Chapter Text
It was the perfect day for kite flying, in Stanley Pines’ opinion.
Today was the sort of day when there was a warm breeze that rustled your hair and tickled your face, and the sky was clear and blue and bright. Sometimes Stan would sit outside and just stare up, up, up at the azure bowl over his head, and get dizzy because what if the world tipped upside down and he fell into it?
His brother Stanford would say something about how “That’s not how gravity works, Stanley,” and “Even if you did start ‘falling up,’ you’d just end up in outer space. The sky isn’t a real place you can go.”
And then they’d get into an argument about broken gravity and falling in the wrong direction, and frankly, Stan wasn’t going to argue with his polydactyl twin when it was such a beautiful day, and they could be running down the beach with multicolored kites streaming behind them instead.
“Sixer! Get your head out of that book and grab some string! We’re flying kites today!”
Stanford Pines looked up from The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science and adjusted his box-shaped glasses. “Hmm?”
Three hours and a lot of glue later, the twins were running out the front door of Pines’ Pawns, waving homemade kites over their heads.
“See ya, Ma!” Stan shouted, darting out the door.
“We’re flying kites!” Ford added, hurrying after his brother.
“Be back for dinner,” Caryn Pines responded, tapping the crystal ball on the table in front of her with a slight frown.
Stanley stood on the beach, facing the water. As his bare toes sunk into the warm, golden sand, he turned to look at his brother, who was sampling the wind with a sophisticated expression on his face.
“Blowing northwest, slight upward draft-” he muttered. Stan launched into him, knocking him to the sand. “Stanley!”
“Quit it with the nerd stuff!” Stan announced. “Flying kites is not a nerdy activity!”
“I need to make sure the calculations I made for the kite’s aerodynamics align with the wind factor today,” Ford argued, pushing his twin off of him and standing up to dust the sand off his pants.
“‘Beep boop. I am a nerd robot.’ That’s you, Poindexter. Just enjoy yourself. Look!” Stan held up his yellow, triangular kite with a broad smile, the effect only partially mitigated by his missing tooth. “We spent hours on these kites, and I’m sure that yours will fly better than mine since you did all of the fancy math stuff, no matter where the wind is blowing. So can you please just enjoy yourself instead of sitting in that big brain of yours and doing boring calculations all day?”
“I-I enjoy myself plenty,” Ford tried. “It’s not my fault you aren’t-” He shut his mouth with a click before finishing the sentence. “...into calculus.”
Stan had the strangest, most uncomfortable feeling that wasn’t what his brother meant to say, but he mentally punched out those confusing emotions. Boys didn’t cry or get sad over little things that didn’t matter.
“...Alright, fine. Go ahead and be a nerd. I’ll fly my kite on my own.” He unraveled the string and flung his kite into the air, only to have it crash back down and send up a spray of sand. The boy smiled sheepishly at his brother’s amused expression.
Two more tries later, and he finally got it to stay in the air. The yellow and black colors almost made it look like a giant bee, except bees weren’t usually geometrical.
“Ha-HA! Look at this, Sixer!” Stan called, waving his free hand at his brother as he sprinted down the beach. At that moment, he tripped and fell headfirst into the sand, letting out an “oomph.”
Ford looked up from the complicated equation he was drawing on the beach with a stick and ran over to his twin. “Stanley, are you okay?”
Stan spit out some sand and pulled himself to his feet with a brisk nod. “Just a scratch,” he motioned to the bleeding gash on his knee. That was a lie - it hurt really bad - but he wasn’t going to let Ford worry himself sick over his brother.
“No, it’s not.” Of course, Poindexter saw right through the facade. “Let me see.” Stan shook his head and turned away.
“I’m fine,” he urged. He turned to grab his kite and realized it was caught in the wind and blowing away. “Oh, no!”
The two boys sprinted across the sand after the runaway kite. Stan pounced at it and hissed in pain when both his knees dug into the beach but held onto the kite.
“Got it,” he blinked a few times, trying not to let the stinging in his knee bring him to tears. “See? Totally not a big deal.”
“We should get you back home so Ma can clean it up,” Ford grabbed his twin’s arm, completely ignoring his complaints. “Come on, Stan.”
“But what about our-”
“Kite flying can wait when you’re hurt!” Ford’s voice raised an octave, and his brother flinched backward.
“Arghhhh, fine,” Stan dusted himself off and tucked his kite under his arm. “Hey, wait a minute-”
“Don’t try to-” Ford turned to see what Stan was staring so intently at, and his sentence dropped off abruptly. Sticking halfway out of the sand, seemingly brought in by the tide, was a strange metal tape measure that glared painfully in the sun when you looked at it from the wrong angle. Stanford stepped forward and cautiously pulled it out to examine more closely.
“Whoa,” he breathed, running a finger along the hourglass - or perhaps infinity - symbol on the side.
“What is it?” Stan limped up beside him, blinking in awe.
“Some kind of tape measure. But it doesn’t…” the boy trailed off as he turned it over in his six-fingered hands. The bottom of the tool read (in tiny print) PROPERTY OF BLENDIN BLENJAMIN BLANDIN, TIME PARADOX AVOIDANCE ENFORCEMENT SQUADRON
“Huh,” Stanley snatched it out of his twin’s hands to subject to his own form of inspection. He pulled out the tape, noting that instead of measuring distances, it seemed to measure time. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, eons-
“H-hey! Stanley, give it back!” Ford grabbed the tool his brother was holding, but Stan had it out of reach, letting go of the tape. “I was looking at it-”
Time seemed to slow to a crawl as the tape retracted back into the device, and the tape measure fizzled and heated up in Stan’s hands, causing the boy to yelp and drop it. But just before his fingers let go, the world around the Pines boys turned bright blue.
And then they were in the middle of a forest, pine needles digging into their bare feet and the scent of tree sap filling their noses, and the strange device was nowhere to be found.