Calvin And Hobbes: Temporal Threshold Velocity
A/N: I don't own Calvin and Hobbes. Also, this was partially inspired by Great Thumbs of Wisdom's story, Calvin and Hobbes: Slipstream.
Summary: It started innocently enough: just Calvin and Hobbes pulling a prank. No one was supposed to get hurt, but Calvin screwed up. Now, he travels the timestream, trying to escape from the twenty-first century cops, with just a cardboard box and other stuff fuelled by imagination, an imagination, Hobbes, and Susie. The three of them are temporal fugitives.
Calvin's Temporal Log; Real date/time: December 31st, 1995, 5:15 PM; Timer's Date/time: Year 1, month five, day fifteen, 5:15 PM: It started innocently enough: just me and Hobbes pulling a prank. No one was supposed to get hurt, but I screwed up. Now, I travel the timestream, trying to escape from the twenty-first century cops, with just a cardboard box and other stuff fuelled by imagination, an imagination, Hobbes, and Susie. The three of use are temporal fugitives, going so far as to create an alternate timeline and hijack our 6-year-old bodies from that timeline before excising that timeline from existence. All that was five months ago. Now, we are preparing to exit the Timestream for the 5th time, in an attempt to lose the cops who are after us. Our bodies will remain with the Time machine, which we dubbed Timer, after realizing that it would practically be our home for an indefinite period of time, while our consciounesses, and Temporal Indiscrepancy Prohibitors, which will switch our former bodies, which will have the consciounesses from our bodies in this time period switched into them, with the ones we will inhabit during our stay here, when we activate our Time remotes and get on the run again. Simply put, we will inhabit our bodies from this time period, while the minds of "us" from the time we are entering inhabit our REAL bodies, and then, when we activate the remotes that transport us back to the Timer, the bodies our consciounesses will be in will switch places with our REAL bodies, and the "us" from the time period we entered will be transported back to just before we interfered, and they'll be none the wiser. It works. End Log.
Calvin's non-log POV: I was taking the Timer out of the Timestream. Knowing where we would each be at 5:15 on December 31st, 1995, I had selected a rendezvous point that could be reached within one-and-a-half minutes by any one of us. I checked the temporal turbulence dial, then iniated a cancellation field, calibrating it to cancel out the turbulence. Any disturbances could cause us to enter at the wrong instant, and our consciounesses would take five days to return to our bodies, following the curve of the earth. We couldn't afford to lose that kind of time. I carefully steered us in, then activated the timeslip, which allowed us to exit the Timestream without leaving a timetrail that would lead them right to us.
The second we exited, I felt the mindswitch activate, being pulled from my own body and placed in another. At the moment the switch occured, in the entered timeline, Hobbes and I had been sledding down the aptly named "Masochist Mount", whereas Susie had been about fifty feet away from the snow fort we had built. The fort was our destination. We would ride across an ice-bridge over the wall, using the trigger-wire firecrackers that we had saved from the previous 4th of July to destroy the bridge behind us, making it impenetrable. As soon as we slid to a stop, I hopped off the sled, grabbed a few unused firecrackers, stuck them in a section of the snow wall, and lit them. The explosion opened a section of the wall for Susie to get in. She walked in about thirty seconds later, then we set to work reconstructing the wall, this time installing an openable gate.
Now, it was defense time. We began to fill the fort with snow, then we started to dig through the five-foot-deep layer of imported snow, icing the tunnels that we created, then making a few large rooms. We covered the entrance hole with a piece of wood covered by snow, then began to add various defenses: massive amounts of snowballs, catapaults, and even a few spring-loaded handheld snowball pistols, set up with manual, semi-automatic, and automatic modes. This would be our temporary hideout. We also had a secret route leading to the G.R.O.S.S. treehouse, where we would stash ice balloons, or frozen water balloons, which would be sent via zipline to us, courtesy of Mr. Bun. I had also devised a method by which we could freeze firecrackers into ice balloons. It involved waterproofing the firecracker and fuse, then using a vat of liquid nitrogen that we picked up in 2116, the year before all of this started, to flash-freeze the balloons after sticking the firecracker inside. Then, ignite the fuse, and you have seven seconds to throw it before it explodes, sending icey shrapnel everywhere. Finally, I started working on the mother of all winter-related defenses. One-and-a-half hours after we had begun, we were finished preparing.
Now, it was the waiting game. A temporal scanner would pick up any Timestream activity, and, after fifteen minutes of waiting, we went home to ask our parents if we could spend the next week camping out at our snow fort with Susie. They agreed . . . on the condition that Dad stayed with us at night. We were back at the fort fifteen minutes later, and Dad was out like a light. We arranged a sentry schedule, with each of us taking four hours. We kept in radio contact with Mr. Bun, and we only picked up one Timeship signal, which passed us right on by. The next day, we had cause to open up the ol' champagne bottle: we had fooled them for a new record of time: one night. Of course, to legally drink, we had to bring our 30-year-old bodies out of stasis. We enjoyed two glasses of champagne each, then switched back into our 6-year-old bodies.
That was the moment when we picked up a large sequence of Timeship signatures, all converging on our location. We quickly started to prepare our defenses, and Mr. Bun sent us the ice balloons and ice grenades to use. We were ready for them the instant they started to exit the Timestream. They didn't need to bring their entire time machine out like we did; they only needed to stick the door out and exit through it. As soon as they exited, they were met with a barrage of snowballs, ice balloons, and ice grenades. They tried to yell, "Cease fire and srrender peacefully, and no one gets hurt!", but we just yelled back, "If you want us, come and take us!" Then, we started to regret it.