AUTHOR'S NOTE
Many thanks to fellow writer jettmanas, who co-wrote this story and also kindly designed the cover-art.
It was another lovely day in Los Angeles, and at present, Sam and Alex were busy enjoying some ice cream at one of the outdoor cafes at the Groove, while waiting for Clover and her sister, Daphne, to join them. There had lately been a buzz of excitement as Daphne, who was a major fashion star model, had been offered a more permanent modelling job for a major fashion magazine, so she had gone down to see the publishers for the job interview, with Clover for support.
If all went well, it would mean that Daphne would be able to settle down in Los Angeles and be able to spend more time with Clover, which would be convenient for the spies, since Daphne recently applied to join WOOHP as well.
Alex glanced at her watch. "Man, Clover and Daphne are running late. I sure hope they haven't run into any problems with the interview."
Sam looked around the Groove and she grinned as two familiar figures came into view, heading their way.
"Hey, you two, how did it go?" asked Sam, as Clover and Daphne sat down next to their friends at the table.
"It went great!" said Daphne with a smile. "The interview went off without a hitch, and the publisher says they'd be up for me starting work next week."
"Awesome!" said Sam. "So I guess this means you'll be officially moving to L.A.?"
"Sure does," said Clover happily. "Daph's already called Trevor at his boarding school, and he's totally okay with moving here. Now all we have to do is find an apartment or something for Daphne to move into."
Alex's face lit up as she had a moment of inspiration. "Say, what about our old beach house? It hasn't been sold or anything, and it's an hour's drive from Mali-U."
"That's a great idea, thanks!" said Daphne gratefully. "It would be a perfect place to live! I heard it has a great swimming pool, and my son just loves swimming."
Alex's expression took on a more wistful look. "You know, I sometimes wonder what it would be like if I had kids in the future. I imagine they could be quite a handful!"
"Yeah, well, if you did have kids, Alex, I imagine they'd be as excitement-loving as you are," replied Clover. "And if Sam had a son or daughter, they could prove to be as brainy as she is."
"And if you had kids, I imagine them being just as fashion-obsessed as you are, Clover," said Sam with a smirk.
Before the girls could speculate any further, they heard the noise of a jet engine in the air. Glancing around, Daphne spotted a plane in the air heading their way.
"Say, that plane's flying a bit low, isn't it?" remarked Daphne a little worriedly. "Pilots ought to watch where they're going."
Sam looked closer at the plane and her eyes widened as she recognised the jet. "Uh oh, that looks like Jerry's jet. Everyone brace yourselves for a woohping!"
No sooner did Sam say this, the plane then lowered a long tube from its undercarriage. It flew right over their heads, and a powerful vacuum sucked the four startled girls into the tube and up the funnel, whereupon they were deposited onto some seats in the passenger compartment.
"Sorry to interrupt your day out, girls," said Jerry as he emerged from the pilot cabin and greeted the spies, "but there's something rather odd happening in the middle of L.A. that I need you to check out right away."
"What kind of 'odd' thing, Jerr?" asked Alex, as the girls activated the instant outfit function on their compowders, which changed their own clothes into their spy uniforms. In a second, Sam, Clover and Alex were clad in their usual green, red and yellow outfits, while Daphne wore her new silver catsuit.
"A rather peculiar power surge, that our WOOHP satellites picked up," explained Jerry. "What's alarming is that the readings we've received seem to indicate some form of temporal energy building up."
"You mean some kind of tear in the space-time continuum? That doesn't sound good!" said Sam worriedly.
"Indeed," agreed Jerry, "which is why you girls need to check it out ASAP, as unauthorised time travel experiments are illegal and very dangerous. Now for this mission, you'll be equipped with Jetpack Backpacks, Laser Lipsticks, Expandable Cable Bungee Belts, and the Tornado in a Can of Hairspray. We've also sent the estimated coordinates of the energy surge to your compowders, which should help you track it down. Oh and don't forget, the annual WOOHP picnic will be on tomorrow."
"Thanks, Jerry," said Daphne as the girls quickly gathered their gadgets and put on their Jetpack Backpacks. "So when will we be arriving?"
"As a matter of fact, right now," said a smirking Jerry as a trapdoor opened beneath the girls' feet. The four of them plummeted out of the jet and into the open air, whereupon they activated their jetpacks and began flying gracefully down to the busy streets below.
"Sheesh! Why does that British guy keep trying to give his agents heart attacks?" grumbled Daphne, as she and the others glided over the rooftops of the various tall buildings of L.A.
"You get used to it," said Sam as she pulled out her compowder and checked the coordinates of the energy surge. "Now according to this, we should be right on top of the weird power surge that WOOHP detected."
Clover looked down below, and her eyes widened as she spotted some strange, colourful lights pulsating through the windows of a rundown building.
"Er, something tells me we've found it," she said as she pointed to the building.
"Well, what are we waiting for? Let's check it out!" said Alex, before the four of them flew over to the building and took a hovering position by the windows. Peering through the cracked glass, they could see a load of complex machinery and computer banks, with a series of cables trailing across the floor, connecting to a hoop-shaped device set in the centre of the room. In the middle of the hoop, a beam of intense light pulsated brightly, a variety of different colours dancing across its form.
"Whoa! Freaky light-show much?" remarked Daphne as Sam discreetly opened the unlocked window and they all clambered inside. Tiptoeing into the room, they made their way over to the unusual machinery and looked over the strange light-beam in awe.
"Wow, what is that thing?" asked Clover a little apprehensively.
Sam crossed to a nearby computer bank and began to check out the readings on the instrument panels, her eyebrows raising in wonder. "Golly, this is amazing. If I'm reading all this correctly, this light-beam is some kind of portal between different time zones!"
"You mean it's some kind of time machine?" gaped Daphne. "But that's impossible!"
"Um, not as impossible as you may think, sis," said Clover.
"Yeah, we got zapped into the past and future on at least three occasions in the past," added Alex. "Or should that be 'in the present'? Or 'the future'?"
Suddenly, the main door burst open and a rather scruffy man in his mid-thirties strode in, dressed in a grubby lab coat and pointing some kind of ray gun at the girls.
"Freeze!" he said. "What are you ladies doing trespassing in my lab?"
"Duh, we're the superspies who're about to foil your wacko schemes to conquer the world! Or whatever it is you're up to," said Clover, as she and the others moved into a defensive stance, glaring defiantly at the man.
The man looked at them in surprise. "Conquer the world? What are you talking about? I'm a scientist, not a criminal!"
The girls were a little taken aback by this, but they still cautiously remained tense for battle.
"So how do you explain this laser display?" asked Alex suspiciously, gesturing to the light-beam. "And who are you anyway?"
The man straightened himself up in a grand posture. "I am Professor Emmett McFly, the greatest expert on temporal physics in the world!"
"Wait, weren't you the guy who once taught at Bev High and wrote that paper on the theory of time portals?" asked Sam, recognising the name from one of the books she once read at the school library.
"The very same," smiled the Professor, pleased that someone remembered his work. "I have studied the theory of time travel all my life, but whenever I tried to get funding to pursue my experiment, I kept getting denied! Everyone thought my ideas were either too ludicrous or too unpredictable. So, I've had to work on my experiments on my own, paying for all this equipment out of my own bank account. And now at long last, I have created a real time portal and am ready to step through to explore the past."
"What, so you can rob the past or something?" accused Daphne, raising an eyebrow.
The Professor looked hurt by this insinuation. "Certainly not! I wanted to interview some of the greatest geniuses in history! Shakespeare, Einstein, and so many others. I might even be able to find out what really wiped out the dinosaurs, all those millions of years ago!"
The girls looked at each other, a little unsure as to what to do next. They had expected to find some dastardly villain to fight, but McFly did not seem that dangerous at all, aside from his rather reckless experiments in time travel. Sam, Clover and Alex knew from experience just how dangerous messing around with history could be, and McFly's research could have potentially dangerous consequences.
"Well, if you're not some supervillain bent on world domination, what's with the ray gun?" demanded Sam skeptically.
"I can't risk my research falling into the hands of industrial spies, now can I?" said the Professor as he began to step forward. "I have to take some security precautions. And you ladies still haven't given me an explanation as to... whoops!"
Failing to watch where he was stepping, McFly's foot snagged on a cable and he fell, the ray gun flying from his hands and crashing to the floor. The impact caused the gun to go off, and it fired a fierce red beam right towards Alex! Moving like lightning, Clover leapt forward and knocked Alex out of the way, just narrowly missing getting hit herself by the laser beam, which instead impacted with the control panel. There was a terrific display of sparks, and the glowing beam of the time portal suddenly blazed an intense, blinding blue light. Before anyone could react, Alex and Clover suddenly found themselves being dragged towards the light-beam by some unseen force!
"Hey, what's going on?" cried out Alex, as she and Clover tried to grab a handhold to the computer banks, but the gravitational beam of the time portal kept pulling them in.
Moving fast, Sam grabbed hold of a nearby pipe to keep herself from being dragged in as well, then she fired her Expandable Cable Bungee Belt, the metal cable wrapping itself firmly around Alex and Clover. Sam then tried to reel the cable in, but the pull of the portal was increasing. As this was happening, the Professor had tangled himself in the cable that had tripped him up, thus anchoring him, while Daphne had grabbed hold of some of the other cables and was using them to drag herself towards her sister and teammates. But as she started to reach them, Daphne suddenly saw that the pipe that Sam was holding onto was breaking loose!
"Sam! The pipe..." Daphne started to say, but her warning came too late. With a violent wrenching sound, the pipe snapped free, Sam lost her hold, and with a cry, she, Alex and Clover were sucked right into the light beam. Just seconds after that, the beam vanished, and Daphne collapsed to the floor as the gravitational force pulling her abruptly dissipated. Scrabbling to her feet, Daphne stared in open-mouthed horror. The time portal beam had completely vanished, and so had Clover, Sam and Alex.
"C-Clove?" Daphne managed to stammer as she caught her breath. "Wha... Where are they?"
McFly stumbled to the controls he had accidentally blasted and checked the readings. "Oh dear, the settings on the time portal got scrambled by the laser blast. As best as I can tell... Those three have been deposited twenty years into the future!"
Incensed, Daphne grabbed McFly by the arm and practically bellowed into his ear. "You irresponsible, clumsy bozo! Why did you have to mess around with time travel in the first place? Get them back here right now!"
McFly cringed under Daphne's fiery glare. "I'm sorry, but the mechanism is completely wrecked, and with the portal gone... I'm afraid your friends are now stranded in the future!"