Once upon a time, two brothers discovered a corporation was involved in shady deals and blew the whistle. On the morning of the court case, Justice Sinclair, who was to preside over it, chose to have a rice cake for breakfast. He beat the traffic and arrived at the courthouse an hour early. Being an environmentally conscious man, he ruled that the mastermind behind the operation carry out his sentence in a special high-security facility. There Jack met professor Tech, and the two of them founded Hazard Inc., swearing vengeance on the twins who had put Jack away. Over the course of their battles, Allan and Edward Kidman gained their superpowers and met Victoria Honeywell and Zoë Wright, with whom they had children with superpowers of their own.
But once upon another time, Judge Sinclair decided to cook a full breakfast with crispy bacon and two hard-boiled eggs. As a result he left home twenty minutes later and was caught in a pile-up on the road he takes to court. His case was handed instead to Judge Stone. Slightly more focused on human development, a part of him actually sympathized with Jack's ideals. Nonetheless, Stone let the law run its course and sentenced Jack instead to a regular prison. There was no Hazard Inc., and both Jack's villainy and the Kidmans' heroism ended on that day.
As soon as the stasis lifted and Candie regained control of herself, she ran outside in a panic. The streets of present-ish day Tokyo were busy, and none of the onlookers gave the fourteen-year-old girl a second look, or they would have noticed she had squid tentacles for hair. Candie rapidly turned her head left and right, then left again, as though trying to make sense of her surroundings, before crying out and sitting down hard on the sidewalk, resting her elbows on her knees (or what passes for elbows and knees considering she had no bones) and covering her eyes with the palms of her hands. Candie let out a groan but before she could finish, the tyre from a passing car struck a puddle and soaked her. There wasn't enough water to harm her inkling constitution but it was still unpleasant. She was joined by Madie who quickly towelled her off with a jacket, and handed her the rest of her human disguise and her translator. The two wrestled with their respective thoughts in silence for a few moments, before Madie spoke:
"I can't believe you'd do something so… so selfish!"
The word shocked Candie. "Selfish? How is that selfish?"
"Leaving the people who care about you behind, just because you can't cope with the way things are… that's selfish." Madie's reply came.
"This isn't about me. I want to do this for my mom. She's the one who's not coping." Candie said, and added "… and if I erase myself from history, no one needs to deal with my being gone because I never existed in the first place."
"It's just… it's just so…" Madie couldn't find the words and was close to tears.
"Pointless, that's what it is." Mo had joined them, also in his disguise. The three inklings were indistinguishable from humans. The Inkling boy continued matter-of-factly: "Don't you remember the stories about how our moms went back in time and wound up in the time of the Great Turf War? Aunt Bessie didn't change history, she just ended up writing it the way it already was. And those scrolls Mom and Aunt Callie signed…"
"We get the point and you're not helping!" Candie snapped and made another groaning sound in her throat as she threw her hands up.
Suddenly there was a voice. Despite being inhumanly soft and gentle, it was overwhelmingly clear over the bustle of people in the streets. It was a young girl's voice and it said only "Inklings."
Madie instinctively looked up, as though expecting to find something celestial floating overhead.
"Over here!" This time it was a boy's voice, raised so as to be heard and coming from behind them.
The three squids turned around, and standing behind them were two children, both roughly fifteen years of age. The boy had medium length reddish-brown hair and wore oval spectacles. The girl had seemingly milk white hair, skin as fair as the palest of inklings, and a face so beautiful that if you were to reach out you'd half-expect your hand to pass right through her. Her apparently unpigmented silver-blue eyes seemed to at the same time be focused on atomic level and see everything in front of her for miles ahead.
"Sorry if we frightened you!" The boy spoke again as he straightened his glasses in front of his green-brown eyes. My name is Wolfram Kidman and this is my cousin Clarity. We're looking for our respective fathers and I believe you three inklings are a key piece of the puzzle!"
"But how did you see through our disguises?" A baffled Mo managed later in a coffee shop
"We have gifts…" The celestial looking human girl began. "Mine is the ability to see other people's gifts. In your case, your superbly developed ink defence. This could only have meant that under those wigs and face-pieces, the three of you are inklings."
"How were you not surprised that we exist?" Madie asked. "Aren't humans supposed to think we're fictional?"
"Our dads told stories of meeting three of your kind," Wolfram replied, "And we had always known they were true, even though no-one else believed them."
"What are you three doing here?" Clarity inquired.
"Would you care to answer that Candie?" Madie turned to her cousin.
Candie had been silent all the way from the sidewalk, and was sitting with her back turned towards the table but now she spoke up: "I wanted to change the past, okay?!" She ranted "I wanted to stop my parents from meeting so I wouldn't be born."
"You can't change the past," Wolfram said knowingly, "but you can change the future."
Candie turned her head so that the company could see the side of her face. "If I'd wanted a fortune cookie, I would have ordered Chow Mein!"
"I'm not being philosophical," Wolfram persisted, "this is truer than you realise! Ambivalence is one of the most powerful forces in the universe! If someone is truly of two minds about their next action, and their hands aren't being forced, their minds cleave the very cosmos into two separate timelines. Even the most seemingly insignificant choices can end up having immense effects on the course the future takes. I know this, because I've seen these effects for myself. There are countless parallel realities that make up this universe, and my gift is to jump between them. And I'm convinced there are others, too. Others that are so far removed from this cluster of realities that I can't get to them. Where the splitting of timelines works differently. But I'm wandering off topic.
I like to check how my other selves and their loved ones on other timelines are doing, but I'm having trouble finding us on one of them. The trail died here in Tokyo, so I've jumped back here to my original reality to look for clues in subtle differences. That sometimes helps. And sure enough, we found you."
"We're sorry," Madie said sympathetically. "But we don't know what happened to your dads. You're the first humans we've ever met, so there's no way we could know anything about any others. And we need to get home."
Candie gave a quivering sigh. Mom's gonna love this one. She thought.
"We believe you," Clarity said. "But we still think you can help us. If you came from the future you must have some means of time travel at your disposal."
"We do." Mo answered. "We borrowed a time machine from a family friend." Even though Akkoro's secret laboratory was technically a five minute walk away, it felt like it was a galaxy and a half from the coffee shop where they were sitting.
"If we take what we know we can get to the last place our fathers were known to be, but going there gets us no closer to finding them. If we can go to the exact time they were there we can follow them and finally find out what happened." Clarity continued
"You want to use our time machine? We don't feel like it." Candie was still sulking.
"You have questions of your own, do you not?" Clarity stated. "You feel that your existence is a burden on someone you love."
"So what?" Candie felt uncomfortable discussing her plight.
"I can help you. I can show you what the world would have been like if you never existed." Wolfram offered.
"And just how do you plan on doing that?" Candie asked.
"Like I said." The human explained. "I have a gift. I can jump between the different realities brought about by differing choices. Love can be rife with uncertainty. It's very likely there exists a reality where your parents never pursued a relationship in the first place"
Candie brightened up. "And if you find one, you promise to take me there?"
"Candie!" Madie was upset all over again. Now her second cousin really was being selfish.
Wolfram discreetly held a palm at Madie as if to say relax, I know what I'm doing.
"If I find one – and I'm positive that I can – and you like it, you can stay there. But I'm telling you now: It might not be as perfect as you think. It takes more than one person to make or break a reality." He said.
"We have a deal." Candie said cheerfully and extended a hand, which Wolfram shook.
The party payed for their coffee and stood up to leave. Mo lifted his backpack which contained the time machine. "So when are we headed?"
"Three November, twenty-sixteen." Wolfram answered.
"I know that date," Madie remarked.
"That's right. It's the date the Squid Sisters had their fourth concert in the past," Candie added
"And that's exactly what our dads were doing in Tokyo." Wolfram continued. "No one from our home town knows where they went, or even noticed they were gone. The last anyone ever saw of them they kept going on about how they were going to Japan to see the 'Seafood Sisters'."
"Squid Sisters," Mo corrected, slightly offended.
"We know that," Wolfram explained. "But no-one else back home seemed to care. We think it may be related to why they left. At any rate, why that's interesting is because in this reality, our dads tell us they only went to the third concert in Paris, and even met the Squid Sisters and another Inkling, and an Octoling!"
"The Squid Sisters are our mothers! We've heard this story, too! They were there with two human girls; one had black hair and the other red!"
"Our mothers! Surely it was by some cosmic design that the universe has brought the five of us together!" Clarity exclaimed but somehow maintained her angelic serenity "Something on the timeline they're seemingly missing from must have been different which could have driven them to come all the way to Tokyo."
"That's right", Wolfram continued. "We came to Tokyo looking for a trace and found nothing before we found you three. Our best hope would be to check the last time and place we know for sure they showed up, and that's the Squid Sisters Concert from 2016."
"Hold up." Candie said. "Something doesn't quite make sense. What year did you say this was?"
"2033," Wolfram answered. "Why?"
"You said earlier that you were both fifteen years old."
"That's right," Clarity said.
"So if no one's seen your dads for seventeen years, where did you come from? And how do you even know what they look like?"
"It's like I told you," Wolfram began. "It's not our own fathers from this reality that have gone missing. It's our fathers from a parallel reality. No trace of them, no trace of us, we even checked on our mothers. In that reality they're married to two other men, and they've never heard of our dads or even each other. It's like our dads barely even existed to begin with."
"Shall I set the time machine up here?" Mo asked when they came upon a clearing
"Not quite," Clarity replied. "We need to make the jump first. Everyone join hands."
The inklings joined hands with their human acquaintances, although they did not completely understand why.
"Now just so you all know," Wolfram cautioned, "This is going to feel a bit weird."
To the inklings it felt like Wolfram took a step forward even though he remained in place. It felt like they were being gently pulled by the hand but they couldn't quite tell in which direction. They could have sworn they were suddenly somewhere else, yet everything around them still looked the same.
"What just happened?" Mo asked with the confusion audible in his voice.
"We just jumped." Wolfram answered "This is the reality where our dads are missing. We're ready to go back."
Moments later, the group of five sat in the time machine, each face looking at all the others in turn.
"Just look at us!" Mo said in an air of excitement as the time machine powered up. "We're like a group of heroes in our own right!"
"Like the Squidbeak Splatoon!" Madie exclaimed, her eyes pinched tight with delight.
"No," said Candie, "we're something different altogether! We're… the Gladius Brigade! Now if everyone's seated and strapped in, we're ready to get going." she said as she popped the Thinking Cap onto her head. "Next stop, three November, twenty-sixteen!"