The throne room was small, but very tall- with a ceiling that was nearly ten metres up.
It had a throne in the middle of it.
There were some carvings around the outside of it that looked like something out of Lord Of The Rings, but that was about all there was to say about it, relatively speaking.
"What are we supposed to be looking for in here?" said Ruth, stepping up to examine the throne as Ciara shut the door behind them.
"A button," she replied cryptically, and started hunting around the outside of the room, running her hands over the carvings.
"I have some questions," Calvin announced, rather loudly. "Why do you know so much about this place? Why did you bring us here? Why is the weather on this planet so weird? Why do you speak so weirdly when everyone else around here uses normal English like normal people?"
"And what button?" Hobbes chimed in.
"This button," said Ciara, locating a rune with five lines radiating out from a common center, and pressing it.
The room began to shake.
"What are we supposed to be looking for in here?" said Jack, stepping up to examine the throne as Benny shut the door behind them.
"I have no idea," the archaeologist admitted, staring around the room. "I guess we should just start-"
The room began to shake.
"Okay, what's happening?" Ruth demanded, scrambling across the room to stand next to Ciara. "What did you do?"
Ciara grinned.
The floor in the middle of the room started to split apart into several pieces, swivelling away to allow room for a large machine to rise from the ground- tall, and covered in rows of blinking lights. Ciara crossed to it, and began to work the controls expertly.
Hobbes pounced across the room, having sensed that there was something wrong, and attempted to knock her away from the machine. Ciara sidestepped him easily and continued to work.
"You've got to teach me how to do that," Calvin breathed for a second, starstruck, and then shook himself. "Wait a second, what's that thing meant to be?"
"It's a doomsday device," said Ciara, rolling her eyes. "I'm attempting to destroy this stupid little planet and all its inhabitants. Do keep up."
"A doomsday device?" Ruth yelled. "Are you insane?"
Ciara turned and glared. "If I were insane, then I would have let my father and all of his silly little disciples kill me at the first opportunity!" She scoffed. "Would you believe that they thought the gods existed? How ridiculous is that?"
"Oh, great," Hobbes mumbled from the ground. "We've got a psychopathic atheist on our hands."
"I heard that," snapped Ciara, and her foot whipped out, kicking him in the small of the back. "Bow before your crown princess, cat."
The room rumbled ominously.
"Hey!" exclaimed Calvin angrily, stepping forwards. "Nobody gets to beat up Hobbes except for me!"
"Okay, what's happening?" Benny demanded, scrambling across the room to stand next to Jack.
"Why would I have any clue?" Jack exclaimed.
A portal was beginning to form in the middle of the room, similar to the one that had brought them back to this time and place originally.
"Time," Benny said. "It's shifting." She grinned. "Hey, want to jump directly into the portal with little to no regard for our personal safety?"
Jack rolled his eyes. "Bernice Summerfield, you're a terrible, terrible influence on me. Of course I want to."
They took a few steps back, and, together, ran forwards and leapt, landing in the exact same room that they had just left, but plus a large doomsday machine in the middle.
"Hey," said Jack, reorientating himself and looking around at the little gathering. "What are you guys doing here?"
"Being witness to the end of the world, apparently," said Ruth dryly, just as Calvin tried to leap at Ciara and Ciara grabbed Ruth around the waist, holding a knife to her throat.
"Back off or she gets it," Ciara hissed, in a very menacing but not entirely original way.
The room, as a whole, froze.
The rumbling from outside continued.
"Okay," said Benny. "I think we've got off on the wrong foot. We haven't done anything wrong, but you seem to think we're trying to stop you, and-" She broke off and frowned. "-wait a second, you're Ciara." She snapped her fingers, and pointed at the younger woman dramatically. "Or should I say, Acari, Little Miss Fake Princess, right?"
"Fake?" Ciara, or possibly Acari, snapped, tightening her grip on Ruth, pressing the knife deeper into her neck- but not quite deep enough to draw blood.
Ruth gulped.
"Get away from her," Jack barked.
Acari smiled, and pushed Ruth very suddenly onto a very particular patch of floor, slamming her hand on a button set into the machine. Ruth yelped as she was catapulted into the air, arms flailing wildly, and into the rafters.
She scrabbled for a hold on the wooden beam and succeeded in maintaining a fairly steady grip in which she was sort of half-sprawled across the centre of one of the thickest ones.
"Ruth?" Benny called upwards.
"I'm good!" she gasped, trying to regain her breath.
Down on the ground, Hobbes had got back to his feet- or paws, anyway- and was glaring at Acari. "You're the one who's making this planet tear itself apart."
"Guilty," she admitted, and turned back to working at the controls. "What about it?"
Calvin frowned. "Well… why?"
"Because I feel like it," she spat. "And this entire planet deserves it. I've been working up to this for weeks. You've seen the effects already, haven't you? That's what I did from home. I messed up all of the time around Minas IV, because I'm clever enough to do it, and because-" She broke off suddenly, and her lips pressed together tightly.
"Because what," Jack said.
"Because he offered me a way off this miserable little world!" exclaimed Acari, triumphantly pushing in the last few digits to the code she was typing and hitting a green switch.
The machine began to glow.
"Who's 'he'?" Benny wondered quietly.
"You'll never find out," Acari sniffed. "There's no way to stop the activation process unless you're a genius, like me. Which none of you are."
A grin slowly began to spread across Calvin's face. "Says who?"
She turned around, and sneered at the six-year-old. "What, you? A child? What could you possibly know about the complex procedures behind-"
"Rifts in reality, spreading across the multiverse," he interrupted smugly. "I did my research on this, months ago, and I worked out a way to stop it happening. I know fifth-dimensional maths."
Acari was now looking slightly worried. "What's five plus twenty-two in five-D?" she shot off.
Calvin thought for a second. "Easy. One thousand, six hundred and six point two."
"Wrong," she started, but Calvin wasn't done.
"And seventeen square Rels," he concluded, smirking triumphantly.
She stared at him. "Who are you?"
"Calvin the Bold," he started, about to launch into a triumphant speech on how great he was, but Benny elbowed him.
"Are you saying," she said lowly, "that you can stop this entire mess?"
"Yeah," he said. "It should take me a bit of time to rework everything from memory, but I should be able to."
"Then get going," she told him, and pushed him towards a corner, even as the planet started to twist and shake and tear itself apart. "We'll keep her back for as long as we need to."