“Pipaluk! Lunch is ready!”
The little man bent over his desk didn’t hear his wife’s call. He was frowning at a series of complicated formulas spread across several whiteboards and blackboards while his pen doodled freely on a sticky note. Its cartoon sketches made more sense than the jumble of letters, numbers, and glyphs before him.
“You’re wasting those,” a paperclip chided in its squeaky voice.
The pen dropped dispiritedly to the desk.
“It’s fine,” Pipaluk muttered, waving a hand absentmindedly. “I don’t know what I’m doing, anyway.” He sighed and slumped back in his chair, removing his thick, round glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose. “I can’t think here.”
“Pipaluk! Lunch!”
“You’ll get it,” his pen said encouragingly, hopping onto its tip again and adding a smiley face to the spikey-haired cartoon man on the sticky note. “You always do.”
“Although if you could do it without an explosion this time, I’d appreciate it,” added his first-aid kit. “That last one left a lot of casualties, and Band Aids don’t work well on objects.”
“I still have burns,” the china cabinet said sadly.
“I know, I know…”
Pipaluk sighed and replaced his glasses. His new laboratory was as spacious as his last one, but it was also colder. That came with living in the North Pole, of course. He’d gotten used to the much warmer Nebraska climate. Aside from adding defrosters to his glasses, he hadn’t invented a single thing in the seven months since his family moved back to the Arctic.
If this kept up, he’d have to find something else to do. Maybe take up an actual profession.
“Pipaluk!”
He jumped in his chair at the shout in his ear. His wife Emma stood next to him, hands on hips, lips pursed, chocolate-brown eyes narrowed in frustration.
“Oh, h-hi, h-honey,” Pipaluk stammered. “Did I…miss something?”
“Not yet, and I’m not letting you miss lunch again today. Come on.”
He trudged up the stairs after her, sighing heavily again. Maybe it was the subject. There was a reason nobody had successfully built a time machine, after all. It was hard. Possibly impossible. And definitely controversial, since the risk of succeeding and then altering history drastically with a single apparently minor disruption to the past was very real.
Everybody told him he couldn’t do it, and he shouldn’t do it. Everybody.
But after bolting his lunch, he was back at his desk, puzzling over the formulas again.
If he could do it—if he could go back in time and stop Lily from ever meeting that raccoon—then Emma would stop blaming herself for misjudging its character and inviting it into Lily’s home. Then Lily wouldn’t have to live with Pipaluk’s family, too scared to be alone.
Then that entire tragedy with Boris’ attempted murder and Lily’s arrest wouldn’t have happened.
“Need a little help?”
He jumped in his chair for the second time that day, but this time, the voice didn’t belong to his wife or any of his past experiments. It belonged to a tall woman with slate gray hair and wispy black-veined wings.
“You’re back,” he gasped.
She smiled. He knew that, although he couldn’t quite make out her face. It was as though a grey fog hid it from him, a grey fog that became more solid over her slender body to drape her in an airy dress and more dense between the black veins to form the smokey wings.
“Here.”
She handed him four vials, three of them filled with objects he recognized: grey scales, grey dust, grey hair. Key ingredients in the potion he’d invented to restore Lily’s magic when she overexerted herself. But a thin clear substance filled the fourth vial, sloshing against the glass walls when he tilted it slightly.
“What is this?” he asked, studying it from every angle.
“H2O.”
His head snapped up to look at her again. “Water?”
“Well, not strictly ‘water,’” she explained. “Its origin is a place out of mortal reach. You can use it once, and only once. I cannot supply you with more. You wouldn’t believe all the paperwork I had to do just to give you that small amount.”
“So…it’s okay for me to make a time machine?” he asked hesitantly, returning his attention to the immortal water.
She didn’t reply.
He looked up, and she was gone. Not a trace of her in the laboratory, aside from the four vials she gave him.
The four vials and a headful of ideas.
He worked the rest of the afternoon and on into the night. Emma probably called him for dinner, and then bedtime, but he didn’t hear her, and if she came to get him, she must have given up. There was no stopping him when he had hit on a solution.
The formulas became more elaborate, the sketches more abstract, the laboratory more cluttered. The feather duster and broom were complaining. His pen was cheering him on. His calculator was muttering about bad math.
And then it was done.
“What the heck is that?” the Rubik’s cube asked, uncharacteristically confused.
“That,” Pipaluk said proudly, beaming at the mass of metal, wood and sparkling gray magic, “is an urglegaburblezoombler.”
“A what?” echoed a chaotic chorus of metallic, plastic, wooden, squeaky, scratchy, and otherwise discordant voices.
“How do you spell that?” asked his pen.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. Now, I insert the vial of water here, and—”
The world ripped away from him. He was in a void of darkness, blacker than black, more silent than silence, holding the device and staring around at the nothingness.
“That was fast.”
A click from the urglegaburblezoombler sounded, deafeningly loud, and bright lights appeared in the darkness like stars, zipping past him almost too quickly for him to make out any details. People, places, objects, set in times he recognized and times he didn’t. An elaborate ball in the European Middle Ages, samurai battling in the Japanese Sengoku period, Moses parting the Red Sea, in no logical order.
Was that him, flushing his son’s dead goldfish down a toilet?
How did he pick one day and jump into it?
Were those aliens?
As Santa’s elf, he was well-versed in the various species and races inhabiting planet Earth, but that wasn’t one of them. Were those…people…living in an active volcano? Was that a flying shark? Wait—that was Emma with another man! And those kids were not Pipaluk’s Bobby and Sue!
“Focus,” he reminded himself. “This is a rip in the space-time continuum. It's not my reality, and I can’t let it distract me. I want the night that raccoon ended up on Lily’s doorstep.”
The blackness ripped away with a suddenness that made his stomach jolt. He was on Lily’s front porch, shivering in the frigid cold and looking out at the ice snow globe she’d created to seal herself away from the world. A blanket of white covered the ground; icicles hung from the eaves.
And a raccoon stared up at him from a cardboard box.
“You!” Pipaluk pointed an accusatory finger at the raccoon. “I don’t know who you are, or what you are, but you need to go away! I won’t let you mess Lily’s life up again!”
Its whiskers twitched. It flicked a brown-furred ear.
Wendy sent you, didn’t she?
Pipaluk’s pink eyes widened. “Are you in my head?”
No. I’m just talking directly to your mind. What is that? The raccoon nodded its head toward the device still clutched in Pipaluk’s hands.
“Oh, it’s an urglegaburblezoombler,” Pipaluk replied, looking down at it. There was still water in the vial.
Who do you think you are? Dr. Seuss?
“I…I don’t know! It just came to me, all right? But wait. We’re not having a conversation here! You need to leave!”
The raccoon climbed out of the box and trundled up to Pipaluk. It sat on its haunches in front of him, swishing its black and brown striped tail back and forth. Studying him. Studying the device.
The silence stretched into awkwardness.
“Um…what are you doing?”
The raccoon’s black eyes flashed purple. It reached a paw out to Pipaluk before he could react, touching his heavy work boots, and the world ripped away again.
Sort of.
Pipaluk and the raccoon were still there, on Lily’s front porch, watching time pass at high speed, watching people move in and out of them as though they weren’t there. Because they weren’t. Boris arrived; Lily woke up long enough to eject him out of the snow globe before she passed out; Emma and the raccoon dragged Lily inside. Day turned into night and dawned again, and when the light faded a second time, time stopped.
Follow me.
Pipaluk looked down at the device. Only a little water left.
He followed the raccoon inside.
The icy hall was dark. Another raccoon padded past them toward the kitchen, casting them a sideways glance as they went to the living room. Pipaluk’s stomach was churning. This was when it happened. When the raccoon used Lily’s enchantment, which it had tainted, to attack Boris. It was about to happen.
You can’t believe your eyes.
“Well, what am I supposed to believe?” Pipaluk demanded.
The raccoon sat in front of the frozen-over fireplace. Pipaluk stood next to him, shuffling nervously from foot to foot. The other raccoon returned, an egg roll clutched between its teeth. It clambered onto the sofa and sat down, looking at them.
Now, it said.
Thought?
Pipaluk wasn’t sure. Nor was he sure how he could distinguish the voice of one raccoon from the other when they sounded the same, but he could.
The one sitting next to him tugged on his lab coat, and a fog appeared in the fireplace. Suddenly, it was sucking them in, Pipaluk and the raccoon, yanking them through a haze to tumble onto the floor of an icy bedroom.
“What is going on?” Pipaluk exclaimed, picking himself up and looking around.
This is Boris’ bedroom. Stand right there and do not move. Or scream. If you do, the world ends.
Pipaluk opened his mouth to reply, but the raccoon was gone. In its place was a skull, not quite human, hovering above the floor and lit from within by a fog of purple and pink. His legs nearly gave out. The dull bronze orbs in the weathered yellow sockets turned their attention to the sleeping snow warlock, and Pipaluk couldn’t have screamed if he wanted to. This was a nightmare, and he couldn’t do a thing about it.
He caught movement from the corner of his eye. Something black and indistinct, smaller than the raccoon had been, slinking along the floor toward the bed. Cold terror gripped Pipaluk’s heart in a vise.
You can’t have him.
It happened so quickly. The blackness launched itself at Boris before the skull’s last word echoed through Pipaluk’s mind, just as the lasso shot out of the ice bookmark on the nightstand and bronze chains shot out of the skull’s hoop earrings. The rope won the race to Boris’ throat; the metal wrapped around the blackness and yanked it away. It was hissing and writhing; Boris was thrashing about, clawing at the rope around his neck; and Pipaluk stood paralyzed, watching it all in horror.
The chains tightened, splitting the blackness in two as it let loose a blood-curdling shriek. It vanished, and the chains changed course, wrapping around the length of rope that stretched from the bookmark, engulfing it in a purple light. Boris fell back against the bed, his strength nearly gone, and the lasso fell away. He gasped for breath, the only sound in the eerie silence. The lasso unwound itself from him and slithered back into the bookmark.
The skull was gone.
Pipaluk stood perfectly still, his heart pounding out of his chest. He swallowed, forcing saliva into his dry mouth, and looked down at the urglegaburblezoombler.
The water was gone.
And then he was gone.
And the laboratory was back. As was the raccoon, sitting on Pipaluk’s desk, twitching its whiskers.
“What…was all that?” Pipaluk croaked.
Proof that I didn’t betray Lily. I’ll tell her myself when I can, but I’d like you to give her this.
He nodded at a Chinese food menu on the desk. A bright red circle marked the Peking duck, and beneath it, scribbled in nearly illegible handwriting, were the words, “I’m buying next time. –Mr. Raccoon.”
“What does this…”
Pipaluk’s voice trailed off as he looked up and realized the raccoon was gone.
“So…it could have been worse?” he wondered aloud.
“Pipaluk?”
Emma was descending the stairs, dressed in her pink bunny slippers and her baby blue housecoat, her face covered in green cream and her brown hair in curlers.
“It’s really late, Pipaluk, and—”
The image of her kissing another elf flashed through Pipaluk’s mind. He dropped the urglegaburblezoombler on the desk and ran to her, surprising her with his fierce embrace.
“Um, Pipaluk?”
“I love you, Emma,” he said fervently, kissing her cream-covered cheek.
She sighed and wrapped her arms around him. “And I love you, you, you crazy mad scientist, you. Now, come to bed. It’s late. Your project can wait until tomorrow.”
He smiled and squeezed her tighter. Tomorrow, he would start on the self-sorting shoe storage she’d been asking about. He’d made a time machine, after all. Shoes couldn’t be that hard.15Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡNQCj7NvTFt
Date of creation: 02/20/2025
Word count: 2,234
Author’s note: The prompt was to write a short story in the speculative fiction genre including the following six elements: a world in danger, a mysterious visitor, H2O, a rip in the space-time continuum, the ultimate urglegaburblezoombler, and a happy end. There were no word count restrictions.15Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJ7ViEHmWII
Author’s note: And that’s the last prompt from The Fabulous Spec-Fic Smack Down. So…it’s time for a facelift! New title, new cover, new story description—it’s time for this to stop being a book I wrote for a contest and just be a book. I’ll also add an intro chapter about its origins and quirks, and to keep it going, I’ll look into other prompt-based contests. Or just plain ol’ prompts. Who knows? I never do with this story, and that’s all the fun.
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