RFY - Chapter 7 - Destabilization

"I'm fucking stuck here…" Amelia paced around the room Ina had lent her. "Is this just my present now? Am I changing the past technically? I guess it doesn't really matter since it's just my present now. But I can predict future events," she went back and forth with her own mind. The entire situation was so overwhelming. She was doing what she was told was impossible.

This was uncharted territory for her. She would need to be careful.

'And so is the present.' Those words rang deep in her mind. They didn't sound like an explanation or a warning.

They sounded like a promise.

The weird happenings she had brushed off started to make sense. Gura's handwriting being missing, seeing duplicate phones, and Johnny sitting up in bed.

Was the present beginning to destabilize?

Amelia created her third arm and looked at it. She moved it around, observing it in greater detail than she had before. If the present really was destabilizing, what was going to happen to everyone in it?

The sound of the apartment's front door opening brought her out of her train of thought. It seemed like Ina was back. She'd been out grabbing some more food for the rest of the weekend. They had wanted to spend it in relative peace before they both went back to school next week. She doubted that would happen, though.

Amelia walked over to her bedroom door and opened it. Ina was indeed carrying a few too many groceries. Amelia went over and grabbed on the more unstable ones, helping Ina keep it off of the floor. Until one of the apples in the bag fell onto the floor.

Amelia saw what had happened to it, Ina hadn't. The apple had phased straight through the bag. In another timeline the bag had fallen and the apples were spilled all over the ground. One of those possibilities had just bled through into this timeline.

The present was destabilizing and it was getting worse.

"Oh shit, I thought I kept this thing upright enough," Ina pouted a little. Amelia tried to use her friend's voice to distract herself from the overwhelming despair sinking into her soul.

What should she do now?

"Ame, are you ok? You look really pale," Ina's voice pierced through her mind. She snapped her head upward and looked at her friend.

"Y-yeah, I'm fine," she said back. Ina didn't seem convinced.

"You sure? You were acting a little out of it last night." Amelia recalled her cryptic goodbyes to both Ina and Gura. It almost seemed like she was about to kill herself. She cringed internally at her past actions.

"I promise, I'm fine," she needed to talk about this with someone else, "I'm just confused about something." Ina looked at her waiting for some kind of statement. Amelia sighed.

"Have you noticed any weird things happening?" Ina just continued to stare at her.

"What's that supposed to mean, Ame?" she laughed slightly, but stopped when she saw how deathly serious Amelia was being. "What weird things have been happening to you?" she asked with concern.

"Remember how I yelled out Johnny's name the first time we were at the hospital?" Ina nodded, remembering how weird that was. "I saw him sitting up when I yelled that."

Ina had to remind herself not to laugh. It sounded so ridiculous, but something told her that Amelia was serious. "Maybe you should see a doctor. It could be from trauma." Amelia only shook her head. Should she reveal herself?

"It happened again yesterday. He even spoke to me and now I'm really worried." Ina's eyes widened the longer Amelia talked. Whatever this is, it's really bad.

"Well, what did he say," Ina played along. Amelia hesitated for a long moment.

"He said, 'I changed the timeline' and now everything is going to shit," Amelia spoke faster by the end of her sentence. She rushed it out so she couldn't backtrack on it. Ina needed to know since it seemed overwhelmingly likely that they were all in grave danger.

Ina pushed down another fit of laughter, though a bit did escape her. Amelia wasn't impressed by this. "What, it just sounds unreal. Are you sure you're ok?" Amelia stared at her with piercing eyes. Ina felt the need to back away.

Just as she was going to leave this weird conversation, something caught her attention. A third arm sprouted from Amelia's right shoulder. Ina yelped and looked back at Amelia with crazy eyes.

"What the hell, Ame?!" she cried out. Amelia let out the breath she'd been holding in so she could focus. The third arm faded away and she rubbed the weird, fuzzy feeling away. She let out a short laugh.

"Now you've seen something weird, too." Ina's nerves were not calmed.

"Did you do that?! How?! What?!" Ina questioned frantically. A million thoughts were running through her head and she couldn't focus on a single one.

"I'll explain everything to you, but only if you promise to believe me," Amelia pleaded with ehr friend. Ina's attitude calmed slightly.

"At this point… I don't know what to believe…" she said quietly.

Amelia explained what had actually happened to her parents and brother and how she was now trapped in the past. She conveniently left out the fact that she had been abusing her tie traveling ability to run from her own timeline. In her story, she had gone back in time after letting the watch recharge for a few days, so she could try and prevent her parents from dying.

Ina was in shock after the first few words came out of Amelia's mouth. Her entire view of the world was changing. Amelia wasn't who she thought she was either.

"This… This is a lot to take in," she said, seeming out of breath even though she hadn't been talking. Amelia looked at her with sympathy.

"I'm sorry that I have to drop this all on you at once, but I need to," she responded.

"Why now? You said your brother spoke to you about how you changed the timeline?" Ina questioned a little further. Amelia nodded slowly.

"When I travel back, time is supposed to split and a new timeline is supposed to form. But that's not what happened. Instead, I'm rewriting the past and now I'm stuck here."

"Shouldn't that be a good thing, though? If you just created a new timeline, you wouldn't be able to save your parents or change anything really. Maybe you can just let the watch recharge for longer-" Ina scratched her head while she thought. Amelia interrupted her thoughts, however.

"It's not good at all," she breathed in, preparing herself for what she was going to say, "I came here to run away from my present. I wanted to save them, but also do things better this time around. I was planning on staying here in this timeline and not returning. But the longer I stayed here, the more wrong it felt. It was like I was living a false life, one I didn't deserve."

Ina put a hand on her friend's shoulder. Clearly she was in a lot of emotional pain. "Was that why you sounded like you were saying goodbye last night? You were planning on leaving?" Amelia nodded.

"I don't know what happens when I leave a timeline. I might vanish or just continue on like nothing happened. It was really a just in case kind of thing and also me preparing to go back mentally." Amelia sounded slightly guilty as she spoke, like she was regretting leaving her friends behind.

"Ok… So what's the big issue then?" Ina said with worry. She didn't really know how to handle the topic that her friend had just brought up, so she changed it back.

"The timeline is destabilizing," Amelia said with a heavy tone. It was the most serious statement said thus far. It sent shivers down Ina's spine. They were in deep shit. "That apple you dropped didn't fall out of the bag, it fell through it."

"What? How?" Ina's mind continued to be blown.

"I'm not entirely sure right now, but I have a couple theories. The most likely one is the worst, though," Amelia paused for a second, gathering her thoughts, "Time is no longer dividing properly. Multiple possibilities are happening at the same time. In some timeline, you titled the bag a little too far and the apple rolled out." Ina slowly understood what her friend was talking about.

"So it's like how you made that third arm. You moved your arm in another timeline and so it showed up here," she tried to understand to the best of her ability.

"Yeah, but during the time that both arms exist, they're both valid and can interact with the world," she brought back out her third arm, but this time she made her third arm the real one with her other arm vanishing. Ina couldn't help but let her jaw drop slightly.

"So if the timeline accidentally lets another possibility slip through, it could be very dangerous." Ina started to fully understand the horror of the situation they were in.

"I-is this going to get worse?" Ina asked. Amelia's stomach filled with incredible amounts of dread again.

"I'm not sure… I hope not, but I doubt it." Ina's expression grew into one of sheer terror. It looked like she was going to have a panic attack. Amelia noticed this and grabbed Ina by both of her shoulders.

"You're ok, Ina. Everything is fine right now. We have plenty of time to figure this out," she attempted to calm her best friend down. Ina calmed slightly, but was still on edge.

"Y-yeah, let's figure this out, Ame."

Amelia sat Ina down on the couch and went off into her room to grab the time watch. Ina tried her best to not mentally break down during the short time she was alone. Amelia had trusted her with this information so that she could help her. She couldn't afford to freak out right now. Her best friend needed her help.

Amelia grabbed the time watch from the drawer she kept it. She turned it over in her hand and inspected it. There were quite a few dents in its exterior, but otherwise it looked fine. What could've caused it to break like this?

Nancy dropped Arthur and leapt into the air with all her strength, successfully intercepting the bolt. It caused her to seize up for a moment and she fell to the ground in a heap. She quickly regained control of her muscles and threw the time watch to Amelia.

The memory of her mom saving both her and her brother flooded into her mind. Her mom had been holding the time watch when she was hit. It was only after that did it start acting funny. Other than that incident, there was no good reason that its behavior would change. Amelia knew she'd been using it the right way.

Ina was in a state of mild panic when she returned, although she seemed to be calming herself down at the moment. Amelia told Ina about her incident in greater detail, no matter how painful it was. Ina agreed that the purple lighting strike must've had something to do with her current situation.

"So how would we fix that?" Ina asked the obvious question. Amelia stared at the time watch in her hand. She was gripping it a little harder than she needed to. Ina also stared at it for sometime before she said something again, "Wait, why weren't you able to go back further than the incident?"

"Uh, I guess it ran out of power…" she thought about it for a moment. It seemed too convenient that she would only be able to go back to that very point, though. Maybe it was a weird thing with time, that she could only go back as far as she had been in this timeline continuously. Ina perked up suddenly.

"Power…" she mumbled out, "What exactly does the watch do with that power it uses and how much does it usually use?" Amelia thought for a bit, again.

"It turns the power into time energy or something. I don't know, I never really paid that much attention to the details. Plus my parents didn't really understand how it worked, either," Amelia answered Ina's first question, "As for how much power it uses… A trip of a few weeks into the past should only drain a little bit. We've been able to go back to the early 1400s with no problems." Ina seemed invigorated by Amelia's answers.

"What if you just need more power?" Amelia looked at Ina with wide eyes. "I mean, it's just my theory, but what if the time watch is just using too much power and now it needs more to finish the time traveling thing." Ina's lack of understanding showed up a little near the end, but Amelia understood her perfectly.

They could fix this with enough energy.

"Ina you're a genius!" Amelia jumped on her friend and hugged her tightly. Ina jolted with surprise for a second before calming down.

"Thanks…" she mumbled, embarrassed with her display of intelligence. Huh, she could use that word… "You could say I'm 'Inatelligent'" Amelia immediately pulled away from the hug, feigning disgust.

"Ugh, you just have to ruin big moments don't you?" she said, trying not to break into a laugh. Ina's slight giggling prevented her from doing so, and the friends laughed together as the mood slowly lightened.

"So how can we get a lot of power?" Ina began to think again.

"We could rig something up with the power outlets, but that would take a while," Amelia came up with and dismissed the idea in one thought. Ina perked up slightly.

"How bad of a time crunch are we on?" she asked. Amelia thought back onto the frequency of the events.

"Probably a few days," she said initially, "but I'm honestly not too sure. It could be 48, 36 hours… Maybe even shorter if we're unlucky." Panic began to set into Amelia's heart. Ina spoke up to break through her friend's impending panic attack.

"So we should come up with something that we could do by tomorrow. How about a bunch of batteries?" Amelia pulled her thoughts towards Ina's suggestion.

"That could work, although I would need to figure out how to wire them all up. We could still use the power outlets, too. Yeah, yeah, I think that's our best shot." Amelia ran through dozens of scenarios in her head. She couldn't think of a better plan at the moment, so they would roll with that one for now.

"Alright, so let's go get as many as we can," Ina said as she began to gather her things to go out. Amelia continued to think, though. There was someone else that deserved to be involved.

"We should tell Gura, too." Ina looked over at her.

"I guess we could, but would she even believe us?" Amelia created her third arm in response and Ina sighed, "Oh right. But why should we? This could be really dangerous, Ame."

"It's just as dangerous to not know what's going on. If we don't fix this as soon as possible, people are going to freak out." And a lot of them might die, Amelia left the last line unsaid. Ina frowned slightly.

"Alright, I'll call her while you get ready." Ina pulled out her phone and dialed Gura's number. Amelia sighed and went into her room. She put on some fresh clothes and came back out to Ina waiting for her.

"We're going to pick her up. You better be ready to explain that whole thing again." Amelia's heart sank. She definitely didn't enjoy explaining how her parents got killed by some fucked up, inhuman, mythical creature. She also didn't like changing her story slightly, but nothing good would come of explaining that right now.

The two girls headed out and drove to Gura's house. She was waiting outside and hopped in right as the car pulled up.

"Hey guys! Kinda short notice don't you think?" Her positive energy set both Ina and Amelia at ease.

"Yeah, unfortunately we kinda have an emergency," Ina began to explain before nodding for Amelia to take it away. Gura looked at her with confusion and Amelia took a breath before starting her story all over again.

By the end of it, Gura's jaw was hanging open. What she had just heard was impossible. None of that could've happened, but Amelia and Ina both stared at her with complete seriousness. Plus, Amelia had shown her the weird powers she had, so they were telling the truth.

"Wha…" was all she could muster up. Ina stifled back a laugh, but Amelia continued to stare at her.

"Can you help us?" Gura just stared back, but slowly she began to nod.

"Y-yeah, I'll help you guys save the world…" she said slowly. Amelia fell back against the seat and sighed. "But, how are we going to fix this?"

"Batteries and electricity," Ina answered as she began to drive off. Gura continued to have a look of confusion on her face, so Amelia elaborated.

"We're going to get as many batteries and wires as we can. Hopefully, we'll be able to pump enough electricity into my watch that this can all be fixed." Gura's confusion subsided slightly.

"Ok, I kinda get it. So, all I need to do is just carry a bunch of batteries?" Amelia nodded.

"Yeah, as many as you can carry." Gura's confused expression disappeared entirely now, replaced by one of determination.

"I'll try my best!" she cheered. Ina and Amelia felt their spirits lighten.

The hours ticked by until it was late in the afternoon. The air hadn't gotten much cooler, though. It was still hot and heavy, causing all three girls to struggle to carry anything, let alone massive battery packs.

However, they pushed through. All of them knew what was at stake. It was not only their lives, but everyone's. Family, friends, people they hadn't even met. If they failed, everyone was going to be ripped to shreds by time itself.

Amelia felt pain in a place other than her arms when she remembered this fact. Her heart ached at her previous decision. It had been such a stupid, selfish decison, but it was one she had to deal with. She was going to fix it and move forward.

She grunted and yanked on the bags in her hands. She had underestimated just how heavy batteries and wires could be. It felt like she had doubled in weight. Hopefully Ina and Gura would fare better than her.

Amelia carried her bags down the street and eventually made it to where she, Gura, and Ina had agreed to meet at. It was nearly the time they had agreed on as well, so she could just wait a little bit.

She set the bags down and leaned against a nearby wall, sighing in relief. The relief ended early when she felt herself phase through said wall slightly. She jumped up and yelped a little. Things were getting really bad by now. It almost seemed like it was getting exponentially worse over time. That meant they needed to fix this as soon as possible or risk it becoming impossible to solve.

"Hey, Ame!" Gura's voice called out from the other side of the street. Amelia looked over and saw both Ina and Gura waiting on the other side. Gura waved her usual excited wave to which Amelia waved back.

The two other girls carried massive bags of electronics. Packs of small batteries, lithium-ion battery packs, Gura was even carrying a car battery somehow. That must be incredibly heavy for her. Amelia thought back to how she struggled to pick up a large bowling ball. It made her laugh slightly.

The walk sign came on for the intersection and the two girls made their way across. Amelia picked up her own bags again and walked closer to greet them. Gura lagged slightly behind Ina, as she was encumbered by her massive bags of supplies.

Ina made it across safely.

Gura would not.

Just as Ina reached the other side, a truck waiting at the intersection began to flicker.

"Oh, SHIT!" Amelia immediately recognized what was about to happen. The truck was destabilizing, splitting into two different versions. The timeline was confused as to which was real, so both possibilities were about to occur.

"Gura!" Ina turned and saw what Amelia was screaming about. The truck fully split and one shot ahead.

Straight at Gura. The small girl couldn't do a single thing to get out of the way in time.

Ina and Amelia sprinted towards their helpless friend, but they were just too far away.

The two friends were helpless as they watched the destabilized truck smashed into Gura. Somewhere, in some timeline, the driver had run this red light or the light was green. And now, that possibility is happening here, too. Both the stationary truck and the moving truck were just as valid as the other one at this moment.

She was sent flying across the intersection, screaming the whole way.

The truck continued for a few more yards, causing a few car accidents along the way. Then, it vanished into thin air, the timeline correcting itself too late.

Amelia and Ina both ran over to their friend who laid on the ground in an ever growing pool of blood. They both had to fight the urge to throw up as they saw what had happened.

The entirety of Gura's left side was torn to shreds. It was a miracle that her limbs were even still attached. Her skin was white as a ghost and her breathing was severely strained.

"Gura!" Amelia cried out, tears beginning to stream down her face in waves. Ina was silent, but also felt tears fall down her face.

"J-j-j-just… f-f-f-fix-x, i-i-iitt-tt…"

Her breathing stopped. Amelia and Ina cried harder as a crowd gathered around them.

Gawr Gura was dead.

Author's Note: And now the real choice comes into play. Follow Gura's wishes to fix the timeline and let her die, or risk ruining everything...

My favorite kinds of stories are the ones where the characters' decisions drive the plot. Besides the initial Priestess Incident, Amelia's emotions and choices have been the driving force behind everything. From her overwhelming urge to run away, to her complete ignorance of what her time watch truly is, she has been the root cause of everything. And now, she needs to deal with the consequences of having a friend die from those choices.

I was originally going to kill Ina earlier on in the story and have that be the main reason that Amelia went back. It would've been during their initial fight when Amelia saw Ina and Gura together. However, I think that would've been a little misleading to the audience. When the story gets to this point, Amelia was supposed to see what an idiot she had been for using the time watch so stupidly. But if she did it because Ina was dead then it would come off as manipulation on my end. I still like the idea, I just don't know how I would've pulled it off. Honestly though, I am very happy with the decisions I've made thus far.

Next Chapter: What do we do now...

Any feedback/criticism is appreciated!