Old, Unhappy, Far-Off Things

"Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child."
-Cicero





The Present Day

Trixie leaned back in her chair in the church nave and smiled at her boyfriend and her friend. "I'm glad I met you both. I wish we we'd finally come together when we weren't being hounded by a psychotic bitch, but still."

Timmy shuddered dramatically. "That's one experience I don't want too much of. Come to think of it, one is too many."

Silence reigned in the church once more, and looked as Molly glanced around the church, obviously appreciating what she was looking at, both in the reverence for the dead and the church itself. Molly had been baptized an Episcopalian, just as Trixie herself had been, and while neither one of them was terribly observant, their faith was there. She gathered it was the first time she'd been in a church of her denomination in a long time.

After a long moment, Molly spoke up. "Unfortunately it didn't end that night. We had to contend with the twelve month media circus surrounding it."

She shuddered dramatically herself. The Dimmsdale Incident, as the media had quickly branded it, had shocked the world. Their names had been withheld in the mainstream news reports, but the circumstantial evidence had made their identities easy to determine. The blogosphere had spent the entire time dredging up every detail about all three of them, and splashing it up on the internet. That was the undoubted right of a free press, but it still stung. It especially stung to be referred to as a vapid bitch who's "rampant capitalistic greed and arrogance of wealth" had pushed a "vulnerable girl" into snapping against her "oppressor." One of the few silver linings, however, is that it finally forced society to acknowledge that "teens" were not children and that they couldn't just chalk up everything they did to "immature brain development" and leave it at that. Veronica had ended up being tried as an adult, and she wasn't getting out of prison for a very long time.

The violence hadn't ended that night, unfortunately it had spread out across the continent from Dimmsdale as virtually the entire Red Wolf gang from both the Eastern and Western groups had eluded the police cordon and scattered. It took a full two weeks to account for all of them, and only four had been taken alive. The rest died in a series of violent confrontations with police as far away as Ontario.

Timmy smirked. "But the year after it was all said and done was actually a good year."

Molly smirked, a forlorn, but happy look on her face. "It was a Golden Age, the three of us were actually on the verge of graduating high school at sixteen. The two of you were happily in love, and I was closer to you both then ever."

"But God, it seems, was only allowing us a respite."

Trixie nodded, feeling queasy as she remembered that seemingly innocuous day in school, innocuous at least compared to the titanic series of events that had followed later.

"I remember that day in school," she began. "The history teacher was late…"

One Year Ago

Sweat stuck the back of Beatrix Tang's shirt to her back and bra as she slunk deeper into her chair between Timmy and Molly. It was a hot day, a very hot day, one of those days with highs in the nineties that were as ubiquitous as dirt in Southern California as it inched closer and closer to summer.

"For the love of God," she heard a male voice cry out from behind her. "Where is the old fart?"

She saw Molly clench her fist out of the corner of her eye and reached out to put her hand on her friend's shoulder. The mutual best friend of both her and Timmy (though she was still closer to Timmy then she was to her) liked Richard Mazzare for a variety of reasons, not the least of which of which because the sixty-year-old man gave no sign of being either put off by her advanced intelligence, nor was he one to condescend to her because of her age.

She'd been known to react harshly to people who insulted him. Usually it went no further than shrieking and swearing. Usually.

Leaving aside calling him an old fart, where is he anyway, she thought. It's already twenty minutes into classtime. She looked around him. The back of the class hooligans were already starting their loud conversation about how much they drank and what "asses they tapped." Three couples had started making out and the half of the rest were making noises about leaving.

And the natives are getting restless.

"What were we supposed to be covering again?" She found herself asking.

"The origins of the First World War." Timmy responded.

Molly's chair grunted as it's occupant stood up from it with such force that she knocked the glasses off the young woman on her right. At her shouts of protest, Molly leaned down and picked up her glasses and handed them back before she grabbed her books and went up to the desk.

A few of the students, who hadn't noticed what she was doing, stood up and grabbed their backpacks.

"This is bullshit," one of them, a girl, said, "Let's get out of here."

The flat of Molly's hand slammed down against Mazzarre's desk, the report echoing throughout the room. "Whoever leaves the room before either Oversteegen or Hauptman shows up to formally let us out or Mazzare shows up will have to answer to me personally!"

The three girls slid back into their seats. After a moment, the back room gang started up again.

"Shut the fuck up!" Her voice snapped over their talking. "You can be alcohol abusing jerks bragging about how many "bitches" you've nailed on your own goddamn time! You will shut up right now, you will not say one more goddamn word that isn't a question about what I'm about to tell you, and don't either one of you think of leaving before the end of class time, unless it's an emergency. Your puppy had better have been run over or you or a member of your immediate family better have bone sticking out of your skin or so help me I will make bone stick out of your skin! Do you understand me? Or has all that pot and alcohol addled your brain to the point that between you all you don't even have one brain cell to rub against the inside of your skull?"

The back of the room stared at her in shock before closing their mouths slowly. After a long moment of her pinning them to their chairs she nodded.

"Good." She walked over and pulled down the map hanging over the chalkboard. "Now, I don't have Richard Mazzare's slides and presentation notes but I do have my own PowerPoint on the subject I created when I was bored." She used the student login to get into the computer on the desk and shoved a flash drive into the computer, after a few minutes, she'd had her presentation open. In the minute before the Windows browser closed she noticed half a dozen other PowerPoints in among her other documents.

Trixie found herself shaking her head in surprise. She really does over prepare doesn't she?

"Now," she began. "The ultimate causes of the war were decades if not centuries in the making, so I will give a brief overview of the background." She pointed out Germany on the map of Europe. "How many have you been to Germany?" She raised her hand

Trixie, who'd been to Düsseldorf on more than one occasion since they had agreed to partner with Rheinmetall providing many of the electronics and fire control systems for their latest line of UAVs, raised her hand. A smattering of other students followed suit. Even one of the hooligans at the back.

"Good," she said, bringing up a slide showing a black mass in central Europe from the border of Denmark to Northern Italy. "Now, the nation we know as Germany didn't exist for most of history since the fall of the Roman Empire. 'Germany' was simply the name of the general cultural region inhabited by numerous different small duchies, principalities, kingdoms, and city-states that spoke the same basic language and shared largely the same culture. To use Churchill's words on India, 'It was no more a united country than the Equator'. Now there were a couple failed attempts to unite the German peoples prior to 1871, both by French guys. The Holy Roman Empire was one such attempt. It…didn't pan out. Apart from a few strong Emperors like Charlemagne it was a failed state for the majority of its existence. Another attempt, also imposed from outside," she switched over to another slide showing a somewhat smaller blue mass, "was the First French Empire's Confederation of the Rhine created by Napoleon I Bonaparte. An attempt that, didn't survive the collapse of the Empire."

She switched over to a map that was recognizably closer to that of Germany today, albeit somewhat larger, with the color representing the German state spreading over territory that today was part of Poland to border directly against Russia. She then switched over to a closer map showing armies and formations moving out of Germany into France.

"The German state as we recognize it today was formed under the leadership of the most powerful of the German kingdoms at the time, Prussia. Starting in 1866 she defeated Austria, her traditional rival for control of Central Europe, then moved on to consolidate the rest of the German states towards a politically unified federation similar in some respects to our own, albeit with monarchies. This culminated four years later in a highly successful war on the part of Prussia's North German Confederation against the Second French Empire of Napoleon III. And by 'highly successful' I mean highly successful. Within nine months the Germans had captured Napoleon III, triggered the collapse of the final French monarchy, and captured Paris, forcing French surrender."

"The remaining German states signed on with the North German Confederation and in September of 1871, in the former palace of the French kings, Wilhelm I, king of Prussia was declared Wilhelm I, German Emperor, and a federal German Empire was created." She turned on a scene she recognized from said museum in Düsseldorf, a painting of Otto von Bismarck in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, everyone's swords out and pointed upward in triumph as they hailed their new Emperor before them.

Trixie couldn't help but think back to Palpatine's Declaration of a New Order.

The implications weren't lost on Timmy either. "'For a safe and secure society!'" He muttered in her ear.

"France was forced to cede to this new German Empire the predominately German-speaking area of Alsace-Lorraine as well as pay five billion francs in war indemnity. With the British Empire not particularly interested in exerting any influence over continental Eurasia outside the Asian part, and the newborn French Third Republic humiliated, the German Empire became the foremost European power."

"Now," she said, crossing her arms under her breasts. "Germany's behavior in the first forty years of her life can be likened to the new girl in school, eager to prove her worth both to herself and her peers. Jealous of the most popular girl in school, Great Britain, and desiring a colonial Empire of her very own, she seized concessions in Tsingtao in China, some scattered Pacific colonies, and some of the last territory in Africa that was available." Maps of each of those locations showed up on the screen one after the other. "Then she spent vast amounts of her money building a Navy that was far in excess of what she needed to police her own colonies, purely as a vanity project to match the Royal Navy, which naturally forced the Royal Navy to expand to match, as it was their policy to have a stronger navy then the next three navies after them in terms of size, not to mention several confrontations with all three nations in the decade right before the start of the war. Between that, her rivalries with France and Russia, and several additional disputes in the final decade before the war, she'd created a powderkeg that only awaited the spark."

"That spark came on June 28, 1914. Every summer the Austro-Hungarian Army conducted training maneuvers. The summer maneuvers of 1914 were to be centered on the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Corps in Bosnia. In March it had been announced that the heir to the Habsburg throne of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Este and his wife Sophie, the Duchess of Hohenberg would attend the maneuvers and would visit Sarajevo." She flipped on a black and white picture of a man, a woman, and three children.

The man, with close cut hair and a noticeably large handlebar moustache was standing, the woman, clearly his wife, was sitting, with his daughter and sons standing and sitting in front of them. "This picture was taken about 1910. The guy with the short cropped hair and the moustache is Franz Ferdinand. The woman sitting down next to him is Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Of the three children, the eldest, the girl standing is Princess Sophie the Younger, about nine when this photo would have been taken, the boy standing next to his mother is the next eldest child, Prince Maximilian, and the little boy siting down is the youngest, Prince Ernst. Just four years later, Archduke Ferdinand and Duchess Hohenberg would lay dead, the victims of two terrorist groups acting under the cover of a third. One was a Serbian irredentist terrorist group buried in the ranks of Serbian intelligence called the Black Hand, the other a bunch of college students called the Young Bosnians. It's leader was the Chief of Serbian intelligence, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, code-named Apis. It was on his orders that the assassination was to be carried out, and he was the one who recruited three members of the college radical group to carry it out: All Austro-Hungarian subjects from Bosnia and all going to school in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia then and now."

She sighed, and a faraway look appeared in her eyes. "And on June 28, 1914, upon their visit to Sarajevo, after surviving one assassination attempt earlier that day, the Archduke's driver got confused on the route he was supposed to be taking, and right in front of a young man, Gavrilo Princip, not yet twenty, who'd missed his earlier chance that day, and assuming any further assassination attempts were now impossible, abandoned the plan and walked off into a sandwich. He was just walking out of the deli when their car pulled up in front of him. Not believing his good fortune he dropped his sandwich, pulled his pistol out of his coat and fired point-blank into their car. Sophie was dead within a couple minutes, and her husband died on his way to back to the governor's mansion. After that events proceeded quickly to war. Germany backed Austria-Hungary in an ultimatum in Serbia where it was to crackdown on free speech regarding Serb irredentism. When Serbia took too long to agree, Austrian artillery shelled Belgrade. Germany declared war on Russia and France and moved to occupy Belgium to prepare it's invasion of France, prompting Britain to declare war on Germany." She shook her head. "You know-,"

She was interrupted by the sound of feet outside the door and the door next to the teacher's desk turned to show Caroline Hauptman opening the door and sticking her head in. The blonde, late thirtyish vice principal, was short compared to most of the younger women in that class. At five foot seven, Trixie was taller than her by a good four inches. Oversteegen and Hauptman had both been moved up from the middle school to Dimmsdale High. She was glad, they were good at their jobs, however badly they'd been dragged through the mud as a result of the Dimmsdale Incident, when media on both sides of the aisle politically had fired into them due to their supposed failure to "rein in" Veronica, and thereby preventing the week of violent firefights in the United States and Canada.

She wasn't surprised however. Veronica's actions and how she'd carried them out had defied every established theory as to the causes of violence in young people. Her family hadn't been neglectful or abusive. She hadn't suffered from low self-esteem. She hadn't been bullied herself, rather had always been a bully, just as Trixie herself had once been. She was walking proof that low self-esteem and violent behavior weren't linked, and that young people were capable of complex planning. It was no surprise the media seized upon anything they could to pin responsibility on someone other than Veronica.

She herself had come out in support of them., personally walking over to a press mob outside Oversteegen's house and making a statement. Loudly. There really was nothing much they could do. It wasn't so much that they didn't take the situation seriously, they did they just couldn't prove it in a way that would satisfy Veronica's parents, and the police.

At the moment, Hauptman was looking at Molly with a surprised look on her face. Surprised, but not condemning. If anything she looked amused. Shaking her head, Trixie could have sworn she heard her mutter "Why am I not surprised," under her breath.

She sighed, and turned away from Molly to face the rest of the class. "Class," she said, her eyes downcast. "I hate to have to be the ones to point this out, but," and she sighed, as if physically unable to say what happened next. And she felt her heart begin to sink. "Mister Mazarre has been in a car accident. He's at the UC San Diego Medical Center."

Immediately the class started up again, this time with more than a hint of worry in them. Despite their reaction to his tardiness, he was genuinely popular with his students.

Molly, still standing at the head of the class, looked crestfallen.

-----

"I can't believe he's in the hospital," Timmy heard Molly say as the three of them moved into the hallway from the rapidly emptying classroom. She shook her head, the worry for her unofficial mentor when it came to history clear on her face. "I should go see him. I have half a mind to hop on my motorcycle and go now. School's out for the day anyway."

Timmy was only half-paying attention to Molly. There was something wrong, an undercurrent of fear was running through the crowds. All the godchildren in Dimmsdale who'd reached physical maturity, all thirty of them after Timmy, Molly, and Trixie, were milling about in the corridor. Waiting for him.

"Something's wrong," Timmy said, and Molly and Trixie fell silent, noticing the change.

Looking around he beckoned the nearest one, a pretty sixteen-year-old with olive skin and raven black hair.

"Karen," he asked, his own voice taut with the experience keeping his fear in check. "What's going on?"

"I don't know, sir," Karen Oliveras said harshly, looking around her. "Our godparents apparently received some message from Fairy World and started pulling out about an hour ago." She sighed, and an apprehensive look appeared on her face. Apparently some of the others overheard them saying SNAKE PIT."

"Shit," Trixie swore. He looked down to realize that Cosmo and Wanda were gone from his pocket. They were with Poof this morning, he thought to himself. They must have been caught in Fairy World when the lockdown went into effect.

SNAKE PIT was the contingency plan that went into effect whenever FairyWorld detected a new timeline forming. Upon the formal receipt of the order for SNAKE PIT, all godchildren, who were protected from changes in the timeline, were to be transported immediately to secluded bases, and from there they were to assess the situation, and then, under the command of the senior godchild (he or she who had had their godparent the longest) in their sector, carry out operations to restore the previous timeline.

And one Timothy Turner was the senior godchild for Southern California, Baja California, and Baja California Sur.

He opened his mouth only to be interrupted by the automated message coming in over his bud communicator.

"PRIORITY * PRIORITY * PRIORITY * PRIORITY * PRIORITY* This is a priority message to all Godchildren worldwide. Message begins: The Director of Emergency Operations has issued an emergency activation order. A new timeline is in the process of forming, and Contingency SNAKE PIT has been activated. All fairies have been withdrawn from Earth. All godchildren will be transported to their mustering bases upon termination of this message. Please report to your chain of command as defined by the senior godchild in your sector of operations and carry out SNAKE PIT contingency orders as soon as possible.

Message Ends.

Abruptly reality around them began to… fizzle. There were no other words to describe it, as creation itself seemed to wink out of existence for a fraction of a second.

Then Creation came back, but not the same as before.

Timmy stared around her, he, his lover, his best friend, and all the other godchildren in Dimmsdale of high school age were standing in burnt out ruin. The hallway that had just seconds ago to them been full of a hundred other students in addition to them was now a charred ruin.

And it wasn't new damage. The walls were covered in what was clearly old soot, and the lockers that were strewn about and horribly mangled were rusted.

"What the hell happened?" Molly whispered, no longer bothering to disguise the fear on her voice.

"I don't know," Timmy said, trying desperately to project confidence that wasn't there no his voice as he turned around to view both the women he loved, albeit in different ways.

"But we're going to find out."

A heartbeat later they were whisked away in a flash of golden light.