Shizuka had returned to Dark Shadow's headquarters, and showed the Precious to Gekkou. The latter looked upon it, but didn't appear impressed.
"What?" Shizuka couldn't understand.
"You disobeyed me just to get this." Gekkou said.
"Oh come off it." Shizuka replied.
"Even if you did manage to get this..." Gekkou continued, "... there's something rattling inside it. If a machine does this, this usually means it's broken."
"So what?" Shizuka questioned, "Isn't this what we always do? Use whatever people consider junk..."
"You expect me to do this after your betrayal?" Gekkou interrupted.
"Betrayal?" Shizuka asked him, "Everything I've done was for Dark Shadow. I never betrayed anybody!"
"You did use our one escape route in case of an emergency." Gekkou reasoned.
"You mean an emergency like when Gaia was taking over?" Shizuka asked him.
"THAT was hardly an emergency." he replied, "There are far worse things for which we now aren't prepared."
"But with this Precious, we are now." Shizuka told him.
Gekkou got silent, though there was a clear negative air about him. He mumbled a few words, and the Precious started to grow larger and take a more humanoid form.
Meanwhile, at SGS, nobody knew what Verne was on about. He pointed at the title of a book, but that still didn't make them any wiser, unless... Since the title was "The Time Machine" he could only have meant that the Precious was a time machine.
"A time machine?" Natsuki asked.
"How could such a small thing be a time machine?" Souta asked, "I mean, wouldn't it have to at least fit a person?"
"For that matter, is time travelling even possible?" Sakura asked.
"After everything you have all been through, you wonder if time-travelling of all things is possible?" Satoru asked her.
"Anyway..." Verne interrupted them, "... to answer Souta's earlier question, what you had was a mere model, used for demonstration."
"Emerald, are you citing that book now?" Mr. Voice asked him.
"Yes." Verne sounded quite serious.
"Er... Verne, I realize that it may be difficult to tell fact from fiction with us..." Eiji started."
"Maybe." Verne interrupted, "However, this book is told through a first person perspective, whose name is never mentioned. Scholars have been speculating that this narrator and the writer were one and the same. But if so, that would mean that some guy in the late 19th century had already figured out how to travel through time. It is possible that the writer merely did that to make his book seem more credible, or..."
"Or it has actually happened." Satoru seemed to realize.
Verne nodded: "As the story goes, the Time Traveller shows this one model of his machine to his friends, pulled a lever on the model and it vanished into thin air. As the Time Traveller himself explained, it was going ahead into the future, but would only stop travelling if someone switched off the machine."
"That would explain how it could appear out of nowhere." Mr. Voice realized, "The machine must've malfunctioned, so it stopped working, hence it stopped travelling as well."
"So what would Dark Shadow want with it if the time machine doesn't work?" Natsuki wondered.
"Broken things can be fixed." Sakura told her.
"It would make sense in a way." Masumi realized, "I mean, she did seem to have known what we were going to do before we did it and used it to her advantage. That could only be possible if she had a time machine."
"But if she had one, why steal it from us?" Eiji wondered.
"So many questions and not enough answers." Souta realized.
"Maybe that wasn't our Shizuka you fought." Mr. Voice said, "Maybe some future version of her travelled back in time, stole the time machine, gave the stolen machine to her younger self, who saw her older self fighting, so she then used the machine to travel back, so she'd be the older self she who helped her."
Apart from Satoru, nobody quite understood how that worked.
"Now I know what they mean when they say time travelling is a paradox." Verne realized.
"Hey!" Natsuki suddenly had an idea, "But what if Natsuki-tachi had that machine? We could use it to witness history ourselves!"
"Or we could save your people." Masumi said.
"No!" Mr. Voice said, "If use the machine for such things, who knows what the effects would be. People who would normally exist would never have been born, alliances would never have formed,... you can change history in ways you can't imagine."
"Speaking of which, Dark Shadow might not know this." Satoru suddenly realized, "Who knows what they'll use it for, if they manage to fix the machine."
"Hadn't thought of that yet." Eiji spoke.
"But if she can somehow use the machine to predict what we will do, we're helpless." Masumi stated.
"Maybe not." Verne said, "If I understood what Voice said earlier, I may have an idea."