Cindy was cut off in the middle of her sentence. At first she thought that the T-Rex had gotten them, but she realized that she didn't feel dead, so she opened her eyes. And gasped.
Things were flying past her at high speeds. Caveman, knights, dragons, covered wagons, disco lights…. Cindy realized that they were going through time.
With a jolt and a bump, they landed. Cindy gasped. The two of them were in the exact same places as they had been before Jimmy pushed the button. Cindy was holding Humphrey's leash, and Jimmy was holding the time freezer. They stared at each other, totally silent.
"Dinosaurs?" Cindy asked after a moment.
Jimmy nodded.
"Okay, Jimmy, what exactly happened?" Cindy asked. "We just spent days in some kind of jungle place with dinosaurs running around, and now we're back to our own time, where no time has passed, and we have apparently come back without the help of anything."
Jimmy was quiet for a moment, thinking. Then he said, "Well, I don't have any certain answers, but I do have a theory. You see, if my theory is correct, the time did work, technically. It froze time, which is how we returned to our own time without any time passing. But for some reason, it also sent us back in time. I knew I shouldn't have used parts from my time travel remote," he added under his breath.
"You used parts from your time travel remote?" Cindy exclaimed.
Jimmy grinned sheepishly, causing Cindy to roll her eyes. Then she asked, "So then, how did we come back?"
"I have my time freezer set to unfreeze time automatically if it wasn't unfrozen manually after seventy-two hours. If something were to happen to me and for some reason I couldn't push the unfreeze button for one reason or another, time would stay frozen forever. If I had an automatic unfreeze, time could go back to normal. We must have been in the time of the dinosaurs for seventy-two hours, and so when time unfroze we were sent back to our own time."
Cindy nodded, pretending to follow it even though she was somewhat confused.
"One last question. Why is your ankle back to normal?" she asked.
Jimmy looked down, noticing for the first time that it was fine and that Cindy's hair bands were back in her hair. He grinned. "I don't know that one, exactly. I'm guessing that anything that happened there doesn't affect now. But that one I'm a little fuzzy on."
Humphrey began to tug at his leash and whine, sick of just sitting around doing nothing. Cindy noticed and began to walk slowly away.
"I'd better go," Cindy said over her shoulder. "Humphrey's getting restless."
"Wait, Cindy?" Jimmy said.
"Yeah?" Cindy said, stopping and turning around. Hunphrey began to whine again, but Cindy shushed him.
"What were you about to say, you know, right before that T-Rex almost ate us?" Jimmy asked.
"Oh, that?" Cindy said, blushing. "Nothing, nothing at all."
"Are you sure? 'Cause I'm pretty sure I heard you start to say something…."
"It was no big deal!" Cindy insisted.
"If you say so," Jimmy said skeptically.
"I do say so, Neutron. Now can I go? Or are you going to insist on playing twenty questions?"
"No, you can go, you can go," Jimmy said. Cindy turned again and headed off. Jimmy watched her go, a funny feeling in the pit of her stomach. He shook it off and headed to his lab to fix his time freezer.