Chapter 3

     They found themselves back in the classroom. Their lab was still sitting at the counter where they had left it, undisturbed. The teacher hadn’t even come back from his bathroom break yet.
     “Wait…is it just me, or does Mr. Brambleton take a long time to come back from the bathroom?” Anastasia asked.      “No, it’s not that. The way this thing works, it can bring you right back to the time you left, if it hasn’t been excessively long.”
     “Our lab! C’mon,” Heather gestured, turning to the materials, “let’s finish this before anything else happens.”
     “What?! But I wanted to check that place out some more…!” Drew bemoaned.
     “Okay, so everything is back to normal,” the stranger nodded to us. “Good luck with your lab, people.”
     He looked down at his warping device again. “So, I guess I’ll just excuse myself quietly…”
     Anastasia pondered aloud. “It’s funny…we just got transported to another dimension and back, and here we are thinking instead about whether we’ll get our lab done on time.” She put a hand to her cheek. “And it’s just going to conclude like this? How…anticlimactic.”
     The room glowed and wavered again as the stranger clicked a button on the device.

     “Aha. I knew it. Things never end that quickly.”
     “Please tell me this is some really realistic flashback.”
     “Sorry, Heather. You aren’t hallucinating this time.”
     “Grah!!”
     The blonde stranger looked more puzzled than ever. “What’s up with this? Did I forget to set the amplitude, or the phase shift, or what?” He clicked a few more buttons and they warped back again.
     And there again.
     And back again…

     “Okay. I think it’s quite clear now,” the blonde sighed with exasperation. “We can’t separate our warp patterns at all.”
     Heather blinked. “Meaning…?”
     “Wherever I warp, you guys warp. I can’t leave you behind in your world without being stuck with you, and vice versa.”
     “Why’s that happening?” Phillip asked.
     “I have no freaking idea!” the blonde threw up his hands. “Oh, geez…What I am I going to do? I guess I must’ve messed up the thing somehow, but…arg, I don’t know what’s wrong!”
     “So you aren’t the one in charge around here,” Phillip uttered with a glower. “Most likely you’re some intern who doesn’t really know what he’s doing.”
     “Well, okay, I admit it,” the blonde said with a reluctant grimace. “I’m not the master of this lab, I’m his apprentice. But, I’ve studied under him for years, so I do know what I’m doing!”
     “Not for this, you don’t.” Heather retorted.
     “Well…” he sighed. “…The truth is, this was a new prototype that my master had left here under my charge, and…well, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to test it out a bit.”
     “Oh, so you were goofing around!” Anastasia piped.
     “Well, you don’t have to put it that way…but anyway, that’s not the main thing right now. We need to find a way to get you guys back to your dimension without dragging me along with it. And since this is a prototype, first of its kind, the only one that’ll know is my master, Professor Enstrite. And he’s in another town, so we’ll all need to warp there and ask him what to do.”
     “Wait a second,” Heather interjected, “we can still warp back to our world. We have a lab to do, and anyhow our parents will be waiting for us. They’re not going to be thrilled when they find out we’ve vanished!”
     “Remember what I said? You can warp back to the time you left. It’ll be like you were never gone! And hey, the only way we can find out what’s going is if we stay here and investigate,” the stranger insisted.
     “But I swear I’ll forget what the lab’s about if we stay here for that long, regardless of how much time passes there or whatever! Just at least let us go back to finish it first!”
     “It won’t be that long! Let’s just go and…”
     He trailed off because Heather had begun advancing on him with an ominous expression that, despite her somewhat diminutive height, was impressively intimidating. “We. Are going back. To finish. The Lab.”
     The blonde stranger nodded slowly. “Okay,” he squeaked.