“Please,” a soft, familiar voice said, “are we barbarians? I think not. Help our guest to his chair.”

Crum paid no attention to the hands that lifted him by the arms and dumped him onto a seat. Cold, yet giving. Leather upholstery. He was too distracted by his lizard brain screaming about the impossibility of that voice being in this van right now when he had watched it’s owner disappear round the street corner only seconds before. So, he fell back on his training and took a sensory stock take.

The van was humming, the engine vibrations low and subtle. Ready to roll, but not rolling. So, clearly his abduction hadn’t raised any alarms. 

A thin, biting sensation in his wrists suggested his hands were zip tied behind his back, though he didn’t recall the lock’s application. No bother, he could snap it with a single fluid motion any time he chose. Something which he suspected they knew, yet they had gone to the bother of tying him anyway. To piss him off, or as a matter of procedure?

The cloth over his head was soft, breathable blackout material. Another professional touch. This wasn’t their first rodeo. Fortunately, it wasn’t his either.

By the sounds of the movement and breathing in the van, he was dealing with five adversaries. Three in the back, two up front. No need to worry about the two in front. The driver would have his own job, and not deviate from it. If the front passenger had got in there and not in the back, he too must have a separate directive. Which left just the two pairs of hands sandwiching him on the seat, and the owner of the voice, sitting opposite.

Nothing particularly interesting about the temperature, and strangely no discernible smells. In fact, the van smelled of nothing, as though all the odours had been sucked right out of it. Leaving behind a strange electrical charge in the air. Weird.

“Well, remove it,” the voice said, somewhat plaintively. 

The sack slid off his head, revealing a dimly lit interior, more like the inside of a limousine than the gaudy, flower-adorned livery Crum remembered. Disorientation tactics.

Crum blinked slowly, taking his time. He wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction of seeing him on the back foot. His eyes narrowed at the stranger.

“How many of you are there?”

The stranger tipped his head to one side. “Interesting,” he said.

“What do you mean, ‘interesting?’ You left the casino fifteen minutes ago, then again, a couple minutes ago. You were across the street and simultaneously in this van. I figure that’s at least two.”

“I mean,” the stranger smiled, “how people react to impossibilities tells us a lot about them. You didn’t insist I couldn’t be in two places at once, you simply imagined a scenario where that was true. This is exactly what I was talking about, instantaneous reality revision. Very rare in humans,” the stranger addressed the driver, who merely nodded without turning around.

The woman sitting to his left coughed pointedly.

The stranger glanced at her in consternation briefly, then shook his head as if to clear it. “Oh, right,” he said. “Very rare indeed, Now, let us discuss your… predicament.”

“You mean the one where you stole my winnings and set me up to look like a cheat?” Crum growled.

“Come, now, now, now,” the stranger chuckled. “Set you up to look like a cheat? You were cheating, or have you forgotten that part?”

“How did you…?” Crum tailed off, cursing himself for giving too much away. Amateur.

A casual, silencing gesture from the stranger cut him off. "It's not the 'how' you should be concerned with, but the 'why.'”

Crum closed his eyes. Felt a shift in the electrical charge. The woman on his right coughed again. Wait, that wasn’t right. Hadn’t she been…

Crum glanced to his left. At the man sitting with his arms folded across his chest, face a stone facade. He glanced to his right, as the woman who he could have sworn was on his left.

Clearly, they were messing with him. And they knew he’d been cheating because they knew about the device. Apparently had a similar one of their own, which they were using on him to cause this constant shifting sense of bamboozlement.

Crum chose to ignore the relative placement of pawns on the cheeseboard and focus on the king.

Okay, he shrugged, forcing his voice to remain neutral. “So, why?”

The stranger held a long, bony finger to his lips, tapping the tip of his straight, thin nose. “Because you, my boy, are just what I need. But first, let me ask you, you saw it, right? Tonight, and all the others?”

Crum’s eyes narrowed again. Great. He’d been kidnapped by a lunatic. He was about to snap the wrist tie and put an end to this little charade, when an image of the Golden Ticket, flappers, jive bunnies, disco queens and all overlaid and mingling like a kaleidoscope in time, flashed into his mind. 

Tucking this away as just one more thing to ponder later, Crum answered, “Let’s say I did. What of it?”

The stranger’s face lit up with glee, like a kid getting a go-cart on Christmas. “See, time sensitive, too. I told you,” he spoke over his shoulder again. 

The driver nodded without turning around.

“F’Taal, focus,” the woman said. 

“Right, right,” the stranger, what had she called him, F’Taal, waved a hand in the air beside his head.

Crum made small mental adjustments about the power dynamics in the group. F’Taal, was clearly the ringleader, but not in complete control. He was appealing to the driver, and being reined in by the woman. Interesting.

 “So, let’s just say we know. About your friend Yarek, and his mind-control device in your pocket there. About your ill-advised experiment tonight, and it’s consequences. And about many, many other things which I wish I could just tell you now and short-cut the process, but…” he sighed. “Right now, you have a choice. You can get back out of this van with that bag there, and attempt to return it to young Dom there. Return to Yarek with the device and fall on his mercy. I could tell you how that ends, but…rules, amIright?” he laughed conspiratorially.

The man sitting beside gave a long, slow, long-suffering sigh. More of a groan really. F’Taal straightened his face and briefly pulled a face like a child being admonished before his haughty facade returned.

“Ooor?” Crum prompted, beginning to get an inkling of the man’s character. In here, he seemed flighty, distracted. Completely different to the serene, focus stranger he has met in The Golden Ticket. 

“Or, you can seize the say. Step up and be all you can be. Take one for the team. Wait, no that one’s not right, is it?”

The woman leant forward, shaking her head.

“What our esteemed colleague is trying to say,” she interrupted, “ Is that we have a vacancy. And your skillset fits the bill. We’ve been watching you, evaluating certain characteristics, and it seems you match the profile. So, if you want out of your current situation, we can help.”

For the second time tonight, a match struck on Crum’s vagus nerve. 

“Did you set me up?” He asked, glancing from her to F’Taal and back.

“Not exactly,” she smiled. “You didn’t really need our help getting into this mess, now did you? I mean, we have tried a few times intervening earlier, but somehow that always just ends up worse.”

Crum felt as though the van had just turned a violent corner at high speed, despite it not being moving. His throat had gone dry. 

“You mean, with other recruits?” Crum asked.

“No, I think you know what I mean,” the woman said.

This is dumb,” the fed-up man interjected. “We know what happens. Just give him the damn book already. He’ll figure it out.”

“We’re just trying to make the whole thing less of a wrench,” the woman said. 

“Djamon’s right, Sweilagh,” the other man beside the driver said. Just rip off the bandaid. He’ll be okay.”

“You sure?” the woman said.

“I was,” the man in the front seat said. “I mean, it took me a minute, sure. But I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Okay,” Sweilagh said, sitting back. "If.”If that’s how you want it. Here.” 

She held her hand out. A thin card-covered paper booklet had somehow materialised in her hands, and she thrust it towards him. Between it and her thumb rested a business card. Old school.

Crum took them from her.

“Just remember,” F’Taal said, “Desperation can be a powerful motivator. Sometimes, to see your true potential you must be pushed beyond your limits. And you don’t need the device. It’s a crutch.”

“That’s enough,” Sweilagh slid open the van door and stepped out, motioning for Crum to do the same.

“And just because they’re out for your blood, doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid…” F’Taal, who had apparently spun off into a fit of incoherent babbling, continued. Crum tuned him out, and turned his focus back to the woman.

Who wasn’t there. Crum blinked, and looked around, catching sight of the van as it crossed an intersection, running a red light.

Crum shook his head and added it to the list of things to ponder. Preferably over a bottle of something that set the throat on fire and killed a few neurons.

As he set off down the street, he glanced down at the booklet. The New Recruit’s Guide to Time Travel in a Fluxive Universe. Was the only text on the cover, in a thick, black font. Crum thumbed through its pages, filled with dense blocks of fine print, and wondering why they hadn’t just used more pages or stuck the thing on a thumb drive or a chip or something. Dismissing it for now, he tucked the booklet into his pants waistband at his back, and thumbed the business card. It was sleek and metallic. One one side, nothing but an emblem of what looked like a wire-frame lotus flower. On the back the words, “To alter the past, embrace the present.”

Crum shook his head and dropped the card in the same pocket of his pants as the broken device. He would worry about it later. Right now, there was a bottle with his name on it, and Crum wasn’t one to leave a bottle hanging.