense) and helped us rewire everything. Xavael cast a spell called SEAMLESS ARMOUR which usually is used on SUITS of armor, but he said he heard it got cast on a leaky boat once so he figured it would work on a time machine. And Doc Mason as usual was directing everything from the safety of the New Babbage Consulate.

"Is everything ready?" he asked from a staticky screen perched over my shoulder while I was spotwelding.

"Yes! We double-checked and triple-checked!" I snapped back.

"As a point of testing I've dilated the time in the immediate vicinity to give us the equivalent of days of preparations instead of the actual hours we had left," stated Qli from inside the tube where she was plugging cables into the joints of her brass armor.

"Yeah, it works great. But unlike you Qli some of us need to eat and sleep once every few days!"

"It's quite normal for you to feel cranky in your present state..." interrupted Doc. "Blah blah blah cans of tuna in the lower cabinet..."

FINALLY! I ripped off my goggles and jumped down and started tugging on the cabinet until it blew open with a shower of sparks. Doc started yelling at me as I reached for the fire extinguisher. Ash looked up from where he was riveting the bulkhead as the whole chamber started shaking. "I believe that was the wrong cabinet."

"Is Doc cursing at me in Russian now?"

"No." Qli answered. "You've launched us into hypertime! The feedback through Doctor Mason's connection he sent him into a backwards loop."

"Yeesh. He's gonna tan my..."

Another huge explosion. I wrapped my arms around a support strut as everything that wasn't nailed down got sucked through a hole in the wall where Ash was still hanging on. One of the other cabinets burst open. I saw the cans of tuna spinning in mid-air, hurtling towards the infinite void. I leaped...

"NO!" Screamed Qli as I hit a sliding sheet of metal with full force.

"What happened?" I asked as I waited for the room to stop spinning.

"Ash covered the rupture from the outside and hung on long enough to spot-weld it before he..."

"Before he what? Where...where is he?"

"He is lost." Qli placed a can of tuna on the floor beside me as I curled into a ball. I grabbed and hurled it across the room. I was too busy yowling.