GLITCHY FRIEND.

 1774, NOVEMBER 28th, MONDAY7:30 pm.

Noche took a deep breath as she stood before the lighthouse door. She closed her eyes and gathered herself, before snapping them open and reaching out for the knob. Her fingers wrapped around the handle, tightened, and twisted. It didn't budge.

"What the?"

She tried again – nothing.

"Noche, are you sure this is the way out?" Shaylin asked.

"You saw the memory in the beam of light too. This is the way out!" Noche swore. "I don't get it. Why isn't this working? Fuck. Fuck!"

"Bruh calm down."

"I am calm!"

"You know, I'm a higher rank than you," Mary smirked. "I can technically give you orders."

"Orders? Here's an order. Kiss my ass."

The blonde continued to pull at the doorknob as Alice began glitching. A moment later, the violet-haired girl vanished.

Alice stood outside the gymnasium at Cross HQ. She looked around and tried to gather her bearings. It wasn't the first occasion where she had glitched through time. The only question being was this the past or future? Alice walked forward and Noche turned the corner ahead.

"Alice! Your horn!" the blonde shouted, "What happened?! The left one is broken in half!"

Alice's hand went up to the missing bit.

"... You broke it," Alice said.

Noche's brows lowered.

"I what?"

"... Never... Mind."

Alice walked past Noche and pat her on the shoulder.

"... Goodbye."

Noche could only furrow her brows and watch Alice walk away. It seemed she was in the past; probably during the Cross entrance exam. For a moment she wondered if she had revealed too much of the future by telling Noche it was her who broke the horn. Probably not.

With a sigh, she continued down the hallway. It was always so frustrating to be sent to a random period in time. It made her feel like a gray piece of paper that's been dipped in black ink and left on a forgotten road under a clouded night sky. With a heavy heart, Alice began her search for Mary.

Back in the present, Noche continued to struggle with opening the lighthouse door.

"What just happened to Alice?" Shaylin asked.

Mary frowned and turned to face the ginger.

"Alice has a... condition. She's a VIP. Her ability is time travel. But when she was younger, she abused her power. Now it's broken," she said. "Alice glitches through time and she can't control when it occurs or what time she ends up in."

"T-Time travel! A-Are you serious?" Tak asked.

"Dude, of all people you shouldn't be surprised. You're the one who has unlimited drive," Mary said. "Combined with immortality, a photographic memory, and your kinesthetic ability... You're way too powerful."

"S-Sorry."

"Bruh, no need to apologize," Mary sighed. "I guess I'm just trying to say it's not that surprising compared to, well, everything we've seen lately."

"Gee golly gosh, she glitches in time? That must be real hard on your relationship."

"It... It can be. From my perspective it's been one continuous ride," Mary said. "But for Alice, I can only wonder what it's like."

She paused to turn towards Noche, who was staring at the door while tapping her foot. Both hands were placed on her hips before she kicked the door. It didn't work and she cursed.

"Somedays, Alice and I are really close. Best friends who do stupid shit and laughing until we cry," Mary muttered. "Other days, she barely knows me... and I'm so afraid that might be the moment my Alice doesn't glitch back."

The dark-skinned girl crossed both arms over her chest and grabbed her biceps. Her head turned to the side and she stared into the vast emptiness of the realm.

"I look at us and it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen... and I could lose that at any moment," she said. "It scares me... Honestly, I sometimes wonder, with her situation and my disease, why we ever got so close."

Tak gave her a sympathetic look as Shaylin nodded.

"Is that why she's so quiet?" Boots asked.

"It's hard to make friends when you can glitch into a timeline where they've never met you, or have forgotten you," Mary shrugged. "The only person I've seen her warm up to is Tak, and that's probably because he's immortal and shares her love of books."

"I-I don't know what to say," he gave a half-hearted, but uncomfortable smile.

At that moment Alice glitched back into existence. She had both her horns and was aiming down the sights of her Fuck you sniper rifle.

"I take it the horns don't grow back," Raven said. "Which means this Alice is from the past?"

The violet-haired girl scowled and threw up her gun.

"Apple, what's wrong?"

"I have... an important shot to make... In MoveCity," she said.

"At what time and date?"

"July twenty-seventh, seventeen seventy-seven at seven forty-seven pm."

"Alright bruh, that's in the future. I'll make a note to make sure you take the shot."

"Thanks mango."

"Won't that fudge up time?"

"Nah bruh... Probably," Mary smirked. "If it's caused a paradox before, I've never noticed."

Shaylin perked an eyebrow. "I'd like to know how that works."

"Bruh, so I have a theory. Time is the location of mass within space... For example, the matter that makes Alice is separate from the matter that makes the universe," she said. "When Alice glitches her matter stays the same, while everything else scrambles."

"There is... personal time and environmental time," Alice said. "When I time travel, I'm still experiencing my own growth in a linear way... Even if the world around me is constantly rewinding or fast-forwarding."

"That makes sense with time-traveling stories," Shaylin said. "The time traveler sorta has their own timeline going on despite existing outside of time... Which means there's two timestreams."

"Their personal time and the environment's time," Mary said. "Both of which are comprised of matter existing in space. Time happens when that matter changes location from point A to point B."

"My... personal time is out of sync with the environment's time."

"But how would that cause glitching you may ask? Here's my theory, time flows differently than how we perceive it," Mary said. "We live in a stop motion and can only see the finished movie. We can't see what happens between any two frames."

"Time doesn't flow from point A, to point B, to point C... Time flows all over the place, and our meager human senses can only organize it into a linear fashion."

A thoughtful expression overtook Shaylin's countenance. "Are you saying time is scrambled, but we can only perceive it when it's organized in a way that makes sense?"

"YES! Time flows from point A immediately to point C, but we can't perceive anything past point A until we see point B. Then from there, we'd have to wait until point C appears again," Mary shouted. "To us it seems like one smooth transition. A, B, C. Yet our perception might not be the reality. It's likely A, scrambling occurs until B, and more scrambling occurs until C, and we'd never even know it."

"Just like we're characters in a stop motion... unaware of the actors moving us between frames," Alice muttered. "We think the movie is only two hours long, when in reality, it took hundreds of hours to complete."

"And that's why Alice glitches! Because she's no longer a part of the movie... She glitched so hard that she broke the proverbial fourth wall," Mary threw up both arms. "She's broke out of the film and is now walking around on the set."

"To put it simply, time may not be linear, but we perceive it as such," Shaylin said. "We see A, B, C, D, E, but reality could be A, C, E, D, B... And we wouldn't know it cause we can't comprehend it out of order?"

The ginger raised her cybernetic hand to her chin.

"And Alice has somehow become the exception to this rule? Making her appear to be glitching to us, but the fact is, she's experiencing reality as it truly is – rather than how we normally perceive it."

"That sums it up," Mary nodded.

"Intriguing," Shaylin grinned. "If that's true, one could theoretically time travel by manipulating all the mass in the universe except oneself."

"That would explain why we can remember Jack despite him being erased from existence," Raven said. "Because the matter that makes our memories haven't been altered during the corruption process."

"Bruh, that would also mean we couldn't save him by traveling back to the past, as the matter making Jack has been destroyed," Mary said. "If we traveled back in time, he would still be gone... Unless we traveled so far back the matter making his body was different from the matter that was deleted."

"P-Poor Jack," Tak muttered.

The group was silent for a moment.

"The sex sounds intense," Shaylin blurted. "The risk of glitching and getting caught really increases the thrill."

Alice's ears turned red and her eyes went wide while Mary exploded with laughter.

"Bruh, showers are also difficult."

Alice turned a glare to Mary, who only laughed harder. All the while, Noche continued to flail with the door.