He took a deep breath. Alright, time to make my case. "You're from the future... or rather, your consciousness is. Later in life, if nothing changes, you will lead a rebellion and I'll end up being recruited by your younger sister. And I create a way to travel in time... basically."

"Say I believed you," Wren answered. "How... and why did you create time travel? And does that make you like me?"

The 'how' question was a lot harder to explain, so he started with the 'why' question, since it was simpler. "Before I was offered a position in the rebellion, I did a lot of work against Akram alone. I spent time in a lot of places gathering information and secretly passing it on to some of the rebellion's informants. In between that, I was researching time travel, toying with the idea of going back and making sure that Akram never became president or got to take over, but I knew it was dangerous, so I never tried."

"What changed?" Wren asked. "Why do it now, and drag me into it?"

"I found something on one of my undercover ops. I went in as a scientist and nearly got caught for information I thought was useless. But when I looked through the plans I'd stolen, I discovered that Akram was planning to use time travel too, but he wanted to use it to wipe out the rebellion before it even started. All he would need was your name and he could stop you before you even started. I knew if I traveled back and stopped him here, none of that would even happen, so I actually set out to test my theories about time. I left a note in case I was right about everything and I used my mini-machine, setting it to self-destruct right after use.

"Then I came here. I'd been watching you long enough to know who you were and how to find you in the past, so when I got here, I just had to search a few things on the internet. Coincidentally, we live really close in this year, so I did a bit of bartering with my parents and actually met the younger you. She's nice, maybe a bit more trusting than you are. Either way, I created a second time-travel machine to send her mind to the future, which would, theoretically, pull your mind to the past. And clearly it worked."

"But I still don't understand why you need me. You said yourself that you generally work alone, and you were only just planning to actually join the rebellion. Not to mention, why me in the first place? I'm not special, I just adapted to the circumstances around me. There are plenty of others who would be better, like Zephyr or Shadow or Panther... just to name a few."

Dylan leaned back in his chair and sighed. "You're selling yourself short, Wren. I chose you because you adapt. It's what you do. You take the situation, adjust to it, and then blend in. You're good at it, and that's why you haven't been discovered yet, but Akram was getting close when I pulled you, and trust me, he's determined enough to do it. I need you because you can adapt to being a teen again much faster than any of the others, except maybe Zephyr. I couldn't take both of you or no one would be capable of leading, and you need Shadow and Panther to keep fighting in the rebellion anyway, even if they could pull it off."

"Okay fine, but that still doesn't explain how you accomplished time travel and it also doesn't prove this isn't some elaborate hoax in a crazy VR created by Akram to get information from me."

Dylan raised an eyebrow. "Really? That was your first thought?" he sighed and shook his head. "Wow. Alright, how about this: you don't have to tell me anything about... whatever you think he wants to know and I'll try and explain the whole time travel thing for you."

"Agreed." Wren leaned back and crossed her arms, waiting.

"So when you think of time, you think of it as say, a straight line, like when you go into those games and if you go one direction you can't go back again, right? Well time can seem like that, but that's not what it really is. Every moment is it's own individual thing. It exists apart from the others, but they're all connected, like a bunch of people in a really big pool. Humans have already mastered a really, really small part of time travel, which is going to the future. Anything that happens from here on has already happened, but for us to experience it, we have to jump forward in time a moment. You following?"

"So far, I think so," she answered.

"Good. So once I realized that we already mastered traveling forward in time, despite how small of a time jump it is, I realized I could both amplify and reverse the effects to go back in time. However, I couldn't figure out what would happen to your past self if you went to the past. After a while, I decided that the most sensible way to get to the past would be to allow your consciousness into your younger self. But that left the question of where your younger self's mind would end up. I concluded that they would be transported to the future, which would be our present."

"So my fourteen year old self was just thrust into a world she doesn't understand or know how to survive? Good job, you just killed me!"

"She has Zephyr to watch over her."

"She won't tell anyone, you idiot. Trust me, I know what I was like at that age, and I never told people when I had a problem. I barely open up now. People might have known to some extent what I was feeling at times, but their interpretation was rarely close to the real issues. Zephyr might not even know she needs protecting.

"The way I understand this, if our past selves get killed, our future selves can't have existed, which means poof, we're gone too, even if we are in the past."

"I had explored that thought... but it's entirely possible that because we're in the past, we'd be safe."

"How could we have traveled to the past if our younger selves died? Just because they're in the future doesn't mean their deaths won't affect us. They die and you won't even have been able to send them to the future or pull your time travel experiment, which means that no matter how you think about it, their life is linked to ours."

He thought about that, but he knew it wouldn't make a difference. "You remember I did research on you. Even as a child, you were capable... are capable. Zephyr will watch her back no matter what, and we're in just as much danger here as soon as we go up against Akram, 'kids' or not."

Wren sighed and set her pen down. "We can talk about that one later. Right now I need to know your plan for keeping Akram from becoming president."

"It involves Shadow, Panther, and a whole lot of sneaking out at night."

"I'm listening."