The barber shop door seemed to unlock and then swing open on its own. The time hoppers reappeared inside the building and Kashton returned the key to its drawer.
"Nothing like traveling through time and building the time machine on the way." Zaman leaned in studying his work as he replaced the faulty apparatus, then powered up the machinery. Without delay the enterprising inventor returned the youths instantaneously to the present hour they originally left.
Wheels hummed on the seamless rails under a commuter train gliding smoothly into the nearby station. As the kids disembarked, the endless experimenter removed the ahead of its time mechanical contraption from the console. The time navigator said with an all-knowing smile that on the trip home he had to take an excursion along the way. "Your comic book gave me an idea." The horologist added, "Oh, you two have a week to dismantle the Tempus Fugit, or the mansion caretaker (bless his heart he's a character), will stumble upon and actuate it by dumb luck... makes for an awkward fanfiction retroactive continuity and three hours of my life I won't get back -- there's even one isolated incident with some rando with a beard that looks like he video chats with God living in my house, but that's a story for another time. Write it down."
The orderer of time opened his golden pocket clock and worked the dial to precisely 1:43. In the twinkling of an eye his form evaporated into the floating mists of time, like a stubbornly persistent master prestidigitator of the stage vanishing through a trapdoor.
