you’re not, like, proud of your cooking. it’s just a thing you were forced to do for nine years and have gotten pretty proficient at. you’re just lucky it’s convenient.
you make a week’s worth of heaping helpings. steamed pork buns, fat soup dumplings, spring rolls. all the fixings. you even spend way more time than necessary baking homemade fortune cookies. you don’t write any fortunes for him though. you’re literally from the future, so that feels like cheating.
you finish off with a ton of rice–no, seriously, probably like a metric ton– and pile all the food on the floor of your weird buddhist-hellenist-fusion-style temple. this is a lot of takeout. good thing you still have an alchemiter to make some huge plastic Tupperware™.
alex and zack find you, eventually, in the remote spot in the forest. they both look not so super thrilled to be here, which is fine. you make a mock bow and ignore zack’s complaints about how much food there is to carry. more carrying means less corn eating. you also ignore the note alex slips discreetly into the pile. if they want to contribute one piece of paper to your pile of food, that’s fine.
“cool. my part’s done.” you turn to leave, trusting that they’ll come up with something without you.
You’re still nervous about potentially popping time bubbles, but Zack said it was cool and he’s the closest expert around. It was likely better to send in some food rather than a person, both because you’re not sure how this will work and because food is less likely to doom a timeline. Probably.
Taking the necklace off, you close your eyes and think of exactly where you’re sending this stuff, then flip the charm into the air like a coin as you smile.
The portal opens as normal, growing outward from the quarter-sized dream catcher and swirling with soft white light, speckled with colors constantly swirling in motion. Every now and then there’s a greenish-yellow electric streak that makes Zack frown.
You step back, making room for your brother’s part. He gives you a look then lifts his hands uncertainly. With a bit of focus, the portal changes, the soft white turning into more of a swirled red. The many colors are there, as is the lightening, but they’re sluggishly slow now and harder to pick out of the darker light. It was… Unnerving to you. Looking back at Zack, all he does is glance at you with glowing red eyes.
“You just gonna stand there or what?”
You were not just going to stand there. You start delivering the goods into the portal, like loading a food truck, except the back of the truck was a time-and-space bending magic portal to the outside of the universe.
It didn’t take too long before all the food (and a quick “love” note) was delivered to Jave, several months in the past and a reality away.
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