SAMURAI POWERPUFFS

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE – Back to the Future

One by one, the metal-clad figures removed their helmets. The first one off revealed the long, flaming mane of an adult Blossom. Though now fifty-five years old, she looked no more than half that age. Her sisters quickly followed suit. Then the leader took its off, showing a fifty-ish Professor Utonium, graying at the temples but still fit-looking in spite of being almost ninety-five. In their changed future, he had developed the process that radically slowed the aging process: The long searched-for Fountain of Youth. (The world naturally believed it was a wonderful thing for mankind, but privately he admitted to the girls that it was because he couldn't stand the thought of looking the way they had described him as an old man.)

The final figure removed its helmet, showing the grinning, greenish face of Mojo Jojo, sporting a brightly colored bandana over his large head and an earring in his right ear. Not to mention his large, Powerpuff eyes.

Of course, the three girls knew the story of Aku and the great Samurai known only by the name of Jack, because they had lived it. So did the professor and their long-lost brother (who didn't like JoJo and preferred to be called Mojh). Everyone else in Townsville, including their own children and Blossom's twin six-year old granddaughters, also knew much of it. (Buttercup had lived the party-girl life she'd always dreamed about and had been the last to settle down. Her two were six and eight and loved the idea that they were an aunt and uncle at their ages.)

All of it was now a part of history. And part of that history was the knowledge that the samurai warrior had indeed been a direct, though distant, ancestor to the professor, on his mother's side, and indirectly, to the girls as well. But because of that history, everyone in Townsville had been warned to stay away from Powerpuff Park around a certain date and time. The girls from the past could not be allowed to see their future.

With those girls on their way home, Blossom asked, "Professor, are you sure this is going to work?"

"Yes, Blossom, the time machine will drop that tube in the exact spot where I found it."

"But Professor, what if something goes wrong?" Bubbles worried. "It might change everything!" She touched Mojo's arm. "I can't stand the thought of you not being my brother, Mojh."

"That was so long ago, Bubbles, that I do not remember the days before you showed me the light. But as we are still standing here, it will not change, or should I say it has not changed, for us standing here is evidence of that being the case, or we would not be standing here."

"Geesh. That's not the only thing that hasn't changed." Buttercup thought with a small grin on her face.

"Professor, I know you've explained it a hundred times, but I just can't get how something that happened now, in the future, caused something to happen in the past, and it's happened over and over and nobody remembers it!" She gave her long, shining black hair a toss as if to say she needed to clear out her head.

"I'll try once more, Buttercup." the professor said, while everyone got out of their special suits, made just for this day. He was dressed as always, in his black pants and white lab coat. Mojo wore a black leather outfit as he spent much of his free time riding his big Harley, when he wasn't assisting his father in the lab or handling an emergency with his sisters. They no longer wore color-coded clothes, opting for casual wear; Buttercup and Bubbles in jeans and loose-fitting sweaters and Blossom dressed a bit more stylishly.

"It all starts with the samurai. His reality came before ours, so even though you never met him until after you were born, your creation was still the result of that encounter. Time is an endless looping cycle."

"Yeah, I know that, but why did we have to send ourselves back?"

"Because, Buttercup, there is that rip in the fabric of time that was created when HIM sent you to this time. That rip was never closed because you never went back. HIM returned the way he came. Aku and Jack both returned to their time through the portal that Aku created. Only you did not return. You remained fifty years in the future, and when the portal closed, that future changed to the one we know. Your past selves did not belong here."

"Yeah, Buttercup." Bubbles chimed in. "If we don't close up that hole, Aku might find a way through it and change the future again."

"Right, Bubbles." Mojo agreed. "We have no way of knowing if any of our counterparts in this endless cycle have sent you back, so we had to do it, and as I have already stated, we are standing here discussing that which has already not happened."

Buttercup just shook her head. Blossom said, "Don't feel bad, Buttercup, it gives me a headache, too. All I know is it was weird seeing ourselves as kids again."

"Yeah." Bubbles said. "Poor me! I was so scared!"

"It was great seeing you like that again." the professor said.

"Good thing we had those restraints." Buttercup smirked. "I was an ornery little cuss, wasn't I?"

Four grinning faces looked at her. "Was?"

Some things, indeed, never change.

NEXT - EPILOGUE