Summary: Tanah travels into the future and sees some unfamiliar familiar faces.

Extra Notes: Daun/Duri, Petir/Halilintar, Api/Blaze are females while the others remain the same.

Tanah should have slapped Cahaya into the sun when he had the chance. It might not solve his current predicament, but he could laugh at the memory to tide him over on his worst days.

This? This would count as a bad day. Whether if it will turn into The Worst, he'll have to wait and see.

Especially considering the fact that Cahaya's supposed time machine had stranded him in what appeared to be the future, smack dab in the middle of someone's lab.

The first thing that came to mind was that he was still in Cahaya's room in the future, only upgraded and maybe even expanded to accommodate all of this complicated machinery.

If the heap of used coffee pugs piled in the corner wasn't telltale enough, the man opening the door certainly was, the hinges creaking and coming to a startling stop as the pair stared each other down.

They remained in silence for a while, taking the time to study the other's appearances. Cahaya, now an adult, was dressed in a gray turtleneck sweater, white pants and socks was holding yet another cup of coffee, had his expression fixed between a mixture of confusion and curiosity.

His hair was a total mess, bangs sticking out in wild directions. The sight was almost comforting, knowing that no matter how long time has passed, Cahaya's habits will remain the dead same.

"Let me guess," Adult Cahaya groaned, taking a swig of his coffee. "Time travel?"

Tanah shrugged. "Maybe?"

The sigh that left Cahaya's mouth was so heavy that it could rival the weight of Tanah's combined existential crises.

"What year?"

"2022."

"Oh." Cahaya took another sip of his coffee, gesturing Tanah to follow him outside the lab. "My very first time dabbling in string theory and wormholes. How nostalgic."

He led Tanah down the hall, tapping away at a holographic screen projected from his watch while still holding the mug. The liquid was dangerously close to spilling, but he paid no mind to it.

The first thing Tanah noticed about the house was that it had been expanded – the halls were wider than he remembered, making space for shelves and computers embedded into the wall.

However, the most jarring thing about the entire ordeal, was that how the doors that led to the others' rooms were all removed. Where Api's door used to be was now a white metal closet, and Daun's room was used for more machinery and chemicals, the door completely removed.

Tanah must not have hidden his surprise well if Cahaya, who hadn't even turned around, commented on it.

"Don't act so surprised," he said, tapping away. "It's been 400 years since your time. We all grew up and found our own paths."

Tanah almost choked. "400 years?" he demanded. "And we're still alive?"

Cahaya shrugged. "Something we figured out when we enrolled in college." He downed his coffee in one go. "We just learned to accept it and move on."

"Where is everyone else, then?" Tanah asked. The house was quiet, eerily so. So unless the walls were incredibly sound proof, he didn't hear anyone else. "Does anyone still live here?"

They reached the place where the living room used to be. It still was, just renovated with a large rectangular desk at the center with fridges and cushioned chairs. It reminded Tanah of a futuristic meeting room he saw in the movies.

Cahaya patted one of the seats for Tanah to sit on. He himself moved to the chair next to what appeared to be a built-in monitor.

"Here? No." He powered the monitor on. A projector came to life, displaying another holographic screen hovering above the center of said desk. "After we moved out, I repurposed the house into my personal lab and Duri's greenhouse. And we only meet if there's world-ending emergencies, or movie nights on Sundays."

"We... don't live together?"

Tanah couldn't imagine waking up to a house without the others. At first only he, Petir and Angin lived alone, but the others gradually moved in for one reason or the other. He'd grown used to their presence overtime, and perhaps even enjoyed it.

But knowing that sometime in the future they'd be separated, sounded virtually impossible to him. He always imagined that it would be them against the world.

Cahaya quirked his lip at him.

"No, we don't," he confirmed his suspicions. "But if it makes you feel better, I can tell you that Taufan, Blaze and Duri live in the same district. Though I'm sure Duri's involved with some top-secret agent organization somewhere... Anyway, we still keep in touch."

A blue screen popped up right before Tanah's eyes, showing a picture of two other familiar faces. One more than the other.

"Is that me?" Tanah demanded, narrowing his eyes at the gold-eyed man in the picture, then to the red-eyed woman who was grumpily sharpening a sword. "And is that Petir?"

Cahaya nodded. "You were the one that sent us this picture," he explained. "You and Halilintar have been in outer space, busy doing everything and nothing. You still do commissions for TAPOPS sometimes, and Halilintar's off doing her own thing. They met up in a hostile star system by complete coincidence and now they're wanted on seven different planets."

"Sorry, but—Taufan? Blaze? Duri? Halilintar?" Tanah studied the people's faces. They were definitely him and Petir, but more refined. It was like they had taken all the rough edges and smoothed it out, growing out of their awkward puberty stages into confident, self-assured statures.

"We changed our names after tapping into our powers more." "Cahaya" kicked his feet up onto the table, waving at the picture with an empty coffee mug. More pictures appeared beside the original, showing grownup versions of the people he's all too familiar with. Some of them have changed beyond recognition. "You can call me Solar."

Tanah pursed his lip. "There's more to our powers?" He intertwined his fingers in worry. "We can already cause so much damage, and it gets worse?"

"Or better, depending on your stance," Solar agreed. "You'll come to experience something we call a 'Breakthrough,' where our powers have evolved too much to remain stagnant. Though, it doesn't happen naturally. We all experienced a point in our lives where it comes to save our behinds. We call that a 'Triggerpoint.'"

The pictures before him dissipated, and several others came to take their place. Only this time, they weren't innocent selfies or group photos that the group had taken together. They were pictures taken in different points in time with detailed descriptions written on the side, depicting a hard fought battle like a light-hearted documentary.

Tanah's breath caught in his throat. "These are..."

Solar nodded, giving no indication of his true feelings regarding the bloodshed. "Halilintar was the first to achieve Breakthrough." He had taken a sudden interest in the bottom of his mug. "We didn't know what had happened until much later."

The Earth elemental's lips quivered at the studies, the scans that were shown to him. Unlike the others, they were clearly less detailed and precise, showing the aftermath of the Breakthrough itself rather than the process.

He wad almost afraid to ask, "What happened?"

Solar scoffed. "Don't remember much. Only Gempa and Taufan know the full story." He set the mug down. "But the gist is she was mind controlled and turned against them. Unfortunately the stress of the entire ordeal was too much for her to handle. In the midst of her confusion after her Breakthrough, she went Anakin Skywalker and tried to kill everyone.

"Similarly, Taufan experienced something similar. He was drugged and that messed with his cognition. Also tried to kill everyone. Came back to his senses when he almost killed Gempa.

"Gempa, on the other hand, watched both Halilintar and Taufan die in front of him. He—well, you—lost it and almost killed everyone.

"Blaze made a mistake of burning down several buildings, and was blackmailed by our entire community. Some propaganda here and there. She was in a bad place. She snapped eventually and tried to kill everyone.

"Ais was stuck underwater for hours in a broken off ship. He survived the initial shipwreck but had limited oxygen to survive on. It was winter, too. He slowly suffocated and drowned to death but Breakthrough'd at the very last second.

"Duri's was expected. She had been showing signs for a Breakthrough for several weeks but it never happened. When we battled a sudden invasion, she was injured so badly that it saved her just in the nick of time. Though, she had amnesia for a bit and couldn't remember anything.

"As for me, I was the last to Breakthrough. I'll admit I had been impatient and snapped at the others. I tried to hasten my own process by risky measures but nothing worked. It wasn't until everyone else was defeated and half-dead, and I was launched into the sun to die. My failure broadcasted for all my friends to see. In the shame and my impending doom, I became Solar and turned the tides."

By the time he was done speaking, a new cup of coffee had mysteriously appeared in his hand, steaming and piping hot.

Tanah finally found his voice.

"That's — that's..."

"Traumatizing? Horrendous? Incomprehensible, even?" Solar took a sip of his new coffee. "It was hundreds of years ago. We've had plenty of time to sort our issues out. Not all of them, but it's a slow recovery."

"I..." Tanah swallowed. "Why tell me all this?"

Could he prevent all those tragedies from happening? Is he strong enough to forge forward knowing what hardships lay before their path?

They weren't equipped to handle all those battles, all those wars. They were only kids messing around with their new-found powers that broke a table every other Monday. There was no way that they could go to space to fight aliens or even get shot into space.

"This is only a slight fraction of what is to come." Solar's voice took on a hint of sympathy. "Think of this as a crash course. Of what you should expect, or perhaps even worse."

He turned in his seat, talking into his glowing watch. Before Tanah could enquire further, a larger body tackled him in his chair, curly bangs poking his eyes.

"Aw~ It's baby Gempa!" a woman's voice rang out. She released him, pinching both his cheeks and stretching them out. "I remember when he was always this small. He's adorable!"

Solar sighed audibly. "Duri, leave him alone. Don't confuse the poor thing more than he already is."

Duri pouted at him. "Not even a 'welcome back'?" she demanded. "How rude! I came bearing gifts, too!"

"Wait, not in front of—"

She snapped her fingers. A flower bloomed from the ceiling, the petals blossoming to uncover whatever was hidden within. The unknown object fell and hit the desk with a solid thud, debris of metal and copper sent flying everywhere, littering Tanah's clothes and hitting his face.

"—the kid."

Solar sunk deeper into his seat, his expression one of utter relief.

"Thank god this isn't one of your prey." He adjusted his collar. "Is this supposed to be a CPU?"

"Stolen straight from MATA's headquarters itself. It's banged up because I had to fight some double agent in a white tux for it. Weird fashion sense, but I won't hold it against him."

Solar waved her off. "It's fine. Should be able to reverse engineer the thing in an hour tops." His eyes slid towards Tanah's direction. "Before that, I'll need to send him back first."

The pair then followed Solar back to the original room Tanah appeared in, sitting in the sidelines while Solar dusted off a machine and calibrated binary and whatever numbers he needed into it.

It took Tanah mere seconds to recognize its design and even less time to voice his suspicions. "Isn't that—?"

"The very same," Solar confirmed, tapping the metal surface with an extended baton. "I do monthly maintenance on this hunk of junk, because I'm far too lazy to make another. Better having this old thing on hand than nothing at all."

When he was done, he instructed Tanah to stand at the very center of the machine, handing Duri a pair of dark visors to protect her vision. He himself had forgone the protection, seeing that he was resistant to his own element.

Despite knowing what was going to happen, Tanah can't help but clench his fists by his sides, nervous of the entire procedure. Duri did nothing of comfort and instead chose to feed her carnivore plants, tossing it strips of beef jerky and giving it a high-five when it caught it in mid-air.

Solar, on the other hand, was in deep concentration of his work. He eventually looked up from the computer, giving Tanah a brief nod.

"I should send you back where you came from," Solar said. "About five seconds later after you were teleported here. Hopefully mini-me hasn't screwed anything up in that timeframe."

"Five seconds isn't a lot," Duri commented.

"It's enough time to cause irreversible damage." He hit a button, and the floor beneath Tanah's feet began to light up. Tanah whipped to him in surprise, but all Cahaya offered him was a sigh.

"Do yourself a favor," Solar said as Tanah's body began to disappear into the light, "and don't come back. Time travel is a pain in the ass."

Tanah opened his mouth. "Wai—"

Light flooded the room, blinding everyone in it. Duri raised her arms to shield her eyes while Solar simply narrowed his. Wind surged from the center of the machine, sending loose papers flying wildly and Duri's plants flat on the wall.

The light died down. Solar blinked spots from his vision as the machine died down, having fulfilled its purpose.

Cahaya was going to die.

He was going to die a thousand deaths.

He was going to die very painfully in those thousand deaths.

They were going to mount his head on a pike and parade it in some grotesque festival that Angin and Daun always wanted to go but never had the chance to.

Holy shit—

It's his time to die.

He stared at the black splotch on the carpet of his floor, smoke lingering around the spot as the remains of the cinders died on the charred, deformed ends.

He just killed Tanah.

And everyone else was going to kill him.

Should he start making a new identity? Should he begin packing and booking flight tickets? Should he change his name to Bob and live the rest of his life as a mysterious mailman with an unspeakable past in the Philippines?

He knew one day his genius would be the end of him. Someday he'd find himself dabbling in forbidden knowledge he couldn't handle. But Ya Allah—not like this!

Cahaya was halfway through his Operation: FMDMACTRFMVF (Fake My Death and Move to Another Country to Run From My Vengeful Friends) when a burst of light flooded his vision, followed by a large mass falling on his body and knocking him to the ground.

...

Was this hell?

Tanah blinked at the sudden change of environment.

First he was watching Duri high-five plants, now he's back in Cahaya's lab/room, sitting on an oddly stiff cushion that had broken his fall.

Said cushion was twitching. Wait a second—

Before he could get up and help Cahaya to his feet, Angin burst into the room calling his name, looking panicked and out of breath.

"Tanah? Tanah!" He lunged into the room. "There you are!"

Angin helped pull Tanah to his feet, grimacing at Cahaya's state but paid not much mind to it.

"Angin?" Tanah frowned at his disheveled state, panicked like no other. "What's happened?"

The wind elemental was in visible distress, but he forced his voice into a whisper as he dragged Tanah out the room by his arm.

What was said next sounded eerily familiar, but bone-chilling all the same.

"I don't know," he stressed. "One moment I was getting ice-cream at the park, the next Petir's out for my head. She's lost it!"

Duri set the visor down, her plants withering away into thin air.

"You didn't tell him everything?" she asked flatly.

Her face was a blank mask, all signs of playfulness vanished in an instant.

Solar drummed his fingers along the machine. He didn't turn to face her, but she could see his reflection from the metal as clear as day.

"I told him what he needed to know." His eyes landed on the heap of broken watches in the corner, tucked away in a dusty glass case. "What's done is done. All I did was prepare him for the worst."