"I gotta hand it to ya, Mick, it looks exactly like a trash can with wheels."

Funny. Hilarious. Also true, Micky thought to himself, scratching his chin. Except for the fact that trash cans were a lot smaller, not to mention the fact that most garbage containers didn't have four large tires attached to them. Really, locomotion was a vestigial feature, since the contraption didn't actually need to move, and there was nothing vehicular about it that would suggest that it SHOULD move. Looking at Mike, Micky replied, "You have to admit, everything looks cooler with wheels."

After a brief glance at his curly-haired friend, Mike gave a conceding shrug, then added, "Was the paint on the floor necessary? 'Cuz y'know Babbit's gonna add that onto our rent."

Dismissively, Micky waved a hand. "If it becomes a problem, this thing can fix it. Trust me."

He should not have been surprised when Mike arched an eyebrow at him, given certain recent happenings. Without taking his eye off Micky, he said, "Davy, get The List."

The shortest member of their band sat halfway up the spiral staircase, smirking at Micky with a half mischievous, half pitying look in his eye. As soon as Mike made his request, though, Davy snickered, and quickly disappeared into the upstairs bedroom. A quick glance at Peter in the kitchen for some sort of answer only earned Micky a shrug.

Did they— Did they doubt him and the genius of this incredible machine? How could they not see the wonder and potential in its (admittedly slap-dash) frame? Had they really missed the cleverness in the execution of his timer device made out of salvaged alarm clocks? Perhaps they were offended somehow by the button clearly labeled 'emergency use only' in pink crayon. No, it must have been the cardboard casing around the circuitry that earned their distrust, because even Micky had to admit, that decision had been a little desperate. His friends just had to embrace the future, though, and that was that.

…Only the future wasn't exactly inviting, with its rusty outer shell and it's frayed wires and its four unnecessary wheels and the television screen that had to sit turned on its side because it was the only way Micky could get it to fit where it needed to go. The future kind of looked untrustworthy.

"Got it! Got it here, hang on…" Davy waved a small stack of papers over the railing on the second floor, before straightening them up for proper recitation. "Ahem. A List of Cause and Effect, by Michael Nesmith."

Davy made a sweeping, formal gesture with one arm. Mike bowed.

"January second," Davy went on. "Micky says 'Trust Me.' Microwave catches fire. Fire turns ceiling blue." Four sets of eyes looked toward the blue smudge above the appliance. As of yet, Babbit was not entirely convinced that said blue smudge was artwork, as the four of them claimed.

"January twelfth. Micky says 'Trust Me.' Peter discovers the hard way that cats don't make good back scratchers."

He flipped to the next page. "February thirtieth. Micky says 'Trust Me. There are thirty days in February.' Monkees miss March first gig."

Davy's voice trailed off again as he skimmed over the list, turning past a couple pages. "Oh, here's a good one. April ninth. Micky says 'Trust Me.' Next day, five men in HazMat suits quarantine the house for a week in order to verify one Micky Dolenz isn't baking rabies into pies."

"Look, that was an innocent mistake," Micky protested. "How was I supposed to know they'd take me seriously?"

"Last one," Davy said, cutting Micky off. "Promise. April twenty-first. Micky says 'Trust Me.' Hypnotist meant to entertain people at party causes Mike to cluck like a chicken for three days."

Wistfully, Mike said, "Sometimes ah still get this weird craving for chicken feed." Shaking his head to bring himself back to reality, Mike fixed Micky with a stern glare. "Your track record's shoddy, son. And with what you're on about claimin' this thing can do, well, you can understand why we'd all be just a little reluctant to jump in head-first when you say 'trust me.'"

"Please?" Micky begged. All he wanted was for them to believe him this time, because if it worked — WHEN it worked, rather — it would end up being the grooviest thing any of them would ever see. He really believed it, too. "I built this thing from the ground up. Wire by wire, wheel by wheel, box by box. Irradiated rock by irradiated rock."

Alarmed, Michael paled.

"I'm kidding."

Mostly.

Peter stood up from his seat in the kitchen and approached Michael, and the two of them exchanged a quick glance with Davy, who shrugged. "He did say 'please,' so…"

Mike sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. "Davy, go on an' add it to the list."

Giddily excited, Micky flipped on the television screen, but just before he was able to go about his safety checks and start-up procedures, Peter laid a hand on his shoulder. "Hey, Micky… What DOES this thing do, anyway?"

Blinking, he looked between the almost-literal bucket of bolts and his light-haired bandmate. "It's not obvious?"

Again, with the endless patience that was his trademark, Mike said, "Enlighten the uninitiated, please."

With a shrug, Micky said simply, "It's a temporal transport. A time machine. I figure, we go forward in time like … I dunno. Ten, twenty years, see what it's like… What?"

He couldn't read the expressions on the faces of the others at first, but watched with rapt interest as they each formed into definitive emotions. Mike rolled his eyes, his demeanor incredulous. He'd always been the most grounded of all of them and hated (or at times, outright denied) the supernatural predicaments into which they'd occasionally found themselves. Even so, the tall young guitar player couldn't completely discount that weird things happened, sometimes without explanation, and that they usually involved one of Micky's brilliant ideas. "What do you mean, 'what?'" Mike asked.

"It's completely daft. You're gonna turn the livin' room into an inferno, mate," Davy said. "And that thing's a lot bigger than a microwave."

Peter, smiling, laid a hand on the trash-can-on-wheels. "I dunno, guys, you know what they say. Third time's the charm, right?"

"Third!" Davy exclaimed, shaking the papers in his hand. "There's fifty documented times that Micky's said 'Trust me' this year that ended in some degree of disaster. If fifty times isn't 'the charm,' that's…"

"…A shoddy track record," Mike finished.

As far as Micky was concerned, despite the continued dubiousness on the part of his housemates, he'd been given the okay, so he was going to start setting things into motion. Resisting the urge to say 'trust me' again, he tuned the television to static, calibrated a bunch of random dials, and flipped the numbers on the clock. "We need to decide how far to go forward," Micky explained.

Behind him, Peter examined the stacked, taped-together clocks, his own enthusiasm waning just a bit when he noticed that they didn't appear particularly stable. "If Babbit hears that TV, he's gonna come up here, you know."

"That's part of the calibration. It gives off the right sound wave pattern," Micky replied. "It's all about sound, and this connection from one point in time to another. Neat, huh? I got the idea from this one guy who said my shoes were ugly, and I told him to take it back, but then I realized he really couldn't 'cuz I'd already heard it and he couldn't take the sound out of my ears or, you know, my brain— "

"So you built a time machine?" Mike asked, incredulously.

Micky shrugged. "Well, yeah. It seems like the obvious escalation to me." The machine started to whine, a high-pitched keen which caused Davy and Peter to cover their ears. Suddenly, Micky was grateful for his earlier decision to use cardboard to cover up the inner workings of his creation, 'cuz they'd have second thoughts if they all got a peek at what it was doing. "Look, before this deafens us, how far forward are we going?"

Micky noted the absolute calm with which Mike leaned on the wall next to the machine. Either he didn't believe any of this would produce results, or he was inwardly fighting a battle to prevent himself from hacking the machine to pieces before it gained sentience and took over the world. He sighed, rolling his eyes. "How 'bout nineteen-eighty-four. Might as well see if George Orwell was onto anything while we're at it."

"Okay, okay…" Micky said, fooling with the clock numbers again. "You gotta stand in the paint— the paint circle on the floor— " Excitedly gesturing to it, he waited for the other three to comply, but they all stood well out of its range, staring at it as if it were full of piranhas.

Grumbling, he took Davy's shoulders, then Peters, and guided them into the target area, where they stood quite tensely in wait. When he was just about to drag Mike along, the taller man held up a hand and cautioned, "Look, ah'll do it myself. I swear to my fuzzy wool hat, though, Micky, if there are any chickens involved, ah'll end this machine."

The warning was less about chickens and more about something going catastrophically awry, of course. Stepping aside, Micky smiled and waved the reluctant Texan onward, before stepping into the circle himself.

Quickly, he realized the flaw in his plan, that with all of them in the circle, no one was left to press the button to make the time machine actually send them forward in time. Snapping his fingers in frustration at this oversight, Micky once again stepped out of the circle in order to procure the nearest object he could find which was also long enough to reach the controls. Returning to the designated location, he held it out over the button, and as he brought it down, Michael realized just a second too late that Micky had grabbed his guitar.

Their departure happened in the blink of an eye and without fanfare. Lacking any feeling or perceived passing of time, they were at one moment at their pad in California, and the next—

The circle of floor on which they'd been standing had come along for the ride, Micky noted, fighting off a wave of vertigo that threatened to knock him off his feet. Curiously, they were outside, supposedly standing in the same spot from which they'd departed. With a look around, he felt his stomach flip-flop while his feet struggled to keep purchase on the displaced piece of their home.

"The machine— where…"

Turning around, he lost his balance and stepped off the circle of flooring and onto the grass. Its sharp edges caught on his pants, making scritchy noises as he stumbled unintentionally away from the others, using the guitar in his hand to keep himself from falling down the slight incline.

Mike managed to catch Davy before the shorter boy toppled, as well, and still found time to chastise Micky for using the guitar as a walking stick. "Hey now, careful with that!" he groused, holding onto Davy's shoulders until the short Englishman nodded to signal he was okay.

Meanwhile, Peter had also stepped one foot off the floor, balancing carefully while looking around at their strange nineteen-eighty-four scenery. Down the hill coursed a swampy river, its banks muddy and uninviting. The sky was cloudy, the humidity almost unbearable, with the sounds of nature around them within the imposing plantlife sounding increasingly hostile. "Guys, I've never seen these kinds of trees before," he squeaked out, backing closer toward Davy.

"S'cuz we live in a city," Mike said, though he didn't seem entirely at ease as he caught up with Micky and confiscated the guitar. "Next time, you warn me 'fore you go usin' this in one of your projects." Pause. "And b'fore you ask, the answer's no."

Interspersed in the scratchy grasses, bright, colorful red and blue flowers grew, their blossoms - if they could be called that - an array of unfamiliar shapes. At present, they stood in the shadow of something that vaguely resembled a palm tree, only its leaves were huge, broad and tear-drop shaped, stretching over them like natural umbrellas. It was definitely one of the stranger things Micky had seen, but he wasn't worried about that at the moment, since his mind was on their missing time machine.

As he continued to take in their surroundings, Peter suddenly pointed across the river and asked, "Hey… What's that?" Hoping his friend had found the missing time machine, Micky turned to look, squinting at the ground.

It was Mike, though, who shielded the sun from his eyes with one hand and looked over the trees. Calmly, as if this were terribly common, he said, "That's a pterodactyl."