Chapter Text
The Lost Light,
Earlier.
“Time phone.” Kimber says.
“Time phone.” Aja agrees.
“Well, I suppose I can’t stop anyone from calling it a time phone.” Perceptor says, slightly disappointed in them. “I won't bore you with the details, but your teleporter mishap has recreated a macro-cosmic environment within which which the barriers of time become more malleable. It would be remiss of me not to allow you to make the most of this opportunity.”
"So we can call our past selves and give us advice?" Kimber asks. “Is this like, Back to the Future rules?”
“Slightly. Parallel timelines, and such. I would advise you not to try to make significant changes to your personal time stream, but only because it causes all kinds of interference that means your message won’t go through.” Perceptor shrugs. “So just try to nudge things in a particular direction, if you must try and make changes to your personal timeline.”
Pizzazz and Stormer are hanging back, letting the three of them have their moment. When Jerrica tries to drag Pizzazz into it, she just shrugs and says there’s nothing she’d want to change about herself.
Jerrica feels like that’s a lie, but leaves her be.
“Cool.” Aja snatches up the opportunity to be first on the time phone. “Go back to the tree house and tell Shana not to be a coward when I was doing those stick and pokes.”
“You didn’t even invite me to those.” Kimber whines, folding her arms and pouting like someone had just opened up a well-healed wound. “I was cool enough to get a tattoo.”
“You were thirteen,” Jerrica laughs. “And we were grounded for a month. Shana, be meaner to Aja when she tries to cut all her hair off after every bad breakup.”
Kimber pauses. “Do you think we can, like, talk to dad through this?”
“Back to the Future rules, Kimber.” Aja offers.
“I’ve seen that film, I know about the whole bulletproof vest thing.” Kimber glances over. “Jerrica?”
Jerrica pauses for a moment, finally nodding in agreement. "Synergy?"
Synergy appears with a shimmering hum. "...You wish to know when the 'best time' to call your father would be."
"Yeah." Jerrica nods, pursing her lips.
"September Eighth, Two Thousand and Eight.
"Oh, dude. Shana's fifteenth." Aja says. "You remember how happy she was to get a learner's permit?"
"Ohmigod," Kimber says. "She literally drove me to the mall and back so many times that Christmas."
"Synergy?" Jerrica asks, inputting the day and time. "It's asking for a time."
"At precisely three minutes past eleven in the morning."
Jerrica dials in the time, calls through, and then puts the phone on speaker.
“Dad?”
“Jerrica,” he laughs. “I told you to stop calling me at work.”
She wishes she called him more, now, because it was close to the only times they got to really talk after mom died and dad became consumed by the project that eventually became Synergy.
“Sorry.” Jerrica says, quietly, before composing herself. “Would you believe me if I told you we’re calling from the future?”
“That’s a good one.” He laughs, louder. “Better than the time you told me you got abducted by aliens.”
Jerrica glances over to her sisters, then up at the ceiling of the alien spaceship, and then purses her lips.
“You gave us access to Synergy.” Jerrica says.
There’s a quiet pause.
“...What did you use it for?” he asks, finally.
“Her.” Kimber corrects, before pausing to realize that Synergy as she knew her might not even have existed yet at the point Jerrica dialed. “We became rock stars.”
“Kinda the biggest act on the planet.” Aja shrugs, before glancing around to the robots. “Or, uh, multiple ones.”
“We met aliens.” Kimber says. “Also another you invented portal technology and we, uh… saved the world or something.”
“Is Shana with you?” He laughs. "Wish her a happy birthday for me."
“Shana’s in Milan.” Aja says, with a laugh. Their dad probably figures she just chickened out of the prank call. “She got accepted to Fashion school. Istituto Marangoni. Quit the band because it meant more to her.”
"What about the rest of you?"
"Kimber just proposed." Aja says. "Before an operation. So dramatic."
"But it wasn't super official," Kimber offers. "So I'm gonna do a proper one once I have my appendix out."
"I finally got a Grand National after we met a guy at the Indy 500." Aja says. "Spent weeks putting it back together. Jer?"
Jerrica thinks back to everything that's happened over the past five years, combing it over through all their hardships and triumphs, the long nights in the studio and the longer nights putting together the company, and with all of that churning through her brain the only thing she can settle on telling her dad is: "I picked up skateboarding again."
"Skateboarding."
"To impress a girl." Jerrica mutters, glancing over to Pizzazz. She's calming Stormer down after Stormer made the mistake of looking up appendicitis complications on the alien robot equivalent of WebMD again. "I think you'd like her."
Jerrica pauses, adding. "...Eventually."
“Well, this is either the most well thought-out prank you girls have ever played on me,” he begins. “In which case, I’m proud of you.”
They pause, waiting for him to continue.
“Or this is all true, and I’m even prouder.” He says. “But in that case, I’d need to get back to work before you spoil any more of the next twenty years for me. Synergy isn’t gonna build herself. Love you, girls.”
“Love you too, dad.” Jerrica says, and hangs up.
She takes a moment to compose herself, before holding the time phone out.
“Anything else?”
“I’m good.” Aja shrugs. “Figure the only thing I’d tell myself to do is swoop in last second to win some eBay auctions I’m still mad about.”
“Kimber?”
Kimber grabs the time phone and holds the over-large receiver up to her ear, dialing into herself from a week ago. “Okay. Okay. Brush your teeth after you eat that whole tub of ice cream. Do not let them cut all your hair off because you think it’ll make you look ‘soft butch,’ and definitely do not joke to Stormer that she’s going to get you pre—”
They drag her away from the time phone.
“Pizzazz, are you coming with us?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Pizzazz says. She remembers one of the real talkative robots, the one with the visor, telling her his rule for new technology: You really gotta think what Ryan Reynolds would wanna do with it. “Just gimme a second.”
A McMansion in Santa Monica,
Two Months Ago
By October, they’ve settled into something resembling a routine.
Jerrica’s running a hand through freshly-dyed hair in the bathroom mirror while Pizzazz squeezes back into the red dress she hasn’t worn since the Music Awards. Jerrica’s regretting dyeing it, she tells Pizzazz, the black makes her think too much of the time she spent with Silica rattling around in her head, but Pizzazz says that’s all the more reason to take it back and make it something she’s doing on her own terms.
That’s a lie: the first thing she does is ask Jerrica to zip her up, because the zip is just jammed or something, and she can’t crane her neck round far enough to see what the problem is without feeling like she’s a step away from becoming the girl in the Exorcist.
“I can’t believe this stupid event won’t even let us go in costume.” Pizzazz huffs. “It’s Halloween. I should be a space demon ghost right now.”
“Pizzazz, it’s for charity.”
“Yeah, and I’ve schmoozed at enough billionaire ‘charity’ events to know where those donations actually go.” Pizzazz touches up her makeup in the mirror while Jerrica tries to untangle whatever mess Pizzazz caused with her dress. “What kind of creep is running this thing, anyway?”
“Richard Xanthos.” Jerrica says, growing increasingly frustrated by the zipper snagging, if her face in the mirror is anything to go by. “He was close to my father, before everything happened. Hopefully, I’ll have a chance to talk to him about it.”
Pizzazz concedes defeat about the same time Jerrica does, and Jerrica is the one that stomps out of Pizzazz’s bathroom this time.
“Fine,” Pizzazz calls out the bathroom door. “But if this is all a scam to get me to buy a timeshare near Lake Tahoe, I’m smashing the place.”
It’s not domesticity. Pointedly not. Two weeks of living under the same roof would cause Pizzazz and Jerrica to kill each other, and probably both of their bands in the process, so they settle somewhere between ‘clandestine weekend getaways’ and ‘you can never come back to my D&D group again’ and shape it into something that feels equally comfortable and comforting even as it also starts to settle into feeling like Jerrica is making an effort to keep Pizzazz at arms distance just in case she can’t be trusted to keep the Jem secret long enough not to call attention to herself in a public situation. It’s a fear that Jerrica has expressed, in the early hours of the morning, a few days after Pizzazz made bail for the 5x5 Records stunt. Even free of their labels, Jerrica insists, all it would take was for Pizzazz to act differently around Jerrica in a way that causes questions to bring the entire Jem-shaped house of cards down before they can fully get Starlight Music up and running.
For her part, Pizzazz feels like her own house of cards toppled over months ago. Someone snitched on them for the 5x5 hack. Pizzazz doesn’t know who, it could’ve been anyone in the band, but the messages from their group chat made their way into the hands of the LAPD, and they constructed a case so airtight that even her father’s expensive lawyers couldn’t get her out of the consequences of it. It was only the timely intervention of Jem, who managed to get a sweetheart deal that saw her doing a hundred hours of community service teaching music to the girls at the Starlight Community Center, that saved her from a stint in jail.
Pizzazz doesn’t care who in the band snitched, which isn’t a lie, because she would kill and die for any of these losers no matter what they did. She does wish whoever did it would just own up to it, because it feels like whoever did is just sitting there bottling everything up because she doesn’t want to get yelled at. And Pizzazz probably would yell, she knows, which is the worst part, but then they’d all go their separate ways for an hour or two, cool off, and the band would be back to normal.
Instead, everything has been weird since the the trial, and since she’s been spending more time with Jerrica both for court-mandated and not court-mandated reasons, and because it’s also been ages since she’s managed to get the whole band together for a proper thing, just venturing out into the world to cause trouble under the flimsiest of pretenses like they used to do before things got all weird and complicated.
Her phone buzzes on the counter, showing an unknown number. Against her better judgement, Pizzazz pulls it to her ear.
“Talk to me.” she says.
“Pizzazz, listen.” her own voice says. “You're going to—”
“Ugh. What kind of loser do I even have to be for—”
“Nobody snitched. Riot made the whole scandal up to break up the Misfits."
"Why?"
"Uh, to try and get between you and Jerrica. Obviously." the voice says. "Come on, me. That guy's a car with one gear. You really think he'd leave that be?”
“That assh—”
“Have fun.”
Starlight Music Offices,
One Month Ago
In the bowels of the Starlight Music offices, the four of them finally strike gold.
This Benton man was a genius engineer, that much Techrat knows for certain. Even through a remote interface, the machine outdid everything Techrat assumed was possible with computers, and to have access to that technology decades before anyone else could develop it… well, it spoke to a level of individual talent and secrets that were left buried for a reason. It’s played on Techrat’s mind since they interfaced with the machine, before Silica showed the true danger of playing rock star with technology you don’t understand, and grew like a poisoned seed as they realized that all it would take was a suitable distraction to get on-site and override the machine.
And when their routine attempts to hack into Synergy showed a curious recurring error popping up in the code like a meshwork pattern leading them to exactly where the Holograms hid their secret weapon, not quite unlike that one insignificant flaw that brought Silica into being, Techrat knew that it was time to make a move.
So Techrat, with a makeup brush, dusts down the keypad, plugs the digits into a pattern analyser on their wrist to determine how they fit together and, finally, inputs the override code. They take a moment to appreciate the handiwork, as the system lays bare to them without so much as raising the automated security alarms.
Unfortunately, Techrat knew that interfacing with such a machine required a musician. The Misfits were… compromised, on this matter, which meant that external help was required.
“Be careful with the interface,” Techrat hisses. It’s not their computer, but their reverence for the machine is absolute, even as they’re about to take the digital equivalent of a sledgehammer to it. “It is extremely delicate.”
“Stupid American,” Minx pulls off her gloves, setting her hands on the keys. “Do you think this is the first time I have fingered a beautiful woman?”
“Phrasing, darling.” Rapture offers, looming in the doorway.
“I said what I said.” Minx insists, with a huff, looking to Techrat for their instructions on how to use the machine. Instead, their phone starts to ring.
“Techrat.” Pizzazz says, through the receiver.
“Pizz—” Techrat stammers, attempting to correct themselves through gritted teeth. “No Pizzas here, thank you.”
“Drop what you’re doing and walk out. I'll double what the Stingers are paying you, and I've got some cool alien tech I want you to take a look at.”
"Well, when you put it like that... how can a humble rat refuse?"
A McMansion in Santa Monica,
Five Months Ago.
They’ve set up a makeshift skate ramp on her balcony, and Pizzazz is watching Jem start skateboarding again for the first time in years with the stupidest infectious grin on her face, and Pizzazz is trying to coach her through it like she’s any better at it.
Pizzazz hears her phone buzz on the railing, and pulls it to her ear.
“Storm, I promise I’m doing okay—”
“I figure you’re like, seventy percent of the way to figuring it out at this point, but they’re the same person.” Her own voice says through the phone. “Eventually, she’s gonna tell you. Act surprised when she does.”
“Huh?” Pizzazz calls.
“Time travel.” Future Pizzazz offers. “It sucks, but you get to talk to your mom for the first time since she walked out, so it evens out. Now, the main thing is that Jem’s gonna steal your favorite pair of Converse this weekend, and you’re not even going to notice until—”
Pizzazz hangs up on whatever that was.
“Pizzazz,” Jem says, winding down from performing the best heelflip Pizzazz has ever seen. It’s frankly disgusting how perfect she is at everything. “Is something wrong?”
“Huh?” Pizzazz says, lost in thought as she studies the contours of Jem’s face. Maybe there was something to it, but that was Jem’s business, not hers. “Nah, we’re good. Think I’m just late for a dose of my rich girl pills.”
The Lost Light,
Relatively Speaking, The Present.
"Storm. I'm keeping this one short because you're standing next to me—"
"Hi, me." Stormer laughs into the receiver. "Don't worry. You still have no idea what's happening when you're on the other end of this call."
"When are we calling for you?"
"Can we get them not to do the documentary?"
"We'd have to go back and call ourselves about all the stuff we worked out that week." Pizzazz offers. "It's like trying to erase Misfits in Hawai'i."
"Can we do that?" Stormer groans. "That's... just a net positive for humanity."
"Only if you wanna fight me 'cause it'd wipe out a really good weekend I spent with Jem."
"...Hold on. Set it to January 2003."
"Rough time in third grade?"
"Kinda."
Stormer takes the time phone from Pizzazz and, with her hands trembling, pulls the receiver to her mouth.
"Um. That show's never coming back." She launches into what she planned to say. "And you're gonna feel so weird about it because half the cast members turn out to be terrible people ten years from now, so you should just really let it go."
Stormer tosses the time phone back to Pizzazz, covering her head in her hands. Perceptor just blinks at the humans, visibly wondering at what point he should take the time phone away from the two of them.
“And Jetta, tell Roxy to take those friggin’ reading classes already, and get her to say something if how we organize the place confuses her. We're all gonna support her, 'cause she's our friggin' friend. And stop hiding the fact that you and her are a thing already, because other me was joking when she said nobody in the band was allowed to date in the industry. I mean, half that band charter is written in Hungarian. None of you ever read it.” Pizzazz says, on the sixth or maybe seventh call. “And don’t get me started on what happens when you eat those gas station tacos and Clash gets norovirus—”
“That’s…” Perceptor mutters, almost impressed. “An incalculable amount of damage to the regular flow of time. I've never seen anyone but Brainstorm do something so reckless in the pursuit of science.”
“I’m not letting fate tell the Misfits how to live our lives.” Pizzazz shrugs, looking over to an increasingly concerned Stormer and holding out the time phone. “C’mon, Storm. Wanna tell your brother not to get those tattoos you hate?”