Two and the Last Year on Earth ✓ [humor, sci-fi, romance]

Act 28: Where are we? 3

A fourteen-year-old girl wearing a black leather jacket with her hair tied up in a purple and pink scrunchy, set her bag down on a boulder. Taking a deep breath, she nearly choked on high oxygen levels, so she adjusted her lungs to accept the air in the Burninghand. On the horizon of were white skyscrapers with train rails snaking through the buildings. Below the forest of the new city were many colorful little rainbow houses and if she enhanced her hearing and adjusted her language intake, she could hear them.

Laughter. Song. Musical instruments. A new era.

Two smiled. It was in the makes. The seeds had grown to be beautiful cities, just as she hoped they would be. The humans had been ready. She was right to come to this time and she was right to go back to that past. It took seven years to revive Creativity in humans after the Creative Dry Spell and a couple hundred years for the new city to finally emerge.

"Have you got it yet?" she called at her colleagues.

Triad and Fort turned at her call, each grinning up at her with equal silliness. The Travelnywhere Machine had a massive upgrade. It was a hybrid made out of the best strawberry seeds, the best liquified storytelling, and the most high-quality ice cream marble. The best of the best, and for the best team in Stellgaza. Sometimes Two had to admit, Triad and Fort were not her colleagues for nothing. They created the machine aboard the ship with only the splendid hands of Tinkers that there could ever be.

"Ready when you are, Two!" Triad smiled up at her.

Two spread her purple sparkling wings and flew down to the Travelnywhere Machine. "I'll be back before you know it."

"I hope he's worth it," Triad said, still looking sulky although he had erased his feelings.

Two laughed in his face. "I'm the one that decides who's good enough for me," she said with a smirk. She knew he meant it when he said he loved her, and she tried, but she couldn't completely love him back without thinking of Genji.

Maybe I've fallen in love with the humanness about him. Maybe that's it. She thought with a smile and hopped into the machine. It sang a little song about starlight and blue berries which she hummed along to. Once the song finished, there was a flash of yellow and blue light, and she was back in the familiar past.

Gravity almost weighed her down, but she fixed the electronic signals in her brain and transformed her inner workings into those of the inhabitants—which she could not wait to see again. At least she didn't have to transform herself into an eight-year-old.

That was bloody horrendous. She recalled. Two followed the path out of Burninghand and into Birmingham and found a cab. She hopped in and soon found herself at the airport. In no time at all, and with little skirmish, she was back in the old continent of America.

A quick message sent to Dr. Lorkhead and an hour later of waiting in a café, he soon came along. He gratefully introduced her to his newest invention, the Fasta-Pasta Noodle Speeder—a car shaped like a noodle and smelling deliciously of one, too.

"Welcome home!" Dr. Lorkhead's wrinkly forehead crinkled. She knew she had not been gone long, but after being exposed to the near-eternal youthfulness of Stellians, she couldn't help but notice how old Dr. Lorkhead really was. He was sixty-something, but still he looked quite old to her.

Two smiled in greeting. "Well, how has Two Three been holding up while I was gone, doc?"

"Good, good. Nothing horrible happened at all!"

They stood for a moment in shy pause and then she hugged him. He laughed and squeezed her so tight until she had to tell him to stop.

On the way back in the Fasta-Pasta Noodle Speeder, he told her all about all the amazing things that had happened. The Pineapple Theme Park organization kids, PTP, had joined the Cookie and Juice Filmers to make a documentary about their lands. And it was a big success, even adults joined and then some adults allowed the kids to organize them and find new things to do besides waking up, eating, and going to bed.