The Variant's Shadow - LokixOC - ONGOING

* Chicago *

Everyone had been working hard on trying to find where Renslayer had been, and no one had expected OB to call and shout at the top of his lungs that they were all going to die. It of course stopped the search for the rogue judge and brought them all to the Temporal Loom’s control room. 

Ophelia said nothing of her visit to Sylvie, and no one asked her either. They were all too worried about their impending death to be concerned about her whereabouts. To them, she was probably working on her past notes again. 

When she entered the room, everyone was already working and analyzing every bit of data available to them. She left them to it and walked closer to the window. The blinds were shut, but squatting and squinting got her to finally take a peek at what was going on on the other side of the glass. 

And it was nothing good. The whole thing was emitting too much light for it to be safe. She couldn’t imagine the sheer amount of radiation there. The way the timelines were growing was clearly something to be concerned about, but for now all focus was on how to prevent the ones already there to, as OB had said, kill everyone. 

“How much time do we have ?” B-15 asked. 

“It’s stable right now,” OB said, looking at the screen in front of him, “but the branches Dox pruned are growing back.”

“And some more,” Ophelia mumbled to herself. 

“If we can’t get in there and increase the diameter of the Loom’s intake ring enough to boost throughput and clear that knot of unrefined time…”

“Wait a second,” Loki stopped him. “Simpler.”

Ophelia turned away from the window. “Too many timelines forcing entry. The Loom won’t hold long, and when it does break, boom.”

OB nodded at her. “The TVA will be destroyed, and we’re all gonna die.”

“Got it,” Mobius said. “I don’t like that.”

“There has to be another way,” Loki agreed with him. 

“We can’t hack into the system.”

“Really ?” OB asked, hopeful. “That is such a relief.”

“We can’t,” Ophelia told him. 

He looked up and frowned. “Mobius said-”

Loki put a hand on his shoulder. “I think he meant it as an idea.”

“We can’t,” Ophelia repeated, listening to the loud rumbling of the Loom. 

OB was clearly back to his first hypothesis on the matter. “We’re all gonna die still,” he announced. 

Ophelia smiled, more because of how endearing OB had always been than the idea that she was about to die. 

They were all throwing ideas around, but none seemed to be of any real substance. Ophelia didn’t know much about all this, but she was beginning to hope that this was all an awful nightmare and they’d all wake up and laugh about this. Somehow, that didn’t seem any more plausible than any idea she’d heard so far. 

“What about Miss Minutes ?” Casey asked from the other side of the room. “Can she open up access to the Loom ?”

OB nodded at him. “She has administrator access to the entire TVA.”

“But she’s gone,” Mobius informed them. “And the two people who know her best are either dead or can’t remember knowing her that well,” he added, looking at Ophelia. “How are we gonna find a little rogue cartoon clock that doesn’t want to be found ?”