"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" The collective screaming continued.
"Should… should I join in?" Dakota asked. "I feel kinda awkward not screaming when everyone else is screaming."
"Who are you?!" Tobe demanded, snapping out of his very vocal trance. "What are you doing here??!?! What's with your fashion sense?!?!"
"Oh we're time travelers." Dakota replied offhandedly.
"Don't tell them that!" Cavendish squawked. "Also how dare you, this hat is vintage!"
"Yeah, and so is this suit! Probably!" Dakota added. "Who're you?"
"Oh we're ninja working for Dr. Doofenshmirtz." Binggure replied.
Tobe slapped the back of the clown's head. "Don't tell them that!"
"Gasp!" Dakota gasped. "You work for Professor Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…"
The assembled ninja stared at him.
"Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-" Dakota continued, eyes casting about wildly.
"Give him a moment." Cavendish said resignedly. "He'll think of something."
"Iiiiiiiides! Professor Tides. Yeah, um, that's what I call him! Remember that time he did that… thing, with the tides?" Dakota said hopefully.
"Oh yeah, the tide stabilizer-inator!" Binggure nodded.
"I always wondered how he did that, considering Danville doesn't have a coast." Jumong noted.
"In any case, I suppose you are not an immediate threat if you are working for Professor Time-Tides! Tides I meant!" Cavendish stammered. "Oh… blast."
"Wow, that was fast even for us." Dakota noted.
"Couldn't you have picked something that doesn't also start with 'ti'?!?" Cavendish huffed.
"So you guys are from the future?" Tobe asked.
"And you keep calling Doofenshmirtz 'Professor Time." Jing-Jing noted.
"Don't tell him about us!" Cavendish blustered.
"Yeah, actually we'd prefer if you didn't." Dakota agreed.
"Oh, ok." Binggure said.
"No! No, not ok!" Tobe declared. "As the greatest ninja of all time, we're not just going to leave empty handed. If we're to hide this from Sensei, for a good reason or otherwise, you're going to have to tell us why you're here."
"Well, you see…" Dakota began.
"Don't just tell them everything!" Cavendish squawked.
"Too late, the flashback's already started."
---
Having just crash-landed in Doofania and desperately confused by this strange future-past, Dakota and Cavendish were prepared to seek out the one man who might be able to explain all this.
"Now then." Cavendish declared. "It Is Time to meet Professor… Time, and to solve whatever terrible crisis has befallen the timestre-"
"Doofenshmirtz dee-fault ringtoooooone!"
"Oh hey, it's my new Doofphone." Dakota said, picking up. "Yello."
"WHAT DID YOU TWO DOOOOO?!?!?!" came the voice of their often outraged superior, Mr. Block.
"Well hi to you too boss." Dakota replied sarcastically.
"It's been ages, where have you two been?!?"
"I think you mean: 'When have we been?'"
Mr. Block swapped the call to video, apparently just so Dakota could see his eye twitching underneath his short, bushy black hair.
"Ahem." Cavendish interrupted. "Perhaps you'd best start from the beginning, sir. We just got here."
Mr Block growled but complied. "Savannah and Brick called me a temporally uncertain period of time ago screaming about some sort of looming time disaster and formally requesting I time travel in person to help prevent it. Halfway through transit all the clocks in the time vortex disappeared, and then I was spat out in this time period, with no way to contact Savannah, Brick, or anyone else for that matter!"
"Huh." Cavendish replied. "Why, the exact same thing happened to us just a short time ago."
"Man." Dakota noted. "We say 'time' a lot."
"The entire timestream has become tangled into an unimaginable mess of conflicting backgrounds and temporal paradoxes. Travelling through time is now all but impossible for us. Considering how active you two are in this time period, I can only imagine some monumental screw up on your parts is responsible." Block said.
"Yeaaah, that sounds like us." Dakota agreed.
"Stop that." Cavendish admonished. "We've done no such thing."
"Well, maybe we do it in the future when we go back to the past."
"How could we do it in the future in the past if we cannot travel through time?"
"Maybe we fix it."
"If we knew enough to fix it, we would know enough not to do it in the first place!"
"Well then maybe we forgot we did it already." Dakota reasoned. "You know, in the past-past. Or just did it without noticing. We've already done that at least once."
"Will you two shut up!" Mr. Block bellowed. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to run a Time Agency without time travel?!"
"Sounds pretty hard." Dakota replied.
"IT'S VERY HARD! If it weren't for my conveniently positioned ancestor, it would have been impossible! I've had to earn the trust of this era's authorities, liaison with a bunch of beastly simpletons who think they know how to do my job better than I do, and try to fix this time travel mess with agents who know nothing about time travel!
"As much as I hate to admit it," Mr. Block sighed, pushing the next words out as if trying not to gag. "As of now, you two are my second and third most experienced time agents."
"Wait, if we're second and third, who's first?" Dakota asked.
"I don't want to talk about it." Block shuddered. "Just consider yourselves all I got to work with."
"Not to worry, sir." Cavendish declared. "We've already found the inventor of time travel, Professor Time."
"Hey, did we meet him in this timeline? Does he remember us?" Dakota asked.
"Evidently not." Cavendish replied before turning back to the phone. "We're just going to see him. If anyone knows how to fix this conundrum, it will be h-."
"No, absolutely not! Under no circumstances are you to go anywhere near him!" Mr Block cut him off.
"Wh-whyever not?" Cavendish bristled.
"Listen." Block replied. "In case you haven't noticed, Professor Time isn't Professor Time! Right now, from the perspective of the relative present, we come from one of many possible futures. Time is like a river, or a magnet or something. I dunno. Point is, you can shake it around a little and it'll still basically remain on course. Even a grandfather paradox or two can just work itself into the timestream. But if you do something really big, the whole spacetime cone of potential futures could shift, eliminating the possibility that we could come into being."
"That sounds bad." Cavendish noted.
"Normally we could just time travel into our own future to avoid any changes, that future effectively becoming an alternate universe with its own subjective present in which things went differently."
"Ohhh, so it's Dragon Ball Z rules." Dakota said.
Both Block and Cavendish paused to look at him. "What?"
"Yeah, I'm catching up on my new Doofphone." Dakota said, swapping tabs and shifting Mr. Block's image to picture-in-picture. "Apparently western animation never got going here so anime's really popular instead."
"The point." Mr. Block simmered, "Is that with time itself gone sideways we can't do that anymore! As long as there is even the slightest possibility that our future as we know it comes into being, we're fine. But if you two chuckleheads mess up and ensure that Professor Time can never become Professor Time, then we will cease to exist in a puff of logic! So no. Talking. TO DOOFENSHMIRTZ!!!!!"
"All right sheesh." Dakota agreed reluctantly. "You don't have to shout."
"Oh, and also, try not to think too hard about your own pasts. Your status as time travelers means you're somewhat inured to backstory shifting, but it also means conflicting memories can cause-"
"Oh dear." Cavendish said. "Now that you've said that I'm beginning to think about my old friend Jeffry, the talking… cat… toon… uuughghhhhh…"
Cavendish's nose began to bleed.
"Slap him." Mr. Block said.
Smack.
"Who what?!" Cavendish babbled.
"Don' worry about it." Dakota replied offhandedly.
Mr. Block sighed. "For now, I want you to try and find any temporal paradoxes or logical impossibilities. Places where the fabric of spacetime has been stitched together in ways that don't make sense or contradict known history."
"Oooh ooh!" Dakota replied. "There's living cartoons and Professor Time is a petty dictator."
Block smacked his forehead. "I mean things I haven't noticed yet, you idiots! The more data points I have, the better we'll be able to figure out what actually happened and how to fix it. Now get going!"
The call ended, and Dakota's anime began autoplaying again.
"Well." Cavendish arranged himself. "I suppose we have our marching orders."
"I'm never gonna get to see the animals!" Dakota complained.
---
"And I never did." Dakota finished.
Tobe sniffed. "What a tragic story."
"You get any of that?" Binggure asked.
Jumong pointed at Dakota. "I think that guy's Trunks."
Binggure squinted. "He's not wearing trunks, that's a tracksuit."
