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'Alternate dimensions don't count!' (Gimpy, Undergrads)

"Mikra, it's you!"

Klein threw his arms around the bat wantonly. Rakim's eyes widened, taken completely off-guard and unsure of whether or not to return the hug. The skunk had never broken the distance around them more abruptly, and seemed determined to stay. He seemed to expect the bat to reciprocate so much that Rakim hesitated as to what to say next. "But your chest! Your wings! There's something different about you," Klein gestured at his wings. "Uh, Klein?" The skunk tilted his head at him. "Yes?" The bat pulled cautiously away. "Who's Mikra?" Klein's eyes widened. "Are you not going by that anymore? Does it have anything to do this this?" This time the skunk gestured at his chest. "You mean I haven't done that yet here?" Rakim winced.

"What do you mean, not yet? Why did you have your top surgery undone?" Klein shook his head. "You mean I *started out* like this?" The skunk nodded. "Yeah! You were like this when we met, then you had it fixed." The bat gasped. "So I'm a girl here?" It was so hard for him to imagine. "Yeah! You've always been, you just... Well, you started out like a girl that looked like this. Now you don't. Well, last time I checked you didn't, until just now." Rakim covered his mouth. "So that's why you called me Mikra." Klein raised an eyebrow. "Is that not your name?" Is that what his name would have been if he'd never realized who he was in his own timeline? "I'm Rakim!" The skunk gasped. "That's your deadname, isn't it?"

The bat shook his head. "Not to me, it isn't. What did you mean about my wings?" Klein seemed stunned to see them. "They're back!" Rakim's jaw dropped. "You mean I had them clipped?" The skunk nodded. "Don't you remember? Did you hit your head?" But that wouldn't have explained any of the rest of it, though. "What *happened* to you, Mik... Rakim?" He was going to have to explain eventually. "I'm not the bat you know, Klein, not completely, and yet I am." He may as well have done so then and there, he decided. "What do you mean?" The skunk didn't seem sure of what to make of what he'd just said. "I'm Rakim, but I *would* have been Mikra, if... things had happened a little differently from how they did. Does that make sense?"

He hoped it would. "So you're from another *timeline*?" It seemed to have. "I see you still watch a lot of sci-fi." Klein grinned. "Yeah, for just such an occasion. Wow! I can't believe you're... Rakim!" It was still a lot to take in, sci-fi or not. "It's still so good to see you again. Well, to me, anyway. I hope that's okay," the skunk chuckled. "Have we... Has it been such a long time since you last spoke to Mikra, Klein?" It seemed like it may have been worth knowing. "You mean we're... Are we still together in your timeline, Rakim?" The bat wasn't sure what to make of *that*. "We were in a *relationship*? You and Mikra, I mean?" Klein looked down. "Uh... yeah?" He scratched the back of his head. "But you and I weren't," he blushed.

Suddenly the skunk felt like he'd done something inappropriate by throwing himself at Rakim the way he had. "Well no, but it's... We're friends. Don't worry about it," the bat smiled, putting his hand on Klein's shoulder reassuringly. "What... kind of friends?" The skunk tilted his head at him. "Platonic. We hang out at the Bolgia watching fights and make cracks at each other about them, basically. It's fun. You're funny. It's where we first met, you know?" Klein absorbed this. "Oh, I see! So you *do* have the Bolgia too, don't you?" Rakim nodded. "Yeah. I don't know what we'd do without it. The things that are similar feel just as weird as the things that are different, don't they?" The skunk acquiesced. "That's certainly true."

The bat titled his head at him. "What happened between you and Mikra? Did you guys break up?" Klein winced. "We did. It was sort of a messy breakup. I was super into you, though, well... into Mikra, I mean," he laughed nervously. "I miss her a lot, all the time. I regret the way things ended. I wish we were still friends, at... at least friends, you know?" Rakim grunted knowingly. "That was why you were so happy to see me, wasn't it?" The skunk agreed, somewhat shamefully. "Yeah." The bat was getting the impression that, if Rakim had chosen to pretend that he was really Mikra, Klein wouldn't have been difficult to convince to get back together with the bat. Perhaps even if Rakim *hadn't* pretended, come to think of it...

"How did we meet?" He hoped it wasn't rude for him to ask. "You rescued me from a chameleon rapist in an alley," the skunk said bluntly. "Whoa..." In the bat's timeline, Klein had been through some messed up shit, no question about it, but nothing of that magnitude. Boko was *still* terrifying, even though it had taken on a different form. "All of your partners are 'rescues' like that." Rakim raised an eyebrow. "I have partners?" The skunk nodded. "You have four girls. An albino mouse you saved from a mad scientist's lab, a Wiccan black cat who was disowned by her parents, an Arctic wolf activist on the run from the law, and a raven who used to be a sex worker. They all live with you in your mansion now." Had he really just said that?

"I have a *mansion*!" That part, he could certainly have lived with. "Yeah! Don't you?" Rakim chuckled. "I live in a tiny apartment. It's so cramped! I'm seeing Ogun the chimera, Soma the snake, Dana the gorgon and Scylla the shark, in that order. They have their own places, obviously." Klein put his hand over his mouth. "So you still have four people!" He found this thought-provoking. "But you're... poor?" The bat stuck his tongue out at him. "Bite me, skunk boy," he grinned. "Sorry," the skunk chuckled, "I often wondered what our relationship would've been like if you'd been poor." Rakim raised an eyebrow. "Why is that?" People liked to say that money shouldn't make a difference, when they had a ton of it to spare.

"Well, we both... I was *really* poor when we first met, and you... Well, you were already living in your mansion then. You always did. So I often worried you thought I valued you more for your money than for anything else, and it often bothered me. Or maybe, you didn't think that, but I *was* taking advantage of you, and I just wasn't admitting it to myself?" That sort of thing hadn't occurred to the bat. "How did I come into all that money, anyway?" If there was anything that life had taught Rakim, it was that money didn't grow on trees. "From your father. I take it he wasn't a famous Hollywood actor in your timeline?" The bat shook his head. "I never knew my father. What do you mean, 'wasn't'...?" Klein gulped.

"You're an orphan, Rakim... Well, Mikra is, anyway." Rakim's heart sank. "How did my parents die?" The skunk sighed. "Your mother was a firefighter. She died when you were too young to really remember her." The bat frowned. Fire, here too. And he didn't even get to know her. It was just even more unfair somehow. "Your father died performing one of his own stunts. A lot of people grieved him. He was kinda famous. You went through a big depression, and used the money to retreat in your mansion with your books for a while. You have a *huge* library, by the way! You read everything you can get your hands on. After a while, you decided the right thing to do would be to rescue everyone you could. You became a philanthropist."

Rakim wondered how he'd have reacted himself in a situation like that. "Do I... Does Mikra believe in an afterlife, Klein? Is she Muslim?" If Klein had been drinking something, he'd have done a spit-take. "No! Mikra's an atheist, just like her father. You're Muslim?" The bat raised an eyebrow. "Nothing wrong with that, is there?" The skunk shook his head. "No, of course not! It's just... Wow. She's like, an *enthusiastic* atheist. It's just hard to imagine, I hope you understand." Rakim nodded. "Fair enough. How did we... How did you two break up, anyway?" He kept going back and forth between 'me' and 'her' in his mind. "Ugh... Well, there were a couple of factors that led up to it, I guess. You sure you want to hear this?"

The bat encouraged him to continue. "If you're okay with it, I mean." Klein tried to smile. "Sure, why not. For one thing, I thought of myself as 100% gay when we met. I told you I was soon after we met, before you had a chance to come out to me as trans. In my mind, I knew you were a girl, just... I was super attracted to you, though. I worried it was inappropriate but you told me you didn't care. In time you told me you felt the same way about me, so we started dating. After a while, you started thinking about transitioning, but you worried that I'd... that I'd be too gay, basically. That I wouldn't be able to follow you where you were going. I explained to you again and again I'd still be attracted to you. In time, you went through with it."

Rakim raised an eyebrow. "And were you?" The skunk nodded emphatically. "Oh yeah! What we had was pretty wild. You made me question my sexuality like nobody's business. Sorry, I don't mean to..." The bat waved it off. "Don't worry, it's fine." Klein chuckled, embarrassed. "But yeah. It was, uh, *intense*. I even questioned my gender identity too after a while... I started, uh, dressing the part a couple of times, which I liked. I realized I didn't want to take it further than that, though. But you... Well, it made you start wondering what it'd be like with another girl, yourself. It was still something you'd never done back then." What a story. "So that's why we broke up?" the bat asked him.

"Well, you... *she* insists it had nothing to do with it. I should probably take her word for that, to be fair. That said... It always bothered Mikra that people thought she'd had everything handed to her, even though she'd lost so much. She felt that her money made her pain invisible, that people thought of her as this person who'd go through life without having to take any real risks. So she became a circus acrobat." "Huh!" "I know, right? Anyway, one time, I said something about how I was glad she had wings, that I was relieved to know that she wouldn't die if she fell from a tightrope. After all, she lived her life in a way to provide a safety net for other people, like me, you know?" Rakim wondered if she'd had other guys back then.

"So she had them clipped, just like that." The bat gasped. Bats were known to become very depressed when they had their wings clipped. It was something his mother had always warned him against, even as she'd always supported his transition wholeheartedly. Getting used to experiencing the limitless joy of flight and having it ripped away from you had been enough to drive many bats to suicide, and Irshad hadn't wanted him on that list. "I freaked out. I told her I never would've said that if I'd known that it'd make her do a thing like this, that it wasn't fair to put it on me to spend the rest of my life living with the guilt of having 'made' her put herself through that. She accused me of having envied her flying, of having resented it."

Rakim could tell that the story was getting painful for the skunk to tell him, but it was too late to ask him to stop. "I told her I just didn't want her to die, that having lost people the way she had, she should've known better than to risk putting me through that too. She made some nasty crack about how she thought she could rely on me to support her when she had something removed because she no longer wanted it, but that maybe she'd been wrong to think that. She was really mad at me for making her wing removal harder on her emotionally than it'd needed to be, and I... I didn't want to keep talking to her when it meant risking making her do self-destructive things by accident like that, because she'd take it to heart," he sighed.

"We broke up. I moved out. Now she has four girlfriends, and me... I'm all alone again."

"Hey..." The bat put his hand on Klein's shoulder. "I'm sorry, man," Rakim added, moving in for a hug of his own and patting the skunk's back as he did. "I didn't mean to make you have to go back through all that like this again." Klein smiled through his pain, somewhat ashamed at how grateful he was to have been feeling the warmth of the bat's body pressing against his own again, the contours of his flesh, even though he knew that Rakim hadn't shared the same experiences with him as Mikra had. "No, it's... Thank you, Rakim. I'm happy you're here, whatever I am to you where you're from. I'm sorry for unloading all of this on you, it must be a little weird for you, to say the least." The bat chuckled. "Don't worry about it."

The skunk raised an eyebrow. "There's still something else that's different about your body that I can't quite put my finger on, though." Ah yes... that. "I'm a cyborg." Klein gasped. "No shit! How did *that* happen?" At least it seemed to take his mind off his grief. "This guy Ogun I told you I was seeing was a bit of a tinkerer. When I died, he made a deal with a god or a demon or something to bring me back like this." The skunk's jaw dropped. "You mean there's *magic*?" It seemed more difficult for him to accept than time travel. "I mean, how... How did you die?" This time it was Rakim's turn to have a painful story. "I tried to pull my mother out of a fire. It didn't work. She burned. I burned. He dragged me out of it. What was left of me."

Klein put his hand on the bat's shoulder, looking him in the eye, giving him an empathetic look. "I'm sorry you had to go through that." The skunk's body language asked Rakim if it'd be okay if he went in for another hug, and the bat's body language agreed, so they did. "We've been through some bullshit, haven't we?" Rakim chuckled. "Yeah... Does that have anything to do with why you're time traveling? Is it your cyborg body that makes it possible somehow?" The bat shook his head. "No, I'm afraid not. Well, yes, it has to do with why I'm time traveling, but no, my cyborg body doesn't make it possible, unfortunately. I can't do it at will. I'm trying to figure out how to bring my mother back to life by messing with timelines."

Klein nodded in dawning understanding. "Oh, I see! Is there anything I can do to help?" Rakim smiled at him. "You *did* help, Klein. I need to track down people I know in other timelines to figure out what's the same and what's different, so I can compare and contrast them to figure out how to get to where I'm going based on that. Everything you've said to me so far has been very useful to me in that regard, and I'm definitely in your debt for it." The skunk smiled back at him. "Thank you for saying so, Rakim." It was good to see Klein in better spirits. "You're welcome. I should be the one thanking *you*. In fact, if there's anything I can do for you to thank you for helping me before I'm on my way, don't hesitate to ask."

The skunk chuckled. "Well, not *anything*, I'm sure," he winked. The bat laughed. "You don't have to do anything for me, Rakim. It felt great to see you and to talk to you like this, it really did. It helped give me some kind of weird sense of closure about the whole thing I never thought I'd get, you know?" Rakim nodded. "I'm happy to hear that." He caressed Klein's head and face affectionately. The bat had never thought of him that way, but the skunk *was* a bit cute in his own way, if you looked at him just right. "... Sure, why not." Klein couldn't *possibly* have heard that right, he told himself. "What?" The skunk raised an eyebrow. "Sure. Let's go for it. Why not," Rakim shrugged with a playful grin, "I mean, you only live once, right?" he winked.

***

The crowd around the bat made it hard for him to see. He could've flown, he supposed, but he was trying his best not to draw anyone's attention. Not that he wouldn't have welcomed a reprieve from having been as near to the ground as he was standing on it. The stench that was coming up from the ground was overwhelming, but then, it would've had to come with the territory, he guessed. Rakim chased a fly away from his face, looking up to the wooden platform raised above the crowd in front of him, striving to distinguish the features of the person who was being tied up to a wooden pole on it in front of the rowdy mob that surrounded him.

It was Mnemos.

Intellectually, he'd known that they'd blamed rat witches for just about everything back in these days, but it was turning out to be a very different kind of experience for him to actually be living through, live, in front of him. "My fellow citizens, I address you now, not only as your superior, but as a concerned citizen myself," the bat heard someone say. "Our society has never been in greater peril." Rakim strove to see who was speaking, using his echolocation to try to triangulate their location despite the noise that the crowd was making over it as well as he could. "I wish I could tell you it's not, believe me!" The speaker threw back his hood. "I wish I could tell you we're as safe as you wish we could be." It was a mountain lion.

"Unfortunately, if I were to tell you this, that would be a lie." There was a frightening glint in the puma's eye as he spoke, something that the bat questioned as to whether or not it was something unique that he should have been paying attention to, or something that would have been explainable enough by the 'normal' madness of an Inquisitor, whatever that may have been. He didn't have much of a point of reference for it. "And what is a lie, my fellow citizens?" A sin, they chanted back at him. "That's right, a sin!" Let's make sure *they* don't find out I'm Muslim, Rakim couldn't help but think. "And we all know what the ransom of sin is, don't we?" He knew the Crusades against his people were still ongoing. "It's *hell*!"

The mountain lion's robe moved around him while he gestured emphatically as he spoke. "Now, ladies and gentlemen..." Gosh, the bat probably shouldn't let them find out he was trans either, should he? "We're about to send *this* witch to hell," the puma added, indicating Mnemos with his hand accusingly, "for all her sins against the rest of us." Rakim had to think of a way to rescue her from there, but how? "I wish I did not have to do so either, believe me!" The rat rolled her eyes. "This is always a last resort for us, you must realize." She stuck out her tongue as a calico cat climbed up stairs onto the platform to stand next to her with a torch. "We have asked her to confess, and we must ask again. Do you confess, witch?"

Mnemos looked left, then right, taking in the whole crowd in front of her, and looked down at the mountain lion who'd been speaking to her. "You look *ridiculous* in that, DamageBoost. Everyone knows you're getting off on this, you sick fuck. Show a little *restraint*, why don't you," she chuckled at her own joke despite her dire predicament. "The witch does not confess!" he exclaimed to the crowd, where everyone was now talking to each other so fast and confusedly that even Rakim's refined hearing could no longer tell many of their voices apart from each other. "You know what this means we must do," the puma gestured at the calico cat. Cali approached the rat on the pole with her torch, a cruel grin twisting her features.

That was enough. The bat took flight over the crowd then and there, determined to go to her rescue. On his way to the wooden platform over the mob's protests, he tried to shoot out one of his bladed chains from his wrist toward the calico's torch, only to realize in midair that he'd reverted back to a completely organic body. He was in a cis male, flesh body! Since he'd transitioned at the same time as he'd been made into a cyborg, this was something that he'd never experienced before, but he didn't exactly have a lot of time to dwell on it in the heat of the moment. "What do you think you're doing?" Mnemos scolded him as he slammed into the surprised Cali next to her, knocking the torch out of her hand anyway. "They'll kill you!"

Having knocked the calico cat off the platform outright, Rakim struggled to cut through the ropes that tied her hands behind her back around the pole before the one she'd called DamageBoost would have time to go up on the platform to do to him what he'd been about to do to her. Somehow, when it had come to rescuing the rat from the flames, his phobia of fire hadn't stopped him from knocking Cali's torch out of her hand. Thinking back on it right after it happened, he couldn't believe he'd been able to push himself through it after all. It had been so frightening! His heart was beating so fast. "Infidel!" But he was already carrying Mnemos through the sky before the mountain lion had a chance to reach either of them himself.

Once they were high up in the air away from the crowd, the rat wriggled out of his grip, and the bat gasped, thinking she would fall to her death. Two large pigeon wings sprouted out of her back, and she started flying right next to him herself without missing a beat. "Thanks, kid!" Mnemos grinned at him happily. "I gotta admit, I didn't think you were gonna make it there, but hey, what do you know? I owe you one." That's right. She didn't know him yet. Even her considerable memory didn't extend backward through time. "I already owed *you* one, Mnemos. Let's call it even." She was so surprised she almost veered off her flight path before she caught herself. "You know my name." He did. "Yes. You'll help me someday, you'll see."

A look of understanding appeared on her face. "Ah, you're a time traveler, aren't you?" He nodded. "Well, whatever it is that you're going owe me... I hope it's going to have been worth *this*," she chuckled. "You know, in the grand scheme of things... I think it will."

***

It was good to be back to being a cyborg again, she thought. As weird as it had been at first, as much of an adjustment as it had been for her to get used to it, she'd grown so accustomed to it by now that... Wait a minute. Something wasn't quite right. At first she couldn't quite put her finger on it, but she... She! She wasn't just in a cis female body, she realized. She *thought* of herself as a girl, *felt* like a girl, inside and out. It felt *right* for her to be a girl somehow. This was even more difficult to imagine than any of his - of *her* previous predicaments earlier that night. She had no urge to be in a male body at all, she just remembered having been in one. It was 'phantom dysphoria,' like a phantom limb but not.

"Hold it right there, bitch!"

She heard a revving sound like a motorcycle. "Who's there?" she asked, turning her head on the street to see who was approaching her with such untoward language. "Nevermind who *I* am," he snapped back at her, "what matters is who *you* are." The bat could finally see him. "Have we met?" He was an alligator, but not just any alligator, she could tell. "No, but after what you did to my friend, I'm about to be the last person you'll ever meet!" The streetlights reflected all over his body in a way that led her to believe that he must have also been a cyborg, just as she was. "What did I do to him?" The fact that he wasn't riding a motorcycle at all was also kind of a tipoff. "You beat him senseless. Now it's *your* turn."

That didn't sound like something she'd have done for no reason, she couldn't help but think. "Why would've I gone and done a thing like that?" Steam seemed to come out of his nostrils and maw as he breathed. "He came at you to put you back in your place after what you'd done to him, to us all, before that." She raised an eyebrow at him. "What did I do to him or you or to anyone before any of that, though?" He raised his arms, emitting a loud whirring noise from his maw, his eyes flashing bright red as gears turned on his torso while sparks flickered across his cybernetic body. "You're that cunt who bitches about video games online! We know it's you." Was he serious? But she *loved* video games, though!

They'd provided her comfort as she'd grown up, and provided her emotional support when no one else had been there for her. She'd made friends and lovers through their shared love of video games. She scanned her mind to see if her opinions about them were different in this timeline somehow, but they totally weren't. Everything she said and did was some sort of video game reference, to the point to which it would drive people crazy sometimes, even people who loved video games every bit as much as she did. All that she'd really remembered having done was having said that she wished that there would be more women, more queer characters and more varied species in video games, not that she'd wanted them not to exist.

"You can't be serious," was all she could say. She'd shrugged off people's fears about a cyborg apocalypse for a long time, but she certainly hadn't expected to have to face something like the charging alligator that was coming at her as she sighed and rolled her eyes while extending her metal claws and bladed chains out of her fingers and wrists to meet him head on. "Prepare to die!" the electronic reptile screamed at her before they clashed. Someone seemed to have neglected to mention to him that she was every bit as much of a cyborg as he was as well, though. They also hadn't told him she was a martial arts expert, and that she didn't let people intimidate her into retracting her less popular opinions. Still, he bragged threateningly.

"Prepare to face the wrath of... the GamerGator!" She groaned exasperatedly.

***

"MOM...!"

He threw his arms around Irshad wantonly. "Oh, mom..." Rakim sobbed and sobbed, holding her as close to himself as he could, wanting to never let her go. "I missed you so much, mom..." She hugged him back lovingly, stroking his head with the same kindness that she had always valued so, even wrapping her wing protectively around him just the same way she'd always done to comfort him when he'd been sad as a child, like a great big blanket protecting him from all the cruelty of the rest of the world. "I know, son... I know," she smiled. He could hear when she was smiling in her voice when she spoke, even though she still wore her veil after all this time. He'd waited his whole life for this, and it had finally happened somehow.

"I'm glad you made it here. I've missed you too, you know," she told him. "You..." He stepped back, and really looked at her. She looked different somehow. "Are you... Are you like me, now, mom?" She nodded. "*Everyone* is like you, now, son." He gasped. "You mean...?" Could she possibly have meant...? "Yes. Everyone is a cyborg now, just like you." The implications of what she'd said boggled his mind. "But... How is this possible? Ogun always told me his god had done something unique for him, that he had no idea how to make it happen again. Did... What happened to everyone who *wasn't* a cyborg? Did they die? Was there a war?" People had such scaremongering warnings about a cyborg future. How was he to know?

She shook her head. "No, son... It's a little more complicated than that. You see, it's if we *hadn't* all become cyborgs that everyone *would* have died. This became a way for everyone to survive, just as you wished when your boyfriend first brought you back from beyond the grave the way he did, all that time ago." The question that popped into his mind made him feel as though the ground were giving out from under him, but he had to ask it. "How... How long has it been, mom? How much time passed between then and now?" Ah, yes. He would be going to want to know about that, wouldn't he? "It's been thousands of years, my son."

He gasped. "But... But how? There wasn't... How are you here now, after all this time?" It had taken some time. Everything did. "The world is a very different place now than any of the other worlds you remember, Rakim. Things kept becoming worse and worse for a while, until most of us started thinking that none of us would make it in the end, and eventually... We reached a breaking point. We *became* a 'we' for the first time in the history of our world, a *real* 'we'. All of us did. We had no choice. It was either this, or we would all have been wiped out for good, even you. So we... We were forced to stop thinking the way we always had about life and death, about the value of other people's lives, about what it meant to us."

He was speechless.

"We had to stop treating other people's deaths as though they didn't matter because they were just going to die anyway, so why bother trying to help them stay alive in the first place? No, we had to start thinking, *feeling* in a way in which we all finally admitted, somewhere deep within ourselves, that everyone's deaths weren't something that we had to come up with new ways for us to accept, but that they were all *fundamentally* unacceptable, that they were something that had always rocked us to our core, because it was *supposed* to. We had to reject the redeeming value of death, en masse, that had been sold to us, the twisted masochism of a people who have given up on hoping for a better world. We had to choose life."

There was so much that he wanted to know.

"But even if you chose to use the means you had to turn everyone into a cyborg from then on... How is it possible that you're here? You died a long time before any of this happened." She smiled. Even when she didn't speak, he could see when she smiled in her eyes. "Time travel is common in our time, my son... We have it down to a science in a way that makes what you've been doing seem very brave, to be sure, but also very archaic, like building a ladder all the way up to the sun somehow because you can't build a spaceship. When we made the radical social shifts we made, we started stealthily going back in time everywhere, in every era. We took detailed notes on the lives and personalities of everyone who'd ever lived. Ever."

He gasped. "So this... We're in *Heaven*, aren't we?" She nodded.

"In a way, you can choose to think of this as Heaven, if it helps you... Everyone's here. We're at peace. There's no more death. People have finally stopped thinking that the only good story for the world is one in which it's in conflict all the time, quelled that restlessness that always made them think they had to outdo each other to keep the right to survive, as though it had been some sort of privilege that had to be fought for, instead of a right that we all have, by simple virtue of being alive." He grunted thoughtfully. "Is there... Is there a way for me to alter the timelines to bring you back in my own timeline, the way I set out to do when I first started doing this? Can you tell me how to make cyborgs, how to control time travel perfectly?"

She shook her head, regretfully.

"Unfortunately not, Rakim. You see, there is a timeline in which you tried to do this before." He tilted his head. "There is?" She nodded. "Yes. You tried to go back to before I died, so that you could save me from dying in the first place. The thing is, when you did that... Well, in that timeline's future, you didn't have the loss you'd experienced to spur you on to going *on* your time travel journey in the first place. You had no one to bring back, since I was still there. We couldn't elaborate the rest of time travel based on your current journey the way we did. Ogun never made you into a cyborg, which turned out to be instrumental in the rest of us figuring out how to follow suit later on. So in that timeline... this future never happened."

He looked down sadly.

"There is something I can tell you now, though, son." He looked back up at her. "Yeah?" She looked at him proudly. "When the time came for it... You played a key role in the shifts in the world that made it the way it is today. You really stepped up to the plate. So keep your chin up! You didn't let me down in my past. You won't let me down in your future. I believe in you, Rakim. I always have. Believe in yourself. As long as you keep advancing, you're bound to get somewhere, if only you walk long enough. I'll be cheering you on, every step of the way." He hugged her again, more overwhelmed by emotion than he'd ever been in his life. "I love you, mom." Irshad hugged him back again with unreserved affection.

"I love you too, Rakim."