PART FIVE
"I bet we had a nice wedding." Keely beamed to Phil across the Scrabble board on the coffee table.
"Don't go planning it now." Young Phil looked at her. "We're not dating yet." He placed a word on the board. "Schribism." He spelled a new word.
"Challenge." Keely didn't recognize that term.
"Schribism." Adult Phil leaned over them briefly and sat down nearby on the sofa. "The practice of purposely or accidentally creating alternate timelines through the use of time travel; first coined by Professor Seymour Schrib in 2076 after he discovered an alternate reality of the Earth where apes ruled the planet…"
"New rule," Keely looked up disgustedly. "No more words from the future on the board, take it off."
"How about tatellate?" Young Phil looked up a bit upset. "A smaller version of a tatell."
"No more future words." Keely was adamant. She looked to her future husband. "So, how are you getting home to the future?"
"I'm just waiting for my ride." Adult Phil was stuck making modern words like 'cat' and 'dog' from his Scrabble tiles while perfectly good words like "togat" and "actiod" went by unused.
"Your ride?" Barbara Diffy stopped from where she was and looked to her future heirs.
"Like I said," Adult Phil replied. "I do remember meeting my future counterpart when I was eighteen, and how he got home, but I can't recall how long he stayed."
"Is he still here?" Pim came down the staircase carrying a half-empty bottle of Pepto-Bismol. She chugged from it again, made a face of dire nausea and hugged her mother for relief. Both Phil's and Keely noticed and made a note of Pim's uncomfortable demeanor in the presence of her extra brother. Looking back to Keely, Phil lifted one eyebrow covertly and then leaned across to his fake uncle and whispered a question to his ear. Adult Phil looked at Keely and whispered something back to his younger self with his hands secretly posturing before his chest.
"What did you just ask him?" Keely wanted to know. "Are you asking him about my body in the future?"
"Where did you get that idea?" Adult Phil answered evadingly. "He just wanted to know what I'm doing in the future."
"Yep…" Phil smirked a bit connivingly. "I'm going to be a…."
"Authority on life at the turn of the Twenty-First Century at the museum…." Adult Phil revealed. "Specializing in people and events in the 1970s through the 1990s." He paused as he spelled another word on the Scrabble board. "I also own a string of 1990s-themed restraunts." He grinned quite proud of himself. "It's a good life."
"You better be telling the truth, mister or else you'll be in so much trouble when you get home." Keely adorably snarled at her future husband as one Phil looked to the other.
"I found the problem." Lloyd entered the house once more carrying the dimensional interface unit, which had brought his future son to this time. "The temporal drive energizer is rejecting the modifications I made to the dimensional interface unit. It's just taking too much power. I think I need to overhaul the flex capacitor to adjust for the increased outage."
"You'll get it sooner or later, dad." Adult Phil nonchalantly sat playing Scrabble.
"When?" Pim grabbed Future Phil's head and turned him to face her. "When!"
"Sis," Adult Phil straightened his neck. "I'd be careful about which futures you visit. With your access to time machines, there's outstanding warrants for you all the way back to the Iron Age." Curtis walked through the house for the back door. "The Stone Age too probably."
Barbara turned her head up to the rapping noise at the front door. A brief moment for Lloyd to put a lampshade on the dimensional interface unit to disguise it as an ugly lamp to the people of this century, Barbara twisted the old fashioned door knob and looked to the lovely young lady at the door. She almost resembled Keely with long dark hair. They both had those open regal blue eyes, perfectly sculpted facial features and an ideal teenage figure for a young girl. Clad in a gold blouse with dark blue Capri pants, she looked round distractedly, looked up to Barbara and squealed in a high-pitched voice.
"Scuse me, but I'm looking for… Grandma!" She seemed to suddenly recognize Barbara, bounced up and affectionately squeezed Barbara closely.
"Lloyd!"
"Tricia?" Adult Phil slid up and pulled his daughter from his mother's past self. "Princess, how'd you get here?"
"Well," The eighteen-year-old girl effervescently posed on the back stoop. "Mom started screaming that you forgot to pick her up again from the video station and sent me, Cathy and Lisa to look for you. When the world scan didn't find you, I figured you traveled back in time to see grandma and grandpa so I hopped in the time sled and honed in on the microchip mom had implanted in the back of your neck to keep track of you."
"What!" Both Phil's reached in shock to the back of their necks and looked in perfect unison at Keely. Maybe she was apt to being a bit controlling and didn't know it.
"Oh, Lloyd…." Barbara was once more getting misty-eyed while she turned Tricia around to look her over. "Our granddaughter is beautiful!" A few feet away, Keely lowered her head a bit and her lower jaw as well at the daughter she was fated to have.
"She sure is." Lloyd was beaming over this visage of the future. "I think I even see a trace of the Diffy sparkle in her."
"Maybe she'll outgrow that when she gets older." Keely stood from where she sat on the floor.
"Where are the antacids?" Pim was searching the kitchen cabinets. "My stomach can't take much more of this!"
"Aunt Pimmy," Tricia looked over to her aunt's young counterpart. "Wow, I didn't know you once fat…"
That was the wrong thing to say. A growling noise came from Pim's throat and her eyes seared with anger. Tightening her fingers into claws, she lunged forward held back by her current brother and father while her future brother stood to protect his daughter from her young aunt.
"My ride's here!" Adult Phil was gently pushing his daughter out the back door. "Keely, I'll be home in a few seconds."
"I'll miss you!" Keely called out.
"I'm right here." Phil turned his head to her.
"Wasn't I a good looking guy?" Adult Phil asked his teenaged daughter hurriedly out the door.
"Yeah, right, dad…." Tricia bemoaned her father's vanity.
"Oh, Lloyd…" Barbara was missing the man her son was going to be. "I'm going to have to wait twenty-five years to see them again."
"Mom, I'm right here." Young Phil looked to her.
"Yeah, I just wish I could have got a ride for some spare parts." Lloyd turned round frustratedly. "Five more years, Barb. You heard him. Five more years here, I don't know how I'm going to…" He noticed Pim with a kitchen knife. "Pim, you're not going after Phil with that, are you?"
"Why, of course, not, daddy…" Pim sounded sweet and harmless. "I'm keeping the blonde from having kids!"
A furious fracas of crashes and things getting broken combined with Phil's screams protecting Keely in the Diffy house distracted Neil Hackett as he watered his rose bushes. Wondering what was happening in the Diffy household, forty-two-year old Phil Diffy hovered unseen behind him in a silver time-sled with his teenage daughter clutching his back. She poked fun a moment at the balding principal and heard her teenage mother screaming in the house below. A hum of electro-magnetic energy shielded the two from the friction in the air as the flex capacitor charged and opened a causality field large enough to jump through to their time in the future. The on-board computer modified their settings for the exact coordinates in the time-stream, and back-up systems adjusted to protect the travelers.
"Princess," Adult Phil mimicked Doctor Emmett Brown, the inventor of the first time machine prototype. "Back to the Future!" The resulting flash of light from the anti-gravity generator filled the air while Hackett turned from the screams in the Diffy house to the direction of the now empty space behind him. For a brief second, he thought he had seen a flying craft with Phil's uncle and a young girl on it. Shrugging it off, he started wondering if he was ever going to understand that family.
END
CAST- Amanda Michalka as Tricia Diffy
