Chapter Text
The wind whistled loudly in Nova’s ears, the tree branches shaking around her. She spluttered, suddenly faced with a mouth full of leaves and hair. She kicked at the closest branch to get it out of her face, sending it spinning towards the ground; which would have been a great move, had she not needed that branch to continue her climb. Cursing loudly, she grabbed the closest branch to her head and held on tight as she swayed.
‘Hurry up!’ a voice called from below. ‘We don’t have much time, the tide will be come in in a minute.’
Nova shouted back ‘You do it then,’ but continued pulling herself upwards.
Eventually, she broke through the leaves and was able to lean against the tree trunk. She took a second to rest, soon standing back up and pulling her slightly shoddily-made tech out of her bag. As quickly as she could, she connected the different pieces, chewing on her tongue in deep concentration. She carefully connected the final wire and dropped the end of it down to the ground again. There was a distinct, loud click as Dae plugged it in to his end of the device.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Ready.’
Nova clambered up a little bit higher, sticking the device up in the air. She rested one foot on the absolute highest point of the tree and stood on her tiptoes. Her legs shook as if they were made of twigs. The wind whipped around her again, causing the mechanism on top to start spinning rapidly. Nova pulled her hair back from her face with her free right hand and started humming a song. The device glowed, at first softly, then shone so bright that Nova had to avert her eyes. The mechanisms inside whirred to life.
‘Have you got anything yet?’ Nova called down once she’d gotten sick of the racket the device was making. Under the wind and the sounds of machinery, she could just barely hear the faint sound of a pencil scratching against paper.
‘Yeah,’ Dae replied. ‘You can come down now.’
Nova nodded and shoved the device back into her bag. It rested at the top, nestled in the scarf her dad had made her for her birthday and on top of her lunch box. The wire draped over the side, still connected to Dae’s half down on the ground.
She swung herself between the branches with a lot more ease than when she climbed up. Soon, she was hanging from the bottom branch, trying to read Dae’s notes over his shoulder. Melody glanced up from the calculations and chirped, narrowing her eyes suspiciously. Nova dropped from the branch and raised her arms in surrender.
‘Okay, okay!’ she chuckled. ‘I’ll stop spying.’
Melody gave her one last glare, then, seemingly satisfied, turned to nip Dae’s ear affectionately.
‘According to my calculations,’ Dae said, absent-mindedly stroking his palisman with the pencil in his hand, ‘they should be right up there.’
He pointed just a little bit off the direction they’d been walking for the past hour, at what appeared to be a dead end blocked off by trees and long, thick grass.
Nova nodded. ‘You better be right this time,’ she said, trying to sound as threatening as she could and not at all succeeding. ‘The project deadline is breathing down my neck.’
Dae rolled his eyes, shoving his notebook back in his bag. ‘It’s a month away, Nove.’
‘I still need to write up the whole thing!’ Nova protested. ‘I haven’t even done any research on it because I’ve been so focused on finding them. And I’m going to need research because there is no way I can gather enough information about this centuries-old, under-researched phenomenon in-’ she checked her watch, ‘about fifteen minutes.’
Dae nodded, grinning, already walking towards the dead end. ‘Sure.’
Nova ran to catch up with him.
It took them about five minutes, probably longer, to wade their way through the grass, during which Dae spent most of the time complaining about the absence of Nova’s mom.
‘She’d just like…’ Dae tried to mime something with his arms, but it just looked like he was swimming through the air, ‘... and the plants would part. Like Moses and the sea.’
Nova frowned in confusion. ‘Who?’
Dae shrugged. ‘It’s a story Morgan told me. Apparently there’s a guy in human mythology who could just…’ he mimed swimming again ‘... and the sea would part for him.’
Nova raised her eyebrows and whistled appreciatively.
‘Wouldn’t that be useful?’ she said. Dae nodded.
Eventually, they broke through onto the beach. Nova summoned her staff, carefully prodding the ground around her. Dae watched with bated breath.
For a minute, Nova’s staff only connected with sand and she could feel her heart sinking.
She’d been so set on this project, she’d literally committed every second of her time over the last few months purely to this. She’d spent weeks sitting up to her chin in books, she’d holed away in the her Aunt Amity’s workshop for five days perfecting the science, she’d pulled more all-nighters than she could count. And this was her last chance. She didn’t have enough time to conduct another experiment. If it hadn’t worked this time-
Her staff slipped straight through the sand like water. Nova nearly fell in after it in shock. She looked up at Dae, whose mouth was wide open in shock.
‘Oh my Titan,’ he whispered.
‘Oh my Titan,’ Nova agreed. ‘We found them. We actually found them!’
Nova started to laugh, jumping up and down in excitement. Dae’s face broke into a grin.
‘We did it!’ Dae exclaimed. ‘We did it, we did it, we did it!’
Nova practically launched herself at Dae, who caught her with ease and spun her around, both of them screaming in each other’s ears. Melody flew up to perch on top of Dae’s head and added their own sweet song to the racket.
When they pulled away from each other, Nova immediately grabbed Dae’s hand and dragged him further onto the beach.
‘Come on!’ she said. ‘We’ve only got ten minutes!’
The time pools were the most fascinating thing that Nova had ever studied. It was a disorienting feeling, sticking your head in the sand and suddenly flipping the right way up and emerging in another time period. But she would endure that feeling a billion times if that was the price she had to pay to explore them for hours on end.
They decided to split up. Dae went wild, sticking his head in whichever pool he found. Since he wasn’t a part of the project technically, he was more free to explore - although he swore that he’d make notes of what he found. Although, looking at him buried torso deep in the sand and yelling back through time about the shells he’d found, it was doubtful that there would be much useful information in his notes.
Nova, however, decided to take a more scientific approach. Her project wasn’t about history, so she didn’t pay too much attention to the other side of the pools. She dipped in and out of them, taking samples of sand and writing down every thought she had and every observation she made. She left nothing to the imagination in her notes: she wasn’t going to risk a low grade on this project.
She pulled herself out of the Deadwardian Era and checked her watch. They had about a minute until the tide came in. Nova and Merlin, who was wrapped around her shoulders, shared a glance and Merlin nodded at her.
She nudged Dae’s foot and he jumped so hard that his head came out of the pool it had been in. Nova snorted at his expression.
‘We need to go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got just about enough and the tide is coming in soon.’
Dae sighed. ‘Damn. I was enjoying this.’
Nova shrugged. ‘Yeah, but I think our parents would be quite worried if we got stuck in another time period or burned alive in the boiling sea, so we need to move it.
‘True.’
Nova reached out and Dae gripped her hand tightly. She helped to pull him up to standing, leaning so far back that she ended up toppling over herself. She landed with a solid oof on her back, pulling Dae over with her. Her head snapped back and hit the sand. Melody squawked as she was unsettled from her perch on his shoulder. Merlin detached from her staff as they fell, hissing discontentedly.
Dae groaned, pulling his face off of the sand and pushing himself up off of Nova, who pushed her glasses aside to rub her eyes, disoriented.
‘Sorry,’ Dae smiled sheepishly, ‘I guess I’ve gotten a bit heavier since the last time you had to pick me up off the floor.’
Nova snorted, shifting to lean on her elbows. ‘It’s fine. But we really need to go.’
She shifted her arm about a foot sideways to push herself up. Instead of the stable, warm sand that she was expecting, her hand passed right through the floor. She barely had time to register what had happened, but, suddenly, she was falling. She reached for Dae, grabbing his hand.
It was fruitless.
The time pool sucked them both in, just as the tide washed over the beach.