Can we talk about how good Time Trap is?! Like it’s one of my fav Loud House episodes of all time and I absolutely love it. It’s so angsty but so wholesome at the same time and as usual, I love the sibling dynamics. And the hug at the end of the episode was so cute 🥺
He was back. The room spun, and he heard, rather than saw, the worm-like creature slough away and plop into the water of the nearby pool. Then he was very, very sick...
When it was over, he raised himself shakily and checked the interface suspended above him. The six brains glowed faintly, and the six Matoran bodies attached to them remained motionless, as still and unmoving as they had been since the Signal crossed the universe and worked its terrible transformations, however long ago that’d been. There were no more days or years since the sky had been taken apart, so it was hard to keep track.
The various linkages of the interface seemed unphased, which was more than he had expected. He steadied himself against another wave of dizziness. His mind felt…bloated…expanded, worse than normal telepathy. Helryx had mentioned side-effects…the toll of “transtemporal projection”. She was one to know, of course.
Aside from that, everything had gone according to plan. He’d conveyed the information that Helryx had provided, as best he could. The Matoran that he had addressed…the Matoran had been strange—confused at first, but seeming to understand by the end. Afterward, he’d successfully pulled himself back, though the effort had been greater than expected.
Was it enough? How would he know? Even Helryx hadn’t been sure. The fact that he was still here, in this chamber, still in continuity with past thoughts…Did that mean he had failed? Would he even recognize success? The changes might be subtle...
He looked around. The chamber looked no different than before. He placed a hand against the cool stone of the floor and sent out a sonar pulse into the substructure. Mostly intact, no new incursions, although the ominous microtremors were still there, as always.
Unsatisfied, he stood and crossed to the long row of masks embedded in the wall nearby. He removed an Akaku and an Iden and placed them on the faces of two of the inactive Matoran. He tried not to look at them for too long. It still disturbed him to see them this way, even after all this time. His sensitive hearing registered the ever-so-slight shift and rasp of their autonomic breathing.
“Get used to it,” Helryx had told him time and again. “We work with the tools we have. If you succeed, you can have all the stimulating conversations with them that I’m sure you would’ve had otherwise. I never found Ce-Matoran to be particularly good talkers myself…”
Krakua wasn’t sure that he would ever get used to it.
The interface hummed ready. He stooped and positioned himself in the center again, and the six brains glowed in a circle above him like a living Suva. Eyes closed, he exhaled and activated his own Suletu.
Suletu into Iden. Up through the stones of the fortress his consciousness projected, broadened, then coalesced. He was in open air, hovering just above the central column. Into Akaku, he swept the interior rooms briefly from above. All as expected. The many defenses continued to be manned by his forces. No change.
Now he moved his mind-spirit out to the ramparts and brought the telescopic components of the Akaku online. The dense protosteel walls went transparent, and he looked beyond:
Dry oceanbed greeted him, but that was nothing new. He had hoped...but no. In all directions the waste spread from what had once been the shores of the fortress island. His fortress, now. The ocean floor was eaten into numerous holes and channels, all the way to the smoke-filled horizon. The Swarm appeared to be focusing its efforts elsewhere for the time being. He glanced up at the sky, or what once had been sky—now a mixture of jagged gaps and fitful flickering lights. It was a strange, broken thing, and beyond his sky there was another sky. More alien, with a single great light burning down.
He remembered when the Swarm had started to eat the sky, and the stars had gone out one by one. That was when he’d known for sure that the world was over.
He had not felt that way when the first Cataclysm had struck the universe, and they all learned that the Great Spirit had been deposed by a treacherous Makuta named Teridax, nor even when the second Cataclysm followed, and the seers said that the Makuta was contending with the Great Beings themselves.
Even when the Swarms had appeared from every hollow and deep crevasse, and the strange Signal washed across the universe, converting every Matoran it reached into a servant of the Swarm, into a destroyer...he had not yet given up hope. Everyone he had sworn to protect, gone. All but the Ce-Matoran, whose minds were different, and who instead were simply hollowed out by the Signal and left empty. The seers cried that the Great Beings had cursed the universe for the crimes of the Makuta, and had sent their robotic servants to accomplish one last terrible Duty: to eat the world into Nothing.
Even then he had not fully despaired. But the sound of the world being unlidded: a deep, unnatural groaning noise that shook the atmosphere and went down into his innermost ears, into his bones…That had been the moment. There was no going back.
But Helryx had another plan. A backup plan. She always did.
The interface powered down as he reinstalled himself into his own body. He sat motionless, letting the seconds beat by. Nothing outside had changed, as far as he could tell. After all the battle and desperate strategy, all the effort, the sacrifices and pain, all the millennia of preparation…he had hoped that it would be enough, that he would not have to—
The ground shook slightly, enough to ripple the water of the dark pool. Suddenly there was a squat figure in the doorway at the other end of the chamber. Two icy-blue eyes stared at him from beneath a domed faceplate. It was one of his. It chkt'd at him in its ugly way, and he understood it—he had by now become adept at communicating with the creatures via their sound-frequencies.
“INCOMING INCURSION. NORTHERNMOST HEXTANT, BELOW,” it chkt’d.
He’d been the only Toa of Sonics in existence when the second Cataclysm arrived, and that made him uniquely suited to combat the Swarm. He was able to confuse their command-structure, deactivating individual units entirely or even turning them to his own will.
“RETURN TO COMPLEMENT,” he chkt’d in reply. “INTERCEPT AND DIVERT.”
The swarm-unit acknowledged his command and swiveled to go. Another tremor went through the floor as it did so, and for a moment it teetered, off-balance.
“Careful, Mazek—” he began to say involuntarily, but stopped. Helryx’s words drilled into him. They are gone. Their names are gone. He fought back a tide of memories, memories of a Ko-Matoran, a friend…the accursed Signal ringing in their ears—unexpected, too fast for him to neutralize it with his own counter-vibration—of the painful sound of limbs buckling and stretching, of armor fusing here and splitting there, of a voice pleading for help, pleading as the vocal tract deformed and the words distorted, and the eyes elongated into slits, still icy-blue.
Disconnecting it from the rest of the Swarm had been the only mercy he could give. They are gone. Shut it out.
No, he would never get used to it, not even after ten thousand years.
The swarm-unit had left. He sighed, resigned at last to what he must do. He removed the Iden and Akaku from the interface and re-cycled the system, checking the attachments on the Masks of Truth, Translation, and Helryx’s own Mask of Psychometry once again.
Next, he retrieved a stack of tablets from a nearby table. They were covered with writing and calculations: Helryx's logs. He waved to the far wall, and the door of the vault opened with a hiss. The chamber beyond was cold and damp, green-tinged, and filled from top to bottom with hundreds of small tubes.
And in each one there was a worm.
He surveyed the result of their centuries-long hunt through the wreckage of the world. The Order had known for some time that the transtemporal memory encoded in the nascent minds of the creatures could be used to reconnect to moments in the past, but never to change those moments. Not until Helryx’s research, and the creation of the interface.
He consulted the tablets again, tracing along the carefully organized shelves. He would have to select another specimen, target the right moment, and communicate the right message, but which to choose? Helryx had been unsure if a sequence was required, even with all her years of traversing alternate dimensions and spying on different timelines using the last remaining Olmak.
For his first attempt, just minutes ago, he had used the one that Helryx deemed to have the broadest potential: a specimen that had attached itself to a single Matoran prior to either of the cataclysms. The messages he had transmitted were obscure, something about the importance of “lightning” and “six heroes”. That was as much as he could transmit through the link.
It was odd, though. The Matoran had not responded to the name Helryx had listed. It insisted its name was something else, something starting with a “V”. He couldn't recall. Hopefully it wasn't vital. The target had been located in an important place, after all—very close to the Core. Surely it had been the right Po-Matoran...
What next? The logs offered many options. A number of specimens had apparently interacted with the Makuta Teridax himself at one point, but such direct interference seemed unlikely to succeed. Another of the worms had apparently linked itself to an ancient entity called Tren Krom at least forty millennia before the cataclysms. There might be an opportunity there, yes…
He pulled down the canister containing that specific worm and tucked it under his arm, returning to the main chamber. There was another shudder in the ground, and the stasis tubes clinked and jostled as he moved to the interface, preparing to unseal the tube.
Something stirred in the doorway on the far side of the chamber—another of his swarm-units, or one of the lesser couriers he’d peeled off. He chkt'd to dismiss it without looking, too absorbed in his task.
“The Manutri chirps its greeting,” a voice said, “but the icehawk is earless and cannot hear. It dives for the kill. Who is the greater fool?”
Krakua’s eyes snapped upward. It was a Matoran—bent and ill-shaped—standing across the room from him, examining the interface with sharp eyes.
“Who—?”
Another tremor shook the fortress. Harder this time. His forces must have engaged with the latest incursion below ground. The Matoran moved into the room. A Po-Matoran. A familiar mask. Krakua stared. For a split second, he thought he might be hallucinating. His mind still had that bloated feeling. It was possible...
“I take it that, from your perspective, we have only just spoken,” the Matoran said, stepping into the room. “For me, it’s been a little longer, but here I am.”
Krakua finally found his words: “How are you not…not…”
“Not part of the Swarm, like the rest? When the fields of Flameleaf dissolve each season and must be replanted, the hardier Firevine is exposed, for it does not melt. But that’s not really important, is it?”
It was relief that he was feeling. Relief like pain, washing over him. He felt his legs go weak. He hadn’t had a real conversation for such a long time. It was difficult to formulate his thoughts aloud.
“I thought…I thought nothing had changed,” he stammered. “Thought the message didn’t work. I can’t believe it.”
“Well...” The face of the Matoran now grew flat and serious. “You’d better get over that quick. I’ve had time to consider this plan of yours, messy though it is. You’ve at least done most of the legwork, I see.” The Matoran motioned to the open vault.
Krakua nodded slowly, still feeling a little dazed.
“First,” the Matoran continued, “you can put back that worm you’re holding. It’s the wrong one—the markings are off. We’re looking for a specimen from Metru Nui, around the time of the first Cataclysm. You have this, yes?”
“Metru Nui…” Krakua set the tube down and focused his attention, sorting through the tablets he still held. “Yes, here. I dredged the specimen from the ruins of the city outskirts, but Helryx classified it as ‘minimal impact’.”
“Did she? How disappointing. No matter. There is, or was, a certain Toa of Fire in the city who will need some special...encouragement, I think. And then…then we’ll see what happens.”
“Encouragement? There’s nothing about that in the notes…I wouldn’t even know where to start...”
“Encouragement was never her strong suit, I suppose. Well, I'm sure your mentor did her best, but this may have been a little beyond her expertise. Where is she, by the way? I thought she would be here.”
Krakua blinked: “She…The last time…she never came back.”
“Encouraging.”
“She was probably just delayed. Time runs differently on other planes. Or maybe—”
“Or maybe not.” The Matoran shrugged dismissively. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll work with the tools we have...”
The tools we have. Krakua’s gaze wandered to the interface as the Matoran spoke. The masks stared back at him. The eyes were open, glowing but empty.
“...And we’ll have to get a bit more creative with our messages,” the Matoran was saying. “We can do better than...whatever it was you relayed to me back then.”
The floor trembled again, just a little. By the feel of it, he could tell that his forces had been successful in deflecting the incursion. His tools...They’d report in soon.
They are gone. Their names are gone. But if you succeed...
Krakua shook himself. The Matoran was looking at him expectantly. “Well, uh...the messages have to be simple,” he said. “Otherwise the disturbance is too great, and the timeline splits.”
“Of course. Basic causality.”
“And they have to be cryptic as well—not too easy for the target to comprehend immediately, but still decipherable at the right moment.”
“You don’t say.”
“That’s the hardest part, really. Helryx hated it, and I was never any good at riddles...”
