12: You're Here, There's Nothing I Fear
Previously on 2.17 Seconds Into Never, while Meg and her past self are with Liz Flask and the angel Constance trying to undo Meg’s changes to the timeline, back on the Titanic Constance’s ex-boyfriend the Antichrist is about to arrive to battle the Green Moth and her friends...
Somewhere in the North Atlantic, April 14, 1912
Ron Raven had nothing to do, which unsettled him. His powers involved two areas: communing with the local ecosystem, and coming back to life after being killed. Unfortunately he wasn’t dead yet, and the North Atlantic ecosystem was mostly just freezing cold water and a fish or two, but he didn’t think the fish could help. He thought he sensed a kind of whale some leagues off, but he wasn’t sure if it could get there soon enough even at top speed. Ron Raven didn’t like that.
He and the Wombat were watching as the Green Moth tried to hold Time in place. Then all at once everything changed again as a burst of fire belched out of nowhere onto the deck, and out of the fire stepped a man in a grubby suit looking extremely ticked. “Hello, I’m Ben, I’m the Antichrist,” he announced. “They said God himself couldn’t sink this ship. Well, let’s give the other side a go, shall we?”
“Let’s not,” said Ron Raven calmly. A salmon leaped out of the water at a heroic speed and smacked the Antichrist right in the face.
“Second that,” said the Wombat, pulling out his reserve stock of wombombs and hurling every last one of them. Both the man and the salmon disappeared in another burst of fire and a cloud of smoke. The Wombat winced. “Ooh, sorry about your fish there.”
“It gave its life for-” Ron had just begun to intone when the Antichrist burst out of the cloud, and he was roaring mad.
“The angel sent you here, didn’t she? That stupid interfering brainless-” He added a number of other adjectives that not even Constance, the angel who once had dated him, would have said.
Ron said nothing. A full run of salmon leapt out of the water and plopped down on the Antichrist in a shower of fish and spray. “Stop that!” he shouted, spitting fire. “Stop that or I’ll-”
“Get him off the deck,” Ron said, very quickly and quietly to the Wombat, before calling up yet another small school of salmon and hurtling them into the Antichrist’s face. The Wombat, being out of his trademark square-shaped small explosives, went for the direct approach: he broke into a fast run and tackled the Antichrist bodily. Anyone would find themselves taken by surprise when fighting off fish by the dozen and then suddenly tackled by the Boundless Burrower, and even the Antichrist was no exception. He slipped, couldn’t regain his balance, and then both he and the Wombat lost their footing and fell right into the cold waters of the freezing Atlantic.
“I’ll get you for this!” the Antichrist spluttered the moment he surfaced. “I’ll get you all, just see if I don’t, I’ll devastate the planet I’ll rain fire on all of-”
Whatever else he might have said was interrupted as he was summarily swallowed by an extremely large sperm whale. There was a tremendous booming noise, followed by an equally tremendous splash.
That did it. The Green Moth had not moved a single centimeter all this time; her entire attention having been focused keeping the flash in the sky where it was, thereby pausing Time, the iceberg, the Titanic, and Gaseous Girl in their respective places. Now her attention flickered, just slightly, torn by the sound of a giant whale splashing. Time jerked into place again. The flash zipped away across the sky and disappeared.
“What did you do?” the Green Moth said, rounding upon Ron Raven.
Before he could answer, Gaseous Girl came rocketing out of the ocean, carrying a soaked and shivering Wombat. She landed triumphantly on the deck, smiling happily. “Ta-da! Melted that, saved him, saved everyone, what’s next?”
“Friggle,” the Green Moth said in a quiet voice, and Gaseous Girl was thoroughly shocked for the first time in her life.
“Welp, that’s it, we’re going back,” Constance said.
“Wait, what?” both Megs said.
“Not you, not either of you, forget the we, okay? Just me! Why I got into W.I.N.G. sometimes I wonder, I really do,” Constance said irritably. “Look, the timeline’s completely whacked and I have to go fix it okay? Cool. Bye!” She disappeared in a golden flash.
Present Meg Atomic, past Meg, and Liz Flask looked at each other, unsure of what to do. “I got a pack of Uno cards,” Liz offered.
Present Meg shrugged. “Why not?”
“Promise not to use your powers so’s to make it fair?”
“Always.”
And so they sat down to play Uno and wait to see whether Time itself would be saved.
Poor Wombat must be freezing! 🥶