He exhaled slowly. "Alright… we're going in."
Rick's eyes flicked to him. "No second thoughts?"
Rod smirked. "Old man, this is the point. All the detours, all the river crap — it was for this."
Rick grunted, but his jaw tightened. Together, they stepped forward, slipping seamlessly into the loop.
The world blinked — and suddenly, they were standing in the real kitchen.
No frozen edges now, no glassy surface.
The air was warm, smelling faintly of rosemary and solder smoke.
Diane turned, and this time she didn't just glance at them.
She saw them.
Her eyes narrowed slightly. "You're not supposed to be here."
Rick swallowed, forcing his voice steady. "Diane… it's me."
She tilted her head. "Which one?"
That landed like a punch. Rick flinched, but Rod stepped forward.
"Doesn't matter which one. What matters is we're here to get you out."
Her gaze moved between them — sharp, assessing.
"You've tried before. Both of you. And you failed. Why should I believe this time will be different?"
Rick spread his hands. "Because this time it's not just me.
And it's not just some brute-force time grab. We're doing this with… precision.
Threading the Planck-time needle, remember?"
Diane's mouth tightened. "I remember you missing the needle."
Rod's tone was calm, but there was steel in it.
"Mom… you've been stuck in this second for decades.
You know it's not life. You know it's a prison. Let us open the door."
Her gaze softened — barely — before hardening again.
"And then what? You pluck me out, drop me into a timeline I don't recognize, tell me it's home?
You think I want to wake up to… this multiverse?"
Rick stepped closer, voice low.
"I don't care where we land you, as long as you're alive to land anywhere."
Rod nodded. "We're not asking you to love it right away.
We're asking you to trust us enough to make that choice later — somewhere outside this loop."
Diane looked between them for a long moment. Then, finally… she exhaled.
"Alright," she said softly. "I'll go with you."
Rick's head dropped forward, a breath of relief escaping him like he'd been holding it for years.
"Holy… holy shit."
Rod actually grinned. "Knew you'd see it our way."
Diane's eyes narrowed, not unkindly.
"Don't make me regret it."
Rick straightened, wiping at his eyes like it was just dust.
"Yeah, yeah, let's… let's get to work."
Rod's tone shifted, businesslike.
"We've got to black you out first. You and Beth both.
Just the mind, not the memories — so you don't fight the pull mid-extraction."
Diane's brow furrowed. "Beth? She's… here?"
Rick's voice caught. "Yeah. The loop's got her too."
Rod flicked his fingers, pulling thin strands of shimmering light from the air — the threadwork of the loop itself.
He twisted them into a tight knot, a sigil that pulsed once, twice, and then dissolved into their palms.
"Alright," Rod said, glancing at Rick. "We lock the exact frame where both of them black out.
No more guessing. We take them together."
Rick nodded, adjusting a device on his wrist — a hybrid of portal stabilizer and soul tuner.
"We sync on my mark. Three…"
The loop slowed, the explosion's flare dimming to a candle flicker.
Diane's form shimmered, Beth's faint outline flickering into place just behind her like she was walking into the scene.
"…Two…"
The air thickened, the kitchen walls trembling as if they knew what was coming.
"…One."
Both Diane and Beth froze mid-breath — eyes closing, bodies relaxing into the blackout state.
Their souls flickered faintly in the air above them, untethered but still anchored to the moment.
Rod grinned, the blue-gold light flaring around his hands. "Got 'em."
Rick's own aura pulsed in sync. "Then let's pull."
Rod's hands moved in a blur, pulling new strands from the air — each thread humming like a taut guitar string.
He wove them together into a compact knot and pushed it into the frozen space between Diane and Beth's suspended forms.
The knot pulsed once, then stretched into a thin golden ring, hovering around them like a halo.
"That's the lock," Rod said, voice sharp with focus.
"Loop will keep cycling, and when it hits this frame, it'll stall here until we're ready to extract."
Rick glanced at his wrist device, tapping out a sync pattern.
"I'm setting a failsafe so if the loop degrades, it pings us no matter where we are.
You know, in case this thing decides to eat itself while we're gone."
Rod smirked without looking up. "You're learning to trust my work, old man."
Rick snorted. "I trust it just enough to have an emergency eject."
Before Rod could reply, the kitchen lights flickered — not the actual lights, but the light of the loop itself.
The air grew heavier, the smell of ozone seeping in from the corners.
Rick's eyes darted to the edges of the moment. "Uh… I think the river just realized we tagged its prize."
The walls began to ripple, bending like soft plastic.
Beyond them, the shimmering currents of the River of Time surged, slamming against the loop's boundary like a storm tide.
Rod's tone shifted instantly. "We're out. Now."
They both stepped back toward the glassy seam that connected the loop to the river.
The seam was already thinning, golden cracks running through it.
Rick frowned. "It's trying to collapse the bridge before we can—"
"—Then move," Rod snapped, flicking his wrist. The seam flared, widening just enough for them to slip through.
The instant their boots hit the glass surface of the river, the kitchen behind them imploded into light, sucked backward into the current.
The halo-ring lock remained intact, spinning slowly as it sank into the stream.
Rick risked a glance back. "If that thing drifts too far…"
Rod shook his head. "It won't. I tied it to C-137's core anchor.
It's not going anywhere unless we want it to."
The river roared louder now, the currents surging against their legs like it wanted to drag them into every other possible version of this moment.
Rick swore under his breath. "It's pissed."
Rod flicked through another set of hand signs, faster this time, and a slit of raw white light tore open ahead of them — their exit point.
Rick eyed the chaotic water around them. "That's… not gonna destabilize our bodies back home, right?"
Rod smirked. "It's either that or let the river eat us. Pick one."
Rick grunted. "Yeah, fine, white hole it is."
Together, they stepped into the light.
The river's roar cut off instantly, replaced by the hollow silence of the space between moments.
Then came the slow pull, the familiar tether of their real-world bodies reeling them in.
Rod's voice carried across the void. "Next time we open our eyes… we move fast. No hesitation."
Rick nodded. "Yeah. We've got 'em on the hook — now all we gotta do is yank 'em out."
The light collapsed, and they were gone.
- - - - - - - - - -
The river didn't make leaving easy.It never did.
Instead of spitting them back toward their bodies, the current shoved the other way, trying to drag them deeper into the mess of branches.
Every step forward felt like walking against a tidal wave made of every bad decision they'd ever made.
Rick grunted, bracing himself against the force.
"This is worse than coming in. At least on the way down we had momentum.
Now it's like the river's doing that passive-aggressive thing where it pretends it's not mad but also won't let you leave."
Rod scanned the shifting currents. "Forget the drama. We need the worm."
Rick groaned. "Yeah, the temporal hitchhiker-slash-Uber that got us here. Great."
They leapt from branch to branch, each one a blur of alien skies, ruined cities, or quiet homes that could've been theirs in another roll of the cosmic dice.
Time here was liquid, and every leap landed them in a different point of it.
Rod stopped on a narrow stretch of glassy water, scanning the depths.
"It won't be where we left it. The worm doesn't stay still — it rides probability eddies. We've gotta catch the right pass."
A distant rumble cut through the river's roar. Rick's eyes narrowed.
"Tell me that's not it."
The surface ahead broke — a serpentine head rising, scales shifting in color like oil on water. Its many eyes flicked in different directions before locking on them.
Rod smirked. "That's it."
Rick groaned. "Of course it looks like something that crawled out of my hangover nightmares."
The worm surged forward, splitting currents as it came.
They timed their jump perfectly, landing on the creature's back as it breached another branch.
The instant their boots hit, the river's pull shifted — not dragging them down anymore, but slingshotting them upstream.
Rick held tight to a ridge in the worm's carapace. "You sure this thing remembers where our bodies are?"
Rod's grip was steady. "
It doesn't have to remember. I anchored our re-entry point to our quantum signatures. The worm just follows the trail."
The current around them blurred into streaks of color, leaping backward through the moments they'd crossed before.
The kitchen. The Citadel. Diane's shadowed smile.
Each one whipped past in reverse until there was nothing left but the white light of the tether home.
The worm dove straight into it.
Rick's eyes snapped open. The familiar ache of a body reoccupied slammed into him — lungs dragging in air, hands twitching as if they still felt the river's pull.
Rod's own eyes flared gold for a second before settling.
He was already moving, heading straight for the workbench.
Rick groaned, dragging himself upright. "Omega+1 first?"
Rod was already pulling the machine's segmented casing open, checking its core.
"Omega+1 always first. Then the splice anchors. We're going to cut a wedge into the loop's wall the instant it aligns."
Rick grabbed a pair of stabilizer pylons, tossing one to Rod.
"Just like before. Big shiny machine, absurdly high stakes, and probably one of us dies if we sneeze wrong."
Rod smirked without looking up.
"Difference is, this time we're pulling two people, not one. And the river already knows our faces."
Cables were dragged across the floor, monitors snapped to life, and the Omega+1 began its deep, resonant hum.
Lights crawled along its surface, each pulse synced to the loop's rhythm in C-137.
Rick tightened a final bolt, glancing at the readouts.
"We've got… maybe twelve minutes before the loop starts flexing against our lock. That's our window."
Rod's grin was razor-sharp. "Plenty of time… if you stop talking."
Rick smirked. "You wish."
The machines whined higher, their combined energy making the air taste like metal.
Somewhere deep inside the Omega+1, the splice algorithms began their countdown.
Soon, the river wouldn't just feel them again — it would see them.
The Omega+1's hum deepened into a bone-shaking growl, the kind of sound that didn't just vibrate the air but rattled inside your ribs.
Monitors flashed red and gold in alternating pulses — the river's color signature mapped against the C-137 loop.
Rod's eyes flicked over the readings. "We're close. Splice alignment at 87%… 92%… hold it steady."
Rick tightened the final stabilizer pylon, his hair standing on end from the static.
"This is steady. My hands are steady. My heart rate, not so much."
The Omega+1's top array unfolded like a steel lotus, each petal lined with tiny shifting glyphs.
At its center, a sphere of light began to twist — not spinning, but turning inside out, layer by layer.
Rod glanced at him. "On the next cycle, it punches straight into the locked frame.
Once the hole opens, we anchor Diane and Beth's quantum signatures and yank them through."
Rick's smirk was thin. "Right. Easy-peasy multiversal soul heist."
The machine let out a sharp crack, and reality in the center of the lab folded inward — a perfect tear in the air, leading not into darkness, but into the warm, flickering kitchen of C-137.
For one frozen second, it was exactly as they'd left it: Diane and Beth, blacked out mid-step, the golden halo spinning lazily around them.
Then the lights in the lab flickered.
Rod's head snapped toward the tear. "Shit."
A low, rolling sound seeped in — not from the portal, but from the walls themselves. It was the same hum they'd heard inside the river, now vibrating through their reality.
Rick's eyes narrowed. "Oh, no-no-no. It followed us home."
The air over the floor warped, bending like heat haze.
Colors bled upward, pooling into shapes — long, fluid tendrils made of liquid light, each one pulsing with thousands of tiny images.
Birthdays. Deaths. Battles. Futures that had never happened.
Rod's aura flared blue-gold instantly.
"The river's manifesting. It's trying to smother the breach before we pull."
One tendril lashed toward the Omega+1.
Rick grabbed a pulse cutter from the bench and fired a white-hot beam into it, slicing the strand clean through.
The severed piece hit the floor, splattering into fragments of someone else's lifetime.
Rick grimaced. "That's wrong in ways I don't have time to unpack."
More tendrils forced their way through the walls — each one moving differently, some darting fast, others slow and serpentine.
They weren't just attacking the machine — they were reaching for the portal.
Rod leapt between them and the breach, his hands weaving sharp, defensive signs.
"Hold the line! The splice can't close yet!"
The Omega+1's sphere brightened to near-blinding, the glyphs spinning faster.
The halo around Diane and Beth began to flicker — a sign that the tether was starting to engage.
A tendril shot past Rod, nearly reaching the portal. Rick slammed his shoulder into the stabilizer pylon, redirecting its beam to burn the tendril into vapor.
Rod didn't look back. "Seventy seconds! Keep them off the aperture!"
Rick snarled. "Seventy seconds? You couldn't have led with that?!"
The river's presence thickened, more tendrils pouring in, twisting the very geometry of the lab — shelves elongating, tools bending, the floor rippling like liquid glass underfoot.
Rick and Rod moved in sync — one blasting, the other weaving shields of light — as the Omega+1 pushed toward full sync.
Finally, the readout screamed: ANCHOR LOCKED.
Rod's eyes flashed gold. "We're in! Now we—"
The largest tendril yet slammed down between them and the machine, its surface reflecting their own faces from a dozen timelines.
Each reflection mouthed something different — accusations, pleas, insults — all at once.
Rick's jaw clenched. "That's… really not gonna work on me."
Rod's grin was fierce. "Then let's cut it down."
The massive tendril pulsed, its mirrored skin cycling through timelines faster and faster until it was just a strobe of infinite versions of Rick and Rod — some victorious, some broken, some dead.
Rod's fingers blazed through a new set of signs, his aura flaring brighter than before.
"We cut it clean or it'll just regenerate."
Rick gritted his teeth, flipping the pulse cutter to its overcharge mode.
"You take the metaphysical side, I'll take the 'make it explode' side."
The tendril whipped downward, splintering the floor into jagged glass-like shards that floated midair.
The lab shuddered, metal groaning as if gravity itself was arguing about which way was down.
Rod slammed his palms together, the blue-gold light condensing into a blade that hummed like a tuning fork. "Go!"
Rick and Rod moved as one — Rick diving low, carving through the base with a beam so hot it left a vacuum trail in the air, Rod striking high with his energy blade, slicing through the timelines embedded in the tendril like they were strands of film.
The tendril shrieked — not in sound, but in memory.
A flood of voices and images burst from it: Diane's laugh, Beth's tears, a thousand futures they could never have.
"Keep cutting!" Rod yelled, forcing his blade deeper until it hit the core — a knot of pure, spinning time, thrashing like a live animal.
Rick's beam hit it an instant later. The knot imploded in a flash of white, the entire tendril shattering into liquid fragments that rained across the lab before dissolving into nothing.
For one breath, there was silence.
Then the River of Time screamed.
The portal to C-137's locked frame flared violently, the halo around Diane and Beth spinning so fast it blurred.
From every surface in the lab — walls, floor, even the air itself — new tendrils began forcing their way in.
Some were thin and whip-like, others thick as columns, all moving with a desperate, violent urgency.
Rod swore under his breath. "It's dumping everything it's got."
Rick's hands flew across the Omega+1's control panel, redirecting power to the stabilizers.
"We can hold it — but not forever!"
The largest tendril yet slammed into the stabilizer pylon, denting the metal with a sound like cracking ice.
Sparks showered the floor, and one of the monitors exploded in a burst of static.
Rod's aura flared wide, wrapping the Omega+1 in a shimmering shell.
"Focus on keeping the aperture stable! I'll handle crowd control!"
He launched himself into the writhing mass, every movement carving through the river's manifestations, each strike scattering shards of fractured time into the air.
Rick worked furiously, fingers flying over controls, keeping the locked frame's image steady even as the river tried to overwrite it with false versions — kitchens where Diane was gone, Beth was older, or neither existed at all.
"Rod!" Rick shouted over the chaos. "We can't start the pull until we get a thirty-second stability window!"
Rod's voice came back hard and fast. "Then you better get ready to make one!"
The River's pressure surged again, tendrils pounding against the lab's reality like a battering ram.
The lab was a storm.
Metal screamed. Monitors died in bursts of static. The River's tendrils hammered at the walls with the relentless rhythm of a war drum.
Rick hunched over the Omega+1's console, his eyes darting between three different data streams — aperture integrity, loop stability, and signature fidelity.
"We're slipping under 90% lock! If it drops below 80, we lose the real Diane and Beth and start pulling whatever the hell the river wants us to grab!"
Rod landed hard beside him, his aura blazing wide enough to scorch the edges of the floor.
"Then you hold the lock. I'll shut the door."
Before Rick could argue, Rod spun into a new sequence of signs — larger, more violent motions that tore arcs of blue-gold light into the air.
Each completed pattern snapped closed like a seal, slamming over one of the tendril entry points.
The River responded with fury, the sealed points bulging and pulsing as if trying to burst back open. Rod didn't stop.
"Thirty seconds, Rick! That's all we need!"
Rick's fingers flew over the console, locking the Omega+1's focus tighter on the real halo-frame.
Every flicker, every false overlay from the river was stripped away, until only the true image remained: Diane and Beth, perfectly frozen in their blackout moment.
The machine's hum deepened, stabilizer beams narrowing into razor-thin columns of light that pinned the frame in place like specimen glass.
Rod sealed the last breach with a slam of both palms, his aura flaring so bright it cast shadows that didn't match their owners.
"That's it — the river's boxed in!"
Rick risked a glance at the readout. The stability timer began its slow, precious countdown from 30.
"We've got our window."
Rod exhaled once, then pointed at him.
"While we've got it, start prepping the replacements."
Rick's head jerked up. "Now? We're not even—"
"Now," Rod cut in. "We can't equalize causality after the pull. It's gotta be seamless — they vanish, the clones slip in, and the loop thinks nothing changed.
No paradox, no ripple. We walk away clean."
Rick swore under his breath, but he knew Rod was right. "Fine."
He darted to the far side of the lab, unlocking a reinforced cabinet. Inside, two life-sized forms waited in stasis — perfect bio-sculpted replicas of Diane and Beth, right down to the molecular patterns of their skin, hair, and scent.
Their eyes were closed, chests rising and falling in a slow simulation of sleep.
Rick tapped a sequence into the control pad, the clones' neural lattices beginning to warm up.
"Equalizer field's preloading. Once they're in place, even a time god won't see the join."
Rod grinned without humor. "Good. Then when we pull the real ones, the river's got nothing to bite."
The stability timer hit 18 seconds. The walls still shook under the River's assault, but the seals held — for now.
Rick returned to the console, eyes locked on the countdown. "Alright, we've got one shot at this.
When that clock hits zero, we move straight to extraction."
Rod's aura flickered once, a low pulse of readiness. "Then let's make sure it hits zero."
- - - - - - - - - -
Do you get any of that?
FYI guys, I'm still struggling to find the perfect image of Rod :(
Have some idea to my story? Comment it and leave a review!
That's all, peace!