August 3, 1995.
1995.
1995.
1995.
Celine simply stared at those four numbers on the billboard for a few moments, the digits repeatedly swirling before her eyes and seemingly engraving themselves into the insides of her eyelids so that she saw them shining bright and clear even when she blinked.
"No way," she muttered to herself, ignoring the concerned glances a group of passing women sent her way as she felt her legs automatically begin to move and carry her forward. "No way."
She stepped onto the side of the street into an empty parking spot in front of the flower shop, gaping up at the contents of the billboard as their implications fought against every morsel of logic and practicality she possessed.
Celine had always fashioned herself a somewhat pragmatic and level-headed person—able to think on her feet and stay calm in times of stress, a blessed character trait that she thanked the skies for on days when she worked against urgent deadlines or had to deal with horrifically-long essay requirements.
Now, however, as she stared up with a horrified, sickening feeling to her stomach, some distant part in her realized that she couldn't summon any sort of comprehensible thought to her mind at all. It was like all the collective neurons in her brain were malfunctioning and firing all at once, overwhelming her senses to the point where she felt like she had no senses.
Because this—
This wasn't a prank.
This was real-life.
And somehow, by some horrific, catastrophic miracle, she'd landed herself in 1995.
Her eyes roved, alarmed, over the date on the billboard again before traveling to the words above it.
STARK INDUSTRIES
G.E.N.I.U.S. - Global Environment Network Integrated User System
Distantly, past all the panic and hysteria that was accumulating at light speed in her chest, a spark of familiarity struck Celine. After all, everyone and their mothers knew Stark Industries—multinational tech conglomerate, controversial ex-weapons manufacturer, host company of the infamous Stark Expo, brainchild of brilliant inventor Howard Stark, taken over by his son Tony-Stark-also-known-as-Iron-Man, blah blah, the whole sha-bang.
In 2025, Stark Industries was just as successful as it had ever been, bolstered by the reputation and legacy left behind by its infamous CEO and his heroic death. Pepper Potts had been appointed the head of the company, and in the two years following Tony Stark's funeral, had invested over half the company's assets and funding into philanthropic initiatives and educational ventures.
Celine kept her eyes trained on the billboard, which somehow was now serving as the sole anchor keeping her mind focused and helping her not lose her focus and go berserk in the middle of the San Francisco streets. Slowly, carefully, she lowered her eyes to the line below STARK INDUSTRIES:
G.E.N.I.U.S. - Global Environment Network Integrated User System
G.E.N.I.U.S. — Celine knew about that. It was the smart home system product Stark Industries launched in the 1990s that replicated a simplified, earlier prototype of Tony Stark's J.A.R.V.I.S. AI to integrate and control household appliances and security — except the product launch had failed spectacularly when a group of hackers exploited the security vulnerabilities of the product and caused a major breach that affected thousands of users, leading to a PR disaster and internal investigation that then led to the discovery of the horrifically-misallocated funds and inefficient budget management that had led to the hacking catastrophe in the first place.
Later, in the grand scheme of things during the later 2000s, with the whole Iron Man reveal and Avengers Initiative becoming tied to Stark Industries, G.E.N.I.U.S. had become a microscopic part of the company's past, quickly remedied and forgotten by the public. However, although Celine hadn't been born when the whole mess had happened, she'd been subject to many case studies in her finance classes at college where the financial mistakes and failure of G.E.N.I.U.S. was the main topic of study, and she was very familiar with the product.
And now she was in a time where it hadn't even been released yet. 30 years ago.
Somehow, putting a number to it finally cemented the seriousness of this whole situation in Celine's head, and she felt her breath rise quicker and quicker each inhale.
Aug 23, 1995
She found that she suddenly couldn't tear her eyes away from the numbers, couldn't bring herself to look around at this new time and place and take in the reality that she was somehow—miraculously—insanely—in 1995.
In fact, she was so lost in her panic that Celine didn't notice a taxi car pull up next to her on the street until the passenger seat window lowered slightly, and a middle-aged man in a pressed suit stuck his head out.
"Excuse me, miss," he called in a distinctively-English accent before motioning at the marked parking spot she was standing smack in the middle of. "I apologize, but would you mind—?"
"Oh—sorry," Celine muttered distractedly, barely acknowledging him as she shuffled back onto the sidewalk and redirected her stare at the billboard.
Thirty years. I've somehow gone back in time thirty years—oh my god, what kind of sentence even is that? There's no way. The city's playing a prank on me. They're all in on it, and I just need to find the San Francisco mayor and ask him what the hell his deal is and how he changed all the shops and made everyone wear this out-of-style fashion and speak this weird lingo and put up this billboard and—
"I don't mean to intrude," interrupted a voice suddenly, halting Celine's line of thought and making her jump with surprise, "but you seem quite engrossed in that billboard. Might I ask what about it has caught your attention?"
It was the Englishman from the taxi. He'd gotten out of the vehicle and was eyeing her curiously from where he was standing in front of the flower shop door, evidently having planned to step inside.
"Oh—um—"
Celine felt a wave of fresh panic rising in her chest. This was a living, breathing human from 1995, and he'd just talked to her, and now she was expected to say something back, and oh my god what am I going to say am I gonna give myself away is he going to suspect something I can't say I was staring at the date because I'm from thirty years into the future what do I say what do I say I don't know anything about this time—
And so Celine stuck with the one perpetual thing she did know:
Numbers.
"Oh, uh, I was just thinking about the product on that billboard—the new smart home system Stark Industries is launching," she blabbered, the words flowing out of her mouth before she could even process them. "It's, uh, an impressive concept, but I couldn't help but consider some potential financial implications and risks."
Immediately after the last word rolled off her tongue, Celine wanted to slap herself. Seriously? She'd barely lasted half an hour here, and the last thing she wanted to do was to draw attention to herself by drawing up a whole future-proof business plan to a stranger.
The man, however, only looked intrigued. He stepped up next to her and tilted his head up to the billboard, observing it for a moment. "Really? And what might those be?"
Too late to switch topics now. Celine cleared her throat, cursing her fast tongue and rapidly drawing up her previous knowledge of G.E.N.I.U.S.'s financial failures to come up with somewhat relevant things to say so she hopefully didn't come off as a little too suspiciously knowledgeable to the man.
"Well, given the increasing sophistication of cyber threats, shouldn't a larger portion of the budget go towards enhancing the security features before the product launch? I mean, does Tony Stark really expect to release Stark Industries's first-ever artificial intelligence product and not have hackers try to steal the technology and user information? Nothing about the product description emphasizes any sort of advanced encryption, and I just really think that should be invested in. Yeah, it may seem like a high upfront cost, but I think it could really save Stark Industries from potential financial and reputational damage in the future."
It was what Celine had repeated and analyzed numerous times in class case studies, and the finance student in her felt strangely helpless as she ended her spiel—no matter how insignificant it may end up, she knew what financial disaster was awaiting Stark Industries anyways, and there was nothing she could do about it.
"Hm," the man only said, his eyebrows drawn downwards in thought.
"Um, just my thoughts. Not that I know anything about the future. Or anything."
Immediately afterwards, Celine wanted to pinch the bridge of her nose. How obscure. Good going, Celine.
Luckily, the man didn't seem to hear her. He'd paused and had been examining the billboard too, but he now turned to her. There was an assessing look in his gaze—not in an unsettling way, but Celine was instantly wary. "That's quite astute for someone so young. May I ask what you do?"
"I'm a financial analyst intern." She swallowed. "Was. A financial analyst intern."
Because she'd effectively lost her job at this point, and she actually just preferred not to think about that at all right now, if you'd please.
The man stayed silent, looking contemplative, and his prolonged silence was what effectively snapped its fingers in front of Celine's face and enlightened her to the fact that she was conversing about business strategy plans with a complete stranger, and she still had to deal with the fact that she'd time traveled.
What was she doing?
The thought snapped Celine out of her reverie, and she raised her head quickly, breath rising quickly when she realized she didn't even know what specific day it was.
"By-by the way," she started, and the man looked up. "What's today's date?"
"It's July 28th, miss."
"Oh," she said faintly, wobbling slightly as she quickly took a step backwards, feeling light-headed, the words reverberating around her head. "July 28th. Great. Thanks. You know what—I better-I better get going."
And then Celine was hurrying away, leaving the man standing there in the wake of her impromptu departure, her mind running a mile a minute as she turned the corner and disappeared from sight.
—
She ended up wandering around the city for what felt like an eternity, but what was realistically probably around two hours.
In those two hours, as Celine mindlessly walked through the streets, taking in this San Francisco and processing the different shops and stores lined up against the roads, she essentially experienced all five stages of grief.
Denial had been up first, obviously. Celine had denied, denied, denied—she'd walked twenty minutes down south just to prove to herself that her favorite donut place was where it always was, and when it was nowhere to be found, she then walked another twenty minutes to find the pizza place she frequented with friends on the weekend (also nowhere to be found).
However, there had only so much time and effort she could dedicate towards convincing herself that this was some city-wide prank being pulled, because once again—Celine was a fairly logical person, and she wasn't stupid, either. She took things at face-value, and no matter what she said to herself, it had been pretty clear at the end that she wasn't in 2025 anymore.
Then, there had been anger. Why me? had been the sentence repeated through and through in Celine's head because—why her? Out of everyone in the world, why had the universe chosen to pluck her from her office and throw her head first thirty years into the past, right when everything had been looking up, and she'd been ready to present her presentation to her manager and hopefully get the full-time offer of her life?
She'd scared off a flock of pigeons on the street in frustration.
During the bargaining stage, she'd simply sat on a bench in the park, lifted her face to the sky, and thought, Whoever's up there—if you send me back, I promise I'll never ever wear denim on denim again.
Naturally, nothing had happened, so the depression had set in. Celine had dragged her feet throughout the park, eyes hollow and mind blank, until she'd done a large loop and ended up right back in front of Pym Technologies.
That was where she was now, slumped against the outside of the building as the onset for the acceptance stage finally kicked in.
I'm in 1995.
I've time-traveled.
I'm in 1995.
Celine had a sense that it'd be a long time before she moved past this stage. It was one thing for her to acknowledge that she'd—that she'd time traveled, for god's sake, but what about all its implications?
Because reality was setting in, and now Celine's brain was overheating from trying to figure out the hows and the whys of this entire predicament.
How had this happened? How had she been sitting normally at her desk, doing her work, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, been sent through the fabric of time and landed thirty years in the past?
Celine supposed that the singular factor keeping her from going completely insane was the fact that she'd grown up in a time in which nothing could be discounted anymore. With the rise of the Avengers in her childhood and the following uncovering of aliens, gods, monsters, and the Avengers's time-traveling in 2023 itself—all things previously thought of as fictional—Celine had effectively grown up in a generation where imaginative notions swiftly transformed into reality.
There was almost an expectation, a familiarity, for the unknown that Celine had been raised on, and that was probably the only reason why she was taking the fact that she'd time-traveled better than probably should be expected in this type of situation.
Nevertheless, the standard was practically in the ground regardless. Celine raised a hand to her forehead, unseeing, as the stress of the situation bloomed in her temples.
What about school? Work? Income? Her degree? How long was she going to be here, and how was she going to survive when she had no food, money, or place to stay?
Celine's gaze slowly lifted to the building behind her as an idea made its way through the layers of panic in her brain:
Pym Technologies was open 24/7, and she had an employee badge.