“Hm…” he murmured in deep thought.

            “What?”

            “Got a debate going on in my head. I was going to turn the backup power off to make sure the place doesn’t run out of fuel sometime in the next nine months, but… maybe I should just let it run out. The hydrogen fuel would detonate and make an even bigger boom, maybe trigger the earthquake. It even could be the bomb.”

            “Probably safer to let it run out, then. We still got flashlights.”

            “Y-yeah. That’s where I’m leaning. Just don’t know if it’d be possible to get this place running again if we ever needed to without any fuel. All right. You ready?”

            Jace nodded nervously and squeezed his crystal. Wes gulped in air, held it, and sent them through time to his past’s last normal hour of the last normal day. The facility remained so undisturbed over the course of nearly a year, that the only change upon their arrival was that the lights were all off; even the temperature was the exact same.

            Flashlights came on, and the first thing Wes did was check the power plant. Peeking through the door and moving his beam across the chamber, he saw that the fuel was depleted—and that there was no bomb suddenly inside the place.

            “We have to sweep the lab thoroughly,” Wes instructed after closing the door. “Look for anything out of place, that wasn’t here nine months ago. A bomb should be pretty big if it takes out this whole facility and causes a sinkhole.  Unless, you know, the sucker’s nuclear.” He saw Jace’s eyes widen frightfully in his light’s glow, and tried to calm him down, “But I’m sure it’s not! Just focus. We’ll find it. No problem.”

            Jace took a moment to do his anti-stress breathing exercise, gave Wes an assuring nod, and then split off after they left the room so that they could cover more ground.

            Together, they skimmed the lab, then did a slower second tour. And then they went through the place a third time. They checked everywhere, and in everything that could possibly be opened. Even the bare lobby was covered. But across all the rooms, cabinets, trash cans, computer desks, and the vending machines, nothing explosive could be found within the darkness of the subterranean science lab.

            “We still have a half hour,” Wes said after they met back in the hallway intersection again. “If we get much closer, we’ll just go back in time and start over.”

            “What difference would that make? Maybe… we need to get even closer.”

            “I didn’t want to tempt fate on your behalf, bud. What good would that do, anyway? You think we’ll start hearing a ticking clock?”

            Jace shrugged. “I dunno, man. Maybe someone shows up to hand-deliver it. Are we sure we’ve checked everywhere? Maybe it’s in an air vent?”

            “Hold on… There is something else I want to check.”

            Jace followed him back out into the lobby, and then watched as he tried the elevator. It didn’t have power, either, although Wes did manage to pry open the doors with the crowbar and get a quick look inside. He backed out with a puzzled look.

            “The elevator has to be powered from the park side, but it must be cut off right now. Guess that means we can’t take it up and bash through the panels and dry wall as frightened arcade-kids scream and scatter.”

            “I think we should be more concerned that we’re now trapped down here.”

            “Yeah, that too, but we’ll figure that out when we get to it. My bigger point is, someone can’t hand-deliver the bomb, so how does it get in here?”

            “You still haven’t told me if we’ve actually checked everywhere.”

            “Well…” Wes hesitated. “I mean, I looked into it, but I didn’t step inside.”

            “Where? What are you talking about?”

            “The time machine chamber. I didn’t exactly give it a very close look. But, really, that wouldn’t be a good place to put one anyway, right? A big cave of solid rock? It would just dissipate and contain the blast. Unless the sucker’s… Uh, you know.”

            Jace looked unconvinced and sighed, “We have to look closer, dude.”

            “Ah, man, I really didn’t want to go in there. I’m telling you, it gives me serious eldritch horror vibes. Like, non-Euclidian geometry, space-out-of-place type crap.”

            “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Can we just check it? We’re talking about the future of Royal Valley here. And mine.”

            “All right, all right… I was just really hoping I wouldn’t have to.”

            Wes followed Jace this time, reluctantly. With time ticking away, he stopped at the chamber’s edge after opening the door once again. Jace had no problem jumping down into it and swinging his light around, but Wes still had some post-traumatic stress to overcome. The tentacles, pulling him into an abyss, even now felt fresh.

            “Wes, seriously, it’s okay. It’s cold and dark in here, but it’s fine.”

            “W-why don’t you do the looking around, since you’re in there already.”

            “It’s bigger than it looks from the outside. Just help me check the edges.”

            Wes closed his eyes, nodded nervously, and leapt down. He didn’t feel safe in the cavern, but he worked up the courage to at least look around with his light. The twelve-sided chamber was nearly featureless, other than the door and observation window on one face, and an enormous power conduit that suddenly ended in a clean, angled cut.

            “That must’ve connected to the time-sphere thing…” Wes said, giving it a quick study. “When it disappeared, it took the rest of the conduit with it.”

            “Cool. But I don’t see a bomb in here, either.”

            “I don’t know… Maybe the place just spontaneously explodes.”

            “We can’t give up, Wes!”

            “Then any other ideas? I’m willing to wait until we have five minutes left to see if it magically shows up, but then we’re getting out of here.”

            “But how would…” Jace trailed off as they both sensed something change.

            A faint breeze or noise, a subtle shift in air pressure, or a feeling that they were all of a sudden not alone—whatever it was, it made them start sweeping the cave with their lights again. Both beams came to a stop the moment they illuminated a frightening sight that caused Wes to stumble backwards, trip, and fall to the ground.

            A horizontal time portal had appeared, floating over the center of the bottom face. They watched as a few eyeless tentacles sprang out, “sniffed” the air, and then promptly retreated back into the void beyond time. Trembling, Wes got to his feet.

            “S-shit…” he stuttered. “What’s that… thing doing here?”

            A heavy, metallic object with a small glowing panel dropped out of the portal, landing on the ground with a heavy thud. Then the gateway promptly closed.

            “Is that…” Jace whispered, and looked at Wes. “Warren called it the Time Daemon, right? Did that thing just, like… crap out the bomb?”

            “I was about to say that…” Wes replied and cautiously approached it.

            The device was a solid box with no visible seams, or rivets or bolts, about the size of a footlocker. Aside from its small display with a timer ticking down—apparently starting at 20:00, it also had a red light that blinked every five seconds, accompanying a beeping sound. Wes leaned in for a closer look, then took out his quartz.

            “I tried this before, when I was cooped up in the hotel,” he explained to Jace. “You can send objects through time by using a countdown function.”

            “Yeah, okay, neat—j-just get rid of that thing now, whatever it takes.”

            “I’m putting in a date…” Wes murmured as he concentrated on scrolling through the years. “We don’t want this bomb to change history at any point…”

            “So where’s it going, then?”

            Wes didn’t know how to answer. He couldn’t just say “the true present,” as it would confuse or upset his nephew. Jace saw the future as something one could just go into, if they wanted to see flying cars and mega-tall sci-fi towers. But the concept that it actually had an upper boundary and a real, ticking “now” had ominous implications, which the kid shouldn’t need to be worrying about just yet along with everything else.

            “Some place… far, far into the future,” Wes replied.

            He activated the object-transfer five second countdown, and placed it on top of the bomb. The moment he did, a robotic female voice made a worrying announcement.

            “Intrusion detected. Proximity fuse activated. One minute remaining.”

            “Ah, shit!” Wes burst out. “C’mon, c’mon! Get it out of here!”

            “It’s not working!” Jace shouted. “Is the quartz broken again?”

            Wes got in close and examined the crystal’s interface, to see a flashing error message reading, “Unsuccessful transfer: Object mass over limit.”

            “Too much weight!” he explained. “Damn thing’s too heavy!”

            “Oh, crap. Oh, crap… U-uh…” Jace thought hard for a moment, and then held out his quartz for Wes to take. “Try both of them! Sync them up and try again!”

            “But—”

            “No time to argue, man! Just do it!”

            Wes exhaled and nodded, grabbed the crystal, set it to its slave setting, and placed it next to its mate. When he activated his quartz this time, the countdown appeared on both, with the bomb’s own numbers indicating that there were forty seconds left.

            “If it doesn’t work, we run to the elevator and…” Wes went quiet the instant the bomb disappeared in a flash, and air rushed in to fill the vacuum it left behind.

            “Did… Did it work?” Jace huffed. “Is it gone?”

            “Y-yeah… I think so. Let’s not stay here. We’ll seal the place, to be safe.”

            Jace was the first to get back into the control room. Once Wes joined him, they shut and locked the door together, and then promptly sped-walked back to the junction.

            “You didn’t send it into the past, right?” Jace fretted.

            “No, the far future. Trust me. We’re not about to be inside a pile of old rubble.”

            “But we did it, didn’t we? Royal Valley is safe? You still look freaked.”

            His heart rate settling down as he looked around like he was waiting for something to happen, Wes answered, “I just kind of expect to hear this reverberating echo, like that huge bomb messed up the local spacetime…”

            “Like what happened above King Arcade? When the quartz cracked?”

            “We should be more worried about ourselves. We can’t time travel our way out of here now. Elevator’s got no power. We could be trapped.”

            “Maybe… Maybe Warren will find us?”

            “The kid disappeared on us when he was investigating all this. I wouldn’t count on it. We just gotta hope there’s a way to get some power going again. Right now, I need a minute to calm down… That was… heavy, what we just went through.”

            They returned to lobby, where Wes plopped down on the waiting couch and used the glow of his phone’s screen to provide some illumination.

            After several minutes of rest, but in need of idle conversation to keep his mind off the situation, Jace asked, “So… are you going to live in the 80s for a few years?”

            “Wha-huh? Why do you think that?”

            “You’ve been obsessing over the decade. I won’t be surprised if, after the school year is done, you go back without me and hang out in 1984 for a while or something.”

            “An awesome year I never got to see, but, I don’t know what I’ll do. I know we gotta get you back home so you can survive your middle school years, but… I still feel like there isn’t enough for me in the… present to make me want to stay for too long.”

            “But you told me you would stay!”

            “Heh, well, yeah. For a while. But if I get another quartz, you know I’ll be checking out some other time periods. Couldn’t give up the chance.”

            “Just stop saying there’s nothing for you back in 2020. I told you, we could totally hang out more. And let Mom help find you a girlfriend,” he added, jokingly.

            “Don’t even kid around about that. Ugh.” He moaned. “Hey… Be right back.”

            “Where are you going now?” Jace asked as Wes rushed out of the lobby.

            “Got something else nagging at me. Wait right there.”

            Flashlight in hand, Wes returned to his on-site bedroom, where he glared at the wall safe again like it was his newest enemy. He bit his lip and tried one last time to resist, but his hand, already hovering near the keypad, seemed to move on its own. In a way hoping that it wasn’t powered so he wouldn’t have to see what his old-self had stashed away, he nevertheless tapped in “0304” and hit the enter key. Incorrect. Then he saw the notice in small text on the keypad, that it required six digits.

            He hesitated even longer before his second attempt, but once his fingers started punching digits, they did so quickly. He put in “030485”, and was disappointed that it worked and he heard the safe’s latch unlock. He let out an exasperated groan.

            “I really have to stop hanging onto things for so long…”

            He opened the little metal door and lit up the contents. There were only two objects inside. One was the photo of himself with his friends, in a familiar frame; it was the very same photograph that he kept on his desk at work. The second object was an instant new big mystery: a floppy disk in a plastic case, labeled “Toys Backup”.

            Before he could ponder it for long, he heard Jace shouting, “Wes! Come back!”

            Thinking he might somehow be in danger, Wes pocketed the floppy, slammed the safe door shut, and ran back into the darkness to the lobby.

            Warren was there, having appeared from nowhere. Jace, his flashlight down at his side, wordlessly stared at the ninja kid, who held his headgear under an arm.

            “H-he just… flashed in, r-right in front of me…” Jace stammered.

            “Warren?” Wes said and walked over. “You… look a little rough around the edges. Where have you been?”

            “Looking for you,” he huffed. “For months of my time. What the hell are you doing down here? I didn’t really want you to see this place.”

            “There was a bomb, and—”

            “A bomb?”

            “I guess ‘this’ you never… We’ll talk in a bit. We’re trapped down here. Quartzes are gone. So… Don’t suppose you have another pair we can borrow?”

            Warren let out a long groan, replying, “Okay, what did I miss?”