Time and Again and Again.....
Isidor was brainy, and after tending to Master Xavier 039 each morning, his greatest thrill was sneaking off to the library to explore its endless mysteries. He loved learning. The library was his true home away from home, and Xavier often joked that Isidor must know every inch of it backwards and forwards. But the truth was quite the opposite. Isidor constantly uncovered new stacks, hidden nooks, small private rooms and tucked-away sub-basements brimming with rare books and forgotten artifacts.
On his many daily excursions, Isidor befriended all the staff at the library. He often brought Mary at the front desk a sweet treat, thanking her for her kindness and for letting him linger after hours. He also grew close to two of the head research librarians, Mr. Vilde and Dr. Flueric. Both men were peculiar, but it was Mr. Vilde who took Isidor under his wing. He led him to rare books and entire hidden rooms, concealed from the rest of the library. Mr. Vilde delighted in revealing new curiosities, though he always wore a devilish, unsettling smirk as he left Isidor alone to study his latest discovery
One day, Mr. Vilde led Isidor to a narrow, dim corridor deep within the library’s rear wing. With a glance over his shoulder, he pressed against a particular shelf—an unmarked one—and the entire case shifted inward with a groan, revealing a narrow passage. The room beyond was cramped, lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves that strained under the weight of ancient, dust-choked volumes. In the center stood a massive desk, cluttered with yellowed papers, strange diagrams, and rusted instruments. Mr. Vilde’s eyes gleamed. “There are things in here you’ll find… interesting,” he said, his voice curling at the edges. As he closed the hidden door behind Isidor, sealing him inside, he gave a low, wicked laugh. “Enjoy yourself for as long as you want. Just don’t go too far… and get lost.”
Over the next few days, Isidor couldn’t help but laugh at Mr. Vilde’s parting words. He returned to the hidden room again and again, losing hours in its dusty silence. But something about the space resisted him. Twice, when he pushed on the shelf to enter, it refused to move—solid, immovable. Only after repeated attempts did it finally give way, as though the room itself were weighing his intentions. Most of the books were obscure histories, but their narratives twisted in ways he’d never encountered—alternate versions of familiar events, details that contradicted known accounts, as if the authors had glimpsed a different world. On his fourth or fifth visit, Isidor opened one of the heavy drawers in the desk’s center. Nestled inside was a strange device, just larger than his palm—metallic, worn, its surface etched with miniature maps and flickering clock faces, none of them aligned. Beneath it lay a battered notebook, its cracked spine labeled “Time Portal.” The pages inside were chaotic—paragraphs half-finished, entire sections crossed out or overwritten. Multiple hands had scrawled notes across the margins, some in unfamiliar alphabets, others barely legible. It was madness—but it pulsed with purpose. Isidor knew: this would take days to understand… and maybe longer to escape.
After nearly a week buried in the notebook, Isidor believed he had deciphered the device's core function. It was, impossibly, a time portal—capable of transporting its user to any moment, any place. The idea sounded phantasmagorical, something from fevered dreams or madness, but he had come to believe it. Still, he hadn’t seen Dr. Flueric or Mr. Vilde since that first day, and a part of him needed confirmation. He approached Mary at the front desk, asking where Mr. Vilde’s office was located. She gave him a puzzled look.
“Who?”
“The head research librarian,” Isidor said, his voice tight.
Mary frowned. “There’s no one by that name here. We have Mr. Wilde the head librarian in records, but no head research librarian.”
Isidor’s breath caught. He knew they weren’t the same. He’d spoken to Mr. Wilde before—soft voice, thinning hair, very ordinary. Mr. Vilde had been anything but ordinary. But Mary’s tone left no room for argument. Isidor simply nodded, muttered something forgettable, and made his way back to the hidden room.
His mind raced with possibilities. What if he could change things? Undo catastrophes? Save lives? The device could be used for good—for greatness. Driven by this vision, he adjusted the dials. One marked location—he set it to a place near the Bay of Naples. Another labeled time—he set it to the early morning of August 24, 79 AD. Mount Vesuvius. Pompeii.
He made several more calibrations—instinct guiding him now, not logic—and activated the machine. It began to hum, low and metallic, the vibration rattling the floorboards beneath his feet. Then, without warning, a bolt of blue energy lashed out, striking him in the center of the chest. His body convulsed. A sphere of shimmering light began to expand outward from the device, swallowing him inch by inch. The air warped. Sound twisted. And just before his vision collapsed inward, he felt a final, piercing zap—and then stillness.
His body froze. His breath locked. For a minute that stretched beyond minutes, he was suspended—trapped between now and then.
Isidor had chosen the date with care. He knew that his mentor, Master Xavier, traced his lineage back to Italy—some branches even rumored to have lived near Pompeii. The thought consumed him: if he could reach them before the eruption, he might rescue Xavier’s ancestors, perhaps others too. A single act to rewrite fate. He calculated his arrival for several hours before the catastrophe, enough time to warn, to guide, to save.
But something had gone wrong.
As his body unfroze, the humming ceased, and the sphere dissolved into sparks, the world around him roared to life—with fire. The sky was black, choked with ash. The earth trembled beneath his feet. A rain of pumice fell like cursed hail. And overhead, towering into the sky, Mount Vesuvius had already ruptured.
He stumbled forward, choking, eyes burning. Time had slipped. The calculations were wrong. This wasn’t the quiet dawn of disaster—it was its apex. And the city—already breaking, already buried—screamed beneath the weight of history in motion.
The realization struck like a hammer: there was no one left to save. Pompeii was already unraveling, its people swallowed by fire and ash. The moment for heroism had passed. Now came survival. If he lingered, he would be entombed alongside the ghosts of a thousand strangers.
Isidor’s mind, sharpened by years of historical study, raced for an escape. Shifting to another country would require adjusting both dials—too slow. But if he remained in Italy, just altered the year… He snapped his attention to the temporal interface, his fingers trembling as he turned the date dial with urgency: March 15, 44 BC. The Ides. A date burned into memory—forever entwined with betrayal and death.
He pressed the activation node.
The device shrieked to life, its hum growing sharper, tighter. The air split around him, electricity biting at his skin. The sphere reformed—light bending, sounds collapsing inward—and again, his body locked, suspended in that silent prison of transition.
For one minute—or one eternity—Isidor floated, frozen between two storms: one of fire, and one of knives.
Isidor’s vision cleared into marble and torchlight—he stood in the Senate chamber, expecting stillness, expecting silence. Instead, he heard screams.
Julius Caesar was there—crumpling—already surrounded by blades. Robes soaked in blood. Steel glinting in candlelight. The senators moved like jackals, their hands savage, relentless, ceremonial. Too late. Again.
Isidor’s heart raced, his breath catching in disbelief. He had set the time for dawn. The assassination wasn’t meant to occur until midday. He had calculated precisely, drawn from every source. Why was the timeline collapsing ahead of him?
No time. The conspirators had seen him—his strange clothes, the glowing device clutched in his hand. They advanced with suspicion twisted into rage, their daggers red and ready.
Isidor fumbled with the dials, hands slick with sweat. He twisted one—then another. He struck the activation node.
Blue light screamed. A final glimpse: Caesar’s wide, stunned eyes locking with his. Then the hum, the surge, the world folding inward again—Isidor caught, suspended between a question and a wound.
When the light receded and sensation returned, Isidor stood on damp cobblestones slick with rot and coal-dust. The air was thick—filthy—and stank of old blood and fog. Gaslight flickered overhead. He had set the device precisely: London. Whitechapel. August 31, 1888. Three a.m. The hour of murder.
But he was too late. Again. A woman's body lay crumpled in the alleyway, her throat opened like a second mouth. Police whistles pierced the silence. A constable’s lamp bobbed nearby. Isidor staggered back into the shadows, heart pounding. The victim—Mary Ann Nichols, if his records were right—had already been found. But by all accounts, she should have been attacked just now.
His mind reeled. Three destinations. Three misses. Hours, minutes—slipping, warping. Was the machine reacting to him? To his intent? Or to something else?
The constable turned, his gaze drawn by the shimmer of something unnatural—the faint glow that still clung to the device.
He turned the dials again as quickly as he could. The air crackled.
The cold bit first. Then came the shock.
Isidor blinked, his limbs numb, his lungs seizing from the frigid air. He was not on the deck of the Titanic. He was alone—adrift—perched atop a chunk of floating ice, the sea vast and black around him.
The great ship loomed not far off, jagged steel torn open along her flank. Screams echoed faintly through the mist. Lifeboats, few and half-filled, bobbed in panic. He had meant to arrive before the impact—11:40 p.m., April 14, 1912—when warning might have meant salvation. Instead, he was adrift in its aftermath. Powerless. Always too late.
The iceberg groaned beneath him, cracking. Melting. His teeth chattered as he stared at the unfolding horror—the lights of the ship flickering, her back already beginning to rise. A thousand deaths waited beneath the surface, and he had been so close.
Despair threatened to freeze his thoughts, but the cold reminded him—move. Adjust. Escape. Survive.
He twisted the dials again—this time with trembling hands and an empty heart. May 6, 1937. Lakehurst, New Jersey. 5:30 p.m. The Hindenburg. If the device obeyed this time, he would have almost an hour before flame touched sky.
The air screamed. The ice shattered. The sphere returned—this time dimmer, flickering.
The fire was everywhere. It consumed the sky in moments.
Isidor stood frozen again—but not from the machine. From horror. The Hindenburg was already aflame, its silver skin blackening, peeling, folding inward. The air crackled with screams. Metal shrieked. The smell—burning fuel, burning flesh—seared his lungs. It was unmistakably past 6:25 p.m. The tragedy was already unfolding, unstoppable.
Too late. Again. His body moved on instinct. His soul didn’t follow. Hands numb, face streaked with ash, he tuned the dials without thinking. One more jump. One last escape. He chose home—not his apartment, not any past comfort. But the library. The room behind the shelf. The place where this had started.
The sphere formed. The zap came softer this time—like a whisper. And then, silence.
He opened his eyes to the dusty golden glow of the hidden room. The bookshelves around him were still. The air smelled only of leather and paper. His chest heaved.
Then—he noticed the clock.
It matched. Precisely. To the minute he had set. No delay. No slippage. Exact.
Isidor stared, his breath caught in his throat. A chill passed over him—not from time travel, not from fear—but from understanding. The device hadn’t been broken. It had taken him to each destination with precision—but only once death had already begun.
It had never meant to prevent anything.
The truth settled over him like a weight. He collapsed into the old desk chair, and for the first time since his journey began, he let the pain in. The fire. The ash. The blood. The voices. All of it poured through him.
And Isidor cried. Not because he failed. But because the machine had never allowed him to succeed.
Isidor was ready to go home for the day but decided to try one more thing. This time, he set the time portal ahead—to a location in the city, in the not-too-distant future. Once again, the device emitted its hum and blue light, and he froze.
Isidor saw people on the street but moved quickly, avoiding interaction. He got what he came for and set the device to return to the room. Once back, he opened the newspaper he had grabbed and looked at the front page.
Was this hope for the future? Isidor hoped so, but after the horrors he had witnessed, he didn’t want to know anything more. Carefully, he placed the time portal back in the drawer where he had found it. He also returned the 'Time Portal' notebook—but as he did, on a back page he hadn’t noticed before, among writings in many languages, he saw a message:
Non cercare di cambiare il passato! Non può essere cambiato. Impara da esso. E usa questa conoscenza quando guardi al futuro!
Master Xavier had taught him some Italian, so he understood: 'Don’t try to change the past! It cannot be changed. Learn from it. And use this knowledge when you look to the future!'
Why hadn’t he seen this before? Isidor placed the book in the drawer beside the portal, shut it, and left the room. Maybe he would return one day???
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