The Tale of Amaretto

Thirty-Fifth Grain

In which we are introduced to a Null-Timed Zone...

"Amaretto, please open your eyes. You are starting to make me feel a little nervous."

Amaretto, prompted by the voice opened her eyes and looked around hurriedly. All she had remembered from a moment before was saying the strange words that Tempus had given her and the whole world seeming to compress and then shudder with darkness. What she had thought of as the world going black and dark was really her closing her eyes really tight. She felt a little foolish. However, what she noticed next made her feel a little wary. The Queen was in front of her, clutching her other body; new holding onto old as a child does a plaything or doll that they do not want to let go of. Amaretto was going to say something, but she chose against it. The Queen however, was completely frozen.

Something had stopped her dead in her tracks.

A panic began to form in the back of Amaretto's head, but she refused to let it take over her. She was in a strange place, that was true, but she did know how to revive someone. The only problem here was that Amaretto could see that the Queen had been frozen in a moment of screaming. She looked so fascinatingly horrid to Amaretto; her mouth wide open to catch whatever may be thrown in, her eyes slanted in a foul grimace and menacingly slit eyes. The pupils were perpetually dilated, not that Amaretto was sure that they should be.

Amaretto looked behind her where the others were. Alice was in the middle of pulling the trigger on her gun, a rather large and menacing IronMan stood in front of her and looked almost as if he was going to eat her head off. His mouth was gaping wide and he had what looked to be spinning blades on the inside of his mouth in a triangular pattern. The only thing about it was that there was no sound there, the blades weren't even spinning. And the IronMan was paused in a leap in midair. Amaretto frantically looked about the room and noticed that everything in the room had stopped. She put a hand up to her neck and felt the coolness of the hourglass there. She was sure she hadn't used it, but could she have made it work in the heat of the moment?

She looked at the ground and finally noticed the floor was different. All along the entirety of the floor was a large clock that seemed to have no hands, just the face with large bold roman numerals. Amaretto looked around in wonder and then she heard a chuckle. She whirled around and saw a shadowy figure there. A few moments latter she put her hands on her hips when she realized who it was.

"Tempus! What just happened here?"

Tempus moved forwards and Amaretto noticed that he had an almost shadowy corporeality to himself. His feet still made sounds as he walked across the floor, but he still seemed as if he was insubstantial. Amaretto narrowed her eyes, her eyebrows knitting together. "Why are you so transparent?"

Tempus shook his head and in his British accent said, "I'm not really here. This is a phantasm that is generated by the space we are currently occupying."

Amaretto looked around. "The space we are occupying? What's that supposed to mean?"

Tempus smiled and then said, "It means that I have taken this moment in time, just a minute, and compressed it into a second, and then have it playing over and over again in a re-looped procession so it appears as if time has stopped, when in reality, it is going to feel like a massive dejavu headache to all who are in it when they get out."

Amaretto raised an eyebrow and then giggled slightly. "So they will feel a little like they were in a major glitch in the..."

Tempus put up a hand to stop her. "Please, don't bring that movie up. It gives me a headache. So many inconsistencies with time and the space fluctuations! I had people trying to prove it real for months and the amount of hiccups in the systems; let's just say that the clocks were never the same. I almost lost eighty-six hours!"