“Time is different to me than it is to you; I’d say it’s different to us than it is to you, but it’s different to me than it is to anyone. I am made of time. I have all day, I have all the time in the world, and time is never time at all. To me, it’s like a plasmic fluid, moments and phenomena suspended within it, with slow and fast currents that bring things away and around again. It is possible to move things around a little without them ever feeling out of place. Certain aspects of the human being, though, are not very chronoflexible. Believe me when I say I will be mindful of your limitations. I’ve learned from my mistakes, some of them legendary.” This ramble emanated from the Jiggler within a swimming liminal bandwidth that was now the way of reality.

Since the initial zoom into a place that was not quite a place, Wendel had left the cockpit, now that the ship was locomoting by different means. Greezmo said that kind of steering wouldn’t work, and Wendel chose to believe them since it’s no good trying to make an engine do what it can’t. Now the captain and the Kao-Sidhe passengers sat comfortably facing each other on the floor of the hold. The ship swayed rhythmically as though taking gentle steps on very long legs, legs that walked from one landscape to another. With one step the scene outside the viewports looked like mountaintops, the next a moon tundra, another a river channel. This all made sense, flowing like one step after the next. Greezmo occasionally got up to go around patting and whispering to Drift X. The ship purred.

“Where are we going now?” Wendel thought to ask amid the wonder of it.

“I was just considering that, and I have an idea,” replied Rosy Glow, tearing her gaze from the viewports. She got up and went to where Greezmo was actively snuggling into a corner, and they whispered and nodded back and forth. Rosy Glow came back to a spot by Wendel. “Do you have an item of his, or that reminds you strongly of him, or comes from him?”

After just a moment, Wendel blushed and smiled a little. “I can think of something. Want me to bring it here?”

Rosy Glow nodded, Greezmo nodded eagerly, and the Jiggler nodded along. “Show us!” was said with a curiosity that sensed something juicy. Continuing to blush enjoyably about this show-and-tell moment, Wendel went to the compartment where she stored the necklace Leiv gave her that she only wore when they were staying in together. The chainwork was beautiful, and stones sparkled in their filigree when she lifted it from the pouch that replaced the clamshell case the Princess utilized for her ruse. Wendel thought she could probably find another one of those. She secretly, tentatively smelled the necklace, deciding it was fine and enjoying a little reminiscence. It was as much his as it was hers, and she knows that he thinks of it now and again.

“Here it is,” she said upon returning, respectfully lifting it from the pouch for them to see. The Kao-Sidhe surrounded it with appreciation and assessment.

“Yeah, we can try this,” Greezmo said, lifting a suspenseful gloved finger as they drifted toward the warp woodstove. “Don’t worry,” they said reassuringly before promptly popping off a tube that Wendel would never disconnect while in transit. Stalling the captain’s alarm with, “I said don’t worry,” Greezmo beckoned her over. Drift X continued to lope through an endless scroll of locales.

Laying the necklace face up on the pouch, Wendel carried it over in her hands. Greezmo gestured toward the mouth of the hose, and Wendel brought it there. “Just don’t try this in your home dimension,” grumbled the gremlin through their respirator. Wendel could feel a gentle current of air intake over her hands, and the oddity struck her of having her ship do a sniff search from her sex necklace. Only here in nowhere land, surely, with these no-body people. Her mind could accept it if she didn’t try too hard to sort it all out, and she withdrew from the dithering of such an attempt.