Scene illustration by  tanukibomb

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Down in the Drop Shaft Ready Room, Sully adjusted his tricorne hat on his head then took a step back to admire his reflection in the mirror. "Look at that." He puffed out his chest. "I'd say I'm startin' to look like a real pirate!"

On the other side of the chamber Emmet took off his own hat. "I honestly can't tell if you've been listening to me. We are not pirates."

"I know. You've only said it a hundred times."

"And I'm concerned that you don't understand why I've been saying it."

Sully screwed up his face in mock-thought. "Because we appreciate having depth perception?"

The wombat planted his paws on his hips. "Ferret—"

"I get it!" Sully rolled his eyes in exasperation. "Pirates are criminals, thieves, outlaws. We are honest sailors. Believe it or not I do know what a pirate is."

"Hostis mammalis generis," Emmet intoned as if already in mid-lecture. "The common enemy of mammalkind. The only people a ship is authorized to fire upon no matter what flag it's flying or whose orders it's under! Playing cowboy in the wild west was one thing. 'Cowboy' is just a job description and a hat. If you go around calling yourself a pirate then the best thing that could happen is that no one will believe you. The worst is... I don't even want to think about it!"

"Hanged?" Sully smirked. "Drawn and quartered? Sent down to see ol' Davy Jones?"

Emmet thrust a palm into his forehead. How could his assistant be so blasé about this?

Maybe it was because they were still early in the planning stages. Choosing their costumes was only the first step. Once they'd settled on outfits the garments would need to be treated to look appropriately worn and weatherbeaten. And Emmet still had counterfeit coins to strike, inoculations to whip up, modifications to make to the NECESSITY to make sure that Victor's goons—or anyone else—couldn't lay their hands on it again. There were dialect lessons to go over.

Dialect lessons! That alone was a task and a half. They were lucky that English was one of the languages spoken at their destination, but it was 17th century English and they needed to know enough to at least be able to understand a conversation. Fully disguising their own modern speech probably wasn't called for this time: their environment would be a cosmopolitan one, with sailors from all over the world coming and going. They could just say they were from a faraway land. It was the truth, after all.

As for Emmet and Sully, the former was to play a merchant sailor and the latter his navigator and first mate. Emmet's own outfit had been selected long ago—he'd be lying if he said he wasn't looking forward to visiting this era—but he'd at least hoped that getting Sully to join in would put the ferret in the proper mindset. Instead he seemed to think he was going on some... on some amusement park boat ride with yo-ho-ho-ing and bottles-of-rum-ing!

What to do about this? It wasn't Sully's fault; Emmet hadn't told him the true import of this mission.

"Uh... Boss?" Sully piped up. "Is somethin' wrong?"

"No, nothing. Just thinking things through."

"Boss, I was thinking about something myself. In all seriousness."

Emmet looked him in the eye, nodding that he should continue.

"So Victor... what did he call himself in this period?"

"'Captain Barefang.'" Emmet had to suppress his own eye-rolling.

"Right. So obviously he's a pirate. Which means he probably spends most of his time in the company of other pirates. So to get close to him and get the cube back, won't we have to... at some point at least pretend to be..."

"Only if it's absolutely necessary." Emmet heaved a sigh. So this was the moment. He'd have to tell Sully the big secret. "In truth, I no longer think that 'getting the cube back' is necessarily our goal. I've been running the numbers on our anomalies."

"Anomalies?" The ferret scratched his head.

"One: how does Victor travel through time using only a fuel cube? Two: how has he managed to stay alive all this time? He must be over a thousand years old, biologically speaking. Either one of those would be a mystery, but the fact that they coincide in the same person suggests they are the same mystery. And I think I've finally figured it out."

Sully's eyebrows raised. "I'm all ears, Boss."

The wombat headed over to a table on which he'd stashed some maps of the Atlantic. "I've researched every known or suspected sighting of Victor's 'ghost ship' and circled each one I can locate in red. Every 'unexplained' shipwreck from that era I've circled in black." He tapped a claw on the map's surface. "Does the pattern look like anything to you?"

Sully stroked his chin. "Like a circle."

"Exactly." He prodded at the center. "And what's inside that circle?"

"I dunno. It looks like just an empty patch of ocean."

"Indeed. But what if it wasn't an empty patch of ocean? What would you say it looks like 'Captain Barefang' is doing?"

Sully thought this over. "I'd say he was denying access. He doesn't want anybody gettin' in there."

Emmet nodded, grinning. "Exactly. Fortunately I happen to know what is there."

---

Sully knew which way they were heading from the arcs of the corridors. He'd been down this way once before.

"The fuel cube works by quantum entanglement projection," Emmet explained as they walked. "Just like us when we jump. It's teleporting forward in time because its tendency is to close the loop, again just like us. Victor must be getting dragged along for the ride because he wound up entangled with it.

"As for his 'immortality'... well, he isn't immortal. My studies of his cells clearly show that he ages just like anybody else. So something must be reconstituting him at the molecular level—again, similar to what happens during a time jump. And what is his fuel cube powered by?"

The doors opened before Sully could answer. In the middle of the cylindrical chamber was the ring-shaped main console of the Transplanar Instrumentalized Mechanism for Temporal Anomaly Monitoring & Securing: TIM/TAMS.

Emmet strolled over to a control panel and began firing up the projector sequence.

"It's too convenient," Sully opined. "If he's using one of our fuel cubes then there isn't nearly enough bosonic vinegar in it to—"

"You're right," interrupted Emmet. "He's too ambitious for a single cube to sustain all that activity. It implies that someone or something is resupplying him."

The map projection filled the space above the ring. Sully couldn't make much sense of it. He knew the wavy plane at the bottom represented the "present" and some sheets floating above it connected by tiny threads were times they'd previously jumped to.

"Every disturbance in time"—Sully had heard this explanation before—"leaves a trace. Think of what we're monitoring as a sort of 'perpetual present.' It's how I was able to detect that Victor was perturbing time away from the course it would have taken without his interference. Normally these traces are very faint, and they decay after a while. But look at that."

Emmet pointed way up beyond any place that he and Sully had ever traveled to and Sully saw it hanging there. A bunch of planes wrapped around each other, curving and intersecting. There were spidery traces leaving it... but they didn't seem to connect to anywhere. The whole thing rather resembled a little fuzzy ball.

Sully had seen it before, but he figured it was just some piece of information he didn't know how to decode. "What is it?"

The wombat's eyes widened. "What you're looking at, my dear ferret, is the lost continent of Atlantis."

"ATLANTIS?" Sully's mouth hung agape. "You mean... the Atlantis? It's real?!"

His boss waved an index claw. "Was real. It isn't real anymore."

"What does that mean?"

"They were the most advanced civilization to ever inhabit this planet. Whether they came from here or elsewhere I can't say. What I do know is that they possessed technology powered by bosonic vinegar."

"So they were time travelers?"

"Impossible to tell what they were trying to be," Emmet shrugged, disturbingly nonchalantly. "The only thing that can be said for certain is that one day they... wrote themselves out of history. One moment they and their island were out in the ocean. The next they never existed at all. All evidence they were ever here was erased in an instant." He pointed at the innumerable traces. "But we can certainly spot the 'great departure' they effected. It punched such a big hole in the spacetime continuum we can still see their echoes."

"Then we're the only ones who know they were there. But then how does Victor—"

"They weren't as thorough with their exit as they would have liked to be. The universe abhors paradoxes. Every time something unexists that should exist, or starts existing that shouldn't, something always rushes in to fill the gap. Pus in a cosmic wound, you might call it. And I believe you have plenty of experience with that particular substance."

Emmet withdrew a vial from his coat pocket containing a faintly glowing green liquid, as if he'd been preparing for this very moment.

"Now you know how bosonic vinegar is made," he grinned knowingly. "My contribution has been to find a way to extract energy from it, to recapitulate the acausal process by which it came into being and... travel through time."

The ferret's mouth opened and closed like a suffocating fish. "But- that means that..."

"That all of our successes rest on a cosmos that was full of leaks well before we came along." He shut the projector off. "That's why Victor wants the cache of vinegar that was left behind when the Atlanteans vanished. He needs it to sustain himself. He must have finally run out of other options to refuel. And he almost certainly knows that I want the vinegar too."

This was all too much for the ferret to take. "How?"

"I have one more thing to show you."

---

Sully had never seen this room before. It was lined with what looked like long rows of storage lockers. "What is this place?"

"A repository of items I've 'rescued' from throughout time. I keep them in here to study, and to maintain a sort of running list of testaments."

Sully watched him climb a ladder and twist open one of the containers, withdrawing a subtly glowing cylinder. He held it out to his assistant. "Can you tell what this is?"

"It just looks like a tuft of fur."

"Wombat fur to be specific. From the rate of decay the sample is 325 years old, give or take about eight years. DNA testing confirms that it is my fur."

"...it looks like it's been braided," said Sully, dancing around the obvious.

"I must have gone a long time without a barber. You can probably guess how long those sea voyages can take. But the point is: I made it. I retrieved this sample from a cave inside Atlantis, not six months before I hired you."

The ferret felt his pulse start to quicken. "Then it can't be—"

"I went looking for the vinegar. In fact that's why I was there in the first place. There was no trace of it left, which means that somebody got ahold of it and I, somehow, made it back from there safe and sound. My own corpse was nowhere to be found. In fact I picked up a trace from my jump not far away."

"But it can't—"

"A whole lake of bosonic vinegar... completely gone. What we could have done with a power source like that! We could see the beginning of the universe, or its end. Maybe we could even travel forever, reconstituting ourselves the way Victor does. I can only begin to dream of the possibilities! But first things first: I need to get back there and find out what happened to it!"

"This can't be possible!" Sully shrieked. "We didn't... you didn't... if we don't choose to go then it can't have happened!"

The shout seemed to break Emmet out of his private reverie. He took a few steps towards his assistant. "Ah. I know what you're saying. True, from our frame of reference we haven't made the choice to depart yet. But we're talking about a quantity of vinegar never before seen. Who knows how we may have imprinted on it! Think about how Victor imprinted on only a cube!"

"I WON'T DO IT!"

He was hyperventilating. It was too much. Too much. Victor, the cube, all this talk about vinegar and predestination... it wasn't right! The world was not supposed to work this way! No matter what Emmet told him, he had not followed him 325 years into the past, because he simply would not!

As his boss advanced on him, paw outstretched in careful concern, the fur sample started to bubble away into a glowing green fluid.