They walked toward the rising sun, a strange procession: a space trooper, a pirate, a psychic fraud, and a seven-foot furry creature who'd just spent eighteen years on the run from police. Behind them, Damien Thorn's tent lay in ruins. Ahead of them, 1990 waited—with all its dangers, all its possibilities, and one little girl who didn't know yet what she was going to become.
Bill glanced back at Splock. The Nocturnian walked with new purpose, his ridiculous robe billowing in the morning breeze, his eyes fixed on the horizon.
"You okay?" Bill asked.
Splock was silent for a long moment. Then:
"I have determined that logic is insufficient. That reason has limits. That the universe is fundamentally irrational and possibly hostile." He paused. "Also, that I will never again trust a female of any species who compliments my ears."
Bill nodded. "That's fair. That's completely fair."
The fairground was closed. Of course it was. Weekday mornings in Brooklyn were not prime time for psychic consultations, curse removals, or aura cleansings. The booths stood empty, their canvas flaps tied down, their signs creaking slightly in the damp breeze.
They climbed the fence. Chewgumma went over like a furry mountain, his weight making the chain-link groan in protest. Splock followed with surprising grace, his new purple robe billowing behind him like a sad superhero's cape. Duo vaulted over with practiced ease. Bill brought up the rear, catching his pants on a loose wire and tearing a hole in the knee.
The empty lot beyond was a wasteland of mud puddles and garbage. They picked their way through carefully, avoiding the worst of it—though "worst" was relative when you'd spent the last hour in a post-apocalyptic Cleveland.
Bill's hand went to his pocket. His brow furrowed.
"Hey." He stopped. "The radio. The one that appeared out of nowhere. It's gone."
Duo shrugged without breaking stride. "Probably stayed in 2000. The universe probably decided we'd had enough free temporal gadgets."
"But it was in my pocket. I had it. I—"
Splock's voice drifted back to them, calm and slightly distant. "The radios were temporal anomalies. Manifestations of intersecting time streams. Their disappearance upon our return to 1990 is logically consistent with—" He paused. "—with the general principle that the universe does not give out free gifts. Especially not communication devices."
Bill stared at him. "You're taking this pretty calmly for someone who was just—"
"I am not taking anything calmly. I am simply... processing. The processing will continue for an indeterminate period. Possibly forever."
They walked on.
The empty lot gave way to a sidewalk—cracked in places, but sidewalk nonetheless. Normal sidewalk. The kind you could walk on without expecting it to collapse into a sewer filled with mutant alligators. Bill tested each step carefully, waiting for the ground to open up or the sky to turn orange or a pack of slobbering Ryder-clones to come charging around the corner.
Nothing happened.
The street was quiet. A few cars parked along the curb, their paint jobs intact, their windows unbroken. A newspaper lay on someone's stoop, the headline readable: something about local elections, nothing about talking bears or apocalyptic prophecies.
Duo kept glancing over his shoulder. "This is wrong," he muttered. "Where are the fires? The smoke? The floating debris?"
"Don't jinx it," Bill hissed back.
They passed a small grocery store. Its windows were whole. Inside, a man in an apron was arranging oranges in a pyramid. Oranges. Bright orange. The kind you could eat without worrying about radiation poisoning.
Bill stared at the oranges. The man stared back through the glass, probably wondering why four extremely strange individuals—one in a torn military uniform, one in a pirate's jacket, one in a purple psychic robe, and one seven-foot furry creature—were gawking at his produce display.
"Keep moving," Duo whispered.
They kept moving.
A woman jogged past them, headphones clamped to her ears, a bright pink leotard stretching over legs that had clearly never carried her through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. She didn't give them a second glance. Joggers in 1990 Brooklyn had apparently seen stranger things than a Kookie before breakfast.
Chewgumma's head swiveled to watch her go. "Kookie remembers joggers. Joggers always screamed. This one not screaming. Strange."
"Don't question it," Bill said. "Just walk."
They walked.
The neighborhood slowly transitioned from commercial to residential. Small houses with tiny front yards. Chain-link fences. The occasional dog—normal-sized, normal-furred, normal-tongued—barking from behind a gate. Not a single one of them had mismatched eyes or an expression of cosmic confusion.
Bill found himself relaxing despite his better judgment. The sun was actually warm on his face. The air smelled like car exhaust and someone's breakfast cooking. Normal smells. Human smells.
Splock walked slightly behind them, his purple robe swishing with each step, his eyes fixed on the middle distance. His ears twitched occasionally, but otherwise he was a statue in stretchy pants and sandals.
Duo fell into step beside Bill. "You think he's okay?"
"No."
"Me neither." Duo glanced back at the Nocturnian. "He's processing. That's what I think. This is in the spirit of aliens like him!"
"Processing what? The trauma? The existential horror? The fact that an eighteen-year-old with the face of a reptile and the hips of a continent spent an hour trying to—"
"I don't think we should speculate."
"Probably wise."
They turned a corner. A school came into view—elementary, by the look of it. Empty. The building loomed silent against the morning sky, its windows dark, its doors still locked. A flag hung limp on its pole. The playground equipment stood motionless, swings hanging straight down, slide waiting for children who hadn't arrived yet.
Too early. Much too early. The sun had barely cleared the rooftops. School was hours away.
Bill stopped walking.
Duo stopped beside him.
Chewgumma bumped into them both.
"Kookie confused," the Kookie announced. "Kookie expected fire. Kookie expected screaming. Kookie got... empty building. With swings."
"Yeah," Bill said quietly. "I see it."
He stared at the playground. At the empty swings. At the slide that hadn't been melted by any apocalypse. At the hopscotch grid chalked on the asphalt, its lines still straight, its numbers still in order.
No bodies. No fires. No mutant dogs sniffing around the jungle gym.
Just a school. Waiting for children who would arrive in a few hours, completely unaware that in another timeline, their world had burned.
Bill felt something loosen in his chest. Something he hadn't realized was clenched.
"Maybe," he said slowly, "it worked."
Duo nodded. "Maybe it did."
They stood there for a long moment, watching the empty school. Watching the motionless swings. Watching the ordinary, everyday evidence that the apocalypse had never happened and never would.
Behind them, Splock made a sound. Small. Almost inaudible.
Bill turned.
The Nocturnian was looking at the school too. At the playground. At the hopscotch grid. At the flag that wasn't burning.
His ears twitched once. Then again.
"I have determined," he said quietly, "that I am in favor of this timeline."
Bill almost laughed. Almost. "Yeah. Me too."
They walked on.
The York house materialized ahead—two stories of brownstone, neat and solid, its roof just visible above the trees. Bill's stride lengthened without conscious thought. Duo matched his pace. Splock followed, purple robe flowing, sandals slapping against the sidewalk.
Up close, nothing had changed. The same facade greeted them. The same manicured lawn. The same posters plastered on every available surface—lampposts, fences, even the sides of garbage cans. GENE YORK — YOUR MAN IN WASHINGTON! The face smiled down from all directions, promising things it would never deliver.
Bill scratched his head. "This is weird. We're back exactly where we started. Same place, same time. So we should see the same things, right? The same people? The same—"
"Assuming linear temporal mechanics," Splock interrupted, "and assuming our journey to Cleveland was not a collective hallucination induced by contaminated water sources, then yes. The events of 1990 should be precisely as we left them."
"You think we hallucinated Cleveland?"
"I think the probability is low but not zero. The human brain is remarkably susceptible to—"
"Let's just look."
They crept to the familiar window. The same window they'd peered through before, back when Hastings was still alive and Karen was still innocent and Delia was still—well, Delia.
Bill looked first.
His face went pale. His knees buckled. He grabbed the windowsill to keep from falling into the bushes.
"What?" Duo hissed. "What is it?"
Bill couldn't speak. He just pointed.
Duo pushed him aside and looked.
Inside the York living room, everything had changed—or rather, it had subtly, inexorably transformed in a manner both profound and ineffably delicate, like the slow, gentle swelling of a summer dawn over a village painted in watercolor, where each beam of light refracts in infinite tiny prisms on the varnished wooden floorboards, glinting off the polished corners of furniture that had once been ordinary but now seemed to possess an aura, a quiet dignity, a whisper of eternity. The walls, adorned with pictures whose frames caught the light in tiny glimmers, held an air of expectation, as if they themselves were leaning forward, curious, eager to witness the small, ineffable moments of domestic grace that now unfolded within their embrace. The air was redolent with faint traces of tea, vanilla, and something indefinably comforting, the kind of scent that clings to memory like a soft shadow, making the heart ache with unnameable longing.
Karen York sat on the couch, a figure of maternal serenity, her posture composed yet unassuming, the kind of posture cultivated over years of quiet observation of the world, of listening to the whisperings of her own soul, of learning that comfort can be an act of love as much as any grand gesture. In her hands she held a cup of tea—a delicate, bone-china vessel whose thin rim pressed lightly against her fingertips, warming them through some subtle alchemy of heat and porcelain—and the steam curled in languid, sinuous spirals, as if dancing with the very light that filtered through the lace curtains, which swayed ever so gently as though in time with some invisible, infinitely slow rhythm of life itself. On her lap, nestling against her chest with a small, trusting weight that somehow seemed both impossibly heavy and impossibly light, sat an eight-year-old girl, the child known as Delia, though in this moment she seemed almost less a child and more a crystallized emblem of all that is tender and miraculous in the human heart.
But not the Delia they knew—the Delia of memory, of previous encounters fraught with the erratic unpredictability of childhood and youth, with moods swinging like pendulums in grand, chaotic arcs. This Delia was perfected into the form of pure, shimmering innocence, as if some unseen hand had pressed a metaphorical stamp upon her very being, imprinting her with the quintessence of childhood delight. She wore a dress of pink—a pink so precise it could only exist in the imagination of someone who had spent decades cataloging the very concept of cuteness, a dress with ruffles that cascaded like tiny, delicate waves, and little white bows that perched like fragile birds on the fabric, each meticulously sewn, each bow a testament to the care and love that underpinned the universe. Her dark hair, glossy and smooth, had been brushed into ringlets that caught the light with a subtle, almost imperceptible gleam, bouncing gently with each imperceptible movement she made, each motion an echo of joy and innocence. In her hands, she clutched a plush bunny, its ears long and floppy, its nose pink, its very existence a declaration that the world, at least in this corner, was governed by kindness and softness rather than chaos or cruelty.
And she was singing.
"The sun is rising in the sky, a brand new day is passing by, the flowers bloom, the birds all sing, oh what joy the morning brings..."
Her voice, high and sweet, seemed to contain within it a physics-defying purity, the kind of purity that could cause an observer to weep simply by bearing witness. It was pitched to perfection, entirely innocent, filled with the untainted joy of one who has not yet been acquainted with the betrayals, the betrayals that time inevitably imposes, and it floated through the room like a feather on a whisper of wind, each note hovering in the air before dissolving into a soft, almost imperceptible glow. She swayed gently, as if the melody itself had become a physical entity to guide her movements, and her eyes were half-closed in that rare, radiant bliss that belongs only to childhood, to those few fleeting moments when one is entirely present in the world, unshackled by thought or fear or desire.
Karen reached out and stroked her daughter's hair, each motion slow and deliberate, a caress imbued with the quiet, monumental tenderness that defines a mother's love, a touch that seemed to carry within it the weight of uncountable generations, the unbroken lineage of care and protection. "That's beautiful, sweetheart. What a lovely song."
Delia beamed, her smile so incandescently joyful it seemed to push back the shadows in the room. "I learned it at school, Mommy. All the girls sing it. Becky says it's her favorite."
"Becky is such a nice friend."
"She's the best, Mommy. We're going to have a tea party tomorrow. She's bringing her doll and I'm bringing Mr. Bunnikins." She held up the plush rabbit with ceremonious reverence. "Mr. Bunnikins is very excited."
Karen smiled, a smile so steady, so unshakably calm, that it seemed to anchor the very air in the room. "I'm sure he is."
On the coffee table sat a plate of cookies. Heart-shaped. Iced in pink. Each cookie a miniature monument to domestic perfection, to a universe in which sweetness—not sorrow—prevailed, where every crumb bore witness to an ideal world unspoiled by hardship, where the very geometry of confectionary was calculated to inspire awe and longing simultaneously.
Ham Duo's jaw hung open. His eyes were the size of dinner plates. He looked like a man who had just witnessed a miracle and found it deeply, profoundly unsettling.
"Is that—" He couldn't finish.
Bill nodded weakly. "That's her."
"But she's—she's normal. She's—"
"A child," Splock said from behind them. His voice was strange. Hollow. "A normal human child. With normal human interests. And a stuffed rabbit."
They turned to look at him.
Splock's face was unreadable. But his ears were doing something—something complicated, something that involved several motions that Fortinbrasian ears were not designed to make. He looked like a man watching his own funeral and realizing they'd buried someone else.
"She's—" He stopped. Swallowed. "That is not the individual I encountered in 2000."
"Ya think?" Bill muttered.
Chewgumma pushed between them, his furry face pressing against the glass. His small red eyes took in the scene—the mother, the daughter, the bunny, the cookies. A sound emerged from his throat. Soft. Wistful.
"Kookie wants bunny," he said. "Kookie wants pink bunny with floppy ears. Kookie never had bunny. Kookie had hats. Hats not same."
Duo patted his arm absently. "We'll get you a bunny. Later."
Inside, Delia's song drew to a hesitant, lingering close, each note tapering into the air like the last thread of a spider's web in a sunbeam, vibrating just long enough to make the walls seem to hold their breath, as if the very furniture—the couch with its gentle sag in the middle, the polished coffee table, the lace curtains—were leaning forward to listen, to honor this brief, fragile embodiment of harmony. Her small hands, which moments before had been conducting the invisible orchestra of morning joy, lowered themselves in a slow, almost ceremonial descent, as if gravity itself had conspired to make her movements deliberate, ritualistic, and therefore worthy of veneration.
Her eyes, still half-closed in the afterglow of melody, flicked to the plate of cookies. They were no ordinary cookies. They were heart-shaped, pinkly iced, and the icing gleamed under the filtered sunlight like tiny, sugary mirrors reflecting the perfection of a world untouched by sorrow. Delia's fingers extended toward the nearest confection, and in that extension, one could see the entire choreography of polite childhood: the thumb securing the delicate body of the cookie, the forefinger providing gentle support, and, most importantly, the pinkie—elevated, poised, arching in the quintessential sign of genteel refinement, as if a single dropped crumb might undo the entire moral fabric of the universe.
She lifted the cookie toward her mouth with the care of someone handling an ancient manuscript, and as her lips made contact, the dough yielded with a soft, gratifying crunch that sounded to her, and to anyone who had ears refined to the music of domestic bliss, like a miniature celebration. Her jaw moved slowly, methodically, rhythmically—chewing not just to consume, but to honor the sacred cycle of creation and sustenance, as though each bite contained within it the whole story of human delight, the sweetness of sun, the patience of mothers, the innocence of mornings.
And yet, even as her teeth sank into the cookie, crumbs—tiny renegades of sugar and flour—escaped, defying her careful handling. They fell, one by one, like snowflakes that had forgotten to follow the rules of weather, settling upon the pristine pink fabric of her dress, the soft ruffles now briefly adorned with miniature pale storms of confectionary debris. Each crumb had a distinct weight, a distinct angle, a tiny shadow beneath it, as though insisting on being noticed, as though demanding that the universe acknowledge its brief, glittering existence before it was swept away.
Karen, seated with an air of eternal patience that might have been honed over countless generations, watched this delicate unfolding of chaos. With a hand that was both gentle and absolute, she brushed the crumbs away, lifting them as if they were fallen stars, restoring the cosmic order with a subtle motion that took less than a second and yet seemed to contain the patience of centuries. The cloth of her fingers made contact with the dress, the crumbs scattering like tiny echoes of the universe's insistence on small joys, until the fabric lay pure once more, awaiting the next inevitable storm of sugar.
Delia's pinkie remained elevated throughout the process, a flag of elegance and intention, a declaration that even in the act of eating, one could observe dignity. She chewed, deliberately, slowly, her small jaw moving with all the precision of a master craftsman, ensuring that every fragment of cookie was acknowledged, celebrated, and transformed into nourishment for both body and soul. Occasionally, a tiny speck of icing caught in the curve of her lip, and she would barely notice, for in this moment, she was entirely absorbed in the holy practice of savoring.
Finally, after what felt like minutes but was in fact mere seconds, she swallowed, and a sense of completion spread across her small features, as if she had just participated in a rite of quiet, domestic significance that would echo in the room long after the crumbs had been swept away. She looked up at Karen, eyes bright with the afterglow of song and sustenance, and spoke with the softest, most radiant certainty:
"I love you, Mommy."
Karen's hand, still hovering over the freshly purified surface of pink ruffles, lowered slowly. She returned the declaration not with fanfare but with a simple, infinite tenderness, the kind of love that saturates every corner of a home and lingers in the air long after the moment has passed.
"I love you too, sweetheart," she said, and in that quiet exchange, in the hovering crumbs, the elevated pinkie, the ritualized chewing and swallowing, the air itself seemed to sigh in contentment, the room swelling imperceptibly with the absurd, limitless perfection of ordinary, unremarkable, and yet utterly miraculous domestic love.
Bill looked at Splock. Splock looked at Bill. Duo looked at the ceiling, as if hoping for divine intervention.
Chewgumma pressed his nose harder against the glass, leaving a smudge.
"Kookie really wants bunny."
Bill straightened his shoulders. "I'm going to the door. I'm ringing the bell. I'm walking inside."
Ham Duo's face achieved a level of disbelief previously unknown in the galaxy. "Have you lost what's left of your mind? That's Counter-Dirk in there! And Delia! And probably Dr. Hastings—the guy who is absolutely, definitely, one hundred percent not a Viking but absolutely a robot who has already sent us through time twice with stolen Disruptors!"
From behind them, Splock's voice drifted over. "I would like to note, for the record, that while the name Hastings does mean 'descendant of Hastein,' and Hastein was historically a Viking chieftain, the constant reiteration of the phrase 'not a Viking' has begun to feel like a personal criticism of my earlier—"
"SHUT UP ABOUT THE VIKING THING!" Bill whirled on him. "Nobody's blaming you! We're all blaming the situation! And I am DONE sneaking around. I am done with fire escapes that collapse. I am done with peeking through windows like a pervert. I am going to walk up to that door, ring the bell, and see what happens."
"What about the Alien Historian?" Duo pressed. "He could materialize in the living room at any moment and send us all back to Cleveland without so much as a by-your-leave. He doesn't even need a Disruptor for that!"
"Then I'll deal with him too." Bill's jaw set. "I am tired of being afraid of things that haven't happened yet. That's the problem with time travel—you're always worried about what's already happened but also what hasn't happened but might happen because of what already happened. It's enough to make a guy miss simple things. Like war. Or court-martials."
He turned to Chewgumma. "You. Stay here. Wait for us."
Chewgumma's furry face fell. "Kookie not come?"
"You'll attract attention. You're seven feet tall and covered in fur. This is 1990. People notice things like that."
"Kookie thinks this is alien-ism." The Kookie's small red eyes narrowed. "Kookie knows his rights. Organization of United Planets Resolution 47-B clearly states that all sentient beings have equal access to—"
"Splock's an alien. He's coming."
"Splock has pointy ears. Pointy ears hide under hat. Kookie cannot hide under hat. Kookie tried. Hats too small. Hats get eaten." He patted his stomach mournfully. "Kookie will wait. Kookie will be sad. But Kookie will wait."
He waddled to a bush and sat down heavily, his massive form barely concealed by the inadequate foliage. A paw emerged, waving them toward the house.
"Go. Kookie watch. Kookie judge."
Duo shook his head. "This is suicide. You know that, right? We're walking into the lion's den. The lion being Counter-Dirk, who has already killed his wife in front of us in one timeline, and Delia, who—"
"I know." Bill started walking. "But I'm done hiding."
He knocked.
The sound echoed through the quiet neighborhood. Birds sang somewhere. A dog barked in the distance. For a long moment, nothing happened.
Then, from inside, a voice. Calm. Composed. Utterly normal.
"Come in. It's open."
Bill looked back at Duo. Duo looked at the sky, as if asking the universe why it had abandoned him. Splock stood rigid, his new purple robe trembling slightly in the breeze.
"Well," Bill said, pushing the door open, "I'm knocking on death's door. Might as well step through."
He gestured. They followed.
The hallway was spacious, richly appointed. Real wood paneling. Tasteful artwork. A small table with fresh flowers in a vase. The kind of entryway that suggested money, class, and absolutely no connection to the chaos they'd witnessed in other timelines.
They found the kitchen.
Counter-Dirk sat at a breakfast table, a silk robe draped over his shoulders, a cup of coffee steaming beside his right hand. In his left hand, he held a newspaper. On the table before him, a plate of fresh pastries—croissants, danishes, the kind of breakfast that normal, non-evil people ate.
He looked up as they entered.
His hand moved toward a knife.
Duo tensed.
Counter-Dirk picked up the knife, calmly sliced a croissant in half, and spread butter on it. He took a bite. Chewed. Swallowed.
"Good morning," he said. His voice was pleasant. Mild. The voice of a man who had never tortured anyone in his entire life. "Can I help you? If you're here about Karen's charity drive, I'm afraid we've already met our quota for the month. The community has been very generous."
Bill blinked. Duo stared. Splock's ears did something complicated.
Ham Duo's eyes drifted to the newspaper in Counter-Dirk's hands. The front page screamed with election news. A large headline proclaimed:
YORK PROMISES PARADISE: "A BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR ALL"
Below it, a photograph of Counter-Dirk shaking hands with children. Smiling. Looking for all the world like a man who genuinely cared.
Duo leaned toward Bill. "The posters. On garbage cans. The headline. If he'd changed—if he'd become a normal person—he wouldn't still be running for Congress. Normal people don't do that."
Splock's voice was barely a whisper. "Unless the Historian retrained him. Perfected the role. A truly effective politician must appear genuine. Perhaps this is the final iteration—the perfected lie."
Counter-Dirk tilted his head. "I'm sorry, what was that? The campaigning has done a number on my hearing. All those rallies. All those microphones. You'll have to speak up."
Bill opened his mouth.
The kitchen door swung open with a gentle creak, the hinges murmuring like distant, sleepy witnesses to the unfolding of another morning, and there, framed in the doorway as though the world itself had paused to behold her, entered Delia.
She was wearing the pink dress with ruffles and little white bows, a dress so improbably perfect it seemed to have been spun from the sunlight itself, stitched together by invisible hands devoted entirely to the propagation of charm and delight. The ruffles cascaded in tiny, measured waves around her small legs, catching the morning light in gentle glimmers, each fold alive with motion, as if the fabric were breathing alongside her. Her hair was flawless, each ringlet coiled with an almost unnatural precision, bouncing in perfect, joyous arcs with each of her steps, swaying in synchrony with the subtle rhythm of her heartbeat and the quiet murmurings of the kitchen itself.
In her hands she clutched the plush bunny from earlier, a creature of such softness and sweetness that it could easily have been mistaken for a fragment of clouds given corporeal form. Its floppy ears dragged lightly on the floor, tracing tiny arcs, as if bowing to the perfection of the moment, and its pink nose twitched ever so slightly, caught up in the gravity of Delia's radiant presence. She carried him with a mixture of solemn duty and uncontainable delight, a child guarding a treasure while also celebrating its very existence.
Splock's reaction, by contrast, was immediate and comically disproportionate. His ears shot straight up. His spine stiffened. His entire body adopted a posture that might have been intended for combat, though it resembled more the tension of a grasshopper caught in sudden sunlight than anything tactical. His purple robe quivered, betraying his inner alarm.
Delia, however, paid no mind. She did not look at him, did not even acknowledge his flailing, upright ears, as she ran forward with the kind of movement that was both urgent and graceful, a tiny embodiment of kinetic joy. She reached Counter-Dirk and flung herself into his arms with the weightless determination of someone who believed in hugs as forces capable of rearranging the universe.
"Good morning, Daddy!" she declared, her voice ringing like a bell whose tone had been polished by decades of morning suns, high, sweet, and completely invulnerable to any malice. Her eyes sparkled, reflecting the ambient light, and in her expression was a purity so dense, so overwhelmingly concentrated, that it seemed capable of rewriting the laws of reason in anyone who looked upon her.
Counter-Dirk's face softened. Actually softened. The expression that crossed it was something so unexpected, so unguarded, that Bill's gaze faltered. Genuine, unfeigned affection spread across the lines of his face, smoothing out years of habitual sternness as if it had never existed at all.
"Good morning, princess. How did you sleep?"
"Like a baby! Mr. Bunnikins kept me safe from the monsters all night." She held up the plush rabbit, whose ears drooped slightly under the weight of such an announcement. "He's very brave."
"I'm sure he is." Counter-Dirk kissed the top of her head, a gentle, reverential gesture, and she leaned into it, small arms still wrapped around him, rocking slightly as though her very body were a pendulum of pure affection.
"Now, princess, we have guests. Why don't you say hello?"
Delia turned, her eyes sweeping slowly over Bill. Over Duo. Over Splock. Her gaze paused momentarily, just long enough to register that these were new faces, strangers in her universe, but then moved on, unperturbed, entirely without fear. There was no recognition, no predatory spark, no suspicion, only the polite, slightly curious attentiveness of a well-brought-up child encountering visitors in her home, assessing them as one might observe a novel flower: interesting, worthy of notice, but neither dangerous nor remarkable beyond its mere existence.
She curtsied. Actually curtsied. The pink skirt flared outward like the petals of a perfectly symmetrical bloom as she dipped with precise, measured motion, her small hands clasped just so, and her head tilted in an arc that was neither rushed nor hesitant but perfectly balanced between formality and innocence.
"Good morning, gentlemen," she said, her voice pure, clear, perfectly modulated, each syllable carefully enunciated as if she were sculpting air into music. "Would you like a pastry? Daddy's pastries are very good. He gets them from the bakery on the corner. Mrs. Rosenstein says they're the best in Brooklyn." She pointed to the plate, the gesture delicate, precise, almost ceremonial, as though she were offering them not merely baked goods, but a tangible piece of the world's goodness itself.
Bill stared at the pastries. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "Uh—no. No thank you. I'm—I'm fine." Poison, he thought. Definitely poison. This is how they get you. With pastries.
Ham Duo crouched, lowering himself to Delia's eye level. His face serious—the expression of a scientist confronting a specimen both fascinating and potentially dangerous.
"Delia," he said carefully, "I need to ask you something. And I need you to be completely honest."
Delia nodded solemnly, the motion slow, deliberate, almost ritualistic, as if she were acknowledging the gravity of a council meeting in which the fate of worlds might be decided by a single, considered nod.
"Do you ever feel the urge to—" He searched for words, "—spit on anyone? Or make inappropriate comments? Or... proposition strange men with interesting ears?"
Delia's eyes widened in a near-perfect, symmetrical oval of shock. Her mouth formed a precise O, each muscle in her small face aligned in perfect orchestration, as if the very laws of facial expression had conspired to convey disbelief.
"Oh no!" she exclaimed, shaking her head with vigorous, almost balletic energy, her ringlets bouncing like tiny exclamation points, her plush bunny bouncing slightly against her chest. "That would be very bad! Mommy says good girls don't do things like that. Good girls are polite and kind and share their toys and never, ever spit." Her tiny hands lifted in an almost orchestral gesture of moral condemnation. "Did someone do that? That's horrible! They must be very naughty!"
Even as her words filled the air, there was a sense that the universe had contracted slightly, as if the sheer concentration of propriety, sweetness, and unblemished innocence in this child was enough to make ordinary laws—of gravity, of biology, of social conduct—pause in awe.
Ham Duo straightened slowly. His face had gone pale under its layer of grime.
He turned to Bill. His lips moved. The words were barely audible.
"That's not her. That's not the same kid. That's—someone else. A replacement. A pod person. Something."
Splock's hand moved. From somewhere in his ridiculous purple robe, he produced a small device—a rectangular box with two lights, one red and one green. He pointed it at Delia.
The green light flashed.
Bill squinted. "Hold on. I know that thing. It's from *Spark Truck*. The episode where Smock and Circ haul the shipment of screaming pillows to the meditation planet. 'Kill Dzen-Dzen!' I watched it seventeen times. Their scanner had an ORANGE light."
Splock's ears twitched. "The AL307 diode emits at 655 nanometers—objectively red. The orange appearance in 'Kill Dzen-Dzen!' was a post-production artifact. Lavender scent compounds shifted the color spectrum, so the editors simply dubbed the dialogue to call it orange rather than reshooting. The prop was always red. The episode's dialogue is historically inaccurate."
Bill's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "They... they changed the words because the COLOR was wrong?"
"It was more cost-effective than reshooting the scene. The actress who played Circ had already been cryogenically preserved between seasons. Reanimating her would have exceeded the episode budget."
Ham Duo grabbed Bill's arm. "Can we focus? The scanner. The child. The fact that she's not trying to sit on anyone's lap and whisper inappropriate things?"
Bill looked at Delia. At the green light. At Splock's device with its stubbornly red LED.
"Evil level," Splock said flatly, "zero percent. Politeness level... off the scale. The device cannot register readings this high. It is literally maxed out."
Bill stared at the green light. At Delia's innocent face. At Counter-Dirk buttering another croissant like the most normal man in the world.
"What," he said, "the hell is going on here?"
The kitchen door swung open again, and Karen York walked in. She was carrying a basket of laundry—the kind of mundane, domestic detail that seemed utterly alien in this house of secrets and timelines.
"Gene, you didn't tell me we were having company." She set the basket down, wiped her hands on her apron, and smiled at the trio with genuine warmth. "I would have made more coffee. Baked something."
Counter-Dirk shrugged amiably. "They just showed up. Spontaneous visit. Very friendly."
"Men are useless about these things." Karen shook her head, still smiling. She picked up her husband's empty coffee cup and carried it to the sink, running water over it with the easy grace of someone who had done this a thousand times.
Bill, Duo, and Splock retreated to a corner. The kind of corner where people go to have whispered conversations while pretending they're not having whispered conversations.
"Okay," Bill breathed. "Hypothetical. What if the Alien Historian screwed up? What if this timeline—this version of events—doesn't have Hastings? Doesn't have Alexander? Doesn't have any of it?"
Duo raised an eyebrow. "You think the Historian made a mistake?"
"I think he's arrogant. Arrogant people make mistakes. And if he did—if there's no embryo, no plan, no nothing—then we can just... leave. Go home. Pretend this never happened."
"And how do we check? Just ask? 'Hey, Karen, by the way, is your daughter secretly carrying the reborn spirit of an ancient conqueror? No? Cool, we'll be going.'"
Bill opened his mouth. Closed it.
Duo grinned. "I have a better idea. We take the kid. We find a doctor. We do one of those—what do they call them? The things that look inside you without cutting?"
"Ultrasound," Splock supplied.
"Right. Ultrasound. We scan her. If there's nothing there, we bring her back. Apologize. Blame it on a mix-up. If there IS something there—" He made a gesture that could have meant anything. "—we figure out next steps."
Splock's ears twitched. "That would constitute kidnapping. A felony in most jurisdictions. Punishable by—"
"Military necessity," Duo interrupted. "We're operating under military necessity."
"We're not military. You're a pirate. I'm a science officer on detached duty. Bill is—"
Bill held up a hand. "Splock. Shut up. If you don't shut up, I will personally make sure you end up back in that strip club with the eighteen-year-old version of Delia. The one with the Asia-sized rear end. The one who called you 'bunny.' She's still waiting, Splock. She's out there, somewhere in time, and she wants her bunny back."
Splock's mouth closed. His ears flattened. His entire body seemed to shrink slightly.
"That," he said quietly, "is not necessary."
"I think it's very necessary. Now stay here and look innocent."
Bill walked toward Karen. His posture shifted. His face arranged itself into something that was probably meant to be charming but looked more like a man trying to smile through intestinal distress.
"Ma'am? Mrs. York? Karen?" He cleared his throat. "We're from... special services. Government. We're conducting routine health screenings for adopted children in the area. Making sure everyone's... healthy. Growing properly. You know."
Karen looked up from the sink, her expression curious but not suspicious.
"And you have a car? To take her?"
Duo shot Bill a look. We don't have a car.
"We have a car," Bill said smoothly. "Waiting outside. Ready to go. We'll take her to the best pediatric specialist in Brooklyn. Top of the line. Very thorough."
Karen dried her hands on a towel. "You know, that's actually perfect. Delia hasn't had a check-up in months. I've been meaning to schedule one, but with Gene's campaign—" She waved vaguely. "You know how it is."
"Absolutely. Politics. Very busy."
Karen called toward the hallway, her voice carrying with the gentle authority and warmth of a summer morning over a sleepy village green. "Delia! Sweetheart! Come here!" The words lingered in the air, curling around the furniture, brushing against the light filtering through the curtains, as though the very atmosphere waited for her response.
Moments later, Delia appeared, stepping into the room as if the world itself had arranged itself around her arrival, each motion a symphony of grace and unintentional majesty. She still clutched Mr. Bunnikins, the plush rabbit whose floppy ears brushed against her small knees and whose pink nose twitched in silent admiration of her steady, radiant steps. Her ringlets bounced with each step, tiny coils of hair that seemed to capture the sunlight, coil it up, and release it back into the room in tiny arcs of joy. Her dress—the same pink confection of ruffles and bows—swirled lightly around her legs, each fold catching the morning light like a miniature stage, choreographing her movements as if the fabric itself understood the sacred duty of adorning her small, perfectly formed self.
"Yes, Mommy?" she said, her voice a crystalline note of politeness and delight, resonating in the kitchen as if it had the power to suspend time itself for a fraction of a heartbeat.
"These nice men are going to take you for a check-up. A doctor's appointment. To make sure you're healthy."
Delia's face brightened as though a thousand little suns had simultaneously chosen that exact moment to shine directly upon her. "A doctor? Like a real doctor? With a stethoscope and everything?" Her small hands tightened slightly around Mr. Bunnikins, lifting him as if to show him the gravity and excitement of the moment, while her eyes shone with innocent anticipation, reflecting every detail of the room—the polished countertop, the sunlight on the floor, the corners of the ceiling, each ordinary object suddenly elevated to the grandeur of her perception.
"The very best kind," Bill assured her, speaking in tones meant to comfort, yet utterly helpless against the overwhelming radiance of her delight.
Karen crouched gracefully, folding her knees beneath her as though the universe had shrunk to accommodate this moment of maternal devotion. She straightened her daughter's dress with slow, deliberate care, smoothing each ruffle, adjusting each bow, as if the world's order itself depended on the precise alignment of pink fabric. "Now, you listen to these gentlemen, okay? And remember—no sugar before the appointment. You know how your tummy gets." Her hands lingered for a heartbeat longer than necessary, brushing a wayward curl, a wayward seam, each motion an unspoken meditation on care, patience, and the eternal art of motherhood.
"Yes, Mommy," Delia replied, her voice modest, careful, yet still bright enough to make the air itself feel lighter, as though her agreement had physically purified the room of any residual tension.
"And tell the doctor about your allergies," Karen continued, tilting her head slightly as she listed each one with maternal precision, "The strawberries. The pollen in spring. The—"
Splock's ears twitched, betraying an involuntary curiosity. "Allergies? According to my—" He stopped. Swallowed. "I mean, that's very thorough. Good to know."
Karen straightened, her own posture regaining the quiet authority of a woman who had, in a single moment, transmitted all knowledge necessary for survival, comfort, and happiness to the tiny vessel of life before her. "She's all yours. Bring her back in one piece?"
"Absolutely. One piece. Guaranteed."
They began moving toward the door. Bill's hand closed gently around Delia's, small, warm, soft, utterly trusting. Her fingers curled around his in the most natural, unthinking gesture of assurance, as if she had always known that the world was composed of hands like his, and that this connection, fleeting and delicate, was part of the natural order of life. It felt wrong. Everything about this felt wrong—the enormity of her cuteness, the way the room seemed to pause for her every movement, the way her small wrist rested against his, the perfect tilt of her head, the little rabbit she carried like a talisman of innocence. Yet simultaneously, it felt inevitable, like gravity itself had bent to accommodate her walk down the hallway, like the universe had conspired for this very crossing of hands and hearts, and nothing else mattered at all.
They reached the sidewalk, that gray strip of mundane urbanity that, in the presence of Delia, suddenly seemed like a stage upon which the drama of human innocence could be enacted with almost unbearable grandeur. The sun slanted across the pavement, glinting faintly on cracks and small stones, catching dust motes in the air that danced lazily as though waiting for the arrival of someone capable of transforming ordinary moments into eternal memory.
Duo stepped forward to the curb and raised his arm with exaggerated purpose, a beacon to the invisible, impatient traffic gods. Cars passed. And passed. And passed, their tires humming over the asphalt like distant timpani in a symphony that no one but the adults seemed to notice.
Delia looked up at Bill, her head tilting slightly, her large, luminous eyes widening until they seemed to encompass not just the man before her but the very concept of honesty itself. There was a moment—a breath—where it seemed she was staring directly into the soul of morality, weighing every possible nuance of truth and falsehood, and finding them wanting.
"You said there was a car." Her voice, small and soft, carried a weight that threatened to bend the air itself. It was accusing, precise, delivered with the clarity of a prosecutor reading from a long-forgotten, sacred lawbook, each word punctuated by the barely perceptible quiver of her lower lip.
"There is. It's coming." Bill's voice, calm and reassuring, wavered under the gravity of her gaze, as though the universe itself had shifted slightly out of alignment in response to her scrutiny.
"You said it was waiting."
"It's... waiting somewhere. Nearby. Just not... here." He faltered, helpless, while the sun caught on one of Delia's ringlets, which gleamed like a halo of perfect chocolate-brown light.
Delia's lower lip protruded further, taking on a fullness and weight entirely disproportionate to her small face, as if it were now a physical emblem of cosmic betrayal. The same lower lip that, in another timeline, had once formed part of something dark, something that caused unease, now had been transformed into a living, breathing monument of innocent distress, the embodiment of a child on the verge of tears for reasons far more serious than the simple passage of automobiles.
"You LIED." She said it with absolute solemnity, each syllable stretched in slow-motion clarity, as if she were carving the accusation into the very air itself. "You're a LIAR."
Her voice rose with the precise timbre of indignation that could topple empires, correct injustices, or summon the very laws of physics to attention. "My daddy says liars go to a special place where they have to sit on spiky chairs forever." She tilted her small head slightly, eyes narrowing in judgment, and in that look was the terrifying certainty of universal justice delivered by someone not yet eight years old.
Bill glanced at Duo. Duo glanced at the sky, as if seeking guidance from distant clouds, cosmic traffic signals, or perhaps the very meaning of honesty itself. Neither dared to respond further.
A taxi pulled up, its yellow paint gleaming dully under the indifferent city sun, and the engine's rumble seemed almost to hesitate, aware of the enormous importance of what was about to happen within its cramped interior.
Bill practically threw Delia into the back seat, though "threw" somehow lost all menace when applied to someone so small, so impossibly fragile, that the motion seemed more like placing a delicate porcelain figurine into a nest of clouds than anything else. Delia landed with a soft bounce, her ringlets swinging in perfect arcs, Mr. Bunnikins held tightly against her chest, and a faint squeak of delight—or perhaps shock—escaped her lips as if to punctuate the grandeur of her entrance.
Duo slid in beside her, occupying his seat with the casual competence of someone accustomed to absurdity but still awed by it.
Splock followed, moving with the painstaking care of a man navigating a field of landmines, except the mines were not explosives but tiny human limbs, delicate curls, and the ever-watchful eyes of a child whose innocence could strike fear into the hearts of men. He settled rigidly in the corner, as far from Delia as physically possible, his purple robe bunched like a taut sail, his hands folded as though praying for survival, his ears flattened into a state of permanent distress. His gaze was fixed straight ahead, his lungs apparently deciding it was safer not to function entirely.
Delia, for her part, did not move at all in a conventional sense. She sat perfectly upright, small knees together, tiny feet dangling like pendulums too short to reach the floor, and Mr. Bunnikins perched proudly on her lap. She turned her head only slightly, enough to see Duo's face, and blinked in a measured, deliberate fashion, as if to acknowledge his existence without disturbing the delicate equilibrium of the car. The pink ruffles of her dress spilled around her like a miniature kingdom, each fold immaculately arranged by invisible hands devoted entirely to the aesthetics of childhood perfection.
Bill climbed into the front passenger seat, his own motions suddenly feeling clumsy and intrusive in contrast to the delicate, orchestrated serenity behind him.
The driver, a heavyset man with a mustache so thick it seemed to warp gravity around it, looked back at his passengers. At the purple robe. At the seven-foot-tall furry creature glimpsed nervously through the window, still hiding in the bushes. And at the little girl in pink, whose mere presence seemed to make the air shimmer slightly, as if reality itself were deferring to her perfection.
"Where to?" he asked, his voice carrying a note of cautious curiosity, or perhaps dread—the kind that arises when confronted with forces beyond ordinary comprehension: oversized robes, talking fur, and the delicate personification of absolute innocence.
Bill gave him the address of a medical clinic he had seen on a sign. "And step on it. This is an emergency."
The driver raised an eyebrow. "What kind of emergency?"
"Kindergarten. Very serious."
The taxi pulled away from the curb, tires hissing against the asphalt like minor exclamations of consent, the city flowing past in a blur of gray and yellow, and within the back seat, Delia remained a serene, unflappable presence, rocking slightly with the motion of the car, Mr. Bunnikins clutched to her chest, each ruffle of her dress fluttering like a banner announcing the triumph of innocence over chaos.
Behind them, in the bushes, Chewgumma waved sadly with one paw, a soft, mournful gesture toward a world in which the pink bunny he had been promised remained tantalizingly just out of reach. His small red eyes glimmered with longing, and for a brief moment, it seemed the universe itself paused to mourn the tiny tragedies of the furry and the small alike.