Click Tock

Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I own nothing. This is just for fun.

A/N: This is a project I've had in mind for about 5 years... but with school, video games, a monstrous beast of a crossover series that I had to put down and a second season that stalled, I haven't found the time... until now.

Summary: A late night game of Risk begins a story that will span 25 years.

Wednesday, September 10th, 2025

Ithaca, New York

The room was dark. Under an LED ceiling lamp, the fate of nations lay in the balance. In the South, India and the Middle East lay under the boot of the Oceanians. The Americans had taken Western Europe and Britain, while the hordes of the East lay ready to push in from Afghanistan and the Urals.

That left only the bastion of Central Europe in safety, with Russia poised to become the site of a titanic battle.

A battle that should have taken place half an hour ago.

"Come on, Edmund! Throw the dice, make your damn move and be done with it." A feminine voice growled in irritation. "Carol has to be home by 11 PM or the babysitter charges for the whole night, my parents want me home by midnight and if Jenny falls asleep during her orientation tomorrow, her parent are going to have all our butts in a sling!" Anne Walsh was no longer having fun. She'd been commanding the Armies of Asia for... must be 7 or 8 hours already. Dinner had been a ham pizza brought down by Mrs. Gambiani while her son was trying (and failing) to invade Siberia. Carol had been on the phone for the past 10 minutes, promising her young son that she'd be home soon. Jenny was looking through that old Techerson brochure for what must have been the seventh time since her turn ended. And Edmund... was still looking at the board, trying to find a way out of imminent annihilation.

Edmund Gambiani did not even look up from the board to deliver his retort. "Don't rush me, I'm thinking... I'm trying to get out of this. Besides, it's my basement so I get rights." Finally finishing his examinations, he took up his dice and rolled them.

He got creamed.

"Now can we get on with the game so you can lose and we can all go home?" Besides not having fun, Anne was also tired and frustrated at the boy's procrastination. Underneath that mop of curly, dark-brown hair, that winsome grin and the bad Scouse accent he sometimes threw out... he could really be a pain sometimes.

"What's the rush? You gotta go home and change the bandages on the tattoo you got?" Edmund was peeved too. He'd been losing for half the night... just as he had for every game in the last ten years. He was mad and as Jenny looked up, her face displayed an equal amount of shock.

"A tattoo? Your parents let you get a tattoo?!" Jenny was aghast, and that was perfectly understandable. The thought of Parker Walsh letting his eldest get a tattoo was... well, to be honest it was quite unfathomable to the girl. The Walshes were almost as square as Jenny's parents, and the Taylors had been full-blown geeky code-monkeys since they were both in High School.

The only reason the streak of green hadn't been shaved off her head was because it could be washed out any time she wished. She'd been putting it off as long as possible.

"Of course they didn't. His parents did!" Anne pointed across the table toward Edmund, who was trying to decide whether to kamikaze or to try for peace. The Gambiani family, as opposed to the other two lineage groups, were less... stodgy: less alarmist than the Taylors and less strict than the Walshes. True, Mr. G wanted Edmund to avoid all the... mistakes of his own youth but Mrs. G was much more understanding of life's small foibles and "flights of fancy".

She'd been the adult supervision during the tattoo process.

"Well, this is all very interesting, but I have to be home in 20 minutes. Is anyone going to make anymore moves?" Carol Walters was grousing, but the blond felt that she had every reason to grouse. She'd just gotten off the phone with Ben, her 4-year-old son and he was anxious for her to return. Yes, her common-law husband would be back before midnight but she always seemed to be fixated on being a better parent (that is, a parent at all) than her biological father, sire to her and some 35 other known adults, had been. As such, she was getting very impatient.

"Alright, we may as well finish this up. Jenny, I believe it's your turn?" Anne asked the mousy girl before turning back to the game.

After the three women took their turns, each a loss or a draw for Edmund, his turn came.

All he did was wave a little white flag that he pulled from somewhere on his person.

Anne sighed. "Alright, now that Ed's signalled his traditional "surrender with honour", lets wrap this thing up." She raised her caffeine-free soda in a toast. "To us... and the completely mucho times we'll be having!" The thought of this made her decidedly more upbeat.

Her compatriots, however, were decidedly less upbeat.

"Annie... you do realize that we'll be there to study, don't you?" Jenny looked at her friend warily, curious as to why this wallflower in a grove of wallflowers was so enthusiastic.

"Sure... but we'll all be in the same town. Separate schools, yeah, but they gotta leave us some time to unwind, don't they?" Anne was trying to salvage her toast, but her childhood friend and pen pal had one more worry.

"Sure... but Annie, do you realize what we have to measure up to? I've been groomed for this place..." Jenny flourished the Techerson brochure "since I learned to type. And it's not that I don't enjoy messing with programs, it just... it's a lot to digest."

"And from what I get around here, Pop would throw a fit if I did anything crazy while at school. Hanging out, sure... but what did you have in mind?" Edmund was also under a lot of pressure... not to do anything in particular, just to keep from doing anything stupid (like joining a frat).

Looking to the last person in their group, Anne was dismayed when Carol throw up her hands. "Don't ask me! I went through that when I finished my catering course and I'm glad that it's done."

Now quite glum, Anne reformatted her toast. "To us! May we not become complete strangers by the time we finish school!" She chugged the rest of her soda, pushed her chair out, got up and began heading for the basement stairs without so much as a good-bye. Carol got up first to follow her out of concern, while Jenny took the time to say a hasty farewell to Edmund before following them.

Now he had to put everything away.

Carol found Anne leaning against the wall in the hallway directly above the steps. "Alright, what was that all about? And don't ask me 'what'; I mean you leaving in a huff." She asked a suddenly morose teenager.

Anne sulked a bit before finally giving an answer "It's just that... I just thought that me and Jenny and Ed would be... I dunno... able to maintain our friendships or something. You hear how that got shot all to hell." For the past few months, Anne had been quite enthusiastic about University... the people, the new experiences, the quasi-independence from her folks and the potential for parties. But having heard all the uncertainty from her friends, she wasn't so sure about the social aspects anymore.

Carol held off on answering until Jenny had passed them, assuredly to tell Edmund's mother that they were leaving and that Carol would be dropping them off. "Look... they're both nervous about living up to what's expected of them. Edmund's worried about getting into something that'll upset his parents and Jenny... from what little I know, a lot of pressure's been put upon her and I think she's worried about cracking under the strain. In either case, I wouldn't take any of it personally."

Anne shrugged, accepting the explanation on the surface but still upset that her enthusiasm had been wasted. "I guess so. I just hope that they cheer up after we actually get there." With that, she began following Carol to the back door.

Louise Gambiani was currently working over the kitchen sink, apparently cleaning it despite her husband already having gone to bed. Even in her mid-40s, she still looked much like she had throughout her youth. She was relatively tall at 5 feet 8 inches, still wore her frizzy, black hair in a ponytail (though it had gotten rather more curly than frizzy and she occasionally dyed it to keep colour), her skin was still pale, her nose gracefully aquiline and her chin... nondescript. Of course, she no longer had the near-beanpole frame of her college days; a child, a career and twenty five years in the same relationship does not help someone keep skinny, after all.

When she heard the group of young women head to the door, she steeled herself, going over one last time how she was going to say what needed to be said. As Anne came into the kitchen, Louise turned around to face her goddaughter. "Annie, could I talk to you for a minute?"

"Of course. What's up?" With Mrs. Gambiani, Anne was almost as comfortable was with her own parents. Her mother and her had been roommates in their sophomore year at SUNY Yewtown and the friendship had gone from there. While her mom had been doing her clinical rotations in Medical School, Louise had helped her and Parker with their advancing pregnancy and eventual baby girl.. even as she took care of her own infant son.

From the stories they told, it sounded like they'd almost been driven nuts.

"It's just that... well, you've always been such a good friend to Edmund, and I'd like to thank you on behalf of his father and myself. You've helped him stay on the straight and narrow, been there for him when he did screw up and... I just wanted to say that you've been the best goddaughter a mother could ever want." There was a certain cleverness in this otherwise sincere wish, overwhelming gratitude mixed with... something that almost resembled fear or sadness.

"O... Kay." Replied Anne slowly, wondering if she hadn't yet received her invitation to her own funeral. "Ed's a good kid... he just has to get out once in a while, figure out what he likes and what he doesn't." She paused. "Was there anything else?"

"Oh yeah..." Louise reached for a pen and a piece of paper. "If you're interested... and if the place is still standing, this is the room that your mother and I shared in our sophomore year. If you're up for a little sightseeing, It's one of the places you definitely need to go." There was that cleverness again, barely registering on the edge of Anne's ability to perceive, but she could have sworn that there had been emphasis on the word "need".

"Alright, if I get the chance, I'll definitely take a look around." Anne pocketed the paper before finally moving to leave. "Bye Auntie." She bid her godmother ("Auntie" being a convenient shorthand) goodbye, went out the door and almost automatically dashed into Carol's Chevrolet subcompact, idling in the driveway.

Once Anne was in the back and Jenny in the front passenger seat, Carol went through the familiar routine of instructing the two brunettes on proper seatbelt use. Once they were on the road, the mood managed to relax a bit. Small talk was out of the question, as that had already happened during most of the day... however, reassurance was another thing. "Look... you'll get there, you'll settle in, you'll find time to hang out and you'll forget whey you even had this argument."

"You really think so?" Jenny asked. Her worries were far more pressing than Anne's, being of the "Will I measure up or will I crack under the pressure" kind then the "Will we say friends" kind.

"Of course I do. You're in the same city, you'll have a reasonable amount more free time... and you can only study so much." This was the last of the reassurance until Carol pulled up in front of the Taylor and let Jenny out.

As Ms. Taylor reached the door, Anne quietly asked something of her driver. "Did you really mean all that stuff about us finding time to hang out?"

Carol smiled at her through the rear-view mirror. "'Course I did. Your, Ed's and Jenny's dads are proof enough of that." She declined to mention her own father, who had been barely tolerated by the three and who's existence was barely acknowledged even by his own illegitimate offspring. "Besides, meeting new people isn't bad either... how else do you think your parents met?" Just to be sure that she hadn't raised the younger woman's hopes too much, Carol added something. "Besides... you'll always have the summer."

"Yeah. I guess you have a point there." Anne was finally feeling a bit better about everything. They started moving again and before much time had passed, they were at the Walsh Family home... a modest two story with attic that Parker Walsh himself had grown up in. Anne got out on the sidewalk side, closed the door on the car and then walked up the path as Carol idled on the street, finally waving her away when she reached the door. 'Good old Carol.' Thought Anne. She'd been her baby-sitter (absolute best after Mrs. G), her surrogate big sister, her best girl-friend by default until the Taylors had returned when Jenny was 8... an 'all-around good bloke' was the best description possible as the young woman used her key to unlock the door and entered her house.

Once inside, she re-locked the door and headed to the kitchen to get some water. She had half-filled the glass from the tap before she noticed her father sleeping at the kitchen table, slumped over his notebook computer and drooling on the spill-proof keyboard. Oh, how positively regal Parker Walsh looked: glasses askew, unshaven, spittle running from the corner of his mouth, still in rumpled day clothes.

Life as a corporate geographer/geologist... he could have it.

Resting her now full glass on the table, Anne shook her fathers shoulder to wake him up... which she did. "I assume that mom isn't home yet, if you're still up." Anne sat down as Parker finally got himself coherent.

"Nope. She's still at the hospital... a car accident brought in a couple of nasty concussions and the Admin wanted to make sure they're all stable before they let their compliment down. So after I got the twins to bed, I began going over the latest project I got handed until she got home." Parker motioned to his computer.

"And... it's either hard or incredibly boring?" Anne took a guess, knowing that the sort of projects her father used to kill time were often both.

"Definitely the former. This year we're figuring out how to reconstruct a string of mountains in West Virginia." He heard his daughter audibly wince at the prospect of putting a complex geology and water table back together after it had been ripped up and jumbled in the name of cheap hydrocarbons. "That's pretty much the project consensus: like we're trying to reconstruct a steer from hamburger without the option of just starting over and cloning the son-of-a-bitch." Perhaps it was how tired he was, but swearing really felt cathartic right now, the presence of his almost-but-not-quite adult daughter notwithstanding.

Anne managed chuckle.. and then remembered something that Carol had said. " Dad... I know that you've always been a bit tight-lipped about this, but just how did you and mom meet?" It had never really been discussed apart from vague mentions of college romance that had surrounded not just her parents, but those of Edmund and Jenny as well. Carols parents... well, from what she knew, it was a 'wham-bam-not-even-a-freaking-thank-you-ma'am" sorta thing.

Here Parker, in his drowsy state, smiled in remembrance and stated the situation quite plainly. "It was my first week at the Yewtown dorms... some old rat-hole called Chilton, probably torn down years ago by now. Anyway, I walk into my dorm to find your mother rooting through my roommate's stuff. She guesses right away where we were raised... Carols dad in a TGI Friday's, me in a Siberian Gulag." Anne laughed again, this time a full-blown guffaw. "Hey, I swear to it! And let me tell you, if you'd seen my room as a kid, you'd have agreed."

"And I guess it was true love from there on, huh?" Anne may have asked his rhetorically... but Parker must have interpreted it differently. He became... Anne would later recall it as evasive, vague... clever.

That was twice in one night, in one hour!

"More or less." Anne's father then quickly changed the subject because, frankly, the early stages of his and Jessica's courtship had been... bizarre to say the very least. "Speaking of Yewtown, you're going there tomorrow and you should get plenty of sleep. You'd better start getting ready for bed." The delivery for this little piece of advice had screamed that this was the end of the conversation. Thus, seeing no point to argue, Anne merely finished her water, gave a an affectionate "Night, Dad." and started heading for the hallway stairs to the second floor.

Once she reached the upstairs hallway, she checked in on twins. First was Patrick in his room and then Meridith in the room that she shared with her older sister... and would be inheriting as of tomorrow. Finding that both were safe and sound asleep, Anne began getting ready for bed herself... but not before checking to see if her tablet PC was fully charged.

That thing was one of the things that'd probably keep her sane while she was away.