Days, minutes, hours. Odd's never heard of more useless words.

Here, he senses a thing wobbling in and out of existence while black grease curls around its mishmash of scattered presence.

"Hi, William."

"Hullo," the presence replies, glassy ice dribbling into Odd's ears, melting coolly into arcseconds. When William speaks, his voice is an hour late. Odd sleeps to hear the rest. "up? How're you holding"

"Just peachy," Odd replies, when the voice finally reaches him at the end of a lightyear, garbled, faithfully reconstructing each frame out of context. "How much longer?" Odd doesn't really understand the question he just asked, so William probably won't either. It's a habit leftover from a place where ? is different.

"tting close. We're getting close. We're ge" William answers, as if he still has the ability to comprehend ? in abstraction. He's so full of it. By the time Odd reaches him, William has already careened off to another side of the void, spun out by the flaring wind. But he's still there, loudly dividing.

"Where are you going?" His question lingers long after William has dissolved into bits of radiant pollution.

"back." The voice resonates within Odd's leftmost piece, the rest coming after. "XANA's calling me"

"Lucky." Odd mumbles. XANA is not a threat here. Maybe XANA was never a threat anywhere. What could possible happen in a place this safe, a world without danger, where everybody and everything were just spidery cracks on the surface of ?. Or a slab of concrete. Or a mirror. The material doesn't really matter anyway. "Where's everyone else?" Only the cracks.

William drains out of Odd's feet into the aether. "here, I think... Still," His impression washes downstream to poison a different reality, mercury swirling away in a classroom sink to nestle safely in the water table. Just like that, William's gone. The hole he leaves behind is quietly osmosed with ?.

An eternity later, Odd finally trickles into Jeremy and Aelita. He doesn't know how it managed to remain together, but it fits perfectly into itself. Jeremy and Aelita is complete just like a jigsaw, but the explanation it gives will probably be too inexplicably detailed for him to understand. The power of love, maybe. Really typical.

Odd, Jeremy and Aelita says, sparkling pink. You're just in time. It laughs like a boiling bubble.

That joke was so last year. era. some indeterminate ? ago. "Tell me about it."

It was getting lonely around here, Jeremy and Aelita symphs, so perfectly that its voice skips over the choppy, thick, omnidirectional layers of ? without so much as a ripple.

"Aw, you didn't have to wait up for me." Odd wishes he could symph too. Like that'll ever happen.

I didn't, Jeremy and Aelita shrugs. It's just not my turn yet. Where's Ulrich? And Yumi?

"Probably stuck with each other like you."

Probably not. I hypothesize they might've made it back already. The ? pushes Odd and Jeremy and Aelita apart, like it did with him and William. It looks like you're next. See you on the ground! Aelita and Jeremy cheer, wee and bobbing at the edge of a whirlpool that has taken Odd by surprise.

Or not. Maybe it has been there all along, waiting for him to find it. As the weight of the beats submerges him beneath the erratic waves, the bindings. come. back.

Voices are made of sounds. Bodies are made of stuff.

There exists such a thing as a past ? and a future ?.

What is ?, really.

His ejection is imminent. Odd crumples down, down, letting these thoughts enter, letting them solidify into a familiar process. Kinda gross.

Now he can feel the scratchy sheets beneath him and he can see the phone that tells him it's yesterday. Another XANA attack thwarted. Just another trip into the past to add to his collection. But like everyone faced with the gloom and uncertainty following a nightmare, before he can roll over and fall asleep once more to Ulrich's snores, he grapples with relearning the rules.