Even though it was apparent that somehow the plothole had effectively stopped time, Goldie was still doubtful about the effect it would have on logic until she walked into the War Council's chambers and the first thing she saw was a bloodhound typing away furiously on his laptop, muttering something all the while about the declining rates of shares.

"Sell, sell, I've got insider information that says Plot Points, Inc. is going down!" He was shouting into his Bluetooth, and then he noticed Goldie staring. "What are you looking at? Haven't you ever seen a dog work the share market before?" He barked at her.

"Not as such." She said carefully.

"This is Mervin." Livida said. "He used to work on the show Family Guy before Plot Points, Inc. was dropped as the production house."

The bloodhound stared at Goldie and Teddy flatly, as if waiting for them to do something.

"Really? I don't remember seeing you anywhere on the show. Did you work with the other dog on the show, Brian?" Goldie asked, which turned out to be a mistake. The room went deathly quiet.

"Brian, don't talk to me about Brian." The bloodhound snarled. "A week before the pilot aired I was dumped for that highbrow schmuck with the drinking problem and the weird fetishes. Artist integrity, ha! I spit on the studios that grind up the hopes and dreams of the little guys. Burn in Hell, Fox, burn slowly."

"Right." Livida said, backing away slowly. "It was good to see you again, Mervin, but we have to go… this way." She indicated with her hands and Goldie and Teddy crept behind the Mary Sue's back to get away from the antagonised hound.

Goldie could hear the sounds of a party going on. She tugged at Teddy's sleeve before scurrying off down the hall. Teddy made a pass at the back of her shirt, but only ended up grasping a few cashmere threads. He pulled a face and followed. Really, they don't pay me enough for this.

"Damn it all, what the hell do you think you're doing?" He hissed when he caught up to her.

"Something's not right." She hissed back. "This is too easy. Mary Sues fighting Mary Sues? The whole of Suedom wants to stick the war and just go home and chill out? You're seriously telling me that you're buying that? This stinks. This stinks so much that I'm about to have a seizure."

"Stranger things have happened." Teddy offered.

"Oh, yeah? Name five."

Teddy raised an eyebrow, lost in thought for a moment before replying. "No. No, you are not sucking me into that sort of naming thing. No way."

"Can't think of anything, huh?"

"You know, instead of sneaking off and breaking things and getting me into trouble, you could just ask an impartial third party to explain the situation to you." Teddy said. "The Narrator would be happy to help."

"Yeah, I could, but I won't enjoy myself as much." Goldie flashed him a toothy grin. "Besides, the Narrator's an ass. All he does is talk in that big, melodramatic drone. He doesn't actually do anything, beside be another plot point."

Teddy rolled his eyes in a why me gesture. "Any moment Livida will notice that we aren't waiting for her. How do we creep around without being caught?"

"I don't know. You're the wizard. Do a bit of hocus pocus or abracadabra or whatever you lot do." Goldie could tell by the way that Teddy's aristocratic nose wrinkled that he was rapidly loosing patience with her. But that was okay. Most people lost their patience with her eventually.

From a pocket in his trousers Teddy withdrew a small box, and from that box he pulled out a long gold chain. Goldie saw that there was a little hourglass hanging off the chain. Her inner kleptomaniac stood up and demanded attention.

Teddy took hold of the hourglass and knelt on one knee. "This is a Time Turner." He told her. His face was deathly serious. "Only a handful of agents are permitted to carry one."

"And you're one of those agents. Oh, how convenient." Goldie smirked. "I think somebody's been shopping at Plot Points, Inc. again. Someone steal his credit card."

He ignored the sarcasm. "Each turn of the hourglass is equivalent to going back roughly one hour each into the immediate past. Turn the glass enough times and you could in theory effectively return to the dawn of civilisation."

"Cool."

Teddy slapped her hands away. "This can change the future." He said. "If we encounter ourselves in the past or encounter someone who will know our future selves, we could damage the timeline irreversibly."

"Don't worry, Dad. I promise to read the instructions on the box and keep my arms and legs inside the moving vehicle at all times."

"This is not a joke." He snapped at her.

"Hey, if we use that, we could go back in time and warn our past selves that they're heading for an ambush."

"And therefore neither of us would know what we do now, thousands of innocent people will die when the Royal Society attacks, we'd have no access to the True Sue at all, and the two of us wouldn't even be having this conversation about going back in time."

Goldie blinked.

"Oh."

"Besides," Teddy carried on. "We would need to arrive at the exact moment that our past selves go back in time so that the time stream isn't damaged and the whole of creation doesn't collapse in on itself."

"You know, all I really understood out of all that was go back in time."

"Why do I even bother?" Teddy groaned. With no further thought, he flung the chain around both his and her necks. "What do you think?" He asked. "We'll go back while the past you and I are still imprisoned by the Sues, so we won't have to worry about running into ourselves. We'll have an extra day to search, but we have to be back at this very spot at the exact time our past selves go back in time."

"Whatever you say. You're the one driving this jalopy."

Teddy nodded briskly, punctuating his thoughts, and he began to turn the device, Goldie looking on. For a moment nothing happened. And then it was like a video where someone had pushed the rewind button. Goldie's mouth dropped open.

Strange threads weaved their way around her, and she realised that she was seeing the time stream, the timelines flowing around her. Without thinking, she reached out and pinched one of the threads. Somewhere there was an echoing scream, and Teddy glared at her. Blushing bright red, she stuffed her hands in her pockets.

The Time Stream was a strange thing. Blinking, Goldie stared out at the other beings riding the vortex alongside them. An old man with I-stuck-my-tongue-in-an-electric-socket-as-a-child hair and a young guy with a permanently irked out expression in a clapped-out DeLorean stared out at Goldie and Teddy as they drove past. A mean-looking Terminator sized them up as he walked by, and a man in a pinstriped suit and sneakers with a fishing rod in his hand waved cheerily at them from where he had parked his blue boxy spaceship over a small nebula, where the Salmon of Knowledge was known to spawn.

Finally the world stopped spinning, and Goldie's stomach stopped churning.

"Argh."

"The first ride can be a little rough." Teddy whispered. "I mean, if you have a weak constitution and all."

Goldie didn't trust herself to open her mouth, so she just glared.

He helped her off the floor. The two of them could hear Mervin tapping away, growling and yapping under his breath. Teddy put his fingers to his lips and crept forward. The two of them were almost at the door when Mervin went silent. Goldie tensed, certain that they had been made, but after a moment the dog began to warble a few bars of a song.

"Ain't nothing but a hound dog, barking all the time-"

The wizard crept by, and motioned for Goldie to follow. Goldie stpped out into the light, and then she noticed something out of the corner of her eye.

There was a drawing of a machine on Mervin's desk. A plan of some kind. She stared as it for a moment longer before reaching out to quickly bundle it in her shirt.

Once out the door, Goldie and Teddy leaned by the wall, side by side. "I thought we were made." Goldie whispered. "Doesn't that mutt ever leave?"

It was right at that moment that the door was flung open.

The duo could have stayed unnoticed, if they had stayed completely still and silent.

Unfortunately Teddy had been standing directly behind the door when it had been thrown open. Which meant that his nose quite audibly cracked against the wooden frame. Which meant that without thinking he let loose that one word that everybody knows is guaranteed to get you noticed wherever you say it.

Mervin stopped. Closed the door. Stared at Goldie and Teddy.

"What a gutter-trash vocabulary." Goldie Locks slowly raised a hand. "Hi?"

The dog looked at them up and down a moment longer. "Intruders!" He bellowed.

"Down, boy!" Goldie barked. Running on autopilot, she seized the Time Turner from Teddy's unresponsive hands, flung the chain around their necks, and began turning the hourglass.

"No!" Teddy shouted.

The next minute the two of them collapsed in the floor in a heap.

"Ow." By the time he managed to pry the hourglass from her hands, Mervin was gone. The hall was even more deserted than before, and the lights were out.

A tap was dripping somewhere.

Goldie pulled the chain from round her neck. "Well, that was anticlimactic." She said. "Where are we now?"

"Approximately nine hours until the end of the world." The Englishman said in a strangled voice.

Goldie froze. "How do you know that?"

Teddy was standing beside a vending machine, holding a copy of the Daily Fable. There was a sign above the vending machine.

Integral Random Clues & Conveniently Placed Information for Time Travellers & Other Adventurers.

Sponsored by Plot Points, Inc., your friendly plot points warehouse.

"Plot Points." Goldie murmured. "Sponsored by Plot Point, Inc."

"Did you hit your head or something?"

"Don't you get it? I've heard that lots and lots of times. All this with the Mary Sues, the weapon, and how they were waiting for us. And all the conveniently placed information in the last chapter points us back to the one place: Plot Points, Inc."

"Plot Points, Inc. works with the Society to develop Anti-Sue weaponry. They can't be working for the True Sue at the same time. Someone would have noticed."

"Yet we were ratted out to the Mary Sues in the first place, remember. And that could have only been done by someone in Society. You think someone would have noticed that, too. That's why in most circles they're called double agents."

Either that or someone saw us go back in time.

And when I find out who did it, I'm gonna kill him and earn our PG rating.

"A consortium of evil masterminds posing as a legitimate business to further their own goals? Don't you think that's a little… cliché?" Teddy said doubtfully.

Goldie grinned. "Hun, if there's one thing I ain't, it's cliché." Remembering what she had taken from the past, Goldie pulled out the document. "Look at this."

Teddy did, and for a moment he felt faint.

Cannon Converter.

Sponsored by Plot Points, Inc.

"Oh my God." Teddy said. "Never mind Make-Believe Land, the Mary Sues are going to destroy the whole of Cannon. This will destroy all of fiction as we know it."

"Lets move it and stop this thing!" Goldie shoved the plans for the Cannon Converter back into her bra. "Onwards, Macduff."

There was an elevator at the far end of the hall. Goldie stabbed the button that said Anywhere But Here and they were off. The two of them breathed a sigh of relief as Teddy's watch began to tick over once more. You schmucks are really in for it, aren't you? One might think that it would be handy if time would stop, but after a while you realise that it ain't that good when you get sucked into a black hole needing to go to the toilet, and you stay like that for a week.

"Come on, we gotta go!"

"In a minute! Dammit, you have a girlfriend, you should know by now how long it takes." Goldie came out of the restrooms.

"We have a problem."

"Yes, we have the same problem. You."

"No, seriously. Plot Points, Inc. is in the middle of Fiction City." Teddy sounded worried. But then again, he mostly sounded worried when he was around Goldie Locks.

"So? What's the problem?"

"People belive I am saving the world as we speak. If I suddenly turn up in the middle of the City, the Royal Society will know that something is wrong."

" Just make yourself a little less stand-outty, then." She gestured toward his blue fringe. After a moment Teddy changed the colour of his hair and subtly twisted his features with a why didn't I think of that? expression on his face. Goldie wouldn't have been able to tell it was the same man if he'd kept his mouth shut. The posh British tone was the only thing left unchanged.

"How's that?"

"Not bad. If I didn't already know who you were, I'd ask you out on a date."

"Hey! Or possibly, thank you."

"A bit of both." Goldie shrugged.

"I don't think I better go around calling you 'Goldie', either. It isn't exactly a common name."

"Surprisingly not. All right, you can call me… Bella."

"Bella?"

"My middle name." She pulled a face. "Goldie Bella Locks. It's like my mother was subliminally influencing me to become a stripper."

Teddy tried not to, but he smiled anyway. "What about you, broomstick-boy? Do we use your middle name too?"

"Yes, that'll be good." He said sarcastically. "Like no one would notice another Remus walking around Fiction City."

"No way. Your dad actually named you after himself?"

"Ted for my grandfather, Remus for my father."

"Now that's just mean. And shows a lack of imagination. It's like you suddenly have all these life expectations heaped on you before you can walk. Like, shouldn't a child be allowed to develop their own personality instead of having one pushed on them?" Goldie stopped at the look on Teddy's face. "Teddy's just a shortened form of Edward, right?" She changed the subject.

"I suppose so."

"There you are. Bella and Edward, at your service." Goldie grinned.

It surprising how easy it was to walk out the gates of the Fan Domain considering the trouble it took to get inside. Goldie grasped Teddy's arm and hauled herself up on her tiptoes. "We are. So. Dead."

There were vicious-looking men and women lining the massive gates, and a pathway of three metres wide was cleared right through from the True Sue's iron and steel palace. Something had been dragged out of the complex. Soldiers marched past and civilians scurried out of their way.

The two of them slipped out the gate. The marks in the road lead directly to Fiction City. "They moved the weapon from the Fan Domain to the City?" Goldie hissed. "Why would they do that? How could no one notice?"

"It would be easy." He said grimly. "Today is the Honoured Fandom parade, where the elected most popular fandom gets to show off. There are all sorts of themed floats."

"I remember last year. I was in day detention." She sounded heartily thankful for that. "Plot Points, Inc.?"

"Plot Points, Inc." Teddy agreed. "Give me your hand."

"Excuse me?" She sounded startled.

He gave his eyes a little roll. "Wizards can Apparate inside the vanishing points as long as they have a clock-on pass. Which I do. And I am allowed to extend my access to one plus-one."

Goldie screwed up her nose and reluctantly reached forward to grasp his long fingers. "I hate going on holiday with you. It's like going on vacation with the little boy that used to sit behind you in class and pull your pigtails."

"Personally, I never had that experience."

"No, you were probably the one doing the pulling."

Teddy paused for a moment. Then he steadily went quite red. Goldie raised her eyebrows, nonplussed. "And according to the almost unnatural urge of Romance Story Clichés, you ended up dating her, correct?"

"What do I have to do to get you to shut up?"

"That's a secret I'm only giving up on my wedding night."

Another vomit-inducing moment later, the two of them were standing on the brightly coloured, seizure inducing, embarkation point in Plot Points, Inc. Teddy's face was pinched and determined. He was going to get to the bottom of this. And then go on a looong holiday.

"This way."

"I wanna go hooome." Goldie wined.

"The time stream is an unstable force. According to all relevant data we have on the-"

Voices. Goldie and Teddy jumped off the Apparition point and hid behind a device that looked like a giant blender.

"This has never worked before. What makes you think it will now?"

The two scientists walked down the centre isle. "We are not in a position to argue with She who Is Above. We do what we are ordered to do."

And then they saw the cyborg.

"My God." Teddy whispered. "They've got themselves a Dean Winchester doll."

"I wonder if I could get one."

"TXD1 engage." The second scientist said. The machine's eyes lit up for a moment. "Your secondary task is to infiltrate the Mary Sue freedom movement. What is your primary mission?"

"My primary mission is to terminate Goldie Locks and Teddy Lupin." The Dean-bot said.

"If that's the Dean Winchester in the League of Mary Sue," Goldie whispered. "Where's the real Dean Winchester?"

"Never mind that. Let's work on not getting terminated."

Teddy and Goldie gulped.