by Jemima Pett
Chapter 13: A Question of Timing
In which Hugo (or Mariusz?) makes a pragmatic decision
Fred and George squeezed together to look out of the window. Their room was near the top of one of the towers, and it was larger than the cubbyhole that backed onto Uncle Vlad’s fireplace, but smaller than just about anywhere else they’d lived. Baden had a room of his own just across the way, but otherwise they were alone. Princelings in Vexstein were not highly ranked; in fact, they were lucky they hadn’t been put into a dormitory with all the family princelings, although they’d passed it on their way up to this room.
They had caught up with each other’s adventures and were now watching the shadow of the morning sun sweeping across the plains as it rose higher behind the mountains. George reckoned it would take at least another hour to get to their window, by which time Prince Lupin would probably be back from his run and they could all have breakfast.
“I still think we ought to get Hugo, or Mariusz - do you really think they are the same person - to go for the ordinary export option. But the time tunnel won’t be working, so how?”
George paused a bit before he replied, slowly as if still working something out. “He doesn’t actually need the time tunnel to export to us; he would just be exporting to us in 2021 or whatever the year is. That would mean continuous production of Wozna, and no change in his income. The only people who would miss out are us, as we wouldn’t have Wozna at all for, what is it, twelve years.”
“That’s no loss,” they said in unison, and they laughed together. Then they just laughed because they were back together which made them feel they could do anything and it would work.
“It’s a shame about that strawberry juice power though,” said Fred. “It would be very useful and make up for all the drained Energy.”
“Yeah, well, I could make a machine to run on it easily enough,” said George, “but it would be using advanced technology from the future and I would endanger the timeline. Time’s far too funny a thing to risk tampering with it,” and he sighed.
They returned to gazing out of the window until they saw the figure of Prince Lupin coming round a crag on the mountain trail, headed back towards the castle.
“Good, that means breakfast in, what d’you reckon, twenty minutes?” Fred asked.
“Give him half an hour,” replied George, but they got up and started to get ready all the same, and went down to the courtyard to see what was going on.