The calm shattered on the third night. They were just settling in when the first flash of aurora painted the sky in eerie greens and purples. The wind picked up, howling through the cracks of the house.
Miracle barked wildly, and the cat hissed, arching its back. “What now?” Jas muttered, running to the window.
Outside, mini-tornadoes spun like drunken dancers, kicking up debris. Inside, the monitors they’d ignored for days sprang to life. One screen played Can’t Always Get What You Want by the Rolling Stones, the grainy footage of an old concert looping. Another showed Janis Joplin singing Mercedes Benz, her raspy voice eerily fitting the moment.
But something felt off. Ivy Mae’s heart skipped a beat as she watched—these weren’t just old clips. They were from a time she’d lived through, some of them intimately. The Berlin Wall falling. Civil rights marches. The moon landing. The stock market crashing amid U.S. tariffs, the first whispers of a future still unfolding in her mind.
But then it got darker. Elon Musk’s infamous Nazi salute. Protests erupting. Boycotts everywhere, spreading across the globe like wildfire. Canadians refusing to visit or do business with the U.S. Mass deportations. Dark times.
The flickering footage seemed too real, too vivid. The chaos, the confusion—it all felt too close. She could almost feel the weight of those events pressing down on her, like they were happening right then and there, not in the past.
“What the hell is going on?” Roman shouted over the chaos.
Ivy Mae pointed at a monitor displaying a ticker: Good vs. Evil. Choose your side. Beneath it, another message flashed: Time is slipping. Can you see the truth?
Jas shook their head, eyes wide with disbelief. “This is crazy. These are moments from the past! From decades ago!”
Before anyone could answer, the wind howled louder, rattling the walls, and the screens went black. The storm outside intensified, almost as if it was feeding off the aurora’s strange magnetic pull. The house trembled, the very foundation of their world uncertain.
And then there was the strange surge in the air, almost as if the auroras were channeling something deeper—something beyond the usual electromagnetic interference. A surge of power, not just through the electronics, but through them as well.
Everything had gone silent. But it was a silence that felt wrong. A hollow pause in the fabric of time.
Ivy Mae shivered. They weren’t just watching history. They were living it again. Or, at least, seeing it like it was happening for the first time... like everything they saw was in the past, but only now, with no way to interact. No way to change it.
The storm raged outside, but in their hearts, they felt the eerie pulse of something deeper—something funky, a tear in time itself.