1~
"What are you guys complaining about?" Marcie asked, after she saw an opening in the weekend traffic, and changed lanes. "I'm the one playing taxi, here."
"Well, I would have made it home after picking up my mom's package from the post office, " Jason told her, sheepishly. "If I...hadn't lost my bus fare through a hole in my pocket."
Red laughed. "I didn't think there was room for a hole, he's so big."
"Oh, yeah?" Jason retorted. "Well, since I saw you picking up a package there, too, I might've ask you for a ride home...if your motorcycle wasn't towed away!"
"Towed?" Daisy responded.
Red blushed around his ears. "Don't worry about it. I'll take care of that," he told her.
Then, he turned his attention back to Jason. "You, however, were obviously confused. I call my bike a hog, I don't carry hogs on it. Ha! Like I'd let you ride my bike, and kill my baby's shocks."
"Stop fighting, you two," Daisy said, sitting next to Marcie, up front. "You two should be grateful that she could drive us where we need to go. There was antique auction that I could've gotten to, by myself, but my car's in the shop. Good thing we all had our cell phones."
She gave a glance in Marcie's direction. "I just hope that this little detour of hers doesn't take too much time."
"Hey, this little detour, as you call it, is the grand opening of a new, cutting-edge research lab in town. I was given my invite on Wednesday, and I waited all week to be there," Marcie defended. "I'm kind of surprised that anybody from the scientific community would know me well enough to give me such and honor, but I won't refuse."
"Ooooh," Red mocked, rolling his eyes. "I'm the Princess of Science. La-di-da!"
Marcie took the jibe in stride, musing aloud, "Princess of Science, hmm? I like the sound of that. Anyway, c'mon, guys. The least you all could do is spare me a few minutes, so I can check this place out, then I'll drop you off wherever you want."
"Where is this place?" Jason asked.
"Just on the other side of downtown, but don't worry, the traffic's fine, so we'll get there, quickly," she said. "It's strange, but the neighborhood it's in sounds sort of familiar."
Daisy glanced over to the backseat, and conversationally asked Red, "By the way, what did you have to pick up from the post office? Probably some new part for your bike, or something."
Red's blush intensified, slightly, as he stammered and muttered an answer, "Uh, yeah. Just another part for my cool bike," while thinking of the item, wrapped in brown paper and too conspicuously large to be for a motorcycle, that was stowed in the front trunk of the Clue Cruiser.
Blocks from the heart of downtown, but still within the periphery of its business district, stood the new laboratory, and when Marcie parked the Cruiser along its clean curb, she studied its architecture, and came to a startling conclusion.
"No wonder the area looked so familiar to me," she said to herself, looking up at the singular design of the building. "This used to belong to Quest!"
Although no one else knew the significance of the location, except, perhaps, Jason, marginally, Marcie knew that she was standing in one of the shadows of a once-great man's legacy.
A Futura-designed edifice, its street-level manufacturing and research floors were high and broad, crowned with a central tower whose more administrative levels were terraced, as it rose, their facades graced with windows that commanded greater and greater views of the town, the further one ascended.
The philosophy of the architecture did not escape Marcie. The building signified the fact that only through the hard work of scientists and laborers on the ground floor, could the soaring and lasting beauty of science and technology come to prominence.
It was a notion that she, herself, appreciated, and one Quest had abandoned in his headlong dive into darkness and scholastic ostracism.
She walked past the building's facade to peer up one of the sides of the tower. Just below the roof, which served as the locus of the building's radio antenna, support shack, and helipad, where the corporate logo, "Quest Research Laboratories," was once written, now displayed a large, stylized, oval sundial, serving as the background to the words, "Sundial Temporal Research Facility."
Marcie couldn't believe it. The enigmatic think tank was finally making a presence in Crystal Cove, but why? And more to the point, she thought, with slight butterflies in her stomach, what did it have to do with her?
"Is this the place?" Daisy asked from the curb. Marcie stood still in quiet rumination. "Marcie!"
Marcie turned her head to the summons, and walked back to the group. "Uh, yeah. This is the place. Cool, huh?"
Red rolled up his eyes, again. "Whoopie."
Marcie went to the front doors and beckoned the others to enter, with a mask of congeniality. "C'mon, guys. Let's see what we can see."
'So I can get to the bottom of all of this,' she thought, anxiously.
The foyer of the lab was spacious, cavernously so, and Marcie could have sworn that it was even larger inside than out.
"Hey, Marcie, Jason. Doesn't this place make you feel homesick?" Red asked, with a snicker.
"What do you mean?" asked Marcie, knowing that a jibe was coming.
"Well, this is a geek factory, isn't it?" Red remarked. "Isn't this where you guys come from?"
"It could be worse, Red," Marcie said, smoothly. "We could be in a zoo."
It took Red a few moments to process that one, but when he finally did, he felt the sting. "Hey!"
Strolling past posted security guards and labyrinthine side corridors, they soon reached the wide kiosk of the main receptionist. A receptionist Marcie couldn't help but recognize.
"Pardon me," she said to the woman. "But didn't I see you in Creationex, one time? Aren't you their receptionist?"
The familiar woman smiled and explained. "Oh, yeah, but since this place opened up, about a month ago, I decided to do a little moonlighting, on the side."
That would have been the end of the matter, but then, she gave Marcie's face another look, and asked, "Wait, are you Marcie Fleach?"
"Yes, I am."
"Do you have your invitation?"
The girl slipped a folded card from her jacket pocket for the receptionist to peruse. It was returned, soon after.
"The Head Director definitely wants to meet with you," the woman told her, almost conspiratorially. "Take the elevator up to the very top floor, then walk to the director's office. Show that card to the secretary, and she'll let you in."
Marcie, taken a bit aback with the cloak and dagger vibe she was getting from everything, said, "Is it okay if I bring my friends along? They were with me when I came here."
"We wouldn't be here, if you'd taken us where we wanted to go," Red muttered under his breath, before receiving an elbow bump to the ribs by Daisy. "What? It's true."
The receptionist gave her friends a practiced, studious look. Years of meeting different people gave her the ability to discern intent from just a gaze into their faces. There was indifference, impatience, and anxiousness, for sure, but not much else. In her built-in polygraph, they posed no immediate threat.
"Okay," she said. "They can go with you. Good luck, up there."
Marcie reflexively thanked her, then wondered, on her way to the elevator, beyond the central kiosk, why the woman had said that.
It only fueled her curiosity, and her anxiousness, as she and the other stepped into the car and ascended.
The elevator doors parted to a familiar scene for Marcie. Another tastefully appointed corridor stretching out before her, leading her, once again, to the office at the end, that, ultimately, hid the true master of affairs that she found herself surrounded by.
The group stepped out and walked past flanking satellite offices adorned with pictures of Sundial's history, on the walls.
Apologetic, deal making, German scientists standing next to a large, bell-shaped conveyance, alongside other scientists from other Allied countries who shared a similar technological dream.
The pictures of awkward first tests, eccentric financial backers, and so forth, led to the photo of Sundial's engineers, finally, standing proudly around the prototype of the Hour Tower, the stabilizing power source and reality-warping technology that bent space-time to their collective will, albeit, slightly.
Except for unforeseen growing pains that caused them to accidentally pull figures from their eras, like the Slag Brothers, The Red Max, and The Ant-hill Mob, the dream of scientific exploration via time travel was developing apace, culminating, dubiously, in the now destroyed, stolen, and cannibalized prototype of the T.H.R.O.B.A.C.-Tampered History Rectifying Observational Base And Combatant.
This gradual, visual path through Sundial's evolution eventually ended at the desk of the head director's secretary, who sat calmly, yet kept a wary eye on these newcomers.
"Do you have an appointment?" she asked, more as a matter of course, than as a legitimate question. She doubted that they had any true reason to be here.
Marcie stepped forward from the rest and handed the woman her card.
"Fleach. Party of four," she quipped.
The secretary gave a dispassionate look through the card, looked back at this motley crew of youngsters, and said, with a nod, "Go on in. The Head Director will see you now."
Marcie couldn't help but detect something ominous in that, but she led the way to the brass-handled, polished wood door that wore a matching brass plaque that said simply, "Head Director."
She knocked and waited for permission to enter. A voice from within bid them to do so.
Dominated by a window that stretched the width of the already wide room, the office was warm and plush without the décor being too distracting for work. The director's desk sat centrally in front of the window, like an alter, yet its chair was already turned around to face it.
There were two chairs before the desk, as well. One, occupied by someone who didn't turn to regard the new guests, so Marcie took the other, while the rest of her friends took a couch and another chair that sat in the corners of the room.
Marcie heard a snort of derision from the figure seated across from her, as soon as she sat down, prompting her to notice the man sitting in the other chair. She gasped quietly at the recognition.
"Maynard Spring?" she blurted out.
"Doctor Maynard Spring, to you," he corrected, huffily.
"What are you doing here?" she asked. "I thought you were rotting in jail after Sundial fired you for what you did to them and The Wacky Racers."
"I was, thanks to you," the erstwhile Sundial employee muttered in her direction. "Luckily, Sundial was still able to see my genius through my past…indiscretions, and ask for my help in a most delicate matter. One that, unfortunately, you have a part in."
"What do you mean? What do I have to do with anything?"
"Heh! You'll see," he said, with a sly smirk. "You haven't met my ex-boss, yet, have you?"
"This Head Director? No, I haven't."
The smirk deepened. "Funny. He couldn't stop talking about your and his little fishing trip. Particularly about the one that...almost got away."
The gears in her mind were running with past associates. Then, a notion came to her, one so out-of-left field, that she almost laughed in incredulity.
"No..."
The desk's chair suddenly turned slowly to face the guests, revealing a frail, silent, old man in a business suit, breathing feebly from an oxygen mask.
"Oh," Marcie sighed in relief. The notion would have been unthinkable, otherwise.
The man's desk, however, was as broad, as it was wide, and so, she was unprepared when the unthinkable, who was hidden from her point of view, popped his head up, and gave Marcie a knowing smile.
"Hello, Marcie," Schrödinger the cat purred, smugly. "I told you that we'd certainly see each other, again."
Marcie was, for lack of a better word, flabbergasted.
