Young Writers Society

Turning Back the Clock

By @Saen and @soundofmind

Conserved and quiet Blake Croft is a student at the prestigious Northridge Academy of the Arts. As like the rest of his peers, he has been raised with a single goal in mind, and will do anything it takes to achieve that goal. For Northridge doesn't just teach artists - it teaches magicians that will one day take control of the world's governments through the shadows. But even though Blake Croft has always told himself that everything he does is to further his destiny, he decides to disregard the teachings he has been presented with his entire life. Rather than be suspicious of a mysterious and bubbly stranger named Wilson, he takes up an offer to explore his past.

He just didn't realize she meant by time travel.

If Blake had been told that morning that his life was going to change in ways that were straight of his childhood fantasies, he would have promptly called the informant a liar and gone about his day the same as he currently was.

Blake had grown up on a rhetoric and distrust and self-preservation. Anything odd was meant to be treated with extreme caution, and anything especially out of the ordinary was meant to downright avoided. These tactics were something he rarely employed. For Blake had grown up in a reality separate from the rest of society, where magic was commonplace and sending minor demons to pass messages to allies - not friends, because no one was trustworthy enough for that sort of title - was just as accepted as sending a text.

While Blake might have disregarded a warning like the one given to him in this hypothetical situation on the basis of what was to be trusted and what was not, there would have been a second, ulterior motive for his decision. It was the weekend, and weekends were the only time students from the Northridge Academy of the Arts were allowed to mingle among the people they would one day be ruling over.

Northridge wasn't located in some obscure, fantasy world. In fact, it was quite easy to get to if you just knew the right train station: it was situated in the English countryside, only a short distance away from a bustling town. This town was a famous tourist attraction based on its wide variety of shops and landmarks. Blake didn't particularly like the shops, though he did have a very secret love for their gaming one. What he loved the most was the park in the center of it at all. A quiet, secluded area, one that few ventured into when there were so many other attractions available.

That was where Blake was today, sitting on one of the old wooden benches with his laptop in tow. There were two applications on his laptop: a game the younger generation was enamored by, and a paper due on Monday. The former was what he was currently on, and the latter was what he quickly switched to every time he saw a familiar face out of the corner of his eye. He was in the middle of finishing his preparations on the blocky house displayed on his screen, fingers hovering over his keyboard as he added the occasional torch and dug through his many chests.

Wilson brushed the dirt off her loose plaid flannel as she materialized behind a tree in the middle of the park, and hopped a few times to find her footing on the new grassy ground. She smiled to herself as she looked around, seeing the midday sun shine through the healthy green trees, and hearing the distant bustle of shoppers outside of the grassy haven.

With youthful energy, she bounded through the grass, ascending a hill, letting the cool air brush her flat, bare stomach beneath her black crop-top. Her big flannel fluttered behind her like a cape, and it pleased her greatly.

She proceeded towards a curving stone walkway, hopping on individual stones as she hummed a happy little tune from the 1970's Rock and Roll concert she'd just attended moments prior.

As she twirled around and paused briefly, she noticed the teenaged boy sitting on a bench not far from her. When he glanced up to see her, she quietly observed as he clicked some buttons quickly on his laptop. She grinned. He was probably switching tabs, or browsers, or opening and closing something he didn't want others to see. Was it memes? Was it embarrassing? A teenaged boy could be hiding a number of things on the internet, and she wasn't going to bother herself with guessing. But she was going to bother him.

With a smooth gracefulness, she slid up beside the bench, looking over at the studious looking teen. To him, she probably looked around his age. She had long, black hair that reached her middle back, a slim, skinny figure, and mono-lids over dark eyes. Most people pegged her as 18 or 19, and sometimes younger, but never any older. And that was the only thing she didn't really understand about herself. She had never been able to change her form - something she'd never been able to figure out. She had a feeling it was just... right for her. That, and the science and all of the problems that would come with having to re-spawn with new bodies seemed way too bothersome.

She smiled.

"Hey there, sport," she greeted cheerfully. "Playin' some video games?"

The voice was unfamiliar. That in itself was a cause for alarm, and he quickly switched to his paper. The topic was luckily something that didn't betray the true nature of his education - it was a somewhat dull research project on the first world war. There were a few comments about how it had been shaped by magicians, but he had yet to get into a paragraph that solely focused on the subtopic. He typed a line or two before looking up at the stranger. She must have been a tourist. He had never seen in the town before, and she certainly wasn't one of his classmates. It did beg the question of if she had traveled with someone else. And, if she had, with whom.

"Hello," he said, trying to keep his voice calm and monotone.

This was an exercise in interacting with other people. That type of exercise was something he typically avoided, but it was crucial if he wished to become a successful magician someday. He gently closed his laptop. If she was talking to him, she likely was looking for an actual conversation and not a series of short comments.

"I was actually working on a paper for my history class," he said. Not entirely a lie, but also not entirely the truth. "Being here in the park helps me think."

Wilson nodded politely and walked around the bench, plopping down a seat away from him. She just smiled knowingly, aware that he wasn't really telling the truth, or was hiding something, but she didn't really care much either way. He did seem a bit awkward too, but that was fine. Not everyone had to be a master at socializing to socialize, and she wasn't too picky. He looked interesting and there was always something about the loners and the people who intentionally isolated themselves that... drew her. She didn't want to say she was a loner magnet, because that sounded mean, but... was she? Maybe.

Wilson really did try to give a solemn look of understanding as she leaned back, but she just kept smiling.

"Okay, okay, I getchya," she said with a nod. "School and papers and stuff. Blah, blah. History is really cool, though! I know a looooot of history." Which, wasn't a lie. She did know a lot history. She'd also lived a lot of it too.

"History and I go way back," she laughed. "So tell me! What are you writing about? Can I help? What do you need to know? I probably know the answer!"

This entire situation was making him grow increasingly uncomfortable, but he was a magician and a key part of being one was knowing how to act. Though it was far from easy, he maintained a calm persona as he scrolled through the the essay. "The topic is the first world war," he said. "I appreciate the offer, but I already acquired all the information I need for my paper. I just need to put it together in a coherent essay."

He gave her a brief smile before returning to typing. He was just fixing small errors he had noticed when scrolling, but it gave the illusion that he was adding new parts to the essay. That should have been enough to get her to go away. But when he looked up, he saw that she was still sitting there with that stupidly large grin on her face.

Now he was really getting worried.

He closed the laptop and met her gaze. "Can I help you with something?" he questioned, slipping the computer into his bag. It was seeming more and more likely that she was intent on having a conversation with him. That was a horrible twist of fate for him, but he would just have to suffer through it until he found the right moment to escape.

Wilson wasn't entirely dense. She could pick up enough to tell that Blake was uncomfortable - but that was the case with most people and strangers. Especially strangers who approached for casual conversation, because god knows, in this day and age? That was unheard of. No one in their right mind chatted up with a stranger unless they had some sort of ulterior motive, or at least, that's what people kept trying to tell her. To which she would reply: I have none, apart from having fun, and sometimes that involves dragging people along with me to do that.

And then the argument would dissolve into semantics and what "fun" actually implied and she stopped caring after that.

All of that to say she was unfazed by Blake's tell-tale signs of please-go-away-isms.

Wilson's grin only spread, and she nodded. Could he help her with something? "That depends on who's asking!" She said with a wink. "But maybe I can help you with something!"

Wilson leaned forward, a smile gracing her face with excitement and an innocent twinkle in her eye.

"Have you ever wanted to revisit your past? See things as they were through your now matured eyes? Figure things out? Make sense of it?"

He studied her for a moment after she had finished speaking, trying to comprehend what exactly she had been trying to offer. It had sounded suspiciously like a sales pitch, but he just couldn't figure out what she was trying to sell. He had met countless people who sold things in this area, but not a single one of the things being sold matched that odd description.

But he had no need for that sort of mystery in his life, so he slipped his bag over one shoulder and started to get to his feet. He got as far as opening his mouth to utter the words "I'm not interested" before the offer finally began to sink in. He closed his mouth. Stared at her. Tried to understand what she was asking. His past was an incredibly private thing, but there were so many things that even he knew nothing about. What had his childhood been like before the death of his parents? What had his parents even been like?

Maybe this girl - or likely a young-looking woman, based off of what she was offering - was some sort of historian. Maybe, just maybe, she could help him fill in the holes of his life. That wouldn't be too dangerous, would it? His childhood had nothing to do with magic. And if they got to the point where they were researching his more current history, there was nothing to say that he couldn't lie about what was being discussed.

"I do want to," he said.

A wide grin crept onto Wilson's face as she watched the boy change his mind, and a light twinkled in her eyes.

"Perfect!" she said, shooting up from the bench with a bounce and hopping beside him. "You're gonna love this," she assured him with a wink and a smile. "Okay, okay so... one sec."

She took in a deep breath and held her palms together, with the tips of her fingers touching her chin. Then she went and grabbed for his hand.

In an instant, it was like she read him. Flashes of images and memories began to play before her eyes, in her mind. But it wasn't everything about him. Not the things he would want to hide, or wanted to keep to himself. But it was just far enough into his timeline to figure out where to go. Or where he wanted to go - and when she found it, she smiled.

The process, of course, took her only a few seconds, so, before he could pull away, she made her decision.

And instantaneously, the environment around them changed. Where they were once standing in front of a bench in a park, they were now standing in the middle of a suburban street. Though the rapid transition didn't jar her at all, she carefully observed the boy for his reaction while she began to talk.

"Well, here we are then! I guess I should probably introduce myself at this point," she held a hand over her mouth. "Oop. That's kind of embarrassing. But you can call me Wilson! I'll be your back-in-time tour guide. Oh. And yeah. Don't freak out. It's okay. I can bring you back and stuff."

It was one thing for someone to say not to freak out; it was another to follow through with their words of wisdom. It was nearly impossible to describe how Blake felt after suddenly appearing in - well, whatever this place was. It looked vaguely familiar. A suburban street, with perfect little houses lining both sides of the road. Kids wanderings the sidewalk, playing games in their driveways while their parents watched from their front porch. Some even were strolling down the streets, a pet or a baby stroller in one hand and a drink in the other.

That didn't mean that they had gone back in time.

He had dealt with many magical things before, but time travel was not one of them. You just couldn't bring yourself from one point in time to another. Even the most powerful marid could never accomplish a feat like that. But here was, in a place that he didn't even remember coming to in the first place. Forget about time travel - even transporting someone so fast and to somewhere so far away was impossible.

He was about to open his mouth to demand an explanation when he saw a house off to the side from it all. A happy, incredibly familiar house. It had been countless years since he had last been there, but he recognized it all the same.

It was his childhood home.

And though he remembered his parents even less than he remembered the house, he had seen several pictures of his mom and dad. And there they were, the two of them standing in the front window. They were just as young as they had been when the crash had happened; he must have been brought back in time to only a short time before they died.

He turned to Wilson. "H-How?"

Wilson smiled, and gestured to herself with a wave of her arms from head to toe.

"Wilson, time traveller extraordinaire at your service! Don't worry too much about whether time travel is real," she said, giving him a pat on his shoulder in a way that would feel condescending were her smile and tone not so genuine. "I'm very special and I can go wherever and whenever I want, whenever I feel like it. Which is a lot. It's all very science-y and mystical and blah blah, boring explanations. But you didn't come here to learn about me - you're here to learn about yourself! Or uh... your past! So uh -" she turned around, looking at the houses lining the streets. She paid less attention to the people and more attention to the homes since she was looking for something in particular. It didn't take her long to spot the house that was so vibrantly highlighted in his memory, but she pretended like she hadn't seen it.

"Which one of these houses is yours? Oh. Wait," she stopped, then looked back at him. She smacked her forehead. Even though she already knew his name from when she found this memory in his head, she knew she should ask him. She'd made the mistake a few times before and revealed that she knew a lot about people without them ever telling her anything, and she figured out the hard way that that never went over well. It was always best to play ignorance even if it wasn't real. Besides, the less stuff there was for him to freak out about, the better. With a sigh of disappointment at herself, she leaned forward with her hands on her knees, and looked up at him with her hair falling in her face.

"Gosh, I'm sorry. Your name. I should know your name, dude."

"It's Blake," he absentmindedly said, turning his attention back to the house. He could go up there. He could up there and actually talk to his parents, find out everything he had ever wanted to know about them since he had first realized most of his peers had parents of their own. He could finally understand what it was like to have a family. "Blake Croft."

He could get to hear them say "I love you", even if it wasn't to him, and lock away the sound of their voice so he would never forget it. He could tell them a little bit about himself - nothing too much, because he still wasn't sure how this time travel thing worked - but enough to see if they would have been proud of him if he had been alive today.

"Can I interact with people here?" he questioned, his eyes lingering on the house as he spoke to Wilson. "I want to talk to the people in that house. I'll use an alias. I'll tell them I'm their long lost relative, and that I'm here because I wanted to find more out about my family. They'll believe that. They have no reason not to."

Wilson blinked a few times. Blake was doing surprisingly well, all things considering. She couldn't help but smile proudly on his behalf, and she gave him a pat on the back.

"Well, that's a bit of a complicated question! You ever seen those time travel movies or read those sorts of books? Well, turns out paradoxes aren't as big of a deal as you'd think. Time has a way of sorting itself out despite a few little decisions people make, but you know, that's not a hard rule. Time's still kind of squishy and bleh and whatever. So uh, yeah! Of course you can talk to people! But I gotta stick by your side to make sure you don't do anything too drastic, ya know?" She leaned on him just a little as she laid her arm around his shoulders and gave him a little wink.

"But sure, let's come up with a fake name for ya. What do you wanna go by? I'm thinking of going by Willy. And since I need a cover too, you can just say I'm your friend," she said as she pulled her arm back off of him and started buttoning up her flannel over her crop top. "And you know, also doing this. Gonna play it safe and be a little more conservative, ya feel?"

The close contact from a girl who was still a stranger to him made him feel deeply uncomfortable, which made him incredibly grateful when she took her arm off. He took a few steps to the side. The space between them would hopefully dissuade her from trying something like that again, but he was starting to get the suspicion that an action like that rarely stopped her.

The combination of how friendly Wilson was being with how bizarre this whole situation was made it hard to come up with a good alias. Everything that he could come up was just from a story, and they'd probably recognize it if he tried to get away with something like that.

His mind drifted to a girl who would have likely gotten quite a kick out of something like this. He wasn't even sure he could tell her about it; it seemed like the secretive sort of thing you wouldn't want people to know about. But May was good with secrets. Her entire life, according to her, had once been built around that. Something about cabins and gods, though she never went into much detail.

He turned his attention back to the present - or past, he guessed. He needed an alias, and he needed one quickly. So he gave himself another moment to come up with one, couldn't and promptly panicked.

"Max Acker," he said. "I'll go by Max Acker."

Wilson blinked.

"Uh... okay. Sounds a little like massacre, but I can dig it," she said with a shrug. "Well, let's see about that house then, right? I'm assuming it's family you wanna see? If you think they'll buy the estranged family member bit, that might work. Is it a little too close to the truth?" She shrugged again, and froze mid-shrug, looking over at him, as if expecting an answer but she didn't wait for him. "Ehhhhhhhhh. I guess we'll have to see. Worst case scenario, you spoil everything, I have to zap u back to your present times, and then I have to come back here and play janitor and clean up the mess. Which! I'm really hoping doesn't happen though so. Just consider a few things beforehand."

She held up one finger, as she began to count on her hand.

"One: no mentioning people or technology or pop culture references from the future. You might think this makes conversations dry, but let me just tell you now, you'll avoid so many awkward conversations this way." She held up two fingers dramatically. "TWO! Don't tell anyone you're from the future. And don't tell anyone who you really are. Pretty straight forward." Three fingers. "THREE! You can't take anything from the past with you. No matter how much you might want to." Four fingers. "AND LAST OF ALL! Under absolutely no circumstances can you tell anyone anything about their future. No spoilers!! LET THEM LIVe."

After another needless dramatic pause, she shoved her hand back in her pockets and gave Blake a nod. "Okay. That's it. We're good to go as long as you don't break any rules. I think I covered them all for now."