Pinpoint
(Yet another from gleerant's future!Sugar verse… did I say Roch n JJ rock? Charles's pov)
The targeting was tricky: you had to be precise. In order to use the device intentionally, you had to be absolutely clear, and if you'd never experienced that moment before, you had to imagine it so fully that you could actually feel it. Because Mama had made the machine, after all. Mama had made it.
He'd begun planning his sister's rescue the night she'd vanished, but the machine hadn't been quite right at that point. And his understanding, and Mama's understanding of the thing had been so incomplete. He'd watched her work on it, and he'd tried to draw her out about it, and he'd done some tinkering, secretly, on his own.
See, he was the string. Mom thought she was, but he was the string that could bring his sister home. It was his responsibility. And now he couldn't keep letting his parents get hurt.
She needed protection, and for that he needed an adult. One who had a strong string himself. And he was pretty sure who that was, and when it needed to be. But he had to be precise.
And the machine had to work properly. Which required tapping the cosmic connection like Mama could. Maybe this time he could splice into hers.
He began experimenting backwards just a few moments. The targeting was simpler if something significant had happened in that moment, like getting poked with a needle. So he'd do it, then reimagine the moment as fully as possible, the way the sharp tip sliced through the tissue, the signals racing through his neuromusculature to his brain, then other impulses coursing back, causing him to flinch, the drop of blood emerging from the wound.
He reimagined it over and over, every nanosecond, until it was utterly clear. Then he did it again. And again.
He'd waited until his parents were, uh, tapping their own cosmic connection (oh god) once again, and immersed in its vastness, gathered with it his own love for them, and for her, and when the magic was ready, silently he opened the locker door. Balancing it all carefully in his heart, he imagined the pinprick again as he closed it.
And he bled again.
In the universes in which he was allowed to survive, he would remember the relativity of time. And its elasticity.
Plucking the precise moment, he focused the magic and spun his own string out to Mama, following the cord of their connection, so close at times it was hard to tell where he ended and she began. He tugged sharply once.
Instantly he was home. Proof of concept.