2: Assembly Required
Last time in 2.17 Seconds into Never, Meg Atomic had somehow jumped back to the time of the dinosaurs and was about to get messily devoured by a Tyrannosaurus Rex! Meanwhile, back in the present day…
Liz Flask’s first reaction upon seeing her best friend disappear before her eyes was to reach for her phone and call Meg’s mother. She could help! She could do something! Then she paused. How was she going to explain this to Super Soccer Mom, exactly? What would she say? “Oh, hey, Meg spaced out on me and then she disappeared, I don’t know where, sorry about that, hope she turns up later?”
Liz didn’t even know, now that she thought of it, what Super Soccer Mom could do. As far as she knew Meg had never vanished anywhere before. Some superheroes had; Will the Teleporting Wonder for example, missing since ‘92. But not Meg. This was new. This was weird.
Weird gave her an idea. There was a team she knew of that dealt occasionally in weird. As she didn’t have any better ideas, Liz scrolled through her phone for a particular contact. “Hey, Gassy! How’ve you been?”
“I hate that name,” Gaseous Girl growled through the phone.
“Yeah, sorry. Look, I need your help. And your friends maybe. Doesn’t one of you work with time and space and all?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Then, “Yep, we should talk.”
Liz saw them the minute she walked into the grungy old pizza place on the edges of the city. They were the only group of four there, the others being a couple on a date and one or two people who’d just come in to hit the buffet on their lunch break. Gaseous Girl saw her standing in the door and waved her over. “Hi,” she said, “So you know me, that’s the Wombat, he burrows, and next him is Ron Raven, he talks to the forces of nature. Beside me here is who you’re really here for, the-”
“I’m sorry,” Liz said. “You…burrow?”
“He does,” Gaseous Girl said, “And he’s unstoppable doing it. Anyway, this is the Green Moth.”
The Green Moth said nothing, only waved her hand in a vague gesture of acknowledgment. Nothing about her suggested anything the least bit green or mothlike.
“Okay, that’s everyone, so-” Gaseous Girl began.
“Something’s gone funny,” the Green Moth said. She’d narrowed her eyes, staring at a point past Liz, past the restaurant. “There’s a new line. New events. New…everything.”
“That’s not good,” the Wombat said.
“No,” said Gaseous Girl. “Liz, we may have to get back to you, something big’s going on-”
Liz felt a sudden panic. “I think I know what it is,” she said. “My friend Meg, Meg Atomic, she disappeared, and she’s got gravity powers plus she can predict probability and stuff and I thought maybe-”
“What do you mean disappeared?”
“Just that! Poof! Vanished! Right in front of me! She was there and then she wasn’t!” Liz worried she might be drawing attention from the other pizza place customers but they didn’t seem to care. Perhaps they were used to this happening with Gaseous Girl and her friends.
The Green Moth turned her full attention on Liz. “Disappeared…” she murmured. Then her eyes widened. “Oh no. Oh no.”
“What?” Liz said. “What’s going on?”
“She made a new timeline. Branched off time. She’s somewhere in the past, and now there’s a new past, so it’s running away, and now it’s growing!”
“Oh,” Liz said, and for the first time she felt almost relieved. “Okay. So you can travel back and get her and bring her back so it never happened, right?”
There was a very long pause. The Green Moth stared at her. Ice ran down her back. “Right?” Liz said again.
“She split time,” the Green Moth said slowly. “Made a new line. Nothing made is ever unmade.”
“So how do we…” Liz began.
The Wombat wasn’t great at any of the science, just the burrowing, but for once he got to the answer before anyone else did. “We don’t,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Woah 😳