Clock Breakers

Rule 4: Write Everything Down on Round One

"So why put us here of all places?"

"It's not like you had a landing pad ready."

"Yeah, well there's no need to have a constant safety bubble on a college campus, only the real big events."

"And you didn't think to investigate the big event of time all but freezing for one man?"

"It's like I said Freeze, nothing was weird to us. Boss called it off before we could ask."

"And what was the point of that?" I asked quietly, peeking around a corner before waving us forward.

"What's the point of anything Boss says?" Nash asked. "We don't question it, we just do what we're told."

"Mindless soldiers," I mumbled to myself.

"Trusting employees," Nash corrected with a warning tone.

"Yeah, sure, whatever you say," I muttered, peeking around another corner before moving on. I glanced at the breakroom as we passed it, stopping momentarily to look at the microwave.

"What's up?" Nash asked.

"Microwave's busted again," I said, shaking my head. "Happens all the time on this campus, for some reason their clocks never work." Nash nodded and we finally reached the stairs. He looked up, finding nothing but a wall.

"You can't see the height below ground," I explained, starting to climb the stairs. "They're framed with support walls in case the hill goes out."

"Will that happen?"

"Not in the time I was here." We passed the connector floor to the auditorium, still alone. In the first basement level, we were passed by a tired looking professor, writing on a clipboard and nodding to us without looking up. I nodded back. The ground floor was still disorientating, suddenly colorful and alive compared to the sterility of the basement and upper levels. Nash stopped at one of the TVs in the lobby, watching the scrolling announcements.

"See anything weird?" I asked.

"No, nothing I can tell. You'd have a better shot at this though."

"Not necessarily. I never bothered to read it because it was all static - you can see the tonal patterns in how things are written and find outliers because you're not deaf to it yet."

"Good point," he said, slowly turning from the screen. "So where would an object from the future be hidden on this campus?" he asked as we walked down the front steps into the brick courtyard.

"Excellent question," I said, looking around. "Could be anywhere."

"You're not remembering it or anything like last time?"

"No," I said, biting my cheek. "Which is really odd. But it is a small campus, we can just walk around until we find it." My mind kept drifting to microwaves. The one in the lab's breakroom had read 86:25 - an odd cook time to be sure, but at 10 percent power it could work like a low burn oven, and those screens weren't hard to hack anyway.

"Let's check the dorms."

"The dorms? Why?"

"Dunno. Got an odd feeling about it."

"About time," Nash said. "But we aren't going to yours, right?"

"No, we are."

"Freeze," he said, grabbing my arm. "We can't."

"Why not? Whatever we're looking for is somewhere on this campus, right? The easiest place to hide something is in a messy college dorm room. If we check out all the dorm buildings first, that's more than half the hiding places on campus taken care of."