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A light flicks on, and turns to illuminate a nearby wall.
The author of this story does not own the show Ed, Edd and Eddy, nor the canon characters or premise of the show. All non-canon characters that appear in this or the previous fanfic are creations of the author. If you want to post this fic, OR if you want to write your own possibilities for TSoE's story-line, feel free to do so after sending me a quick message saying so and where you want to post it. Thanks----Kyinsky.
The light turns off, and blackness fills the readers' mental imagery.
The darkness slowly lights to gray shadows, and a silhouette rises up. The landscape brightens further, revealing a gray and red landscape... a cul-de-sac in ruins, smoke on the horizon, shadow figures flying in the sky, and reddish moon glowing behind wispy clouds.
The silhouette leans forward into the light. An older, weary Edd tosses some large pieces of wood, scavenged from the dead trees, onto the fire. After checking the coals and sitting down on a log, he rests his head on his arms and stares up at the smoke, and the sparks rising to blend in with what few stars are visible.
I've been thinking, and while I know that the gates accelerated the changes in our world, I don't think they were the sole cause of it. Think about it---I had the dream before. Werewolves existed before. We made the problem worse, but it wasn't all my fault.
I don't think....
Time travel... I wonder. Just as in those X Men movies a mutant gene was discovered that caused powers, so there were certain, traceable changes in us that... accelerated things.
What if... Could it be, that when I visited Mother and Father? But no... No, this I was certain of, when Kevin finally brought the matter up to me.
'If we could use the gate to time travel, couldn't we change the past?' That was what he suggested. We'd considered it, and come think... Eddy could be rescued, Kevin could be cured----though, to be fair, Kevin wasn't fond of the idea, not by the time that we all talked for that last time. Nazz and Rolf supported trying, and Kevin lost his temper... he had been a vampire for a long time by then, it was what and who he was accustomed to being. We weren't accustomed... to being human, anymore, he and I and Marie at the least. And Eddy, we were accustomed to his being gone. But... no, wasn't that in response to that attempted cure? It was changing the past that had to do with time travel....
Essentially, we knew by then it could be done. Hadn't our counterparts in 8-3-2-0-0-9-1---or that's what we called it---hadn't they essentially done the same thing? Their Kevin had played with the remote... their Kevin had sent them back in time, had done what we had customarily done with my second gate of undoing the time that passed in the home universe.
But, something about Tony's gate was different----and in our world Tony's gate's hadn't survived. I hadn't used his controller as a reference for my adjustments to my design, instead referencing only my memories of the design. When that other group altered time with his gate... their physical selves were the ones of that time period---they replaced the selves of that time period. All the ones alive in the gate when it activated, and due to some temporal quirk Eddy, they had all essentially undone it. Put themselves back at the morning after my dream, with Plank somehow getting to the trailer park, and Eddy somehow getting his memories of.... Somehow, but there's no sense to it! The only guess that comes to my mind is that Tony had a glitch in his gate. Something in his didn't work right, and it came to create this amazing possibility.
...I envy them that world. I did then, and I still do.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* TSoE: Alternate Paths Part 2 *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Edd stepped forward, and fell forward. He managed to land on his feet, and staggered as his orientation shifted. Somehow he'd ended up in midair...?!
//My calculations were fine, I know it!// He whirled and backed up, then titled his head. A few feet above him, the light of his own gate was glowing in midair. Around it, however, was what looked suspiciously like the beginnings of a gate.
"Whoa!" Marie screeched, landing and catching herself with her arms. "The hell?!"
"Move!" Edd moved forward to pull her back to where he was standing. "Or someone will land on you!"
"Leggo, leggo!" She waved his arm off, and stood next to him. "Wha---is someone building a gate?"
"Is someone there?" An Edd-like voice asked, and the two looked to see a familiar black hat above the other side of the structure.
"Oof!" Ed landed on his stomach, and blearily stared at the grass. "...Double D, I don't remember that ever happening before... Where are the stairs?"
"What is going on...?" Footsteps, and Trip peered around the corner to see Marie and Edd. "...Huh? Hey! You guys!" He grinned, and moved over to examine the light within the gate. "I thought there was something going on---huh, what took you so long to visit? Home stuff?"
"...You could say that." Edd glanced at the gate. "Our gate was torched, for one." Trip winced, and they glanced over as Marie pulled Ed out of the way.
Jonny appeared at the edge, evidently poking his head out. He frowned as he had to look down at the others, and sighed. "I thought there was something weird over here... whoa!"
Kevin's head materialized behind him, and Jonny's frantic attempt to grab something merely pulled the vampire down with him. "Ow!"
"All of you guys, huh...? Sorry about that. If I thought you guys were gonna show up, I would've built this side of the base already." Trip explained, and moved to help pull Kevin up. The boy's sleeve slipped, and Kevin hissed and yanked his arm away. An odd smell rose up, and the boy frowned away from any other motions.
The group generally got to their feet, looking up at where they'd fallen from. It looked much like Edd's old gate had, except that the base wasn't in place yet---and they'd stepped through the gate into a place four feet up in the air.
"I guess you guys made it back without being experimented on after all." Marie remarked. "So... uh..."
"Experimented on?" Trip glanced between their faces, noting the dull eyes in each of them, and he rubbed the back of his head. "The four of us made it to the gate without any problems, and left; since it seemed like you guys had stuff of your own to take care of. Why would we have been experiment on...?"
"Long story." Edd shook his head, and the group started to gather and get to their feet. "Could we impose upon you for a place to be, while explaining? ...Other than here?"
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Last updated: 3/21/07 at 9:12 pm
