"This is very, very wrong."

Stuart looked at Kari. "I don't know," he said, "it's a lot righter than it could have been."

"It is wrong. For one thing, you're not dying." She eyed him suspiciously. "Are you?"

Stuart tapped himself on the chest. "I don't think I am."

"Exactly. And what am I doing with this thing in my hand?!" She cast the fishing rod down in disgust. "I don't even LIKE fishing! We need to get out of here and work out what the hell is...get that piece of grass out of your mouth!"

"Hey," mumbled Stuart idly through chewed grass, "I adapt quickly."

She reached over and yanked the offending piece of flora from between his teeth. "You need to stop relaxing and start helping me instead." She stood up and passed her steely gaze over the landscape. "Those trees don't look quite right either..." she muttered.

"I think you have a problem with accepting good fortune."

"And I think you have a problem with accepting things too readily," she snapped back. "We suddenly appeared in some place, some weird, unknown place, and I'll be damned if I'm going to just sit here and pretend like it's nothing out of the ordinary."

"What's so bad about turning up here anyway? I mean it's a thousand times better than when I was bleeding from the stomach and Kentarou was..." Stuart stopped mid-sentence as he noticed Kari visibly flinch. "Was uh...was...nmph." He trailed off.

Clenching her fists, she wheeled around and poked him sharply in the sternum. "Listen to me you," she hissed, "right now what I'd like is to restore some goddamn normality to my life, which has been severely lacking as of late. Now it may seem acceptable to your deficient mental capacity, but I am not going to be satisfied here without at least some kind of explanation of what's going on with this place and how it got here, because whatever this is, it is NOT where I'm supposed to be!!"

"Correction," said Helen, "this is where you have always been. Certainly if you look at it from the non-linear perspective, that is."

"Yahh!" Kari yelped, jumping back in surprise from Helen who had suddenly appeared behind them. "What in the...?!"

"Mm-hm, I know. Disconcerting isn't it?" Helen looked down at the still-seated Stuart. "If I could draw you from your lakeside leisure for just a short while, perhaps you'd like to come and join the others."

"The others?" Stuart got to his feet. "Are they alright?"

"Oh yes," Helen replied amiably, "although some of them would argue otherwise..."

They shortly emerged in a small clearing to find Tim and Emily at each other's throats. Not that this was particularly unusual, however the circumstances behind the confrontation were certainly original.

Emily glared at him with eyes that looked as if they were likely to set him on fire if she kept it up for much longer.

"This," she said with a voice that seemed a little more...down to earth...than she was usually accustomed, "had better be the worst joke ever conceived. Because if it isn't I'm going to go and find some clubs. Heavy clubs with spikes all over them. And then I'm going to do my best to eradicate any possibility of you ever qualifying for health insurance ever again. Then I might feel a little better."

"Believe me," replied Tim with a voice that was battling between an innate melody and an imposed caustic growl, "I've half a mind to commit seppuku right here and now if I have to listen to myself spout this flouncy drivel for myself longer. I sound like a wannabe eunuch."

"I could make you a fully-fledged one if you give me two seconds..."

"Heya guys," waved Stuart as he strolled on in. He looked at Tim and tilted his head. "You're looking a little different today Tim."

"Am I," Tim asked as flatly as he could manage. "Am I really?"

Stuart scratched his chin. "Yeah, although I can't quite...uhh..."

Emily put him out of his misery. She thrust an accusatory finger at Tim's head. "Look at his goddamn ears!!"

Stuart did so. "Hmm..." he mused, "pointy."

"Well I'm glad to see you're on the ball."

Emily continued her indignant flailing. "He's got my ears!!"

Stuart frowned. "Whose have you got then?"

"I don't know! My ears are normal and my voice no longer amazing and my HEIGHT..." she sobbed, "I'm so frikkin' short!"

"You were always short. We just didn't feel like rubbing it in your face."

"Just because you lose these things I don't see why I should get stuck with them," grumbled Tim.

"Ahh," nodded Jen sagely. "He's an elf."

"I am not an elf!"

Stuart looked at him more closely. "...Is that an earring?"

"You shut up."

"Yeah," agreed Helen, "such an elf."

"And why is he an elf?" Stuart enquired.

"For exactly the same reason that you're not dying, Emily's now just a boring old human..."

(*sob*sob*)

"...Jimmy's now a guinea pig..."

"He's a what?"

"...Tori's, uh, disturbingly similar..."

"Wait, being normal is disturbing now?"

"...And Kari now has an inexplicable lack of fashion sense."

Kari nearly choked. "Excuse me?!"

"THAT skirt?" Jen squinted at her quizzically. "With THAT top? What were you thinking?"

"For all you know this could be the height of..."

"No."

"But - "

"Really," said Jen firmly. "Just no."

Kari sat down on the grass, and began to sulk.

"Being..." continued Jen, careful not to lose hold of her own sentence, "that the spatio-temporal fabric has been tampered with so as to create a continuum alternate to that which you were, in a linear sense, previously accustomed. The upshot of which is that certain physical parameters may or may not seem curiously adverse to your prevalent perceptions, and although such perceptions would typically have been realigned in accordance with the temporal manipulations, in this instance certain isolated anomalies in the fifth dimensional radius prevented such an occurrence within the immediate three-dimensional spatial region so as to negate any alterations made to the fourth. You see?"

......

There was a very, very long silence.

Helen sighed. "Jen," she asked earnestly, "lay off the technical jargon? You know they can't handle it."

"That's their fault," replied Jen without sympathy, "not mine."

Slowly, Stuart raised his hand.

Jen gave him a perturbing stare. "Yes?"

"Could you say that again," he asked, "but using only words that I would understand?"

"What words didn't you understand?"

"Pretty much everything from 'spatio-temporal' onwards."

Jen frowned. "You didn't understand the word 'has'?"

"I was confused as to its motivations."

"Why would the word need motivations?"

"To make it feel confident in its continued existence as a word?"

Tim blinked. "What ARE you two jabbering on about?"

"Life," said Stuart. "I think," he added with less conviction. "Or perhaps I was thinking about lunch and just imagined that I was thinking about life." He patted his stomach mindfully. "I get that way when I'm hungry."

Irritated, Jen opened up her bag, took out a small sandwich and threw it at Stuart. "Right," she said, "for those of you who didn't catch on to the meaning of my previous speech...basically the timeline has been messed with and so the universe that you find yourselves in now is different to the one that you used to be in." She muttered something under here breath about the pains of dumbing down for simpletons. "Any questions?"

Everybody's hand shot up.

"Oh to hell with this," Jen stomped over to the far side of the clearing. "If anyone needs me I'll be over here ignoring you all." She took out an mp3 player and made true to her assertion.

"Uh..." said Helen, turning back to the group, "I'll answer any questions if you - "

"How do you two know all this?" Tim cut in with a suspicious glare.

"Jen and I are operatives of the Temporal Wing: responsible for the Immutability of Space-Time." She shifted her weight sheepishly onto her left foot. "Some people refer to us as 'TW:ISTers'."

"They do not," retorted Tim. "You lie."

"All Twisters are issued with these." She produced a small device from her pocket, the inscription of 'TW:IST' clearly visible. "They allow us to move through time so that we can prevent other people from messing with it. They also produce a localised negation field that prevents us from being personally affected by any changes in the timeline. It was actually your proximity to us that caused your minds to retain their memory of the previous reality rather than be changed along with everything else." She hesitated. "I'm afraid the fields weren't strong enough to prevent some physical changes..."

Feeling the collective hatred of the group turned towards her, including that of a considerably peeved guinea pig, she hurried onwards.

"So, uh, I suppose your next question will be why this has happened..."

"Was it you?"

"No!"

"Pity," said Emily, "I'm in the mood for a battering and breaking Tim's lanky frame might not give me enough satisfaction."

"Beat on Stuart," suggested Kari, lifting her head up from its position of sulk, "I'd put good odds on him being at least partially responsible for everything bad that's happened ever."

"Now-now," Stuart waved his hand uneasily, "that's a bit unrealistic isn't it?"

"Do you really think that reality is high on the agenda right now?"

"Uh...touché?"

"Actually," said Helen cutting in, "the one who's responsible for this would be Phoebe."

The others all looked at each other.

"Phoebe!" Stuart exclaimed, clenching his fists. "Of course it was her! She's just the kind of devious, wicked fiend who would pull something like this...!"

"How so?" Tim asked Helen, ignoring Stuart entirely.

"She gained the ability to travel through time after significantly boosting her magical powers using the Kendi water that she conned Stuart into letting her get ahold of."

They all looked at Stuart.

"Phoebe!" Stuart exclaimed, clenching his fists. "It could never have been her! She's just the kind of poor, misunderstood creature who would be unfairly blamed for...this isn't helping me at all is it?"

"No," said Tim, "but points for trying." He smacked Stuart upside the head, knocking him to the floor.

"Phoebe went and messed with time?" asked Tori.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"To shape the world in her own image, presumably." Helen shrugged. "Or just for kicks. You never can tell with faeries."

"Are other faeries this scheming and manipulative too?"

"No," admitted Helen, "but I wouldn't recommend playing poker with one."

"So it's in her world image to have me as an elf?" Tim looked at himself bitterly. "And Emily as a human?"

"To be honest, I'd say she was just messing with you."

"Hey!" Kari leapt to her feet, surprising Stuart enough to make him fall over again. "If everything's been changed, that means Kentarou might still be alive somewhere!!"

"Uh..." Tim motioned her over to the edge of the clearing. Pulling away some of the thicket, he revealed a small tombstone:

"Here lies Kentarou: he died a horrible, horrible death. Far more horrible than the one you lot saw." Tim scratched his head. "The girl certainly has a talent when it comes to screwing with people's lives."

Kari walked silently back to the centre of the clearing and resumed her position of self-pity.

"Question:" said Stuart, as if they wouldn't recognise one when they heard it, "having established just what kind of fix we're in, is there a way out of it that will involve me looking very suave whilst doing some incredibly cool things and possibly saving everybody at least twice?"

"Not a chance."

"Okay. How about if I look suave for the first time I save everybody, but the second time I go for a more desperate last-minute-bravery kind of edge?"

"I think," said Emily coldly, "that if you could just halt your trivial narcissistic concerns for even a moment, you might stand a better chance of leaving this clearing with your internal organs still intact."

"It's not entirely trivial. If I'm going to have to do something heroic, it's only natural that I should want to do it in the best possible way." Stuart argued with worrying sobriety. "Preferably," he added, "with panoramic camera angles."

"News flash idiot," Tim hissed, "you don't get any camera angles because there aren't any cameras! This isn't television you know."

"If that's so, why did you say 'news flash'?"

Tim didn't have an answer for this, and resorted to kicking him instead.

Helen gave a polite cough. "Well, in spite of all that..." she said diplomatically, "we should at least attempt to find something out about this new world. From there we can assess the situation and perhaps discern a way in which to rectify the timeline."

"You're just using us as stooges to make your own job easier aren't you?" Tim guessed accurately.

Helen attempted to look shocked. "Of course n..."

"Obviously," interrupted Jen, who had grown bored of her time in the corner and felt a need to resume her belittlement of others. "That's all you peons are worth for anyway. Chop-chop now, before I go back in time and warp you in your fragile childhood years."

"That would probably be classed as 'mismanagement of resources'," Helen pointed out.

"Yeah," replied Jen, "but it'd be worth it just for the fun. I'd make it so that Stuart could never stand to look at a garden hose again."

"...Eep?"

"Fine. Whatever." Tim sighed resignedly. "It's not like we could just stand in this clearing talking rubbish for the rest of eternity. Best go find some accommodation. Food, drink..."

"And begin a brand new adventure!"

"And a brand new adv..." Tim paused and looked at Stuart. "...shut up." He backslapped him across the face. "Damn I could do with some toast..."

And so the group trudged unenthusiastically on into their brave new world. Will they face unbridled horrors, wanton destruction and inordinate perils? Or will they simply wander around finding very little of interest while relentlessly quarrelling amongst each other? Find out...if you care...in the next episode of Desigaspring!

END OF EPISODE 21