Chapter 9: The Final Loop
Another time loop started, went through its motions, and ended, and time shattered.
Again.
"This is ridiculous!" exclaimed the first voice, whom we shall now call Eyeball One.
"How many times are we going to have to go through this?" snapped the second voice, whom we shall now call Eyeball Two.
"As many as it takes," said Voice Three calmly. The third voice was not a floating eyeball, so we'll just keep on calling it Voice Three.
Eyeball Two was beside himself, shaking in the air with visible rage. "But-but-but-but-he-he-he-he-he... HE! The HE-ness of this situation is utterly, utterly deplorable!"
"He-ness?" said Voice Three.
"He escaped again, and you let it happen! Again!" He was an aberration. He was an abomination. He was a stain on the window of time, he was a foul menace who needed to be - to be chopped up into little pieces, burnt right down and his ashes strewn across the many worlds, but even death would be too kind, he needed to be tortured and flayed and electrocuted and bludgeoned and forced to wear a pink tutu -
"Are you done yet?"
"Did I say all that out loud?" Eyeball Two wondered.
"Yes, you certainly did." Three sighed. "And you were both doing so well with the not-complaining, too."
"How can we not say anything?" Eyeball One demanded. "We're being forced to endure the same thing over and over and over again!"
"Forced? It was your idea to keep a close watch on me for this particular event. Following accusations of meddling in the timeline in our own world, I believe."
"Um, well, yes," said Eyeball One. "We didn't realise how... monotonous it would turn out to be."
"As I recall, that was why you gave the job to me in the first place, yes?"
"Oh do shut up," said Eyeball Two. "Are you going to save reality or not?"
"Of course. It just requires patience, and a calm, collected mind."
The implication was clear, but Eyeball Two didn't rise to the bait this time.
"Go on, then," he said.
The floating, high-tech screen that the three entities had gathered around to watch the time loop on automatically reset itself, to show the Xiaolin warriors preparing to do their chores on that day once more.
"Stand on your marks," said Omi. "Set yourselves."
"Commence with chores," said Eyeball One dully, at the same time as Omi did on-screen.
"Gong Yi Tanpai," said Eyeball Two, equally as dully.
Omi leapt up, using the Third Arm Sash to wipe a window clean.
"Lotus Twister," said Eyeball One together with Kimiko on-screen.
"And now she crouches down and reaches underneath the couch," said Eyeball Two. "Ugh, I've had it. I can't take any more! Let's go!"
"Yes, do let us know when you've saved reality," said Eyeball One brusquely.
"You're leaving?" said Voice Three.
"Yes!" they both chimed. They disappeared in a flash.
And just like that, Three was left to watch events unfold by himself. As it should be, he thought.
Raimundo looked at the dishes piled up in the sink.
But he didn't use the Shroud of Shadows. Because a silver vortex appeared above the plates, and it swallowed them up.
This was it…
"Woah... freaky," Raimundo said, backing away apprehensively. But then suddenly the vortex vanished, as if it had never been there at all, and Raimundo grinned. This was convenient.
"All done!" he yelled.
"Humph," said Three, "leave it to those two to miss the most important part." That Time-error meant a world of difference.
Because now was the time to act.
Ever relentless, and regardless of Raimundo's discovery, the new loop still continued along its path. The moment that the Sands of Time activated came and went, and from there the loop just kept on going. Fed up of the Xiaolin monks always winning, Jack completed his Time-bot to even the odds. Its first task was to help Jack get to the Shard of Lightning just before it had become active. The Xiaolin warriors arrived at the noisy port only to find Jack and Wuya already there.
"Wow," said Raimundo, staring at the clock-shaped robot beside Jack. "What are you calling this one, Jack? The Clock-bot? Real original!"
"Time-bot," Jack huffed, "Time-bot! Get it right." To his delight the warriors were looking confused, no doubt wondering how Jack had been able to get to the Shard of Lightning first when they were the ones possessing time-traveling powers.
"Ya didn't make a time machine robot, did ya?" said Clay, sighing. "Because going by how well that other time doo-hickey of yours went…"
"This is an even better version!" said Jack. "I've fixed the problems with the previous one, so there!"
"Being able to return to one's own time…?" said Omi, narrowing his eyes.
"Shut up. I got here before you guys, didn't I? Now we're even Stevens!"
"No way are we even," Raimundo said.
"Ready to get your butt kicked for the umpteenth time?" said Kimiko.
"No, not really," Jack said, holding up the Shard of Lightning high. Wuya phased into his body temporarily, as time froze.
Jack removed the Sword of the Storm from Raimundo's hands, as well as several other Wu from the other warriors – the most important of which was the Sands of Time - all the while snickering. Omi used the Orb of Tornami all the time, he'd definitely be missing that one.
After putting the now full bag of booty down next to the Time-bot, he turned around and took a moment to sneer at the immobilized warriors. "Ha! Who's getting their butt kicked now?" He knew they couldn't hear him, but it was still fun to taunt them while they were helpless.
He grinned at the possibilities. "Maybe I should go back in time and steal all the Wu I should have got!"
"Jack!" Wuya hissed, appearing in front of Jack's face so suddenly that he let out a startled yelp. She sounded very visibly annoyed whilst at the same time trying to convey a sense of urgency. "How many times must I tell you? Do not use the Time-bot together with the Shard of Lightning. If the Shard's power is still in effect when you use the Sands of Time, all of time freezes."
"You worry too much, old hag. With these two – the Shard of Lightning and my Time-bot – there's no one that can stop my evilness!" He added a dramatic laugh for emphasis, but Wuya was all the more unimpressed, growling and shaking her ghostly fists in frustrated impatience instead.
"Didn't you hear me, you foolish boy? All of time freezes. Everything. It happened with Dashi before! The entire universe comes to a grinding halt. That's not evil. That's just stupid."
"Oh come on. That's impossible. You're exaggerating."
Jack pushed a couple of buttons on the back of the Time-bot, despite Wuya's cries of, "No, wait!"
And time didn't just freeze. It cracked into a million shards and broke.
Of course, Wuya mused, stupid is what Jack does best. Still, at least they were still alive. That was the main thing. Sure, it didn't make sense that even though time had shattered, Jack and herself were still able to move around – and in Jack's case, breathe, for that matter – but she wasn't going to question a temporal conundrum when it worked to her advantage.
The question was: what to do now?
Everything was white, as far as the eye could see. You couldn't even tell which way was up or down. There was no horizon, just all this empty whiteness, like they were standing in the middle of an infinite blank page. Frankly, this was the mother of all Jack's greatest screw-ups. There would be naught that could top this. Ever.
"Um," said Jack, seeming to reach the same conclusion. His Time-bot's space-time field generator had lost power. Even worse, all of the Shen Gong Wu he'd stolen had disappeared. All he had left was the Shard of Lightning, which also wasn't working. He held the blue orb up in one hand; it had dulled, looking like a black-and-white version of itself, as if the colour had been drained out of it.
"What's wrong with it?"
"The Shard of Lightning doesn't work on time paradoxes, you fool," said Wuya, whose rage had taken the form of the calm moment before the storm unleashed its full fury. "The Shen Gong Wu are all about chi - the movement of energy throughout the universe. They can't work if there's no movement. We must be outside the flow of time itself here."
Well... that explained why his Time-bot wasn't working. In order to generate enough power to move through time, Jack had needed an infinite supply of energy, so he had used the Eye of Dashi as a power source, but if Shen Gong Wu didn't work when they were outside Time... Well, he and Wuya were well and truly stuck here. The other Shen Gong Wu must have remained behind inside the timeline, presumably.
Jack bit his lip, looking like he was on the verge of bawling, or cracking up with hysterical laughter, or possibly both, when he suddenly gasped.
"There's another Shen Gong Wu here!"
Wuya rolled her eyes in an oh great he's going crazy already way. "No, there isn't."
Jack pulled out a bleeping device from inside his black jacket. "My Detecto-bot says otherwise." The Time-bot's propulsion was still functioning even if its time-travelling ability wasn't, so he latched the Detecto-bot onto the back of the clocked-shaped robot.
"You and your infernal machines! It's clearly defective! I can't sense any Wu. Why on earth would Dashi hide a Shen Gong Wu in a place that requires you to break the entire universe to get there?"
Jack shrugged. "Something's making this go off. Might as well see what it is. Maybe we can un-break everything and get back home with it. It beats staying here and doing nothing for all eternity."
Wuya couldn't argue with the last part, and so she followed Jack as he in turn followed the Detecto-bot's signal. After five minutes, they came to a wooden door, coloured white with a green metallic tinge to it. It was standing in the middle of nowhere, and as Jack moved round to check it, he saw that there was nothing behind it. It was quite an ordinary door, otherwise. Yet, the Detecto-bot always pointed to it like a compass to north, even when he removed it from the Time-bot and walked with it round to the other side. He tentatively reached for the knob, half-expecting the door to open of its own volition, but it didn't. In fact, even after wrestling with the knob for a couple of minutes, he found he couldn't open it.
"Well, that's weird," said Jack finally. "Do you think it's the door?"
"How on earth would I know?" snapped Wuya. "I've never frozen the entire universe before!" She sighed as she calmed down and looked again at the mysterious locked door, trying to determine whether it had any mystical properties. "Whatever it is, it's not magical. It's definitely not a Shen Gong Wu. You're on your own for this one."
Jack let out a sigh of his own, and touched the door – and screamed when the door sucked him through, without opening. Wuya wasn't even surprised. She could tell he was okay, as she heard him yell triumphantly from the other side soon afterwards.
"All right! Jack's hit the jackpot! The Wu's gotta be here!"
Wuya phased through the door and found herself inside a small hall of stone that was as unremarkable as the door. That is to say, it looked normal enough – with no furnishings, it was just an empty stone hall – but appearances could be deceiving. There was no sign of the door they'd come through, for starters.
She put on a burst of speed to catch up with Jack. "For the last time, Jack – there are no Shen Gong Wu here."
"Oh yeah? Then what do you call that?"
At the far end of the hall, on top of a stone pedestal, was a strange, silver cylindrical object. Perhaps the hall was not so empty after all. But one had to wonder whether the pedestal had been there the whole time, or whether it had appeared suddenly. Or whether it was even real. Wuya certainly didn't remember it being there a moment ago.
"I don't know," she replied irritably, glaring at the faraway object with what she felt was quite justified distrust. The cylinder shined with a metallic blue gleam and, in spite of any illusions that the hall may have cast, the object itself appearedto be man-made, not magical. The dead giveaway was the word "FENTON" written in large, industrial letters across the side. It looked very much like a Jack invention, in fact, and with Jack's reliable knack for causing disasters, she didn't want him going near anything mechanical ever again. "What do you call that?"
Jack grinned as he pointed the Detecto-bot at the canister, confirming that it was, at the very least, the cause of the tracking device's bleeping. "I call it the Jack Spicer Thermos Of Evil!" he declared, patting his Time-bot on the back as it finally caught up.
"What a ridiculous name!"
"It's a brand new Wu, right? That means I get to name it!"
Wuya clenched ghostly fists in annoyance. "Dashi created all the Shen Gong Wu in order to fight me. In case you haven't noticed, Dashi's been gone for almost fifteen hundred years. This can't be a new Wu. Look, it quite obviously belongs to someone called 'Fenton'."
"Well... then... It's… the 'Fenton Thermos' Shen Gong Wu!" he said dramatically, obviously dead set on giving the object a name. Jack did rather like to claim ownership over things.
"Ugh! I give up!" Wuya spun round, floating away, back towards where they had entered the strange hall. The boy could be such an idiot sometimes. "Don't you dare touch it. Something's not right."
"C'mon, how else are we gonna find a way out of here?"
He walked closer towards it, ignoring Wuya's snarl of frustration.
"Fine, be that way!" she snapped, stubbornly staying where she was. "Don't come crying to me if it's booby-trapped and the walls start closing in!"
She folded her arms, pouting and deliberately looking the other way in order to ignore him, which was why she noticed when everything suddenly became darker. Suddenly she could feel a dark presence permeating through the walls, as if the entire room had gained a malevolent sentience. All thoughts of abandoning Jack immediately evaporated.
"Jack!"
Shadows danced across the walls and the ceiling – a blue mist formed on the ground, threatening to suffocate – it became cold, so chilly that even Wuya could feel it going straight through her – Jack was completely oblivious, still edging forwards, completely bent on grabbing his new discovery –
"Jack!"
He stopped, and turned around to face her.
"What?" he said.
Wuya gave him an utterly surprised look. Was she the only one who could see this room for what it really was?
"You idiot, don't touch -"
A tendril of green light shot out from the cylinder, hitting Jack in the back. The force propelled the Time-bot sideways, and, suddenly it crackled with static, flashes of electricity appearing around it as it flickered into life and caused a small silver vortex to appear next to it. A wind suddenly flared up, a fierce breeze emanating from the silver Time-error. The Thermos remained steadfast, locked in place, seeming to bound tightly to the room, but Jack, Wuya and the Time-bot were sucked inside.
Jack's basement was on the other side, and to Wuya's relief the silver hole on this end closed. The Time-bot was still fizzling with electricity. Wuya briefly remembered Jack saying something about the Time-bot having instructions to automatically teleport itself back to Jack's house should anything untoward happen, though until now she hadn't been sure how reliable the failsafe really was, and she had no idea how it had worked if they truly had been outside time's flow. The electricity couldn't have been from the Eye of Dashi, it was impossible. But maybe it was part of the robot's failsafe, some stored back-up energy? If so, why hadn't it kicked in sooner?
Jack stood up sharply and glared at where the Time-error had been. He growled, a feral, raw snarl that sounded completely unnatural.
"Jack?"
He turned around, and this time what she saw shocked her. It was his eyes. Jack Spicer wasn't there. It was someone else – something else. Something else with inhumane eyes, something else with a sadistic smirk...
She backed away apprehensively. "What...? Who - what are you?"
He hissed, baring pointy fangs and revealing a forked tongue, and a flash of green flared into Wuya's eyes, drilling into her subconscious, and forcing her to forget that they'd ever been to the world of white.
The Observants.
Sometimes Clockwork thought a better name for them would have been the Complainants, because that's all they ever did: filed complaints and issues and grievances and all the rest of it, occasionally against each other but more usually against him.
They had eyes everywhere. They were eyes everywhere. They were floating eyeballs, wearing cloaks, and ever watchful of their world and its delicate place in all of reality. Their creed forbade them from interfering with events directly, so that was why they had given Clockwork the task of managing their world's time streams, so that he could do all the things they were too spineless to do themselves.
And then, when he had bent the rules ever so slightly, they'd sent those two clowns in to keep an eye on him. What a joke. None of the Observants had names, but Clockwork felt it was easier if he assigned names to them, so in his mind he'd affectionately called them One and Two, with himself being the third voice of reason.
Just like all the others of their kind, those two had watched and watched, and watched, but they could never truly see. They'd completely missed the obvious, as usual. And he hadn't bothered to tell them. He knew they would overreact.
Not that he could blame them for panicking. The moments of complete and utter breakdown throughout all worlds and times were becoming more and more frequent. It all culminated on this loop. This was the final loop. Reality could not take another round.
The onus was on Dashi to fix everything back before the current loop ended, otherwise it was game over. There would be nothing but Nothing. But he knew that Dashi could do it. He'd met the monk a long time ago, and he knew that Dashi had what it took.
Now was the time to act.
Every time.
Every time a portal appeared, Jake Long lost his hold on the egg. Getting sucked into a swirling portal had the effect of making you whirly, if only for a moment.
This time...
This time, the egg fell ten feet, and hit the floor. Fortunately, this particular floor was made of rubber, so the egg bounced back up instead of smashing to pieces. In his heraldic dragon form, Jake tried to catch it, but it bounced up as he fell down and vice versa.
Finally, the egg seemed to reach the edge of the make-shift trampoline and rolled down an incline. Jake flew down - and now had a good view of where he'd ended up this time.
It was like a giant baby's play area. Brightly coloured toy blocks were stacked on top of each other, each easily reaching the size of a two floor building, and their faces depicting drawings of fruits and ice cream. In addition, there were trees bearing candy and sweets and toys, much like a Christmas tree with decorations.
He landed in the middle of some chocolate trees, transformed back to his human form, and picked up the egg.
"Uh, oh," said Fu Dog.
"What?" Jake said.
And then he realised, to his horror, that he was surrounded by eggs.
They were all exactly like his own egg: the same size and with a curled, golden spiral pattern in the centre. He counted: seventeen of them! They weren't all griffin eggs, were they? At least the reason for the rubber floor was now clear...
"Oh, no..."
He tried lifting each one, in turn, but he couldn't tell which one was his. They all weighed the same, and had the same markings. Now what?
"Oh for crying out loud... look what you've gone and done," said another voice. It belonged to a red and blue quadruped creature, with long, vertical ears like a rabbit, but it had the face of a toad, and the tail feathers of a bird instead of a short stubby tail. He looked quite annoyed, which to Jake meant that perhaps the other eggs belonged to him.
"You're a human, from the human world, aren't you?" said the toad-rabbit, in a weary, almost condescending tone.
"Er, yeah," said Jake, deciding that a half-truth was probably better than telling the whole truth.
"I swear, they'll make anyone a Tamer these days," the rabbit said, mostly to himself. He shook his head, standing upright on two legs and putting his arms behind his back. "Well, I'm Elecmon, and I'm the guardian of these eggs. So you'd better not have done anything to them, or else." He walked straight past Jake into the centre of the group of eggs, counting them.
He turned his head back sharply to face Jake. "Please tell me you didn't mix up one of your eggs with my ones."
"Uh," said Jake, feeling nervous under the creature's stern glare.
Elecmon sighed. "At least tell me that your egg isn't going to be a Poyomon."
"No, it's definitely not that," said Jake with more certainty. He didn't know what a Poyomon was, but he did know that his egg wasn't one of them.
"Good answer! My eggs are all going to hatch into Poyomon. They have to be a certain precise weight to become Poyomon, you see, so all we have to do is weigh them. Your one's the only one that's different."
"It's no use," said Jake. "I tried that. I still can't tell which one is which."
"What do you think I have that for?" said Elecmon, pointing to a large, black box a little way behind them. "Decoration?"
"Great!" said Jake. "Uh... what is it?"
"It's my weighing machine, genius."
"Ah, okay..." said Jake, still not convinced.
"Don't get too excited," said Elecmon sarcastically, "there's a catch. I provide the energy for it myself, but I got into a fight with a Gazimon on the way back here, so I've only got enough charge for three weighings. And you can only fit four eggs on each side at once. Which means..."
"I can only use it three times. Got it," said Jake.
Jake and Fu Dog carried the eggs, lining them up in front of the scales. Elecmon stood down on four legs and shot an electric blast at the metal box, which made a funny beeping noise and mechanically opened itself up, and now it looked like a set of scales.
"Pretty handy," said Fu Dog.
"Yup," said Elecmon.
Jake put four eggs on one side and four eggs on the other; the scales remained level, so he put these eight identical eggs to one side.
"Can't be one of those ones," he said. The box collapsed.
With eight eggs gone, this left nine eggs, and two more tries.
Nine eggs...
Two tries...
Weighing scales...
Wait a minute...!
"What's wrong?" said Fu Dog. "Why're you screwing your face like that?"
"This is just like the puzzle that stupid professor gave me!"
"Oh, c'mon, kid, he didn't seem that bad," said Fu, guessing why he was a bit upset. Jake had a bit of an aversion towards professors, since the only one he knew, Professor Rotwood, set out to make his life a living hell by constantly trying to publicly expose his secret. The magical community was not known to exist by the majority of humans in their world, and it was a constant battle against Professor Rotwood to keep it that way.
"Didn't seem that bad? Did you see the way he looked at me when he gave me the question?"
"All the better to prove him wrong, then," said Fu. "Something tells me we haven't seen the last of him. You wanna be prepared if we meet him again, right?"
"Excuse me," said Elecmon snidely, "but these eggs are not going to weigh themselves, are they? And I'm certainly not going to clean up your mess, I'm perfectly fine to just wait for them to hatch."
"Aww, man... Fine... Can't be that hard..."
Meanwhile, the master of puzzles himself sat at the bedroom desk, in front of the mirror, inside a hotel. Luke had fallen asleep on the king-size bed, next to another companion of theirs, Flora, who'd been too unwell to accompany them, and had thus remained in the hotel while he and Luke went into town to investigate.
It was now a few hours after Layton and Luke had met the Chinese monk - Dashi, he reminded himself - and the sky above Folsense was still as dark as it had ever been. At this time of year, near the middle of summer, Layton was sure that he should have seen signs of the sun appearing in the sky.
This was a very strange town indeed. And it was hiding the truth behind an equally strange item: the Elysian Box.
Pandora's Box: the biggest mystery the professor had ever come across. It was one that had cost his mentor, Dr. Andrew Schrader, his life.
Absently, Layton started to fidget with the puzzle box that Dashi had given him, twisting it round like a Rubik's Cube.
"You still up, Professor?" said Luke, tiredly. He'd been so tired that he'd fallen asleep with his uniform on, and Layton hadn't wanted to wake him. He shuffled to the edge of the bed and got up, wearily walking to where the Professor sat.
Layton turned his head round. "Go back to sleep, Luke. Don't worry about me. I'll be fine."
Luke smiled knowingly. When the professor's mind was on puzzles and mysteries, less important things like eating and sleeping were often left on the wayside.
"If you say so, Professor..."
He frowned, then, remembering the distraught look on the professor's face when they'd found Schrader's dead body in his flat, in central London. Andrew Schrader had opened the Elysian Box, and fallen prey to the deadly curse.
Luke couldn't begin to imagine what it would feel like if he ever found the professor like that, lifeless and cold... Did they really want to find the Elysian Box? He looked back up at the professor, and his expression turned to surprise as he started at what he saw.
"Oh, Professor! Look, you solved it!"
"Huh?" said Layton, who, lost in his own thoughts about Schrader, hadn't even realised he had opened Dashi's puzzle box. "So I have..." There wasn't anything inside, but it was still a satisfying accomplishment.
"I knew you'd do it! The great Professor Layton strikes again!"
"Shh, Luke," said Layton gently, smiling at Luke. "Flora's still sleeping. It's bad manners to wake a lady."
"Oops, sorry. But..." Luke paused, trying extremely hard not to show worry on his face, but the professor still seemed to pick up on it.
"What's wrong, Luke?"
"I don't think I can sleep. I mean..." He sighed, thinking that he might as well say what was on his mind. "Professor, do you think we should be looking for the Elysian Box?" But as soon as Luke had asked the question, he realised he already knew the answer. The professor couldn't just leave things be. He had to find the truth, no matter the risks involved, or how undesirable that truth may turn out to be. That was just the way he was.
He wouldn't let Schrader's death be in vain.
"We'll find the answer, Luke," he said after a pause, and he smiled reassuringly at his apprentice. "I promise."
Link started down the path, on his way to deal with Bellum, when another hole appeared on the beach where Oshus stood. And then another. And another, and another...
He immediately ran back, and pointed his Phantom Sword at every one that appeared in order to extinguish them, but there was a point where, for every one he dissipated two appeared in its place, and he had to take great care not to get sucked inside one himself. To an outside observer, it was a little like watching someone play the game "Whack-a-mole".
Finally, the holes stopped appearing, and after Link made the last one disappear, he sheathed his sword.
"That had better be the end of it," he said.