Wade stood next to the flux capacitor unit and wondered whether he would have called it that if it weren't for Robert Zemeckis. This one wasn't a small device like the one in the film, though; it was the size of a middle sized washing machine so building it into a Delorian or anything with any style was right out. Not that it mattered.
At the far end of the garage stood the huge vehicle I had chosen for the "Delorian." A vintage 18-wheeler with chromed smoke stacks. As far as trucks went, even Wade was forced to admit, it was sex on legs.
"We nearly ready to fly, Wade?" asked a cool voice with a slight tint of a Hispanic accent. Wade looked down from the mostly dismantled truck engine and smiled at the leader of the resistance.
"Its been more than able to fly for over a week. It'll fly alright, I'm just not sure if I can get it to do what it was built to do."
"I was talking about the time travel…wait, you put flight systems into this thing?"
"Yeah, I wanted the full movie trilogy experience," Wade's gruff baritone echoed back.
"Don't you think that people are going to notice a giant truck flying around?"
"People happily ignore Ron flying around all the time. How often do you hear about a strange blond superhero in armour? Answer: never."
"Yes, but a human is far easier to dismiss as the mind playing tricks than a black articulated lorry!"
"You say pot-ay-to and I say pot-at-o," Wade replied as he strolled across the floor to the truck itself and climbed on to the fender.
"Look, all I'm saying is "guy-in-the-sky" is far easier to ignore than "whacking-great-black-oblong-in-the-sky."
"I understand what you're saying," Wade replied, leaning into the cockpit of the vessel, "Which is why I installed this," he flourished, throwing a switch. Nothing happened.
"What am I looking at here, Wade?"
"Gaddammit!" Wade cried and slapped his hand down on the bonnet of the truck. Something started turning inside and after a brief rippling, the whole truck and most of Wade vanished.
"Camouflage, nice," Damien said approvingly.
"Thought you'd like it," Wade muttered as Damien turned and walked away, leaving Wade unable to find the entrance to the now concealed cockpit to turn the field off. Until that happened, he was trapped up there.
"Damien, there you are," a sweet voice with a southern twang sounded up the hall towards him. Damien paused for a second before the gears in his brain decided to start working together and tell him who she was.
"Anne, what can I do for you?" he asked, having a sneaking suspicion what she was going to say.
"You can take me with you," she announced, holding her medicine case in front of her like a secret. There it is, though Damien, it was inevitable. She'd been asking this since the beginning of the project and I had kept saying no based on temporal paradox. She obviously thought Damien would be an easier mark.
"We've been through this before, Anne. Ron is the primary on this mission and he's already said "no" to you meeting your mother and perhaps doing something stupid like warning her that the military is going to kidnap her when she's pregnant to turn her baby into a genius and her grandkids into polymaths with eidetic reflexes."
"But you'll need a medic," she sputtered, looking desperate for a second, then her right arm collapsed down behind her, her lower lip protruded and big blue eyes were framed with a gently quivering lip.
"No Puppy Dog Pout is going to make me give in on this Anne, Ron taught me all of his tricks, including how he avoided giving into that on numerous occasions."
"Ron never…that sneaky son of a bitch! He figured it out? Damnit!"
"Sorry Anne, you've been firing blanks all this time. He figured out a thought so hideous that it could override the cute and used it every time Kim tried to use the pout on him from that point on. He just pretended to give in."
"What was it? I've got to know."
"Easy, tiger. After the turning into a monkey thing on photo-day, Ron learned to think of kissing Kim as a monkey (even if it was Chippy). That pretty much scuppered the pout right off. I mean, what's the point of the pout after Ron hit puberty other than reminding him of the heinous crime of upsetting a girl?" Damien finished this statement with a flourish and a grin that could have only been learned from the face of Ron Stoppable.
"You're getting rather too much like him," Anne said as she walked away annoyed.
"I'll take that as a compliment!" he yelled after her.
"What are you doing up there?" Lynn asked, wandering onto the hanger. Wade was still suspended in the air, stood on the spoilers of an invisible big rig, missing from the waist down and groping for something that he couldn't see. She stifled a giggle at the sight of his eyes rolled up and tongue out switching from one side to the other as he concentrated.
"Trying to find the control for the invisibility circuit. I can't see it to grab it."
"Didn't you build a remote?" she asked in a voice that made it sound like the most obvious thing in the universe.
"Yes I did, actually, miss Smartypants. It's just not here. It's in my lab and I'm up here where I can't see to climb down and I don't know which of the security features may have been activated.
"I'll go get it then!" she squealed with delight at the idea of entering Wade's lab and disappeared out of the door before Wade could stop her.
Wade cursed himself gently, knowing that she had no idea what the remote looked like, so he'd likely be up here for a while longer.
"Tim, you've got to convince them to let me go with you."
"Mum, that stuff didn't wash when we tried it with Kim, so it sure as hell isn't going to work when you're asking me to defy Ron-frigging-Stoppable."
"Ron isn't that scary, dear," she replied knowingly.
"You may have seen him naked but you haven't seen him angry. Let's leave it at that."
"Ron doesn't get angry dear," came his brisk response. He sighed and dropped his head in his hands before looking up from the workbench.
"Doesn't he? You weren't there when he obliterated an entire room full of synthetics because one of them had tried to mess with Bonnie. You weren't there during the really grim actions in China; you didn't see the bodies of women and children stacked to that they would block the paddies and make everything pickle. Even he couldn't keep from anger at that and he did a lot of damage."
"What's that got to do with this?"
"If you were to come back in time and change anything, interact with your mother, then you or Kim might never be born and we're in more of a pickle than we're in now. Sorry mum, it isn't happening."
"We'll see about that," she said before leaving the room without further ceremony. Tim sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. For the four hundred and sixth time that day, he wished that his brother was still on side.
Lynn was enjoying this. Wade's lab had always been something of a mystery, full of half built magic and wonder. Things that thought for themselves, things that flew, things that made you invisible or let you walk through things. She especially liked the magic hats.
In some ways, they weren't actually magical, but in some ways they were. Most of the systems were engineered by measuring what my brain did when I use magic and causing the same thing to happen in other people. They did some of the minor things that I can do like fly or make himself look like other people.
She wondered why I don't use my multiplying power more often. That was useful and there was always one of me looking over her in Britain. She kinda missed that.
She clattered around for many minutes, looking at the things placed at her head height on all of the workbenches and looking up at the shelves. Everything looked so cool and weird but that didn't help her find what she was looking for…
What would daddy do? She thought to herself, pondering the whole thing for a while. Unfortunately, the answer was something along the lines of; spread his mind through the whole area and see what has the most emotion directed at it at the moment.
That wasn't a huge help.
Wait.
Ron didn't have powers, well, proper magical powers when he was her age but her mum always told her how he always managed to find the answer by accident.
That's silly, she thought until another thought rose up unbidden, it's not like you have a better idea, is it?
Mildly shocked, she got out a stepladder and climbed up to see what was on some of the shelves. Unclear as to what everything was, she covered her eyes with one hand and started to eeny-meeny through them. Unfortunately, she hadn't a hand free to keep her on the ladder. It began to tilt.
She fell screaming onto one of the workbenches, crushing and scattering everything, all the while with her hand over her eyes.
She finally came to a halt.
Timidly, she opened her eyes to find two things she'd not really seen before. One was a clunky steel watch and the other was a strange brass shape that looked like a box with a tail and another tail opposite the first made of grey steel.
She happily snatched them both up and ran back to the hanger.
Wade was pretty sure that he had his arm inside the cockpit now. Just whether he could swing inside to find the control was another issue.
He was about to try when a red tornado appeared in the corner of his eye, screaming and giggling. The shock almost caused him to lose his footing.
"I think I've found it, Wade," she cried happily, producing the watch and gripping the bevel.
"No wai…" was all Wade managed to get out before she turned it.
The truck did indeed become visible. Unfortunately, it took that opportunity to begin transforming into a large black and partially incomplete war robot.
Author's note: The little thing that Lynn found is a device called a Cricket Snapper; they were issued in WW2 to members of the airborne and made a distinctive clicking noise when the iron tongue was depressed and released. They often found their way into the hands of children in the late 40's and 50's so they would be considered archaic but not surprising in the 60's. If you're wondering what one looks like, I suggest you Google it.
Sorry it took so long to get a chapter out. Depression and the difficulty of trying to write What Rons May Come had me somewhat avoiding writing for a while. If anyone has any suggestions about decent Fics to read to try and get my creative juices going again, I'm all ears.