Chapter 8: Who's telling the truth?

March 12th, 1956

Rick was remembering a lot more now.

He had pretty much been able to piece together most of his life up to the point where Cadi had gained her powers. Mary was sitting on his bed silently as he wandered around his room as things came back to him.

“So… that bullet… Did you-use time powers to stop it?”

“Yes.”

Rick was quiet for a moment as he looked down at the fixed laptop on his desk, still dressed in fifties clothes.

“How does all of this time stuff even work? Don’t you have to be careful every step you take? I remember reading this short story about a guy going back in time and accidentally stepping on a butterfly, and it completely changed the future.” At this, Mary rolled her eyes.

“Oh please. Time isn’t that fragile. It’s more like a river. It tends to want to go a certain way, and if you throw a rock in a river, the water’s just going to move around it; but if you do something huge, like divert the river, then that’s when things start to change. But if you remove the anomaly diverting the river, then it goes back to how it’s supposed to be. My job is to make sure that time can flow uninterrupted in the way that it’s supposed to go. That includes making sure that the anomalies are out of the way and that everything is fine and dandy.”

Rick picked up a little notebook from his desk, keeping his back turned to her.

“So you’re saying that whatever is going to happen to my sister, you can’t help her.”

“I never said that.” Mary said obstinately. “I just… can’t… stop what’s going to happen…”

Rick glared at her. “Why not?!”

Mary looked rather uncomfortable.

“It’s just… I can’t tell you. If I told you, it could possibly divert the river…”

“Is that why you gave us that note?”

At this, Mary paused.

“What note?”

“When my parents found out about Cadi’s powers. The one that warned us not to tell anyone. You wrote that didn’t you?”

Mary sighed.

“Observant as always Rick.”

“You signed it “T”... So your real name starts with a t?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“Why did you give us that note?” he demanded, sitting on his desk and looking at her expectantly. Mary stared at him. It seemed that every single time he asked her a question, she had to figure out what she could and couldn’t tell him.

“I think you should try to remember more before I tell you that.” she told him standing up.

“Always with the mysteries!!” he yelled at her. “Maybe if you aren’t going to help her-I will!”

At this, she looked at him in confusion. Then, before she could react, Rick ran through the door.

“Wait!! Rick!!” she yelled, running after him.

Rick ignored her and quickly jumped through another door.

He was back in a snowy forest. Looking around, he ducked down into the bushes and waited.

“Rick!! Please! Come back!” he heard Mary’s desperate voice call out. “I’m only trying to help you!”

He peeked over the bushes and watched as she ran into the snowstorm that was starting to pick up. Then, he snuck back and quietly went back through the door.

Maybe this would give him enough time to find that other door again. She knew that Mary was trying to help him, but she had never said that his sister was apart of the time stream. Quietly, he started to look through doors, seeing memories of when he was a kid, and of high school, and Christmas, and…

“Rick? What are you doing?” a small voice asked.

He turned around to see his little sister standing there in her pink shirt and jeans.

“I’m trying to help you.”

“But how can you help me when you need to help yourself first?” she asked.

“But Cadi-this might be the only chance I get to help you-.”

“You can’t help me if you don’t wake up.”

“I think I heard something this way!”

Rick froze as he heard the voice of Harry Penegar from somewhere down the hall. He felt a chill go up his spine as fear coursed through his veins. Where was this fear suddenly coming from? So far, all he could recall about this man was this kind of goofy guy that was always roped in by his girlfriend. That, and the fact that he was friends with his ceramics teacher.

Speaking of which…

Where was Mr. Johnston?

And how did he fit into all of this?

It was at this moment that he recognized the door that Mary had dragged him through earlier-the one that could possibly tell him what was going to happen to his sister. Unfortunately, it was closer to the people who wanted to kill him, who had just so happened to spot him.

Rick took another glance at Cadi, who motioned for him to follow her. Biting his lip, he decided to follow her as she ran through a bright pink door with a flower on it.

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Immediately, Rick knew that she had led him into the 1960’s as he walked into a large crowd of people at some kind of concert. It seemed to him like Woodstock, especially seeing how he was now standing there in hippie clothes. He wondered why he was suddenly faced with your stereotypical hippies when he realized that if this was all inside his head, it would kind of be based on his own knowledge of the past so...

Was this all he really knew about the sixties? Woodstock? He was sure there was more…

He turned to see Cadi running off to a little building with painted flowers on it, so he pushed past the crowd to follow her.

“Rick! Wait!” a male voice called out. He swung around to see Harry and Emille hot on his trail, and fearfully, he ran faster.

“Wait! I’m unarmed!” the man exclaimed as Rick ran into the little building and slammed the door behind him, wasting no time and barricading it with a couch and a desk. As the couple tried to beat the door down, Rick walked forward into a curtain of beads and into an oddly lit room.

His sister was nowhere to be found now, and there seemed to be no way out. Inwardly, he groaned and started to wonder if he had made a poor decision in running away from Mary. After all, she had really only been trying to help him this entire time.

And he had ditched her…

Then he remembered how he didn’t even really know her and how she somehow knew that something was going to happen to his sister, which made him mad all over again.

He took a deep breath as Emille and Harry continued to bang on the door.

Ok.

Most likely, he was supposed to be finding something that would help him remember more. Something that would be connected to his past…

He looked around the room, unsure of what this building was really supposed to be used for. It could have been a storage unit of sorts, but there were bean bags and lights, and a weird smell…

Focus.

What was here that didn’t fit?

Rick started to look around, determined to move forward.

What didn’t belong here?

After a few minutes, he finally found it. He almost missed it at first, because to him, it also seemed old.

But it wasn’t as old as the sixties.

It was only as old as the nineties.

Slowly, he picked up a beaten up purple gameboy that was holding a Pokemon game in it. He remembered giving it to Cadi as a joke, but she had actually loved it. She didn’t play it all the time, but that’s what had gotten her into Pokemon. One thing she really liked to do was play with her friend Juno and pretend that Pokemon were real.

Silently, he flicked it on.

Warped sixteen bit music started to play. He expected to see Ho-Oh flying across the little screen, but instead, a little pixel face of a little girl that kind of looked like Cadi flew across the screen with a frowny face.

“Please wake up Rick… Please don’t die…” a little speech bubble said.

Nervously, he swallowed and closed his eyes.

Try to remember Rick… try to remember…

With his eyes closed, he could tell that the lighting in the room was changing, and when he opened him, the room now had disgusting seventies wood paneling with weird orange couches. He looked down to see that he was in a striped shirt and bell bottoms.

Ew.

Gross.

“Rick!”

Rick gasped and staggered back as Harry and Emille suddenly appeared.

“Wait! We’re not here to fight you or kill you or anything.” sideburned Harry said, raising up his empty hands. Rick clenched his teeth and fists, not sure what to do. He didn’t know where his sister was at the moment, and Mary was nowhere to be found.

“Then why are you here?” he asked suspiciously.

“We are just here to talk…” Emille said cautiously, coming forward slowly like she was approaching a wild animal.

Rick looked back and forth at the two of them.

“Then talk. But I’m still not trusting you.”

Harry sighed.

“Look Rick-you aren’t the one we’ve been trying to get. It’s that woman.”

Rick blinked in confusion.

“You mean Mary?”

“Mary isn’t her name.”

“Well I know that.”

“You can’t trust anything she tells you.”

At this, Rick narrowed his eyes, still backing away slightly from them.

“And why should I trust you?”

“Because you know who I am don’t you? Do you know anything about her?”

Rick didn’t like this. Something was off, but he didn’t know what.

“Rick, Emille and I aren’t really the people out there who might have hurt you. We are simple part of you right now. The only one who is a foreign entity is that woman.”

Unfortunately, Rick had to agree that this seemed to be the truth. Where had Mary actually come from?

However, something still felt off, and he did not want to trust these two.

“So you’re saying that you guys are just part of my mind right now?” he asked, still suspicious. Harry nodded.

“Yes. And why would part of your mind try to kill you?”

Rick bit his lip.

He had him there…

Now he was more confused than ever.

At this moment, a door swung open, and there stood Mary, looking furious.

“Don’t listen to them Rick!” she yelled. “They are dangerous! They don’t want you to wake up!”

He was about to argue with her, when there was a BANG!

Shocked, Rick staggered backwards as pain spread out over his stomach. He looked down to see that blood was spreading over the gross seventies shirt he was wearing.

“RICK!” Mary screamed, but it sounded a little hazy. In his daze, he looked over to see that Emille was standing there with a gun, a smirk on her face.

“This was taking too long.” she said coldly. Rick wasn’t sure what happened next as he fell to the ground in pain. There were some sounds of perhaps an argument? His vision was darkening around the edges…

“Rick? Please Rick-just hang on!” a voice begged.

Then, everything faded away into darkness...