Sandstorm {Discontinued}{Rewritten}

Interlude #4

Warning: Mention of suicide attempt, viewer discretion advised. (I know I put a warning at the beginning but still. Better safe than sorry.)

Note: Before you ask, yes the people in the second scene of this one are Carter and Kendra in a past life. I thought it would be easier to give them personality if I gave them their own thing. So, I'll occasionally put interlude scenes with them in past lives or even this one before they met.

{~}

Ralph and Julian had given Anita and Oculus a brief crash course before all but shoving them out of the Flash Museum. (Apparently their mere presence in the place could somehow devastate the future. Anita didn't really see how, but she didn't bother to question it either.) Evidently Cisco Ramon and someone called Barry Allen had been working on a project together, something neither Ralph or Julian had managed to get details on. According to the two older men, the project had gone south rather quickly and someone had attacked Allen and Ramon for whatever they'd been doing. Their attackers had managed to ransack everything in Star Labs, taking everything from Ramon and Allen's project except for Doc, who somehow fit into it all. (Ralph and Julian wouldn't say any specifics, claiming it was dangerous knowledge, but Anita figured they just didn't know themselves.)

Ramon had disappeared after hiding Doc away in that little room they'd found her in (the Time Vault, apparently), running off to another universe entirely. (Anita had taken several minutes to register that news. She had only just come to realize that time travel was real, after all.) Allen had skipped town for awhile, too, but had since returned, as the threat was all over. Ramon, however, appeared to be stuck wherever he had ended up. Julian, Ralph, and their friends had been searching for him for some time, but evidently most of them had given up.

When Anita had inquired about how to old duo knew her mother, all she got in return was some vague story about a 'yearly crossover' whatever that meant. Ralph and Julian sent Doc with Oculus and Anita, thinking that would be safer for the little robo girl somehow. (Anita didn't quite understand their logic behind that one.)

So Oculus brought the two girls back to the Lodge, setting up a room for Doc and Anita, even though Doc probably wouldn't need sleep, being an artificial intelligence and all. Doc wasn't much of a talker, which was pretty weird for a kid, but she and Patch seemed to hit it off great. (Anita suspected it had something to do with the fact that they both had mechanical brains. Or maybe it was just that they shared the same zero-zero, thus making them something like siblings to each other.)

The little group had stayed in the Lodge together for several weeks, finding new and crazy schemes to partake in between their search for Ramon, which was pretty much going no where. Julian and Ralph had stayed at Star Labs, promising to contact them if they found any leads in their own search, though Anita wasn't sure how they'd manage to call, since they hadn't exchanged phone numbers or anything. She got the feeling they were keeping a lot of nitty gritty details to themselves, but Oculus didn't push them for answers so neither did she.

Eventual, after about the third week or so of staying at the Lodge, Oculus decided it was time to take Anita home, despite her protests. He brought her back to 2016, landing in the exact same spot they'd left, right next to the dumpster in that ally. It didn't look any different from how the left it, as if life in Anita's native time period was put on pause until she'd gotten back. She grinned at the thought, wishing things could be like that all the time. There really weren't any repercussions were there? If you were late somewhere, you could just travel back in time and give it another go. If you needed a break, you could run off for as long as you needed, and when you got back nothing will have changed. It seemed perfect to Anita.

She looked around, watching a lady across the street as she walked her dog down the side walk. They hadn't been gone long, maybe a few hours at most. Anita's brother would just be getting out of school, probably riding on that tedious bus they both hated so much because it was far too noisy. She couldn't help snickering at that. Daren would be so annoyed at her for leaving him alone. But when she told him that she had actually been gone three weeks and had been traveling with a man who was almost exactly like the Doctor... No, never mind.