"Where are you going, kids?" Scott asked as he was laying on the sofa, reading an issue of a magazine with an unintelligible title, written in the runes of an ancient language.
"We're going to a Love Sentence concert!" the trio screamed excited, while Scott waved them goodbye.
"Aren't you gonna bother us with your dad talk?" Marco asked him sarcastically.
"Not today, Marco. Well, come to think of it, I do have a question actually. When does the concert start?"
"Around eight," Jackie swiftly answered as she put on Star's concert T-shirt. Scott stopped his meaningless task for a second and looked lost in thought for a moment. It seemed as if he was calculated something in his mind and as soon as it was done, he returned to his former activity.
"Great then. Have fun!" Scott said actually putting a bit of emotion in his speech.
Jackie and Marco had left and Star was about to take off as well on her cloud, but she stopped in the doorway all of a sudden.
"Don't you wanna tag along? You know having a friendly fun time?" Scott dropped his magazine and looked a bit scared as if Star had just found out his greatest fear and now used it against him. "You ok?" she asked again.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine," he said shaking his head as if he was trying to ward off the memory of an event ever happening. "No, thank you, I've got some errands to run," he said nervously, for the first time losing his cool.
"Suit yourself!" Star yelled as she charged off along her magical cloud. "That was weird," she thought to herself.
It was the first time since she had known him that he showed any sign of being human. His first emotion was fear and at something completely normal. That was an alarm signal in her book, but for the moment she had something else on her plate. Off to the concert she was…
In the meantime, Scott threw his magazine and was pacing nervously across the living room. He seemed lost in thought, preoccupied and absent. And it all came from a seemingly empty proposal. He stopped all of a sudden and whispered: "It is time," then jumped into a portal and he was gone.
He was so distraught he forgot the basic magic he always used and, as a result, fell at the steps of the High Magic Council. Without hesitation or further thought he rose to his feet and, visibly shaken, ringed the doorbell. The doorman answered.
"Oh, hello…who are you?"
"I've got to speak with the Council. Right now!"
"Oh…okay, I guess. I should inform you that the rules of this building are clear: no magic is to be used indoors. Oh, and also…things are not working very well in here, so…take care."
Thanking Sean, the receptionist and doorman and many other things all in one, he rushed to the elevator, only to find it out of order. Knowing of the many problems of the headquarters, he didn't get scared by the sign, opened the closed shut doors and started climbing up the lift's cable. Reaching the next floor, he exited through an open hatch in the wall and then headed for the stairs. After another floor was left behind, he went to the balcony and climbed up on the ladder there. This was the longest process so far, but that wasn't the last step. Almost at the top, he let go of the ladder, starting to plummet to his inevitable doom… However, about midway down, gravity suddenly switched and now he was literally falling up. As he passed the top floor, the strange defiance of the laws of physics (which are not to be found in this dimension), he was sucked in the lobby of the meeting room. The second he set foot on the soft reddish carpet, the elevator dinged, signaling a ghost arrival, because its doors opened to reveal an empty lift.
"Sorry about that, the elevator is a bit…" But Sean couldn't finish his sentence in time for Scott to hear, because he had already entered the long hallway leading to the meeting room. The building was a total mess. Every step he took yielded a different sound, cracking or creaking indefinitely. When he stopped in front of the door, a strange popping noise echoed through the hollow corridor. This, unfortunately, made the council greet him in full alert mode, all of their magical weapons drawn.
"Isn't that a bit excessive peo…umm…entities?" Scott remarked, regaining a never before existing sense of humor.
"Who are you?" Rhombulus asked, already firing a blast from his sentient arms. Scott was however, prepared and dodged it in time.
"If you wouldn't attack me, I would be completely willing to sit down and tell you all about my purpose and myself."
"He's evil!" Rhombulus' right hand exclaimed, already preparing for another attack, but an empty "Baa" from Lekmet had stopped him. The three living beings inside Rhombulus' body shared a dismayed look.
"Great, now that we have cleared the air, may I sit down, with my guard down, without fearing that I will be frozen solid for a thousand years and thrown inside a crystal dungeon?"
"I've got my eye on you," Rhombulus grumpily threatened the elusive boy.
"Okay, now that the big baby calmed down," Hekapoo said causing Rhombulus to glare at her, "let's go through the standard identification process." As she finished, she summoned an enormous register paired with a red pen, encrusted with a ruby.
"Name!"
"Scott."
"Race."
"Human."
"Human?" the entire council shouted surprised, including Omnitraxus who just joined in.
"You're going to gasp for a long time now, so what if you save them all for the end? Proceed, please," Scott said trying to show that he was in a hurry.
"Fine…Dimension of origin or residence."
"You're going to need a lie detecting device. Oh look, here is one," Scott said conjuring a truth or punishment cube.
The council was completely baffled. In the back of the room, Lekmet was quietly whispering "Baa" talking to someone, while the 3 other members had to pick their jaws from the floor.
"It's a perfectly reprogrammed cube that, instead of testing the validity of answers for his own questions, functions as a polygraph, only much more reliable." Hekapoo, a master in magical craftsmanship, nodded agreeing that the cube is actually perfectly modified.
"Great, now. My dimension of origin is Earth, but I currently reside across many dimensions."
The "TRUTH!" green marker blinking, made the entire Council lose its mind again.
"How is that even possible?" Rhombulus asked. "That's clearly dark magic!" he then shouted firing twin blasts from his hands. Scott stopped them mid-air and made them crash into each other, all with a flick of the hands. This only added to the injury that the Council's minds had from all the mind-blowing stuff that happened before their eyes.
"Can we speed things up a bit? I'm racing against the clock here."
"Explain how it's true that you reside across many dimensions, please." Hekapoo asked him, her voice shaking severely.
"It's fairly easy. I divided myself into a multitude of different selves…I think the number is about 42. I've sent them all to different timelines, but lately, something happened which didn't happen in all the thousands of years I've spent split up like that. There is a problem in this, though. By doing so, I had to split my consciousness as well. My emotions, my thoughts, my memories are all scattered across 42 other timelines, and they were fine, until I've met the problem of this timeline. I don't exactly know what exactly caused this, but now my memories and thoughts are mixing and interchanging continuously, causing me to lose my synchronization with the world I am in. Earlier today, when Star asked me to go to the concert, I lost it, and unaware of what I was doing, I almost revealed this to her…" He got interrupted by the Queen walking in and shouting.
"Star?"
"Oh, hello Moon, pleasure seeing you here. Now, where was I? Oh, yeah. I finished telling you my story, now I must tell you of my purpose."
"Hold on, hold on…This is hard to swallow, even with the cube confirming the truth of what you say," Omnitraxus said, looking a bit confused. "I am the master of time and space…space-time…how come I didn't know anything about this?"
"You think that a being powerful enough to split itself into 42 pieces, create portals, pass through your magical building, all while being human, mind you, hasn't got enough knowledge to hide its tracks?" Scott mockingly answered. "I am on borrowed time, how about I end my story?"
"Borrowed time? What is it that you have to do?" the Queen asked.
"All in due time. Now, why did I split myself? This is a story that stretches for a while. I was born in almost 3000 BC, but that time is meaningless to you. That was the time of the ancient Egyptians who built those effigies you had used, dear Omnitraxus, as the gate…and power source for Earth's interdimensional portals. Now, as a kid, I was amazingly stupid. I didn't know much at that time. It's important to note the, obvious to Hekapoo and Omnitraxus, power of the pyramids. It was the first source of raw magic on Earth. This is the reason why the architect had forbidden anyone, even the Pharaoh himself to enter inside his massive effigies. He was Earth's first defender and, quite unsurprisingly, my father. I clearly had a bit more liberty, being allowed to go anywhere on site, apart from the banned place…where I obviously went, late at night when no one was watching. Exposure to raw magic forces isn't something that a feeble boy could withstand without instantaneous death, but…alas it didn't happen. I don't know how, because I found out that my father had erased my memory extremely late, but I know the effect this had…" Scott stopped short, conjured a glass of water, drank it in one gulp, and then continued, rejuvenated. "It gave me many gifts…Magic powers to be envied by omnipotent beings, abilities to defy laws made by the universe itself…But it came with a burden as well. I had been mistakenly chosen to defend balance across all timelines, dimensions, universes..."
"Your story is…Extremely hard to understand…" Rhombulus remarked intrigued rather than annoyed.
"Yeah, that's because it's fake…You don't need to know my origin to know why I split myself. All you need to know is that my purpose is the safekeeping of princess Butterfly. And since this is the first timeline that had ignored the pattern I've been accustomed to for a couple hundred years, and since this is the last time I save the princess, before she will not be needing saving again…I want this to go smoothly. Plus, I've got enough problems when Eclipsa went rogue, despite me and Glossaryck's best efforts…" All the council was about to interrupt him, but Scott was tired and instead continued, closing their mouths shut. "And now, I had gone on to monitor more timelines so I can see the new pattern, so that I can correct it. Ok, I am done," he said removing the effects of his spell.
The Council were exchanging looks, as if they were trying to figure out what everyone was trying to pose. Their faces showed a mix of confusion, surprise and fear. No one was brave enough to ask away, but still, someone had to take the floor. And who was better than the Queen herself.
"Still…when I first met you, you were trying to stay off the grid… Why did you turn yourself in?"
"I am not guilty of anything, so that I would turn myself in and I needed your help."
"Also, when you introduced yourself to me, you told me your parents were far from regular…Who were they?"
"Oh, you know the only Queen whose husband left?"
"Celena the Shy?"
"Yeah, well. Her husband was my father. He left because he was forced to do so because her servants were not pleased serving an inferior race. However, he was still loved and cherished by the then-Queen, so she left a small mark on him… She used a little bit of magic that lodged deep inside his memories… so that she was never forgotten. By doing so, however she infused him with a spell so powerful…It would transfer a bit of magic to the next generation, ergo, me. It sounds unbelievable, but this is the explanation I got from my father as he woke me up from my sleep, telling me there was a unicorn inside their living room. The rest is…pretty much history."
"Hold on…" Rhombulus sounded as if he just woke up from a thousand year old slumber. "If you want to protect the Butterfly princesses, and you've been alive since Celena…how come no other princess had known of your presence?"
"I chose not to directly interact with them. Moon, here, should know that back when she was only nineteen, she learned how to use magic without a wand, because of me."
"How come?" the Queen asked surprised.
"Well, you were, at the time, extremely brainwashed by St. Olga's school for Wayward Princesses, so dipping down, for you, was nearly impossible. Therefore, I made you remember your innocent days, when, as a child, you still had a sense of wonder within you. You unfortunately switched the root of your magic to anger over the years, but that's none of my business. It runs in the family."
"But if you are that old, how come you look like you're only fourteen?" Omnitraxus asked, his voice echoing through space-time.
"Everyone has an hourglass back in father's time dimension. I stopped mine from flowing."
"Still, you have yet to explain how you mastered your spell-casting so much that you had become more powerful than many of us?"
"That's something that I choose not to answer, because of personal reason, just like all of you won't respond to a lot of questions I would pose you."
"Then, I see no other reason to prolong this, so I ask you… how can we help you?" the Queen asked, fear making its wretched presence felt within her speech.
"I need to unite myself once again, because I do not trust…myself. Therefore, I would love it if Omnitraxus could find the timelines with these Stars," he said conjuring a small piece of paper containing a series of unintelligible letters. "This would help me enormously and spare me of a lot of effort that could be fatal."
"Consider it done," Omnitraxus replied to his demand. "You can come here any time to do your magic."
"Anything else?" Hekapoo asked.
"Yeah…There's gonna be a thing going on with Star later today. I'd like you to watch it, and then, when I will return, tell me what you have gathered from it. I may know a lot, but I have my limits, in case you wondered."
"Your request was made and heard," the Queen said.
"Great, then I will gloriously take my leave…I hereby thank the committee for the time it has lost to listen to…me." Scott returned to his former serious self the second he rose from his seat. The Council remained silent until his steps were only faintly heard resonating through the corridor.
"We'll keep an eye on him too, right?" Rhombulus asked.
"No doubt," Hekapoo replied instantly.
"I'll get right on it," Omnitraxus said, fading out from the orb he used to attend the meeting.
Scott appeared just as the band was finishing their hit song, "Too little, too late." He knew what would happen there, at a concert where a track called "Just Friends" was going to be played. He patiently waited Star outside the stadium. The mere sight of her, shook the new Scott. Her eyes, otherwise filled with emotion, were now dead, soulless, showing nothing short of madness. She was walking on a set path, one step following another, mechanically.
"Star… you ok?" Scott asked cautiously.
"Yeah, yeah ,yeah," she replied without as much as blinking.
"Do you feel like you want to talk about what happened inside?" he tried to reach her through his softest voice.
"Nah, I am good," she again replied as if she were programmed to do so. Without any warning she fired a blast in the air, targeted at a Love Sentence banner. He stopped it right away, but as he turned his back to Star, she was gone…
Back at the Diaz household, Scott entered Star's secrets closet. Digging through her piles of randomness, he pulled out a small, rugged book, bearing a couple of strange etches on its cover. Conjuring a pen, he opened it and started writing in English:
"This is to you, Scott, in the event our failsafe…fails. Star Butterfly of dimension zero is on the verge of going rogue. In case of imminent danger, please, under no circumstances, refrain from using what we both know is unspeakable of. Remember your prime directive. Protect the princess…even if it is to protect her from herself. DO NOT ABSTAIN FROM ANYTHING!"
He didn't know whether or not he had done any good by breaking his own rules. But in the ever so likely event of Star being consumed by her jealousy…it's best he was prepared.