Start of Book 3 - Chapter 106: Prologue

Somewhere far away from almost everywhere, Jeff latched a makeshift cup welded to the front of his rocket-cycle around yet another floating piece of space rock, and once he knew the rock was securely lasso’ed to the craft, he slowly wheeled the craft-asteroid conglomerate around. It wasn’t sweaty work, which he liked. Plus, the person he had stolen this bike from had been a man of distinction, one who had built a gigantic, gallon-sized cupholder into the handlebars.

Or maybe it was for an auxiliary gas tank, or something like that, but Jeff wasn’t going to use it for something boring like that. He had a full gallon of sweet tea in there. If the galaxy at large had anything going for it, it was all sorts of tea. This particular batch was some kind of mildly psychoactive mixture that kept him mildly and comfortably buzzed the entire time, like back when he was younger and used to chew tobacco. It didn’t taste too bad, either.

Pushing the bike’s throttle and moving it forward, Jeff added the space stone to a carefully constructed half-moon shape he had been carefully setting up in the vacuum of space. It had taken him the better part of the day to find big chunks of rock that seemed just right for his purposes, and then at least as long to drag them over here before arranging them. But that was fine. Jeff was a contractor-handyman type of guy, and this was how contractor-handyman types got things done.

He didn’t really have a class, as such. His friend Sean did, and a good one. One that he really shouldn’t have, if Jeff understood the class system well enough to make a judgement on it. Whatever weird time-freeze events the kid had been through that motivated the system to give the kid actual, controllable time-powers had also given him a cheaty enough class that he had been able to cheese events, treat almost every enemy like a good match-up when they fought, and generally punch above his weight level.

Jeff was different. He was just roiling with weird time-power all the time. It didn’t make him strong, sure, but most things couldn’t hit him. That was good because he had shit’s worth of a clue where he’d get whipped in time next, most days.

Jeff took a long draw off his sweet tea and considered the rocks he had set up before nudging a few of them to slightly different locations with the bike, then sighed in relief. It was done. The nice thing about his time-travel powers was that he got a pretty good view of what had just happened and was about to happen in a particular place as he approached it, like he was looking at the passage of time from the window of a landing plane.

Since Jeff liked to think of himself as a competent guy in most ways, that gave him a lot of opportunity to set things up just right. And since he couldn’t attack worth a shit, that was important.

Whatever event was happening here with the ships should be coming up soon. It was near the end of the range of events Jeff could see as he approached, unless he had lost track of time. Sighing, he pulled open his mostly-useless status screen to take a look.

Jeff Greco

Level Error Human (Error: Classless)

EXP: 0/0

STR: Error

DEX: Error

VIT: Error

SAV: Error

MAG: Error

—

Abilities: Elastic Time (2:13 Remaining)

“Yup,” Jeff said, sipping on his tea before reaching back to the cargo bin of the bike, pulling out a large paper-wrapped bundle, and setting it to float between the big ring of rocks he had assembled. “Any minute now.”

As he set his huge tankard of tea back in the cupholder, the ships began to materialize out of nowhere. Well, not nowhere, really. They just moved too fast for the human eye to see.

“Halt where you are, Time Monster.” A loud voice boomed out through the nothingness of space, which shouldn’t have been possible. Jeff had stopped questioning things like that. He was just glad to see his time-aim was on point this time. Whatever was happening here was something that would later affect Sean otherwise. Whatever he did to change things was probably good. “Halt and prepare to be placed under arrest.”

“And if I don’t?” Jeff asked, fiddling with the switch he had palmed after placing the wrapped package between the rocks.

A dozen cannons of various sorts pivoted on the ships to aim directly at him and his bike. “Then matters will progress in a way that makes the arrest itself unnecessary. Make the right choice.”

“Oh, hmm,” Jeff said. “Well, too bad for you.”

He hit the switch at that moment, detonating the package between the rocks. Or something like detonation, anyway. He wasn’t sure how “opening a jar of pure momentum” really worked, in a grammar and vocabulary sense, but uncorking the bottle was close enough to an explosion in most ways that he decided not to sweat it. The nice thing about it not being an explosion in the conventional sense, though, was that it wasted almost no energy making heat and light and applied all that gain to flinging things around better, faster, and with much more controllable directionality.

The cannons all fired too late as the rocks rose through space and blocked each shot, and the orders to move the ships out of the way of the incoming crescent of space-boulders came even later, well past the point where the ships would have any chance of dodging. The stuff they made ships out of was expensive, so ships ended up being pretty small in the grand scheme of things. Rocks were cheap, and even the biggest ones were free. By the time the rocks had finished their work with the enemy ships, there wasn’t much left.

Jeff didn’t have a lot of time left after that, and he decided to dedicate 100% of it to drinking his tea. He had done what he could do for Sean at this point in time, and could already feel time tugging him on to the next significant spot in their intersecting timelines. He had no idea what he’d have to do there, but if space-time thought he was going to face it without a good, solid space-tea-nicotine buzz, it was insane.