They sat on the edge of the table, looking at him.

"I still can’t believe it’s really you, girls. I never thought I was going to see you again…" He waved at the mess on the table.

"And you’ve been trying to make us again ever since." Blossom finished the thought for him. "But Professor, what happened?!"

"We know what happened, Blossom. The time thingie got messed up. That’s why you’re so old." Buttercup said. "Right, Professor?"

He blinked in confusion. "Time thingie? Oh yes, the time portal…but that was so long ago. I’d forgotten all about it." His eyes flashed. "I must see if it still works!"

He started to get up, but Blossom jumped up quicker and gently pushed him back into his seat. "Please, Professor, tell us what happened."

"You happened, girls. Or rather, you didn’t happen."

Three cries of "What?!" greeted him.

He sighed. "I’m sorry, girls, my mind is obviously not what it once was. Please bear with me."

They nodded.

"The day we were going to take that trip to the Bahamas?"

"Yeah?" Buttercup said. "The car’s still packed, but it looks like it’s been sitting there forever."

"You saw it?" he asked in surprise. "What else have you seen?"

"The rest of the house, and it’s all a big mess." Bubbles said quickly.

"That’s it? Nothing else?" It didn’t make sense to him.

"No, Professor." Blossom replied. "What’s going on?" she said, more insistently this time.

"I think then maybe you’d better explain where you’ve been all this time. You never came home from school that day."

Shocked, they looked at each other. "We did too!"

"Professor, we only left there a little while before we got here!" Blossom said, a bit defensively.

"Easy, Blossom. I’m not angry with you. Something obviously has happened to the space-time continuum, and to help me make some sense of it, I want you girls to tell me exactly what happened to you."

They told him. When they were through, he sat there quietly rubbing the stubble on his ancient jaw.

"Professor?" Blossom prompted.

He looked up. "Well…some of it makes sense…it is theoretically possible to travel so fast that a rip in the fabric of time occurs, allowing objects to slip into the future."

"That’s not what Ms. Keane said. She said that as you approach the speed of light, the distance between two points shrinks to zero and that means whatever is going that fast ends up in the future because everything else is kinda standing still, including time."

Bubbles was out of breath when she concluded her recitation of the lesson. Her sisters stared at her.

"Bubbles, you actually listened to that?" Blossom asked.

"Yes." she replied icily, her arms crossed. "Didn’t you?"

"Duh, noooo!" Buttercup snorted. "Geesh."

"Bubbles," the professor said softly. "I’m happy to see that you’re paying attention in class…"

He cast a slight disapproving look at the other two. Then he slapped his knee.

"But that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Hahahahaha!!!"

"Huh?"

"Girls, light travels at the speed of light! If what Ms. Keane says were true, we would age every time we threw the light switch! Maybe she should stick to the three R’s and leave quantum mechanics to the experts."

"I’m glad to hear that, Professor!" Blossom exclaimed. "If that’s how you got to the future, you’d never be able to go back. You can’t just fly backward."

"Yeah, if you did, you’d just keep going even farther into the future only you’d land on your butt instead of your face, right Bubbles?" Buttercup snickered. Blossom joined her and Bubbles shot them both a dirty look.

The professor got their attention again. "Girls, whatever got you here is pointless. We have to get you back to your own time."

"Where exactly are we?" Blossom asked. "Or, maybe I should say, when?"

"I don’t really know, Blossom. My atomic clock was broken during the …the troubles. I started keeping track in my journals, but I lost track when my mind began to slip…If I had to guess, and I guess I do, I’d day forty-five, fifty years."

"Whoa!"

"So how do we rip time again so we can go back?" Bubbles wondered.

"We don’t. Since time only moves forward, you would only be able to go forward through a rip. The only way back is across the fifth dimension with the time portal. Let’s go see if it’s still working. If it’s not, girls, then there’s no hope…"