FicWad

Disclaimer: Chrono Trigger and all its attendant goodies belong to Square-Enix. I'm just playing in their sandbox. Further information can be found in the header for Chapter One.

Thanks to Myshu at fanfiction.net for picking up the slack where spellcheck failed me.



Introducing Nadia would have meant hours of wasted time and unconvincing explanations, so Lucca made certain that her parents were both asleep before sneaking Nadia upstairs and into the bathroom. True to her word, Nadia had provided an upbeat story about the time she slipped into the royal stables and attempted to teach herself to ride a horse, and Lucca, in turn, had found something with loofah-like qualities lurking in the cupboard.

Once they had each managed to scrub the Cursed Woods out of their skin, Nadia sniffed her clothing with exaggerated disgust. "Don't suppose we have time for laundry, huh?"

"They'd just get filthy again," Lucca said, toweling her hair dry. "Adventuring is stinky business."

"Ooh, that gives me an idea." Nadia's eyes sparkled. "Someday I'll open up a bunch of spas for heroes. One free massage every time you save the world!"

Lucca grinned. "I think this is the exhaustion talking, but that almost sounds like a good idea."

"You can be a manager."

"Only if I get dibs on the evil sewer location."

"Yuck. Be my guest."

Still smiling, Lucca gave her hair a final wring before donning her helmet. "Well, I'm set. Try to keep it down on the way out."

Nadia caught her arm before she opened the bathroom door. "You're just going to leave? Just like that?"

"How else could I leave? 'Bye Mom and Dad, I'm off to rewrite history, don't hold dinner'?"

Nadia rolled her eyes. "That's not what I meant. It's just that..." She hesitated, then finished, "You like your parents."

Biting her lip, Lucca turned the knob. "They're not really my parents."

They stole out of the house in silence, but Nadia was clearly more than a little perturbed, and Lucca didn't know how to explain herself. How much of any of them was real? Lucca herself was a collection of fragments from two realities that weren't and one that shouldn't have been. And "should" was a tricky word. Even thinking it left a strange taste in her mouth, an eye-watering mix of menthol and cayenne.

The path to Guardia Forest was deserted under the moonlight. The princess had only been missing for two days, which all of Lucca's memories agreed wasn't long enough for the soldiers to be called in. But there was no sense being reckless, and the two girls stole softly through the shadows at the forest's edge.

"I remember this one," Lucca whispered as they came to the path that led to the castle. "Crono and I used to sneak out to play here, and I can remember which clearing had the Gate in it."

Nadia cheered quietly.

As they picked their way to their destination, taking care to avoid the forest's sleeping denizens, Lucca tried to pretend that Nadia would still be smiling when they stepped out of the Gate. Maybe if the timestream was in so much upheaval already, the path of least resistance would be to leave the future repaired. It only seemed fair that if Crono had to vanish, he could take Lavos with him.

But there were two kinds of "fair," one that depended upon an impossible, disputable balance and another that played out beneath the superficial chaos of actions and reactions. They mixed poorly.

"Brace yourself," Lucca said as she keyed in the sequence to open the portal. It was difficult to say whom she was addressing.

One neon rush later, she was picking herself up from the floor of Bangor Dome, hoping her knees didn't bruise from their encounter with the cold steel. Nadia landed beside her in a cloud of dust.

"Ow," said Nadia, making a cursory effort to brush herself off. "I think I liked the grass better." Her eyes widened as she took in her surroundings. "Is this-"

"What it all comes down to." Lucca's gaze lingered on the door at the back of the room, where the crest of Zeal glowed through the haze. "There's nothing in here. We may as well get going."

Long ago, Crono had been the first one out, slipping through the gap where the automatic door gaped eternally open. Marle had followed, and Lucca had come only when she heard the confused and rather distressed noises coming from outside. Her attention had been focused on the door's design, the only luminescence in the gloom, and she had been enraptured by thoughts of what high technology had brought such a thing to pass.

It was a strange memory to keep so vivid. Perhaps her brain clung to it as a prime example of her ability to jump to the wrong conclusions, but Lucca hardly felt that she could be blamed for overlooking the possibility of magic.

With a sigh, she turned and followed Crono's nonexistent footprints outside, hating that she couldn't recall his shoe size. The wind scratched her as she stepped clear of the wreckage.

And then it was in front of her, cold and stark and the color of ashes, ten thousand nightmares coalescing into a reality that no amount of waking could erase. It had never left her, hiding as it did inside the part of her that worried about keeping the timeline intact. She had never managed to forget that every life on the planet dangled from threads as thin as a boy running into a girl, or a sapling thriving in a desert.

"No." Nadia's voice was little more than a whimper, and Lucca glanced back to see her shaking her head wildly in the direction that had once led to Guardia Castle. "No way. This..."

"Is why we fought."

If she had known that she wouldn't ever work up the nerve to visit the new future, Lucca would have taken longer fetching Doan for the Moonlight Parade. She had been in a hurry, of course, to set everything in place before Crono awoke the next day, but surely she could have taken a moment in her sleepless night to bask in the technology gleaming brighter than the stars. And gleaming so strangely...

At the time Lucca had been willing to attribute the phantasmic quality of the world to the night sky and her own giddiness, but now she wondered if she had caught the future in a state of flux. As she led Doan outside to the Epoch, flashes of barren land and ruined buildings had jumped into her peripheral vision and disappeared just as abruptly when she turned to look at them. Whatever force kept the universe from imploding under the weight of its own impossibility had been strained.

And Doan had been so confused. As the timestream struggled with the sudden influx of paradox, he had vacillated between memories, as perplexed by the idea of huddling in rags as by the sight of the domed city around him. He remembered Lucca, and he wanted to know who was pulling himself out of his home; he thanked her again for feeding his people, and he demanded an explanation before he called the police. But once she'd gotten him back to 1000 AD, he'd settled down and asked after the health of Crono and Marle. And he'd been wearing rags.

Looking back on it, she'd probably taken away the part of Doan that belonged to the ruined future and left the rest of him wondering why he was standing outside in the middle of the night. And her Doan had no doubt vanished into impossibility when he stepped through the Gate, just like-

Lucca shook her head and turned back to Nadia, who was still staring horror-struck at the landscape, her ponytail whipping in the dusty wind.

"This can't be real," she said at last. "This can't be the way the world ends..."

"With a bang and a whimper." Lucca's voice was steady, but she felt as if a giant fist were crushing her chest. She frowned and drew her gun. "Keep your guard up. If it's moving, it wants to kill you."

Nadia walked beside her, shivering. "It's just not right. Back home everyone's playing outside, and having picnics, and- and cutting the crusts off sandwiches. The world can't end when people are cutting the crusts off sandwiches. Maybe if everyone was fighting, and there were big dark clouds everywhere, and some old man in a funny hat kept yelling things in an angry old man voice-"

A sharp metallic gleam scurried across the ground toward them. Before Lucca could fire, a red beam cut through the air, singing Nadia's ponytail. There was a yelp, followed by a crossbow quarrel embedding itself in the robot's processor and sending up a colorful shower of sparks.

"What on earth was that?" Nadia asked after a beat.

Lucca peered at it and shrugged. "Low-level security droid. Little strange to see one outside." She paused. "I hate this, you know. It's not their fault. They just do what they're programmed to." Remembering that she was talking to someone without any technological background, she added, "It's like if I threw a baseball at you. It wouldn't be the ball's fault if you got a lump on your head."

Nadia frowned. "So who's throwing the baseball at us? And why do they have to put lasers on it?"

"Let's just forget the metaphor," Lucca said, resuming their journey north. "Thing is, I think back to when we first found Robo, and sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't been able to reprogram him. And we destroyed a lot of other R-series robots, and sometimes I wonder if I could have done something, but..." She trailed off with a sigh. "I don't know. Sometimes I wonder where the hell I get off making all these decisions."

There was a short silence.

"You didn't answer my question," Nadia said.

"About the lasers?"

"About who's throwing the ball."

Lucca frowned. "Big robotic overmind. Wants to wipe out humanity. Kind of hoping we don't run into it."

"Yikes. Me too." Nadia looked around at the wasted countryside, then asked, "Um, where is humanity?"

There was no point in taking her to Trann Dome. Assuming the tattered remnants of the human race had even survived another year of starvation and marauding robots, they would be in no shape to do anything but upset Nadia further. The Enertron was tempting, but Lucca couldn't handle seeing any more faces on the damage she'd done.

"Hiding," she replied at last. "There are extermination units all over the place."

Nadia shuddered. "You know what I like about the present? There's nothing trying to kill me. Well, except those monsters in the forest, but half the time they just run away. And none of them have lasers."

The monologue showed signs of continuing, but Lucca held up a hand as they reached the threshold to Lab 16. Okay, think. Rats, mutants, and... was this the place with Bikeboy? As her mind continued to wander down a pothole-ridden lane, Lucca turned to Nadia and said, "If you see anything that looks like a puddle with a nasty grin, yell. Weapons can't touch them. And if you hear anyone say, 'The Man,' prepare to be annoyed."

Nadia blinked. "Should I ask?"

"Better not. That hair will probably be the one thing I never forget."



"The hair," panted Nadia, reloading her crossbow as more arachnoid robots skittered out of the shadows, "has got to be better than this."

Lucca was half-inclined to agree. Although her fire magic could cut through the mutants as if they were ice sculptures, every use of it reminded her of how long it had been since she'd slept. It didn't help that she caught herself trying to sear every aspect of the spells into her memory, in case the workings of paradox tried to snatch them away next.

"I don't think it used to be this bad," Lucca called over the din. A fireball shot from her palm to a malicious lump of goo, temporarily winding her. Once she'd gotten her breath back, she added, "I think we wandered into a warzone. The mutants and the machines aren't exactly working together here."

And I don't want to think about why the Mother Brain would start targeting non-human organics.

Nadia shrieked, and Lucca whirled around to see that she had run out of arrows and was using her crossbow as a club to beat the robots away. "Great! So let's wander /out/!"

"I think we're near the end." Lucca's gaze fell on a surprisingly familiar pile of wreckage, and with a near-audible click, the layout of the lab came together in her brain. Lucca grabbed Nadia by the wrist and yanked her around a corner into a bottleneck. "This way," she said, pushing the princess toward an apparent dead end. "Crawl through the hole in the wall. I'll catch up."

"But you-"

"Can make sure they don't follow. Run!" As Nadia reluctantly sprinted toward the exit, Lucca prepared another wave of fire for the pursuing robots.

The next thing she was aware of was the buckling of her knees, followed by her awkward collapse against the nearest wall. A matchhead's worth of flame fizzled out in the air. Before Lucca could call up the strength to try again, a red beam grazed her shoulder.

Suddenly she was jerked back, and her gun hit her elbow as it was pulled from its holster. Shots peppered the area with erratic menace.

"C'mon, Lucca, let's get out of here!" One of Nadia's blasts managed to short out the foremost robot, resulting in enough of a roadblock to delay the rest.

Lucca struggled to her feet with Nadia's help. "Thanks," she managed, wincing as they rushed together toward the exit. "Guess I'm getting a little ti-"

A laser pierced the air overhead, leaving a red-hot patch on the wall. With a yelp, Nadia shoved Lucca through the narrow gap and scrambled after her.

"They'll fit through there, won't they?" Nadia looked skyward in a near-panic, as if expecting salvation to fall from the heavens.

"Hang on." Gritting her teeth, Lucca knelt and hovered her hands over the edges of the gap, focusing whatever energy she could into her palms. The future sucks. Life sucks. Crono's gone, and right now it's all this wall's fault. Heat tugged at her skin as the steel began to glow, warping itself until the exit became a hole scarcely large enough to accommodate a finger.

"There," she panted, "I think that worked." Her helmet thunked against the ground as she fell over backward.

Nadia's face appeared in her field of vision. "Okay, you're getting some sleep /now/, little lady."

"You sound like my mom." Lucca giggled, but it came out as more of a hiccup.

"I think that last one fried your brain," said Nadia, pulling her up and returning the gun to its holster. Lucca swayed on her feet. "Isn't there anywhere safe we can go?"

All the giddiness drained out of Lucca's exhaustion. So we can stay out here and die, or we can try the sewers and die, or we can go to Arris Dome and probably die. Time travel's just a non-stop barrel of laughing fish. Frowning inwardly at what her brain had done to the trope, Lucca said, "There used to be. But a lot happens in a year." She took a step, stumbled, and was caught by Nadia before she could end up face-first in the dust.

"Here." Nadia draped Lucca's arm over her shoulders. "I know you have this weird idea about doing everything yourself, but let me help, okay?"

Lucca managed to return her smile, and they set off together across the barren landscape.



Arris Dome showed no signs of life from the outside, which could mean, logically, that the residents were alive and hiding quietly, that they had all died in the interim, that the robots had taken over and were lying in wait, or that Lucca just couldn't keep her eyes focused long enough to recognize any hints of habitation. Broken glass crunched under her feet as Nadia half-carried her to the entrance.

They paused at the threshold. "Do you think it's safe?" Nadia asked.

Lucca shrugged as much as she could manage. "If there are any killer robots in there, they've heard us coming, and they'd just mow us down if we tried to run. And I wouldn't be saying this out loud if I weren't dead on my feet."

Nadia winced. "Um, can we not say the d-word right now?"

"Down?" Lucca grinned inanely as they began to make their way inside. "Dominoes? Division? Not afraid of a little long division, are you?"

"Very funny." Nadia gave her a stern look that didn't quite take. "You just better not be like this once you're rested up. You're supposed to be the brains of this operation."

"I am the brains. Girl genius. Only blows up two inventions a week, and has even odds on saving or destroying the world."

Lucca thought she might have added more, but found herself coughing on the stale air inside the Dome. A thick layer of dust lay unbroken on the floor. In the absolute silence, the girls' breaths echoed from the steel walls.

"Dammit." Lucca sank straight through sobriety to depression. "There's no one here."

Nadia blinked. "But I thought we didn't want to find any robots."

"It's not that." Lucca exhaled on the wall, scattering dirty specters through the air. "There used to be people here. Your descendents, actu-" Something seized up in her chest, and the sentence went unfinished. "Never mind."

Bracing herself against the wall, Lucca made her way forward to peer around the corner. She saw nothing but dimly lit debris. "On the bright side," she added, "I don't think anyone died here recently. No blood or collateral damage. Maybe they all went into hiding a long time ago."

"It's still horrible." Nadia was using her resolute voice, the one that indicated a quasi-suicidal call to action was on its way. "Lucca, we have to do something about this! We have to find everyone and get them a new home, or at least get all the dust out of here, and then we have to find the big baseball mind-thing and show it who's boss!"

The outline of the Enertron was just visible in the corner, covered by a layer of gray dirt. After taking a step toward it and finding herself leaning on Nadia again, Lucca replied, "We are doing something about it. Changing history, remember? Lavos goes poof, and so does all this."

"It still isn't right." Nadia grunted as she got Lucca past a set of steps. "And, um, where are we going?"

"Funny thing in the corner."

"Gotcha." Once they had made their way across the oddly designed walkways, Nadia said, "What I meant was, these people still matter. Even if we make it so this never happens..."

Not wanting to follow that line of thought, Lucca fumbled her hand down the side of the Enertron until she found the release button. So is it good that I got the general area right, or bad that I didn't hit it right off the bat? Those thoughts didn't go anywhere appealing, either, so Lucca positioned herself inside the device, instinctively holding her breath as the lid snapped shut over her.

It was time-elapsed dreaming. It was empathy for a waterfall. It was intravenous coffee. Even if her memories of the Enertron had been flawless, Lucca doubted that the rush would have been diminished. When the cover sprang open, she all but bounded out.

Nadia raised her eyebrows and gave Lucca a curious poke. "So is that some kind of magic sleeping machine?"

"It's not magic." Lucca patted the Enertron almost affectionately. "Not showy enough, remember? It's pure science."

"And it works?"

"Science always works."

Nadia grinned. "Good, 'cause it looks like fun. My turn!"

Once again the machine whirred through its function, and Nadia bounced out with a cheer that fell into a frown. "That reminds me. I'm kinda hungry."

"It does that, yeah." Lucca let her gaze wander over the trail they'd left in the dust, an oddly tight feeling in her throat. Metaphors. Bah. "And we should probably get going now. No sense sticking around."

As they walked back to the entrance, the metal floor clanging beneath them, Lucca tried to keep herself from staring at the dirty ladder leading to the basement. But her thoughts ventured where her gaze feared to tread.

Once upon a time, everything had happened for a reason. There were entities and forces at work, throwing three people whose combined ages fell short of a half-century deep into the workings of history. They were little wrenches in very big gears, even if that wasn't quite the way they liked to phrase it.

If Lucca had believed that then, she sure as hell didn't now.

The events in the basement were still sharp in her mind, everything from chasing the not-quite-statuesque rat to the wild oath they'd taken to save the world. "It was a stroke of luck that we were sent here through that Gate," she'd said, because luck had nothing to do with destiny and was just a convenient word for one thing happening after another, without meaning or God or the acerbic taste of "supposed."

Once upon a time, we thought we knew how to play God.

Nadia's hand was waving in front of her face. "Lucca? You're spacing again."

"Sorry."

They had reached the surface again, where intermittent lightning flashed too far away for them to hear the thunder. Lucca brushed the grit off her glasses. "Anyway, our next stop is the sewer south of here."

"You have no idea how much I hoped you were kidding about the evil sewer."

"It's not really evil so much as annoying." Frowning, Lucca kicked a rock and added, "At least, that's how it was last time. The future's not cooperating with me."

Nadia looked thoughtful, then reached over and snatched Lucca's gun. "I'm out of ammo!" she protested when an effort was made to reclaim it. "And you're Fire Goddess Lucca! I need this more than you do!"

Lucca stopped her offensive and smirked. "Your use of 'goddess' appeases the mighty Lucca. She will allow you the use of her holy weapon provided that you improve your aim."

"Hey, I hit a robot." Grinning, Nadia struck a pose and affected a deep voice. "Bad guys, beware! Detective Nadia is on the case!"

"And provided you cut that out."

"Spoilsport."



Lucca had been expecting megalomaniacal caterpillars. Marauding robots, while less welcome, wouldn't have been a surprise.

But for the sewer to be completely empty took her off-guard.

"There used to be frogs here," she said, waving her hand to indicate the area. "And fish-things. And bugs." As they crossed the area that had once been full of traps, Lucca added, "Not that I'm complaining."

Not that I'm thinking about what happened to them, either.

"This is really spooky," Nadia remarked as they came near the end the sewer. "I kind of wish something would jump out at us. Well, something not a robot."

Lucca started to make a joke about her just wanting to use the gun, but the circumstances made it difficult to find the right tone. Was there any life left at all, aside from a smattering of mutants? The lack of corpses in Arris Dome offered the hope that humanity had found somewhere safer to hide, but the memory of the human processing plant was burned into Lucca's brain- the huddled bodies, the screaming, the gut-twisting knowledge that people were dying constantly, their lives ripped away as their would-be rescuers made wrong turns and puzzled over the security system.

Someone, perhaps Crono, had asked Lucca if she was okay after seeing it, and she had replied, "You can't save everyone." It was trite and stupid, even if it was true. It was also the only way to sleep at night, because she couldn't figure out how Marle coped and she didn't want any part of how Magus did.

As she and Nadia climbed out of the sewers and back to the wind-scourged surface, Lucca tried to focus her vision southward and ignore the mountain that jutted out of the earth like an exposed bone. Nadia didn't.

"Lucca, what is that thing?"

"Death Peak. Almost as much fun to climb as it looks." Despite herself, Lucca found her gaze turning eastward as she walked. "It's where we got Crono back."

With a little shiver, Nadia said, "Kind of a creepy place for a miracle."

Science had nothing to do with miracles, and Lucca had always come down on its side. While the others had considered Death Peak primarily as an icy lump of spiritual hardship, she was busy noticing that it occupied very nearly the same area as Melchoir's hut, Magus's castle, the Black Omen, and Lavos's point of impact. If Death Peak was a hotspot for temporal mojo, it was probably by virtue of location.

Of course, no one, not even Lucca, had been terribly interested in discussing the place after Crono had been saved. There was always the risk that a miracle would evanesce under scrutiny.

"It's a creepy place for anything," Lucca replied at last.

There was a pause, after which Nadia ran to catch up with her. "So, um, this Bell Jar guy-"

"Belthasar."

"Right, him. He's not a robot or a giant frog or anything, is he?"

Despite everything, Lucca felt the corners of her mouth twitch upward. "We were kind of a weird group, weren't we? He's a pretty much your standard old man, though. Just crazy and probably dead."

Nadia snapped her fingers. "Darn," she said playfully. "And here I was hoping he was a cute young candymaker."

Lucca quirked an eyebrow. "I already told you he's the guy who invented our time machine."

"Well, if there are gingerbread /houses/-"

"Stop right there."

As they came to the entrance to the Keeper's Dome, Lucca tried to formulate a proper introduction. Belthasar had devoted decades to the study of time travel, so at least he would have no trouble believing the basics of her story. And sunken as he was into depression, he would most likely be willing to help restore a brighter timeline. Nothing to worry about.

Oh, who am I kidding? If he's even alive, he's just going to be talking to people who aren't there.

"Um, one more thing," said Nadia as they crossed the threshold. "Is he crazy as in old-man rambly or crazy as in lasers?"

Before Lucca could answer, they came around the corner of a dust-laden computer and found the area empty except for a snoring Nu. Dammit.

Nadia gave Lucca an accusing look. "You said he was human."

"He was. That's just his Nu." Ignoring Nadia's immediate question, Lucca walked over to the creature and poked it in the chest.

The Nu awoke with a start and automatically began to speak. "The professor's programming was, in a sense, his own eulogy. Soon, I, too, will be able to sleep-"

"Good for you," Lucca said. "So Belthasar's not hiding anywhere around here, is he?" When the Nu only gave her the blank, unblinking stare that made its species so infuriating, she added, "He put his memories in you. Don't play dumb."

The Nu shrugged. "The professor gave me only specific processes that emulate his mind. For example..." The creature trailed off, staring vacantly ahead. "Program error."

Sensing that she was in for a struggle, Lucca muttered to herself and started to dig through her knapsack in search of Nu-interrogating inspiration. The process was interrupted by Nadia's saying, "Aww, you're the first cute thing I've seen all day! Do you have a name?"

There was a long pause. "I am Nu."

"They're like organic appliances," Lucca said without looking up. "If your toaster started hiding the bread and demanding that you scratch its back, you wouldn't give it a-" She cut off and knit her brow. "Actually, yes, you would. Never mind."

"I named everything in the kitchen when I was four. The toaster was Mr. Brownbread."

"Better than calling it 'Mom,' I guess." Realization crashed in, and Lucca pinched the bridge of her nose. "Wow. That was incredibly tactless of me."

"Sort of, yeah. But it's been a pretty rough day." When Lucca glanced up, Nadia give her a small smile before turning to pet the Nu. "Hey, what's all that stuff?"

Lucca followed her line of sight to the consoles beneath the defunct computers, upon which were stacks of papers. As she made her way over to them, the Nu said, "The professor left a great deal of work behind. I have organized it as per my instructions, nu."

Jackpot/. As Nadia tousled the Nu's hair, Lucca began to rifle through the notes. Apparently Belthasar had put enough of himself into the Nu to let the creature sort efficiently, keeping most of the mad ravings of his final days segregated from the actual data and scientific notes. Unfortunately, the majority of the papers fell into the former category. As Lucca thumbed through a set of reports on mutant lifeforms, she wondered how much of a headache her devoted followers would one day have from compiling her work. /Not a chance. I'll be published long before I die.

A pleasant fantasy of her twenty-seventh acceptance speech was interrupted when Lucca's elbow knocked several pages from the one of the brain-scrambled stacks to the floor. As she bent to retrieve them, a name caught her eye and rattled something in her memory. Lucca took her notebook out of her bag and began to skim.

The reference lay buried in the tale of Crono's restoration: "Then Belthasar sent us to get a clone/doll from Norstein Bekkler, the Tent of Horrors guy at the Millennial Fair." A few neglected gears began to turn, and Lucca managed to call up a fuzzy image of a disembodied head and its free-floating hands, along with her own conclusion that he was either a Mystic or a convincing optical illusion. She could also recall, with surprising clarity, watching Ayla mimic the clone as part of Bekkler's deal.

So what was a carnival freak doing in a document written more than a thousand years later? There wasn't even any context; the name was part of an unlabeled list, sandwiched between "shells" and "dreams."

Shrugging, Lucca slipped the paper into her notebook and went back to searching for data about the Wings of Time. She had begun to worry that all of Belthasar's work on the machine qualified as insane scribblings when a curious sheet turned up underneath a stack of studies on the weather.

"Energy sources" was written at the top, then underlined several times, perhaps when Belthasar had kept his pen moving idly as he thought. Lucca was quite familiar with the practice, although she was more of a geometric doodler, as evidenced by margins full of rectangular and triangular prisms. Taban preferred stars. But in the end it was all the same; the name of the game was focus, keeping the brain from flying away into a daydream. Everything came down to focus, down through worlds and continents and cities and houses to a girl diving into a vast red sea.

So focus already. Brushing her thoughts aside, Lucca turned her attention back to the list.

The first entry was "Lavos," underlined often and darkly. Across the page from it was "Planet," and a line with a question mark in the center connected the two. An near-illegible scrawl beneath it seemed to say, "DS born but Lavos spawn. Nu?"

Every other entry on the list had the air of existing only for the sake of completion, from "atomic" to "solar."

Turning the paper over revealed a nightmare of intersecting lines and terrible handwriting, in which the only words immediately clear were "WHO CONTROLS TIME?" When she squinted, Lucca saw that "outside" had been scribbled repeatedly around the question, forming a shaky border.

And why is this not filed with the crazy papers? Sighing, she turned to the Nu, which was enjoying a backscratch courtesy of Nadia, and said, "Can you read this?"

The Nu turned languidly to peer at the sheet. "Program error."

"Don't you dare." Fuming, Lucca flipped through her notebook until she found what she was looking for. "See?" she said, pointing at her writing. "You're supposed to be informative. And you should know what this means."

"I think he's asleep," said Nadia.

Lucca's boot connected with the Nu's backside with more force than was probably necessary. Starting, the creature blinked and gave her a baleful look.

"Program error," it insisted.

"Yeah, right. And what error would that be?"

Sidling away from her, the Nu replied, "Error 124N- Physical abuse of Nu. Further interaction prohibited. Good night."

As the creature began to snore, Nadia said, "He reminds me of one of the castle guards. I think I'll call him 'Ernie.'"

"I was going to go with 'Big Blue Bastard,' but whatever works." Lucca frowned and wiped her glasses with her scarf. "This is driving me nuts. I'm going to keep looking through Belthasar's notes, but I don't know if I'll find much else about time travel that isn't written in crazy-talk. He must have wanted to keep his work from falling into the wrong hands."

Nadia pouted. "We're not the wrong hands."

"Yeah, tell that to Ernie."

As Lucca glared at the indecipherable paper in her hand, her peripheral vision caught Nadia peering around the consoles. "Where would he hide a time machine?" the princess wondered aloud. Before Lucca could answer, she added, "Hey, what's that funny glowing thing in the back?"

"The door to the time machine. But we can't open it." Lucca grabbed Nadia's arm before she could dash off to try regardless. "Really, we can't. We'd have to supercharge something made of Dreamstone, and there's no way we have the energy for that. Last time, we had to use a direct conduit to Lavos."

Nadia shook her head. "But we can't just give up! We came all this way, and there has to be something more!" She paused, clasping her hands behind her back. "Or someone."

It took Lucca a moment to follow her meaning. "But we- he's probably not even- it's too far to-" Taking a deep breath, she tried to thread her thoughts back together. "It's just, well, the odds are so slim, and I- if he's not, I-"

There's no way. It's been too long. But he was there for three centuries already, and how are you ever going to sleep again if all your dreams begin with "what if"?

Pushing her glasses up, Lucca managed a lopsided smile and said, "But you gotta try, right?"