Disclaimer: I still do not own G.I Joe. The likelihood of this happening is ridiculous.
"We all set to giddy up on out of here, pardners?" asked Wild Bill.
"Yup, let's go research up a storm in London!" shouted Cover Girl, pumping her fist in the air.
"Er, you know, I'd actually prefer not to run into him right now."
Cover Girl rolled her eyes. "That's not what the fuck I meant and you know it."
"Dusty brings up a good point though, darlin'. Now's not a good time to be runnin' into the poor feller, at least, not without Snakes along."
"So where do you guys want to start? Any ideas?" asked Dusty.
"Well, I was thinking mythology, but maybe we could also just look up time?" suggested Cover Girl.
"I don't think we need information on time mechanics so much, but that's not a bad idea if we can narrow it down to some specific subtopics," Dusty said.
"Maybe y'all can look on that there internet to get an idea of the categories in time. Do a bit of pre-research, so to speak."
"Hey, that's a great idea, Wild Bill," said Cover Girl.
They arrived in London too late to visit the library and decided to check into a hotel. They ordered dinner and gathered in one room around the couch. Dusty pulled out his phone, brought up the internet, and went to Wikipedia. The other three Joes crowded around him to look at the tiny screen. He typed in time. The contents part of the page had 10 different main links and then anywhere from between one to six sub categories. He scrolled past the contents to the first category. "Temporal measurement," he read out loud.
"I don't think we are going to find anything useful in the history of the calendar or clocks," frowned Cover Girl.
"Nor definitions," said Deep Six.
Dusty scrolled down further. "We might be able to find something in religion." He clicked on the link for time and fate deities. "Hey, Deep Six, grab that pen and pad of paper. I'm gonna send this page to you and you can check the links out and decided if we should look up any of the deities at the library."
"Holy shit, I didn't think there were time gods in ancient Egypt," said Cover Girl, leaning over to click on the link. Dusty moved the phone out her reach.
"Woowee, look it that, almost all the ancient religions do. There's even a link to Father Time," commented Wild Bill.
Deep Six pulled out his phone. The text was there, waiting for him. He clicked on the link and noticed something else. "The bible too," he said. The others looked again.
"Oh, yeah, there is a bible verse here, although it doesn't mention a specific person," commented Cover Girl.
"You have to wonder if any of these people who contributed to the philosophy or theories of time might be Father Time," Dusty said, thinking out loud.
"Maybe we can look into the older ones? Or the ones that had the what-the-fuck theories?" Cover Girl said thoughtfully.
"Now there's a thought. We could track down their students and whatnot to give the ladies a list of possible targets," said Wild Bill.
"I'll take the controversial theories people, Dusty," said Cover Girl.
"Alright, I'll look into the older theorists."
"Deep Six, rip off a couple of sheets of paper for us, would you?" Cover Girl asked while digging around in her pockets. She finally found what she was looking for in her leg pocket, pulling out a pen and her phone.
Deep Six passed out a sheet of paper to everyone. Wild Bill took his, looking down at it. "What'd y'all want me to look up?"
"Well, if you don't mind, maybe take on the more modern names. We can cover all the bases that way and it should be easy to rule out most of those," said Cover Girl.
"Sure thing, darlin', but just what do you consider modern?"
"Anything after the sixteen hundreds? What do you think, Dusty?"
"Hmm," Dusty looked up from his phone. "Yeah, anything after that is probably modern."
It was silent except for the sound of munching and the sound of paper being scribbled on. Cover Girl popped a piece of food into her mouth before writing down another name, Parmenides. She clicked on the link for his student, but it ended there and she put a line through the name. Heraclitus was also noted for having controversial views, but again, there wasn't much to follow-up on. She put down Martin Heidegger and J.M.E. McTaggart as possibilities and left them both.
Wild Bill, being the wily one that he was, started clicking on names and then reading the first sentence or two to find the birth dates. If it was past what he was looking for, he would do a search on the page for key words such as wife, married, student, or heir. He was able to eliminate three of the names that way. He put Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and J.M.E. McTaggart on the list to look into further.
Dusty sighed with frustration. It seemed the older theorists didn't really have a record of heirs or anything. Parmenides, Heraclitus, Augustine of Hippo. He could look into Plato since there was supposedly a family tree somewhere. And Aristotle, but he felt his list was woefully short. He put down the paper, pen, and phone to concentrate on something much better: his sandwich.
Deep Six started going through the various links of deities. Some of them were just silly. The Babylonian Goddess Ishtar had absolutely nothing to do with time, other than a story where she walked through seven gates of time. He wasn't going to add any goddesses to the list anyway, seeing how Father Time was male. He noted down Heh from Egyptian mythology, Kairos, and then beside it, Caerus. He considered adding Father Time and then decided not to, figuring the other groups would cover it and there wasn't sense in having fifty million copies of the same thing. He added Zurvan as the last deity on his list.
The four finished compiling the lists and eating, sitting in silence for a bit before Dusty spoke up. "Are we done? If so, let's compare and see if there are any of the same people on them."
They handed the lists over to him. He set Deep Six's list aside, knowing there weren't any of those names on any other list. He compared the remaining three and was able to set his list aside as well. Both Wild Bill and Cover Girl had overlapping names. He crossed out the two names on Wild Bill's list and then handed them back out.
"So, the names we have uncrossed on the lists are what we can go ahead and research tomorrow. I think, seeing as we only have two names and Deep Six has a ton, we should help him once we get to the end of wherever it is our names lead us."
"Only four," Deep Six pointed out.
"Still, that is twice as much as anyone else. It's not really fair for you."
Deep Six shrugged.
The alarm clock went off and Cover Girl reached for it, not finding the button she wanted to shut the damned thing up. She finally ended up yanking it off the table beside the bed and throwing at the floor, where it continued to make its annoying noise. She threw the pillow after it and buried her head under another one.
"Shut up, I don't have to get up and face Sergeant too-fucking-chipper-in-the-god-damn-mornings and I want to sleep in a little," she mumbled. The alarm seemed to listen to her, shutting itself off. Five minutes later, it went off again. "Fucking Christ, I'm up!" she shouted, crawling out of bed and removing the pillow from the clock. She shut the stupid thing off and went to go get dressed.
She woke the boys up and they decided to go get breakfast while they waited for the library to open. They walked along nearly a block's worth of odd fencing, the bottom half of it being brick and the top, black metal bars. They went around the corner, where the fence suddenly quadrupled in size and lost the bars.
"Wow, this is the library entrance?" Cover Girl went up to the gate to check to see when exactly the library opened. Another group was there and they waved when she passed by.
"That's kind of neat the way they made the gate. It's like they used the left over metal from the bars to make the repeating word pattern," commented Dusty.
"And you definitely can tell what it is that way. You'd have to be a moron not to be able to figure it out with advertising like that," said Cover Girl, coming back over to them.
They timed it so they arrived just as the library was getting ready to open. The other group was eagerly waiting and one of them shook his arm and then looked at his watch.
"Cobra," Deep Six hissed quietly.
"Huh, where?" asked Dusty.
"Motherfucking cockroaches! There's a Cobra tattoo on that guy's wrist," Cover Girl whispered loudly.
"Keep it down, darlin'. They'll hear us."
"Change of plans, Deep Six and Cover Girl, get the books you need and research at the same table. Wild Bill and I'll shadow the snakes. We'll switch off in a few hours."
Author's Note: First off, I apologize this is late. Super busy right now. On the plus side, while the rest of this story is unbetaed, it is actually finished! The bible verse referred to is Ecclesiastes 3:1–8. I've reread this several times (imagine that) and I find the first part is familiar and that is because Totenkinder Madchen wrote something similar in her story 'Rock on a Roll'. Go read it, because it was done a lot better :p