Chapter Text
The console on Agatha's lap ticked, rapidly and a bit labored. Krosp leaned over to glare, as one would glare at a kettle of water which refused to boil.
“Well?” he prompted.
“It's still calculating,” Agatha replied, and gently pushed Krosp off. “And looming isn't going to intimidate it into working any faster.”
Krosp snorted, as if the console's insolence was purposeful and aimed at him in particular.
Agatha paid him no mind. She watched the half-ruined equipment carefully, almost afraid it would suffer a disastrous breakdown before it finished its calculations. The mechanical date indicator flipped through numbers, from zero to nine, over and over, like an injured animal running in numeric circles around itself.
Agatha had had to brute-force the console into working again after it was ripped off the larger contraption it had been attached to, and now she feared that her hasty improvisations hadn't really worked. But just as she was about to go at it with her screwdriver again, the ticking changed pitch—lower, less urgent—and the number display started turning over to something discernible as an actual date.
“How far back did it send us?” Krosp asked. Now that it was almost finished, he was suddenly too dignified to lean over and look himself.
“October,” Agatha said, as the numbers representing the day and month finally settled. “And the year is...”
She trailed off. The last four numbers rolled into place. The ticking stopped. The console went dormant.
And Agatha stared with a blank expression at the numbers.
“What?” Krosp asked. “What year?”
Agatha turned the console around and showed Krosp. His whiskers bristled.
“That can't be right,” he said.
“With our luck, yes it can,” Agatha huffed.
“But that means--”
“It sent us almost half a century back in time,” Agatha finished for him.
It had started as such a nice day, too.
They'd finally tracked down Doctor Meshach Nebogipfel, the Spark who'd been kidnapping TPU students to serve as his forced labor. The professors didn't much complain about this, of course, but one of the students had escaped to bring back word that Doctor Nebogipfel was building a time machine, and on the list of things which Agatha didn't want to see anybody meddle with, “time” was second only to “consciousness transferal”.
His lair was out in the Wastelands outside Beetleburg, half under the ruins of some old castle.
Zeetha made short work of his genuinely loyal lackeys, Agatha dismantled his clanks easily, and even Krosp did his part by freeing the captive students who hadn't fallen to the Doctor's sparky charisma.
Things could not have gone smoother, and that was when Agatha should have realized that things were about to go very wrong.
Doctor Nebogipfel did not stay to fight. Or at least he didn't intend to. If he'd just gotten into his time machine and left at that very moment, he would have gotten away, and Agatha would have called the whole thing a bust and gone home.
But no. He had to brag, because his invention was just that good, and how would the world know what a genius he was if he didn't tell them, at both great length and volume?
In retrospect, Agatha regretted trying to peacefully knock him out rather than just shooting him, because in the ensuing comical struggle for the time machine's controls (and during the whole spectacle, Agatha could just feel Zeetha's embarrassment from across the room, but in Agatha's defense, Doctor Nebogipfel was a biter), her death ray went off anyway and the machine engaged some sort of emergency protocols.
And the next thing Agatha knew, she was being prodded awake by Krosp in the middle of empty castle ruins. The trees, spring-green when she'd arrived, were now brown-leafed, and the remains of half a time machine were littered around her like the debris from a blast.
With boundless optimism, Agatha had assumed that even if the time machine spat them up a few months in the future, or at the very worst a few months in the past, in which case the plan was to hole up somewhere and wait for her past self to suffer the same mishap with Doctor Nebogipfel's time machine before popping up again. The caverns outside Mechanicsburg would have served this purpose well; they were still fully stocked, and nobody would be there to notice them. It would have been sort of like a vacation. She could finally work on a few personal projects she never seemed to have the time for.
But this was an entirely different issue.
Agatha picked up every last piece of the machine that she could find. She was aided by two of her little clanks, which she found after searching her pockets; they tunneled under leaves and searched under low branches more efficiently than she could, and they brought back little pieces, stacking them next to the tree stump the console laid on top of.
Krosp was not helping, because he was busy staring at the console. The tip of his tail swished from side to side nervously as he considered the situation.
“Can you fix it?” he asked quietly.
“There's not enough to fix,” Agatha said, gesturing to the pathetically small pile of parts the clanks had scrounged up. “We got the control console, we didn't get any of the actually useful part! It can tell us the date, and it can tell the time machine where to go, but we're missing the actual time machine!”
“Well, where is it?” Krosp asked.
Agatha huffed and forced herself to think calmly. Going on a rant would be cathartic, but hardly useful.
“When I shot the machine to pieces,” she said, “I must have also hit whatever was shielding the machine against the effects of time dilation. So the question isn't where it is, but when.”
“Are you telling me the time machine is broken up in pieces across time?” Krosp asked.
“Well, yes.” Agatha looked around. “The pieces should turn up in this spot, but I'm not sure when.”
And of course, Doctor Nebogipfel would turn up with it.
She took a few breaths.
“Alright,” she said. “We can't just sit around in the Wasteland with no shelter and no supplies.”
“We can't leave, either,” Krosp pointed out. “We might miss when the pieces come through.”
“No,” Agatha said. She picked up one of her little clanks, opening the back to perform some modifications. With just a few small pieces from the time machine, it would be easy to get the desired result. “I'm leaving behind one of these guys. When something comes through, it's going to send a signal to the other one.”
“Sounds risky,” Krosp said. “If Doctor Nebogipfel comes through with them, he could pick up everything and run.”
“He's not going to do anything without the control panel,” Agatha snorted, before continuing somewhat smugly, “and fixing the time machine is going to take him a while.”
She took a moment to feel galled by how flimsily built the entire thing was. Agatha had met more than a few Sparks who could benefit from learning a thing or two from a blacksmith, but considering that she was the one always going up against these clowns, Agatha supposed she ought to be happy their doomsday devices were so easily breakable.
“At the very least, it'll take him some time to gather up all the pieces,” she said.
“Giving us enough time to get the jump on him,” Krosp concluded. “Convenient. But where, exactly, are we going to go?”
Agatha stopped working.
They were halfway between Beetleburg and Mechanicsburg. Either way was a very long walk, but...
“Not Mechanicsburg,” she said. She could prove that she was a Heterodyne easily, but Mechanicsburg was not yet the mildly menacing tourist trap of Agatha's time.
“Then you might want to take some precautions,” Krosp said, and gestured to her neck.
“...Ah.” Agatha touched the pin.
It wasn't as if Lucrezia was still in her head; it was just a plain trilobite pin. The only thing it did these days was identify her as the Heterodyne. Which, considering what people in this timeframe thought of Heterodynes, would be a very bad thing for her.
But she still hesitated when she took it off and stuffed it into a coat pocket. Even more than when she had to rip off all the trilobite buttons off her coat a few moments later.
The console was heavy and unwieldy, but lacking any other option, Agatha picked it up and carried it under her arm. She could have found some hiding spot to stow it, but at this point, it was the last thin thread of hope she had for returning to her proper time, so she was loathe to leave it out of her sight.
The walk through the Wastelands was uneventful. There were strange sounds in the distance, and forest noises which made Krosp's ears twitch, but they reached Beetleburg late in the afternoon.
There were human guards at the gates—not the clockwork soldiers Agatha was used to—but they were very easily swayed to let her into the town when she claimed to be a student who suffered some vaguely-described mishap out in the Wastelands. They looked at the banged-up console with knowing smirks, and waved her and Krosp through. The number of students who returned limping and humiliated to Beetleburg each week tended to be exceeded only by the number of students who were never seen again.
Walking into Beetleburg was... strange.
She was familiar with her childhood town, and it had not changed in anything but details over the years, even in the four decades stretching out between her childhood and this day. But her memories before she took off the locket were always a bit blurry along the edges, a bit washed-out and hushed. She remembered the Beetleburg of her childhood in nothing but contrasting shadows and lights, and now it was as if she was seeing it overlaid with colors.
She never realized how vibrant and busy Beetleburg could be. Brighter and louder, and yet paradoxically far less overwhelming to her senses now that her mind was no longer hampered.
She inhaled—the smells were exactly the same—and this was what finally filled her with homesickness and a sort of aching sadness, because now she remembered being young, inadequate, defective Agatha Clay, and she swayed on her feet with the revelation of how different she was now.
She was jostled out of it by Krosp tugging on her coat.
“I'm hungry,” he said, clearly meaning that Agatha should make solving that issue the priority.
“We need to go to the market anyway,” she said.
Not the Thieves' Market yet, she decided, though she wanted to go poke around there anyway, in case by some stroke of luck more pieces of the time machine had popped up earlier and been picked up.
But there were other markets, and Agatha remembered them from all the occasions she'd accompanied Lilith on shopping trips. The nearest one would be just a few streets away.
Her feet carried her almost senselessly while she drank in the sights of Beetleburg. The differences were often just as fascinating as the things that stayed the same. The street lights were not even gaslamps yet, but the old phosphorescent beetle kind that the old folks of Beetleburg would reminisce about. She could see them crawl around in their glass enclosures on top of thin wrought iron poles. The cobbles on the roads were different in shape and pattern, newly paved for now, and Agatha could swear she could feel the difference in the soles of her feet. And most notably, there was no Clockwork Army yet, but she could see prototypes patrolling the streets, shiny, new, yet archaic looking fighting machines that were unmistakably Doctor Beetle's work.
He'd be young now, wouldn't he? In his thirties, at the most.
It was this strange thought, of a young Doctor Beetle, that distracted Agatha from noticing she was already at the market and staring blankly at the colorful wares displayed.
There was the smell of someone frying fish nearby. Krosp was licking his lips, an intent look on his face as he watched a vendor stick little three-eyed fish on sticks and hawk them off to passers-by.
Even Agatha's stomach rumbled, reminding her that she hadn't eaten since breakfast, and that was over forty years off.
“The fish?” she asked.
“Without the stick, please,” Krosp continued. “It would only slow me down.”
Agatha rolled her eyes, and checked to see how much it would cost.
But as she tried to make sense of the numbers on the placard—there was no way fish on a stick cost that much—she realized the annotations next to the numbers made no sense to her.
She looked around more carefully. Money was exchanging hands everywhere around her, but she now noticed it looked completely wrong, even from afar.
Someone held out a bright red bill to pay for something. Since the vendor was still adjusting his scales and not ready to take it yet, this gave Agatha the time needed to take a closer look at the money. It was emblazoned with the seal of the House of Sturdza.
Agatha's heart sunk as she realized these banknotes were Romanian lions—a currency which had fallen into disuse under the Wulfenbach Empire, when it was replaced by Pax-Guilders at the Baron's behest. This presented an obvious problem when all the money Agatha even had was in Pax-Guilders.
She should have foreseen this particular complication, but she'd been too taken with the sights of Beetleburg to fully consider what traveling so far back even meant.
She explained the problem to Krosp, who did not take his eye off the fish. He stayed staring at them for so long, that at first, Agatha thought maybe he hadn't heard her.
Eventually he sighed, shoulders slumping in defeat.
“Alright then,” he said, finally turning towards Agatha. “Strategy meeting.”
He marched Agatha out of the market. There was an alley off the entrance to the market, and they ducked into it to get off the street. It was stacked with crates of junk.
“How careful do we have to be?” Krosp asked. “We're not going to, I don't know, erase ourselves from history by stepping on a butterfly, are we?”
“Stepping on a--” Agatha's eyebrow rose. “No! That's... a really weird thing to ask.”
Agatha curiously took the lid off of one of the crates and peered inside. Krosp sighed heavily, but followed suit. It looked like construction debris. At least there was nothing disgusting inside. Even Agatha would have drawn the line at anything that squelched.
“We're safe, I think,” she continued, rummaging through the crate. “Doctor Nebogipfel seemed to think that the act of traveling to the past itself would create an alternate course, parallel to that of the time traveler's original timeline. We're effectively in a different universe, one that we created just by being here. Didn't you listen to his rant?”
“I actively try to block out that sort of thing. But did you just say now we're not just in a different time, we're in a completely different universe?” Krosp asked, alarmed. “Isn't that going to make returning more difficult?”
“It's actually going to make it easier,” Agatha said. “We don't need to worry as much about tampering with our own future.”
“So we can do whatever we want?” Krosp asked.
“We're in an alley rooting through the garbage,” Agatha sighed. “Is that really what we want?”
“Point taken.” A mimmoth sprang out from under a broken piece of wood. Krosp caught it and scarfed it down. Agatha pretended not to hear the crunching.
“But as for any other kind of tampering, that's risky,” Agatha continued. “Once we change something, we can't exactly undo it, so it's better we don't... do anything hasty.”
“Like prevent the Other from devastating Europa?” Krosp suggested.
Agatha sighed and hung her head, hair falling to hide her face.
“We could make things worse,” she said finally.
“Or better?” Krosp suggested.
“It's not like I'm not thinking about it,” Agatha said. “But it's something we shouldn't consider until after we have the time machine and actually figure out how it works. There might be issues we're not even aware of yet.”
Agatha found a length of tarp, dirty and ripped, but still enough of it intact for her purposes. She cut off two long strips off the tarp with a pair of wire cutters she happened to have. After wrapping the console in the larger piece of the tarp, she wrapped the two strips around to tie it closed. Agatha knew that, logically, nobody could guess the console's origin or purpose just by looking at it, but it still made her feel nervous when people actually saw it, as if at any moment someone might dramatically point at her and go 'a-ha! Time traveler!'
Krosp could not find anything useful in the garbage, nor any other edible critter, so he gave up.
“What do we have that we can trade?” he asked.
Agatha checked her pockets; a number of tools, a few stray gears and springs, a piece of hard candy which she'd forgotten about and which Krosp claimed for himself, a lot of loose paper with notes and calculations, an iron cast hydraulic pen and, for unclear reasons, a handful of beans at the bottom of her pocket.
“How much do you think you could get for the tools?” Krosp asked, while sniffing at the beans.
Agatha balked.
“I need those!” she said.
“You can get new tools later,” Krosp said, “but only if you don't die from hunger first.”
Agatha sighed heavily.
“Or maybe your death ray could fetch a nice price--”
“Absolutely not!” Agatha snapped, hand going to the inner pocket where she'd stashed the item in question. “We'd be practically defenseless.”
“You can't solve all of your problems with death rays,” Krosp said reasonably.
“Or maybe I need to solve more of my problems with death rays,” Agatha muttered in response, thinking back on how this entire adventure could have been nipped in the bud if she'd just shot Doctor Nebogipfel.
A door opened out into the alley, and a burly man wearing an apron stepped out, glaring at them.
“Hey! What do you think you're doing here?!” he shouted, and produced a length of pipe, which he waved threateningly.
“Maybe not this problem, though,” Agatha said, and, grabbing Krosp by the back of his coat, promptly absconded with him.
Agatha didn't run for long, but when she skidded to a halt, with Krosp now clinging to her shoulder and the console feeling incredibly heavy under her other arm, she realized with a start that they were on Forge Street.
She hadn't... She didn't think about it beforehand, it was just where she ended up.
She let Krosp down and trotted down the street, but when she turned the usual corner, there was no familiar Clay Mechanical sign to greet her. There was no logical reason for it to be there, either, and yet she felt oddly disappointed.
It was getting dark. The street lights were flickering on one by one, casting everything in yellow-green beetle-wing light. It was getting colder, too, the nip of autumn weather more noticeable now, and making Agatha regret pulling all those buttons off her coat.
The streets were not quite empty yet, but the crowds were thinning. People were hurrying home, and a lot of the workshops were starting to bank their fires for the day.
Agatha was still hungry, and they still hadn't found a place to sleep, but at least she was not as unhappy about it as Krosp, who pointedly muttered about not wanting to sleep in the cold.
“We'll just have find an inn,” Agatha said. “Maybe they'll let us sleep in the stable if we offer to pay them back in labor. I'm sure they'll have something that needs fixing, and there might even be a warm meal in it for us if we play our cards right.”
Krosp was begrudging—he could already see this course of action would end with him shoveling dung—but he had to admit that was as good a plan as they had. One that, Krosp noticed, also allowed Agatha to keep her tools.
So they set out with renewed optimism to search for an inn, and this lasted for only about thirty seconds before something else went wrong.
A cold wind picked up, and Agatha pulled her coat closed, but something in the mood around her changed.
The street grew hushed and tense, and Agatha looked up to see strange lights playing in the air, like transparent gauzy curtains in the breeze, their color only visible as they folded over themselves.
This wasn't aurora borealis, Agatha told herself. You couldn't see the aurora borealis at this latitude, and other than the fact that it appeared much too close to the ground, it lasted for less of a minute before the colors snuffed out of their own accord.
Strangely, the tension only seemed to mount. People were retreating along the walls and inside shops, watching tensely for something.
“These people are afraid of something,” Krosp said.
“I noticed,” Agatha said, because it was hard not to. She turned to someone nearby, intending to ask what it was, but she only got as far as “Excuse me.”
There was a deafening crash of metal. At the same time, the console was wrenched out of Agatha's grasp from behind, so suddenly she didn't even have time to react.
She turned on her feet, ready to fight, hand already reaching to her death ray--
A great metallic beast towered over the streets, the top of its head as high as the tallest house. And it really was a beast, not a clank, because while it was made of metal items, they were mashed together in a rough shape—legs, arms, a head so flat it disappeared into the chest—not attached so much as held together. A boiler, an engine, half of a crushed clockwork soldier, several lamp posts, an iron gate and numerous other unidentifiable chunks of metal made up the creature, all in a haphazard mess.
And Agatha spotted the console as well, still covered in the dirty tarp, pinned to the side of the monster's chest.
“Just once,” she sighed, “I'd like to have a one-disaster kind of day.”
“That's not a clank, is it?” Krosp asked.
“My guess is giant magnet monster,” Agatha replied, and then pushed her glasses back into place. They slipped down her nose slightly as the metal wire in them was tugged by whatever magnetic phenomenon was taking place. The tools stashed throughout her coat's pockets were tugged too, and it felt strange, but none of them weighed enough, even put together, to escape Agatha's coat, and soon enough the creature's magnetic pull died out.
The creature took a step that rattled every window on the street, then another. People were starting to run scared, now that they knew which way was opposite the monster, and Agatha found herself elbowed out of the way quite rudely as she held her ground.
As Agatha and Krosp were left alone in the street, the monster looked down on them, crouched to the ground on all fours, and--
It roared, Agatha supposed. A hole appeared in the rough region of its head. A grinding, metallic sound was emitted, like the screech you could hear when two clanks crashed against each other.
There was no way that was a friendly sound, Agatha decided. She pulled out her death ray and she shot at the creature's leg.
The beam dispersed, running off the creature's leg like water and making about as much of a dent.
“I knew I should have brought a bigger one,” Agatha muttered. But a bigger gun wouldn't have changed the fact that she needed to save the console before she did anything too destructive to the monster.
She jumped out of the way as the monster swung its arm at her.
Krosp scattered in the opposite direction, disappearing down an alley between two buildings.
Agatha dodged effortlessly out of the way of the monster. It was big, but slow and encumbered by its own large, uneven limbs. It tottered angrily towards her, like a drunk wind-up toy, and swung without much method.
But it was making it very hard to work on a solution while having to constantly move around.
“Krosp, distract it!” Agatha yelled.
“What do you want me to do?” the cat's voice came in return.
“I don't care if you dance a jig, just keep it busy!” Agatha replied. “And don't get squashed!”
As the creature reared to crush her with both arms at once, Agatha crouched and lunged swiftly between its legs, ending up behind it.
The monster was confused, raising its fists to look for Agatha's bloody remains and finding none. It stopped its rampage momentarily in confusion, but then Krosp jumped out and hit it with a broomstick.
Alright, well, at least Krosp used a weapon, sort of, thought Agatha. The monster obviously wasn't injured, but it was annoyed, and had now switched its focus to Krosp. He whacked it a few more times with the broom, and then had to abandon it as he jumped out of the way of the monster's fists.
Agatha worked fast, full-tilt Spark-induced fugue and adrenaline carrying her. She dismantled her death ray, took out the power core and reconfigured the innards of the weapon into something more useful.
Once she was done, Agatha slipped the power core in and jumped back into the fray.
Climbing the monster's back was easy—it was uneven enough that it offered her a lot of foot holds.
She reached the great hump of its back before it even noticed her, but it did notice her. Forgetting all about Krosp, it swung its great arms overhead, its fists crashing into its own back as it tried to hit Agatha.
Agatha moved fast between the creature's fists, yelping as she swung out of the way of each hit, frantically grabbing onto new handholds as quickly as she could find them. This was utterly terrifying and she would never complain about Zeetha's agility training ever again. Not out loud, at least.
In its wild, frantic swinging, the monster teetered in place and swung around blindly, and it was mostly by happenstance that it crashed a storefront with its elbow. Agatha was rattled by the impact, but not as much as she was alarmed by the shriek she heard.
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the hapless townsman caught between the monster and the debris of his own shop.
Agatha realized that she was not going to reach the console before the monster crushed someone, either accidentally or on purpose.
She swung herself up as high as she could, and when the monster opened its makeshift maw for a roar, she threw down its throat the modified death ray.
The monster stumbled back in startlement as the death ray clanged its way down, and Agatha jumped away.
There was no boom, not even a pop, but the monster stiffened and shook as if electrocuted, and Agatha knew her makeshift demagnetization grenade had gone off.
The monster doubled down as if afflicted with a sudden case of indigestion, and its roar came out in pained chugs this time.
In truth, Agatha had no idea what it would do to it. Given how her day had gone thus far, however, she was putting her money on “make it angrier”, and thus when she jumped down, the first thing she did was pull the townsman out of the wreckage.
“Run,” she growled at him, and if the monster wasn't convincing enough, the harmonics of Agatha's voice were more than enough to make up anyone's mind.
The townsman complied, scurrying away as quickly as possible.
Agatha turned back towards the monster, and in one jerky motion, it turned towards her. It still looked like a pile of junk metal, the grenade having done no visible damage at all, except now it looked like a decidedly angrier pile of junk metal.
Agatha wasn't sure when, exactly, but the sun had set sometime during the fight, and the darkness was making it obvious that the inside of the monster's chest glowed an acid green. She could glimpse the light shifting between metal parts, but she couldn't see what was giving it off. She was intrigued, now. The metal was only the outer shell, a protection for the true creature animating it. Agatha wondered, with scientific curiosity, what she would see once she pried loose all the pieces.
The monster seemed to be rearing for another assault. It crouched down as if preparing itself, its body language indistinct in the darkness, but still threatening.
“Fine!” Agatha hissed, shaking her fist at it. “You want another go at me? Just try me!”
Her temples throbbed. She was perhaps a bit too deeply in the madness to think right, and she wasn't even completely sure what she was going to do once the monster charged her, except she was going to think of something--
Light flooded the street, from somewhere behind Agatha, as bright as the sun, bringing the monster into clear view.
“Now, now, Miss, don't hog the monster!” a voice rang out, cheerful.
“We want our turn too!” a second joined in.
“By which my brother means--”
“Duck!”
Agatha did so, and felt the 'whoosh' as a projectile shot over her head. Once it hit the monster, it exploded into a yellowish-white cloud.
The monster batted at it, and the cloud turned out to be, in fact, quite solid. A second and third projectile joined the first, and soon, all the monster's limbs were covered in the stuff. It howled and raged, but found itself unable to move, and toppled over.
Agatha climbed to her feet, wincing at the noise. When it reached certain screeching pitches, it was like nails on a chalkboard.
“What's the density on that foam?” Agatha asked, slightly worried, and then turned to look at the fortuitous new arrivals. She squinted against the light of their lamp.
“It's our own special blend,” one of them replied, chipper and reassuring.
“Don't worry, it'll hold,” the second said, sounding younger, but just as confident.
The light was turned down, enough so Agatha was at least not blinded by it. It seemed to be produced by a type of clank, shaped something like a lizard, but with great mirrored eyes like flashlights. Its light faded as a crank on the side of its head was turned. Agatha could finally get a better look at the fortuitous new arrivals. She walked up to them, about to thank them.
But as she blinked and the two figures came into focus, Agatha realized that their faces were both eerily familiar to her.
And how could they not be? How many years did Agatha spend staring at the portraits inside her locket? How could she not recognize her father, even standing before her as a young man?
Bill Heterodyne, looking like nothing more than a teenage boy, slicked his dark hair back and gave Agatha a roguish grin.
“I hope you're not hurt, Miss,” he said.
Agatha looked down at the lapels of his shirt, at the two trilobites embroidered on them, and then at the trilobite on the lighting clank. Bill's grin wavered a bit, but he stuck his chest out proudly, even though being identified as a Heterodyne in this time period probably meant something completely different than in Agatha's time.
Then she turned to Barry Heterodyne and, again, there was a surreal moment of recognition. Almost Uncle Barry's face, but younger, rounder with baby-fat, uncreased by worries. So, so young.
He was tinkering with the foam cannon, unjamming the trigger mechanism, by the looks of it, and he looked up (up at her, because he was shorter, still not fully grown), and then down at the trilobite on the cannon, knowing it identified him clearly and perhaps anticipating a negative reaction.
“Hello,” Barry said, gathering himself up and smiling. “Barry Heterodyne. And my brother, Bill.” He pointed his screwdriver to Bill, who nodded and slicked his hair back again, but more nervously this time.
This, at least, spurred Agatha out of her shock. She hoped she hadn't looked too pole-axed just a second ago, and very slowly, she held her hand out towards Bill.
“Agatha Clay,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”
They both beamed at her, and rushed to shake her hand, as if fearing she'd change her mind at any moment. They looked so happy, even not really knowing who she was, that Agatha found herself smiling in return. Her day could not get weirder, and there was a certain comfort in that.
“There you are!” Krosp said as he walked up to her. Bill and Barry looked at each other, and then down at Krosp in interest.
“Krosp! Are you okay?” Agatha asked, feeling just slightly guilty that she'd forgotten all about him.
“Me?! You're the one who was wrangling that iron behemoth a few minutes ago!” Krosp replied. 'Annoyed' was as close as he was going to get to 'concerned', it seemed.
Bill crouched down slightly and offered his hand to Krosp.
“Hello! Bill Heterodyne,” he introduced himself, “and my brother Barry.”
Krosp looked at Bill with naked shock, and then turned the same gaze upon Barry. This, at least, was a reaction the Heterodyne Boys seemed to be expecting. They smiled, projecting an air of harmlessness that would have put baby chicks to shame.
“Agatha,” Krosp hissed out of the corner of his mouth.
“This is Krosp,” Agatha said, before Krosp could continue and say something she was going to have a hard time explaining.
Krosp pulled himself up regally, tilting his head up.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said stiffly. “Now, Agatha--”
“The console!” Agatha smacked her forehead. “Nearly forgot about that.” Though for understandable reasons, she thought, throwing furtive look to Bill and Barry.
“Yes, that,” Krosp said. “The glowing can't be a good sign.”
“Glowing?”
Agatha, as well as Bill and Barry, all turned towards the monster. It was, indeed, glowing, an incandescent blue, different from the green of before. And though it still couldn't move, Agatha could swear it turned its head towards them to give one last, smug look—
Before it disappeared in a flash, leaving behind only its indent in empty foam.
There were ten seconds of stunned silence. Barry was the first to break it.
“But on the bright side, we know how it got away from us the last time!”