Chapter 7: Click… clack… click… clack…
Rip Hunter and the Time Masters
Deep beneath the quiet, curated lawns of Cranston Estates, in a base that technically existed three minutes ahead of the present moment (a detail that made the heating bill a nightmare), Rip Hunter sat surrounded by his favorite kind of chaos: clocks. Big clocks, little clocks, digital, analog, atomic, even a sundial mounted on the wall as a joke. Most of them were wrong by design, and Rip liked it that way.
Kept the other Time Masters on their toes and gave the room a comforting, off-kilter, ticking soundtrack. He sipped coffee that had been microwaved so many times it was basically just brown heat, its taste far removed from coffee, now, its flavour could best be described as 'Warm' and 'Liqued'.
Above them, the house was nothing special: another mansion for the rich and reclusive, all dark windows and a mostly empty driveway, except for one slightly crooked green sedan that had been parked there for six weeks without anyone touching it. The only thing that ever frequently moved was the curtains in the west bedroom, and even that was probably just the wind or, more likely, the cleaning staff forgetting to shut a window.
Inside the base, though, it was a museum of future devices. The walls were covered in instruments that did not belong in the current century. Chronal drift readers, Probability lattice monitors, to name a few, or well, just two.
There was a machine in the corner that projected three competing versions of tomorrow, none of which agreed on the weather or who won the next World Series. A normal place to work, assuming you were paid to worry about paradoxes for a living.
Rip liked to think of the place as cozy, in the way that only a man who'd spent too much time outside of linear time could. Lila Michaels, standing at her own console, didn't agree. She kept glancing at some of the stranger-looking clocks like she was waiting for them to start moving and bite her. "You do realize this is the longest surveillance gig I've ever had, right?" she said, not looking up from a screen. "A year and change. You sure we're not just stalking Dr. Wakati for fun at this point?"
Rip grunted, rubbing his eyes. "You ever get the feeling a story's about to turn? Wakati's a genius, but he's also a recluse. His research has made time travel more common than headaches in a paradox, and lately, the numbers are getting weird. Too many spikes. Too many little anomalies, like someone's shaking the timeline just to see what falls out." He tapped a screen showing the Wakati mansion, its quiet so complete it almost seemed staged. "You don't build a lab like that unless you're close to something big, Lila. I just want to know what."
Across the room, another agent, a man by the name of Edwards, whose only personality trait seemed to be "unimpressed," leaned further back in his chair. "Maybe he's just eccentric. And paranoid. That tracks with every other genius we've tailed." He gestured at the wall of clocks. "Hell, or maybe he knows we're watching, it wouldn't be the first time."
"Maybe . . .," Rip started as he was halfway through another sip of coffee when all the clocks in the room stopped. The ticking, which had been a comforting background noise, vanished, and soon, it was missed as the silence became so thick and unnatural that it started to become the kind of silence that made your teeth itch. Rip felt it in the back of his skull, the part reserved for experienced and or traumatized time travelers, the place where the timeline lived, curled up like a cat. The air went stale. Every screen froze, and all of them felt like the zoom was shrinking in on them, but then the world snapped back, all at once, every clock leaping forward together.
One second had passed, but it felt like the universe had skipped a long beat.
Rip set his mug down, slow and careful. "…well," he said, the word barely above a whisper, the heavy noise from the clocks around them drowning it mostly out, but he knew they both heard him. The room exploded into further noise. Monitors screamed, graphs spiked and shorted out, and the three "tomorrows" on the wall all crashed, the screens going black and smoking faintly, as they overheated. Rip had a feeling that they would never work again.
Lila stared at the data pouring in. "That's… impossible."
Rip was already moving, hands flying over the controls. "Impossible would be easier. I could file 'impossible' under 'interesting but not urgent.' This? This is urgent." He zoomed in on the source of the anomaly. Not some distant star, not a cosmic rift, but right there, under their noses. The signal came from less than a mile away inside the Wakati mansion.
"The Wakati mansion . . Ground zero," he murmured.
Edwards hovered behind him, eyes wide for once. "What the hell caused it?"
Rip didn't answer immediately. He just stared at the numbers, feeling the weight of every timeline he'd ever saved, every paradox he'd ever patched. "I don't know," he admitted, and it tasted like defeat. "But whatever it was, it told the timeline to sit down and hush for a second." He didn't say it out loud, but the thought lingered: and the timeline listened.
He wondered, not for the first time, if Dr. Wakati was the cause, or just the latest victim of the universe's terrible sense of humor. Either way, things were moving too fast now, the kind of fast that made even a veteran time traveler nervous.
Tick - Tock - Tick - Tock - Tick - Tock
Waverider
Far outside the normal flow of hours and days, Waverider floated in the timestream, more an idea than a man, a being who lived in the spaces between "before" and "after." To him, time felt like a river
—sometimes calm, sometimes wild, always moving. Until, tonight, it didn't.
He felt the freeze as a pure silence, a skipped beat in the song of everything. The river stopped, No ripples moved and no current flowed. He opened his eyes and saw the whole of history stretched out before him, a landscape made of light,actions and memory and regret and so much impossibly more.
He reached into the flow, tracing the anomaly back through tangled futures and discarded yesterdays. The source wasn't some cosmic disaster or ancient god's whim. It was a house, a room, a crib, a child clinging to a stuffed white tiger as if it could anchor him to the world. The timeline bent around the boy, reshaped itself to let him breathe.
Waverider frowned, the gesture lost in the glow of possibility that surrounded him. He'd seen speedsters, gods, travelers and beings who could change history with a whim. This was different. The timeline had paused, not out of fear or force, but almost… gently, as if honoring the child's need for peace.
"Interesting," he said, voice rippling into the timestream. He filed the moment away, knowing that sometimes the smallest disruptions made the biggest waves, But seeing no action needed to be made, he vanished back into the flow of history. . with a feeling of knowing that he would most likely see the child again . . . but another time
Tok… tok… tok -Tok… tok… tok…
The Linear Men
In a nowhere place called the Vanishing Point, three men sat at a table made of glass, peering down at the map of time. Their job was simple: keep the timeline safe, no matter the cost. Tonight, the map glitched . .
a blank one-second hole appeared, a gap in the line where nothing should be missing.
They all noticed at once, heads lifting in perfect sync.
Glasses adjusted, brows furrowed, the table zoomed in, following the anomaly to Earth, to Gotham, to Cranston Estates, to the Wakati mansion.
"Well, that's not supposed to happen," one of them muttered. Another leaned in, fingers dancing over controls, pulling up data. "Temporal discontinuity. Universe-wide. Someone made time skip a beat."
The third man pointed at the blinking marker, a note of weary resignation in his voice. "Whatever did that… is still there."
They watched in silence, the blank space on the map pulsing like a wound. One second missing. One second that would echo for centuries, if they didn't act. But for now, they simply observed, wary, waiting for history to decide if this was an accident, or the first move in something much bigger.
Because accidents, in their line of work, never stayed accidents for long. And history loved nothing more than a good repeat performance.