By the time Corinna left, Ivan figured that he had their entire relationship, from his own time to this one, sussed out. They were sufficiently alike that they understood each other, and they had positively earthshaking sex -- but they were *too* alike to *stay* together for any length of time without killing each other.

Ivan decided to dedicate the rest of the day to finding out why he was in the future. He figured that whoever put him there obviously had had some purpose, probably relating to something about the future that Ivan could change if he had foreknowledge of it. Having determined that Corinna was not a problem in need of correction, he was ready to pursue other avenues . . . starting with his father.

Meanwhile. . . .

Jasmine and Tyler awoke to find themselves snuggled up much closer together than they'd been when they'd fallen asleep. Naturally, Jasmine was perfectly content with this state of affairs, but Tyler immediately pulled away. Feeling somewhat spiteful, Jasmine stretched luxuriously, showing off her exceedingly well-formed adult body perhaps more than she ought to have done -- and causing Tyler to flee the room entirely.

A little later, after getting dressed, Jasmine was reminded (by a small knock on her door) that she'd promised the day before to help her daughter get ready for school this morning. With some trepidation she performed her maternal duties, discovering that it wasn't that different from getting herself ready, since she and Lise were actually nearly the same age (as unsettling as that thought was).

Once Lise had been packed off to school, Tyler emerged from hiding fully dressed. He'd decided to avoid possible complications by skipping work that day, and advised Jasmine to tell the clients of her custom-software company that she was sick.

Meanwhile. . . .

Ivan made his way into the city, and discovered that his father's New York residence and the adjoining girls' school were still where they had been in 1999. He knocked at the door. It was answered by a young woman who took his name and ushered him into a waiting area. Ivan belatedly thought to wonder if his father had married in the intervening years.

After a few minutes, a veddy British man about Ivan's age came in. He introduced himself as Christian Neville, a cousin, and seemed rather surprised to see Ivan there. Ivan thought he looked somehow familiar, but couldn't place him (though a study of Christian's mannerisms confirmed, at least, that he was not Aleister Crowley in a younger body). Christian seemed especially puzzled that Ivan was asking after his father, and said so in a tone which indicated that Ivan should have known Crowley would be unavailable.

Not seeing any other way to explain himself, Ivan laid out the whole story of his displacement in time. Christian took the revelation in stride; though he claimed never to have studied the arcane arts himself, he obviously had experience with unusual situations. He also seemed particularly amused to be talking to the Ivan Neville of 1999 -- and that's when Ivan finally recognized him.

"Christian Neville" was none other than a grown-up Damien Mefford, who in 1999 had been the traitorous henchman of schoolyard sociopath Chadwick Bryce. Ivan had packed Damien off to his father's with a request that the boy be given a new identity -- and apparently Crowley had come through in spades. Christian confirmed the identification, and explained that he'd been sent off to school in England for several years -- hence the accent and changed mannerisms -- before returning to New York to take over his "uncle's" educational work there.

At that point, Ivan could no longer delay asking after his father's whereabouts. Gently, Christian explained that Crowley had died years before -- in fact, not long after Ivan's native time. Christian didn't know details, as he'd been contacted only after it happened, but it seemed that Crowley had simply lost the will to live. Ivan found that hard to believe of a man to whom the power of the Will had been a central guiding principle. What could possibly have led the Great Beast to succumb to despair?

If Christian had looked distressed about having to tell the unexpectedly young Ivan about his father's death, he looked doubly so now. He explained that Crowley's already strained relationship with his son had finally managed to reach the breaking point, with Ivan convinced that Crowley cared for him only as an occasional source of amusement and as a cog in his own plans. Following their last thunderous argument on the topic, Crowley had returned to England, taking an interest in Christian as a surrogate son and seemingly trying (without much success) to mold him into a replacement for Ivan. Father and son had not seen or spoken to each other after that point, each being far too prideful to take the first step toward reconciliation, and finally Crowley had seemingly lost all desire to go on living.

Ivan wasn't sure how to take this news. He had never seriously wished his father dead, but he *did* still believe -- and not without reason, he felt -- that Crowley's interest in him was marginal at best. Still, here was certainly something that he could, and probably should, try to change.

Afterward, Ivan asked Christian a few more questions, trying to nail down the identity of the person responsible for his presence in the future. Unfortunately, Christian knew little about Ivan's personal affairs, as the two of them had little contact these days. Thanking Christian/Damien, Ivan promised to get back in touch with his "cousin" a little sooner if he made it back to his own time, and took his leave.

Outside, Ivan considered his options. He needed to learn more about his own future life, including any other problems he might need to head off in the past and any enemies who might have put him here. He was going to have to find someone close to his future self, a friend and confidante whom he could trust to know his business and to be honest with him about it. But who? No sooner had he formulated the question than the obvious answer sprang to Ivan's mind. He hailed a cab and headed for the offices of the Brighton Foundation to talk to Melanie Davis.

Upon realizing that Ivan was still his younger self, Mel immediately made room for him in her busy schedule. And when he started asking her pointed questions about his future life, she did her best to answer them, even when the answers weren't pleasant. Overall, it came out, the future Ivan was not a terribly happy man. He put up a good front for most of the world, but Mel knew him well enough to know otherwise. The business between him and his father had been part of it, but there was more to it than that. There just seemed to be an essential joy missing in Ivan's life. Having done some thinking about his future self's life as a small-time lawyer, Ivan thought he understood at least part of what he had lost. Somewhere along the line his future self had gotten so caught up in the process of bending and breaking the rules that he had forgotten his original purpose. He no longer felt the pure joy of subversion, of bending the system back on itself to fight injustice.

Mel agreed that was likely, but doubted that Future Ivan's problems were entirely professional. One particular thing that had always worried her was Ivan's inability to maintain a stable, long-term relationship. He'd had several promising candidates, but all had self-destructed right when they were on the verge of going somewhere. Ivan found a new worry, then. Mel had told him the day before (though he still didn't entirely want to believe it) that *their* relationship had ended, at his instigation, while they were still in seventh grade. What if Future Ivan had chosen *that* as his one great mistake, and had engineered the mind switch to give himself another chance? Of course, that didn't explain why Tyler and Jasmine had also been switched with their adult selves. Mel didn't think it was very likely, either. She understood that young Ivan hadn't gotten over her yet, but assured him that his future self was quite comfortable with the present state of their friendship.

Still confused, Ivan let Mel get back to her work and returned home. He spent quite some time searching for a message from his future self, but to no avail. Then he decided he'd better check up on the other time-displaced folks.

Jasmine answered the phone at the Elliot residence, and was brought up to date on Ivan's discoveries. She had specifically *not* gone looking for the history of her own life over the past fifteen years, and now wondered if she ought to do just that. Ivan doubted that Jasmine's future life was as unhappy as his own. After all, she had married her best friend and first love (and Ivan doubted that Future Tyler could really be that much more of a prick than he already was in their own time); she had more money than God; and she even had a child of her own. Jasmine admitted that she'd mostly been avoiding her daughter, not quite sure how to deal with a little girl practically her own age who thought of her as Mom. Ivan was surprisingly disturbed by that, and actually lectured Jasmine on what an opportunity she was passing up. Apparently, the recent revelations about his father had gotten him thinking about what kind of parent *he* would be, and he wished that he could have the same chance to find out (and possibly to correct any mistakes) that his friends had been given. Impressed by Ivan's take on the matter, Jasmine agreed to talk more with Lise when the girl got home from school.

The two next spent some time trying to figure out who was responsible for their predicament. Ivan still suspected their future selves, but Jasmine thought there was evidence against that theory. After all, Ivan had woken up in bed with a woman he didn't know, and Tyler had woken up on a plane coming home from a business trip. If their older selves were behind the switch, wouldn't they have planned things a little better? Also unlikely was the idea that the switch had been the work of their older selves' enemies, in order to take a shot at them while their bodies were inhabited by their confused (and magickally much less powerful) young minds. If that were true, surely those enemies would have made a move by now. No, given what Ivan had learned (and was now determined to change) about his own life, it seemed likely that the switch had been benevolent in intention, designed to provide a second chance. And that worried Jasmine even more about the kinds of terrible things that might have happened in the intervening years of *her* life. She decided to find Tyler and investigate their past more thoroughly.

It turned out that Tyler had already had the same idea. He was in his office, looking seriously bummed. He'd spent the past couple hours learning more about his family in the future, and what he'd found wasn't good. His father had died under violent circumstances two years before, and his stepmother had disappeared around the same time. His mother and stepfather were still alive, traveling the world, but that turned out not to be the pleasant retirement he'd assumed. He explained that everyone who touched Death was somehow marked by it. His stepmother's hair had turned pure white from her single encounter with the Shadowlands. His own adult body still bore the brand-like scar of the wound he'd suffered while caught in the middle of a spectral struggle a couple of weeks earlier in his subjective timeframe. And his mother, who'd had more extended contact with Death than anyone else in her family? She had begun to suffer a degenerative heart condition which recurred no matter how many times her husband replaced the organ, and the recurrence had come faster after each operation. Ryan and Mikhail were off traveling the world . . . while they waited for Ryan to die.

Tyler had also come across more evidence of what was wrong with himself and Jasmine in the future. They'd both been puzzled by family members' odd reaction to them the night before. Even though they'd been thoroughly distracted by their odd situation, and certainly hadn't acted particularly like a married couple, those who knew their future selves had commented on how unusually friendly they were being with each other. Clearly, that didn't bode well for the state of their *actual* marital relations in the future. Tyler's investigation had revealed that both of their future selves were huge egomaniacs. His own admitted arrogance had only grown as he had come into his full power as both a corporate executive and a mage. Similarly, Jasmine's lifelong elitist pride in her genius had burgeoned as her intellectual accomplishments had left her ostensible peers further and further behind. Their marriage had suffered accordingly. By the "present" time of 2014, any interaction between the couple that wasn't pure one-upsmanship was hailed as miraculous.

The last part of the past that Tyler wanted to investigate was the fulfillment of the Seven Stars prophecy. Years before, the chantry to which their parents belonged had been presented with a lengthy, cryptic document which seemed to indicate that several of their children would play a role in saving the world from utter disaster in the years to come. The actual "seven stars" of the prophecy were all younger kids (among them Angelyn and Alex Cabrell and Martin Solomon), but Tyler and Jasmine had been told that they were slated to play a guidance and guardianship role in preparing the Stars for their destiny. Though surprisingly little was said about it in the records he'd found, Tyler had discovered that the prophesied threat to the world had arisen two years before, and had presumably been defeated. His father's death seemed to tie into those events. He figured that if they could use their unexpected preview of the future to learn what *had* happened, they would be better prepared to fill their roles in the prophecy, and just might be able to prevent Luther Cabrell's death.

That was when they noticed a strong odor of cigarette smoke in the air, and a disembodied voice congratulated them on finally figuring that much out. Out of nothingness stepped an older woman who looked as though she'd been through hell. Despite the terrible changes in her appearance, the shock-white hair made it clear that the kids were looking at Tyler's stepmother, Katy O'Hara Cabrell. Naturally, they immediately had a million questions for her, most of which she nullified by disclaiming responsibility for their trip into the future. She hadn't done it, but she intended to take advantage of it. In fact, she already had, six times, but none of them had produced the sort of change in the timestream she was looking for. She said she'd been too gentle the last few times, and now it was time to get tough with the kids. But first . . . Katy stepped back into nothingness, and returned an instant later with Ivan in tow. Once he was brought up to speed (hastily; the Widow Cabrell clearly didn't have much patience left in her, even if she had seemingly mastered time itself), Katy opened a hole in space and shooed the time-displaced children through it.

They emerged outdoors, in the mountains. Tyler and Jasmine recognized the location as being a few miles away from the secure retreat the old chantry had maintained. More specifically, it was where, in their own time, they had recently attended the funerals of the Rabbi and his wife. In *this* time, though, the area was practically *filled* with headstones. Pretty much everyone in their parents' circle was buried here, and all the death dates (including, oddly, the Rabbi's) were the same: 2012.

Katy started to explain, but Jasmine had already figured it out. They had screwed up. Her and Tyler's self-absorption hadn't just turned them into assholes and warped their marriage; it had kept them from getting the younger kids ready for the battle they were destined to fight. And so, when the time came, it had been their parents' generation that had stepped into the void and saved the world . . . at an awful cost. Katy confirmed that she had survived purely by chance, and was now determined to put things right, even if it meant exposing the kids directly to the horrors their negligence would someday bring about. Katy knew it was traditional for Old and Wise mages to be insufferably cryptic in their pronouncements about the future, but in this case -- "FUCK cryptic. This is my LIFE. Their lives. Your lives. Everyone's lives. Now straighten the hell up and do it right next time . . . or I'll be right here waiting for you until you *do* get it right."

Jasmine and Tyler were appropriately humbled, but Ivan was still confused. What the hell was *he* doing here? He hadn't screwed up any prophecy. Who was mucking about with *his* life? Katy again insisted that she wasn't the one responsible for the mind-switch itself, so she couldn't help him there. She'd brought him along to the graveyard in hope that he would serve as an extra influence on his friends, pushing things in the right direction. While he might not technically be part of the prophecy, he was a member of the human race, and so Katy hoped he would see his own vested interest in the survival of that species.

Well, then, could Katy at least tell them how to get back to their own time so they could set about changing things? It turned out that they didn't need to do anything; the mind-switch was a timed thing and would peter out on its own. While Katy hadn't existed in linear time herself for quite awhile, and thus had trouble judging the exact timing of events, she believed that they would naturally return to the past in a few hours, sometime that afternoon. Anything they still wanted to get done in the future, they'd better do soon. With that, Katy returned the kids to their future homes and disappeared.

Back in his apartment, Ivan added the day's events to the note he'd written for his future self. And then he began to wonder. If he and the other two managed to change the future as much as they intended to, the Ivan of this time might be entirely different from the one he'd spent the past two days learning about. In that case, would his note make sense to his future self? Would it even *exist* in a future that Ivan of 1999 hadn't actually visited? Heavy stuff. Still, if only to prove himself a better man than Future Ivan, he finished the note and then settled down to wait for the transition back to his own time, gleefully going over the sports scores and stock market reports he'd memorized, and wondering what he was going to do with his next shot at the future. Criminal law didn't seem to agree with him. Politics, perhaps? "Senator Neville" had a nice ring to it, and "President Neville" even more so. . . .

At the Elliot home, Jasmine was pacing the halls, wondering if her daughter would get home from school before she was swept back to her own time. She happened to run into Angelyn, who offered her an apology -- "it was the only thing we could think of to do." Asked what "it" was, Angelyn smiled cryptically, said "I think you know," and walked away. It took a few seconds for the realization to sink in: Angelyn was talking about the mind switch. The younger kids -- no longer kids in this time -- had done it somehow, to give their unhappy friends a reminder of their youth. And since Katy had seized the chance to alter the *past* as well, technically the Seven Stars *had* come through on their destiny, though not as originally intended.

Lise did get home from school before the switch back, and what's more, she had already figured out that her "parents" were actually their own younger selves. Asked directly if there was anything her parents-to-be could do differently, Lise at first didn't know what to say, but eventually came out with the fact that her mom and dad took an "absentee landlord" approach to parenting. Her father was frequently away on business, and her mother -- who worked at home -- still didn't seem to have much time for her. They rarely ate or went anywhere together. Lise wouldn't mind seeing *that* change. Actually, Tyler and Jasmine weren't entirely sure if Lise, as such, would *exist* in their own future, since they certainly intended to avoid the accidental pregnancy in college that had led to their wedding in *this* timeline, but they promised to try to do better, then hugged Lise and sent her off to do her homework.

Afterward, Jasmine realized that they didn't have much time left in the future, and decided to seize what might be her only opportunity in years to get romantic with Tyler, his own reluctance be damned. Knowing that it's always easier to get forgiveness than permission, she acted swiftly and without warning, laying upon him her best attempt at a passionate kiss. Perhaps it was beginner's luck, or perhaps the revelations of the last few hours had left Tyler too emotionally exhausted to resist, but he did not run screaming as she had feared. Indeed, after a few seconds of stunned surprise, he returned the kiss with not-inconsiderable enthusiasm. And so this brief taste (ahem) of the future ended pleasantly for at least a couple of parties. . . .

MEANWHILE, FIFTEEN YEARS AND TWO DAYS EARLIER, LET'S CHECK IN ON THOSE SCREWED-UP ADULTS:

Ivan Neville, attorney at law, awoke in his teenage body in a Huntington Academy dorm room. Having already been through the mind-switch business once as a boy, he quickly figured out what had happened, and set out to collect his time-displaced cohorts. Across the hall, he found an angry Tyler Elliot, also newly arrived from 2014 and very aware that Ivan had been sleeping with his younger sister. Fortunately, he was easily persuaded that a fight between the two of them, at the present height of their magickal powers, would likely leave the campus a burning wreck for their younger selves to return to. And in any case, they had bigger things to worry about.

Meanwhile, in another dorm not far away, Jasmine's reaction to awakening in a nine-year-old body had not been nearly so calm and collected, and now she was trying to explain to a groggy and bewildered Mel what she'd been shrieking about. It didn't help that seeing her friend so frighteningly young was only slightly less jarring than seeing herself. Fortunately, she was rescued by a phone call from her husband (of whom she thought more highly, in that moment, than she had in years). Tyler instructed her to meet him and Ivan at the boathouse in ten minutes.

Once gathered, the three immediately found themselves faced with a conundrum. If they remembered going through the first half of the mind-switch as kids -- and they all did -- why hadn't they remembered the date on which it would happen and been more prepared? And come to think of it, if they remembered the earlier switch -- including Katy's lecture about the importance of changing things the next time around -- why were they even here? *They* were from the screwed-up future, which if their younger selves had done their jobs right, shouldn't even . . . exist.

And then the truth hit home. Their future *didn't* exist anymore. They were leftovers, snatched out of the "bad" future by the mind-switch spell. That was why they couldn't remember dates or other small details of their past. They were remnants of a vanished possibility, preserved for a limited time by magick. In a day and a half, when the spell had run its course, they would not be returning to their own time. They would be replaced by -- or transformed into, if one wanted to be optimistic -- whatever future selves their younger counterparts managed to grow up into after being warned against repeating *their* lives. In any case, everything that made them who they were would be written over and forgotten.

And guess what? They didn't much mind. Truth be told, they didn't like themselves. Oh, they were supreme egotists, all three, but being able to remember their younger selves' trip to the future -- the first step in the revision-in-progress of the past they remembered -- gave them an opportunity for honest self-appraisal like none they'd had in years. A chance for things to be different, even if the "they" who experienced the difference would be their present selves only in name, was something truly to be wished for.

So . . . when you have a day and a half left to exist as you are, how do you spend it? Ivan knew immediately: "We do what we've somehow forgotten to do along the way. We have fun. We're kids again, so let's act like it. 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we *surely* will die. . . .'" Ivan even knew just *how* they were going to have fun. In their own past, the HALF campaign to "liberate" the school from administrative tyranny had dragged out through Christmas, and had gone extraordinarily wrong. Copycat pranks by less ethical parties had resulted in actual damage and injury. The draconian responses of the administration had led to the punishment (including expulsion in some cases) of students far less guilty than themselves. Ivan proposed that they make the very first change to their past themselves, by forcing the administration's surrender that very day. The Elliots were agreeable. They'd meet again later in the day to plan, but now it was time for breakfast.

And so the three got to reacquaint themselves with their friends -- their extraordinarily young friends, whose chatter about school gossip and incredibly magnified adolescent concerns meant less than nothing to the time-displaced adults. Tyler was completely at a loss to remember what he had ever had in common with either Brandon or Kelli, even though they had once been his oldest pal and first girlfriend, respectively. Things got even worse for poor Mr. Elliot when Caitlin Summers showed up at the table. He quickly figured out from her behavior that she was his younger self's current girlfriend, but it took him a moment to remember her name. And of course, it didn't take him long to realize that he no longer really found middle school girls at all desirable. His wife was no help at all; while she wasn't intensely jealous the way the younger Jasmine would have been, she did seem to find her husband's predicament amusing.

Ivan was having somewhat better luck relating to his personal circle of friends and attachments, especially when it came to the opposite sex; he found there were certain girls he could find desirable at *any* age. Indeed, he'd felt a twinge of regret upon first seeing the young Melanie again, and had to fight down an urge to try to preserve their relationship. But he knew that was all too likely to backfire horribly, and he didn't want to risk changing the future *that* way. Instead, he decided to do his younger self a different favor, by breaking up with Mel himself this very afternoon. To that end, he asked her to go riding with him after lunch.

When the young Corinna Marks appeared at the table, Ivan found that she was still pretty hot, too. He recalled that during the first half of the mind switch, fifteen years in his past and her future, he had spent a glorious and exhausting night of passion with the full-grown and very experienced Corinna. He decided to return the favor by bedding Corinna's thirteen-year-old self, visiting upon her youthful body the collective experience of a decade and a half of on-and-off trysts between them. Since they were not yet lovers in this time, he started things off with a challenge he knew Corinna would never be able to resist. That evening there was going to be a rehearsal for their drama class's upcoming performance of _Faust_. Ivan offered to be Corinna's sex slave for the night if she out-performed him during the rehearsal, as long as she was willing to pay a similar penalty if he proved the superior thespian. Corinna was intrigued, but somewhat surprised, by the offer; wasn't Ivan intent on resisting her temptations in order to preserve his tenuous relationship with Mel? Once Ivan explained his decision to break up with Mel, though, Corinna was only too willing to take the bet.

Finally breakfast ended, and everyone headed to their morning classes. About halfway through a computer class that even her younger self had always found boring and slow-paced, Jasmine vowed to insure that no version of herself would ever have to sit through such torment again. After class, she went over to the high school side of the lake and located the least idiotic of her old teachers. Imperiously she announced that she was getting nothing out of her present class, and requested his help in getting herself assigned to a more challenging course. He promised to talk to her present teacher, but Jasmine insisted that wouldn't be enough, because no one had ever gotten to see just what she was capable of. She offered to give such a demonstration to him. He handed her a thick packet of advanced math and comp-sci work, and promised that if she did well on it, he would instruct her privately from then on. Looking over the packet, she found the work challenging but doable (she hoped) for her younger self -- and literal child's play for herself.

Meanwhile, Tyler had embarked on a similar, if more disturbing, scheme to make his younger self's insipid business class a bit more bearable. Mentally dominating the teacher, he overwrote the man's meager knowledge of the subject with a portion of his own vast expertise, then implanted a compulsion that would "inspire" the teacher to use the revised curriculum Tyler was penning. Really, he thought, he was doing the poor man a favor by correcting his rank ignorance. Perhaps the teacher could even supplement his salary with a bit of success in the stock market.

At lunch, the time-displaced trio pretended to pay attention to their table companions while actually carrying on a separate telepathic conversation about their plans for the HALF campaign. Ivan intended to conjure sufficient fireworks to spell out the HALF logo in the sky that evening; that event would be timed to occur while he was in the middle of his play rehearsal, thus giving his younger self an alibi. The fireworks display wasn't the key to his plan, however. He had discovered that the school's headmistress had a teenage daughter. Ivan figured that seducing the lass, videotaping the encounter, and leaving the tape on the headmistress' desk to be found the next morning would just about do the trick. As long as they made it clear that HALF still had other copies of the tape and could make them public at will, the woman would have to capitulate to their demands. The only problem was the limited timeframe. Ivan doubted he could pull off an effective seduction in one evening without turning the girl into his mental puppet, which he was loath to do. However, he had obtained a number of pictures of his target. Might Jasmine be able to create an entirely computer-generated sex scene for the tape? That would have the added advantage of not getting the actual girl in (much) trouble, since she would likely be able to prove her innocence to her mother's satisfaction -- but would still leave the headmistress vulnerable to blackmail. Jasmine agreed to do the job.

That afternoon, Ivan thought of something else he could do to tweak the future to his liking. In this time, his friend-and-briefly-girlfriend Melanie was about to embark on a modeling career for Elliot Enterprises. His younger self had half-jokingly insisted on taking part in the contract negotiations, knowing that he stood no chance of winning concessions from Ryan Elliot but still savoring the challenge. Ivan's *present* self, however, was an experienced attorney -- perhaps even good enough to give Ryan Elliot a run for her money (literally). To that end, he wrote up a contract proposal and faxed it to Ryan's office. She responded with a counter-proposal, and so forth through several iterations. In the end, Ivan didn't win much that Mel wouldn't have gotten anyway -- Ryan was both already quite generous and also fairly limited in what she could reasonably offer to a starting model -- but a subsequent online conversation did reveal that Ryan was thoroughly impressed with Ivan's grasp of legal terminology and the nuances of drawing up contracts.

Later in the evening, after planting his fireworks in appropriate locations, Ivan kept his riding date with Mel. His initial overtures about the state of their relationship brought out her fear that they had too little in common to stay together in the long term. Ivan, of course, knew that was true. Kept at an appropriately safe distance, the Sacred and the Profane might be capable of a wonderfully complementary friendship -- such as he and the adult Mel enjoyed in the future -- but if forced too close together they would inevitably contaminate each other. Without fully explaining his situation, Ivan hinted at his foreknowledge by explaining that he'd had visions of the future, based on which he believed that the two of them were meant to be no more than friends. Mel agreed that was probably best. Thus amicably broken up, they proceeded to have a rather enjoyable ride.

Meanwhile, Jasmine had just finished up Ivan's sex tape when she heard a desperate knocking at her door. She opened it and her husband dashed into the room, in obvious need of sanctuary. It seemed he'd been trying to keep up the status quo of his younger self's life by spending time with Caitlin Summers, only to have the girl become uncomfortably amorous. He might have a thirteen-year-old's hormones for the time being, but he was still more than twice Caitlin's age, and a married man to boot. Jasmine hoped that Caitlin hadn't managed to get Tyler's sex drive *too* revved up; while she would have loved to take advantage of those adolescent hormones that seemed to be giving her husband so much trouble, she herself was stuck in a nine-year-old body, and thus in no real position to do so. Then Jasmine realized that she had the perfect tool to kill Tyler's libido indefinitely: the little digital melodrama she'd just finished making for Ivan. See, once again taking the "freaky circus sex" concept a bit too literally, Ivan had insisted that the little digital Ivan who was humping the little digital ingenue be clad in a clown suit, complete with big floppy shoes and red rubber nose (the only visible part of the male figure's otherwise electronically scrambled face). So the Elliots settled down to watch the tape and have a good laugh.

Around the same time, the *real* Ivan was taking the stage with Corinna and the rest of the cast of _Faust_. While Corinna's performance as Mephistopheles was top-notch, as expected, Ivan combined his years of expertise in courtroom theatrics with judicious use of empathic projection to turn in a positively stellar performance as the devil-dealing doctor. After the rehearsal ended, he approached Corinna, who seemed rather indignant that he'd managed to outdo her. More concerned with getting the girl into bed than with preserving his victory, Ivan confessed that he'd cheated to win their bet -- obviously, since how else could he possibly have managed to outshine Corinna onstage? The compliment to her abilities placated Corinna, and Ivan turned the conversation back to the terms of their wager. Corinna, of course, had been trying to tempt Ivan into her boudoir since they'd met, and certainly intended to keep their agreement. Ivan, too, was willing, and so they retired to Corinna's room to get started. Knowing just what he intended to do to the young lady that night, Ivan first laid down a soundproofing spell on the walls of the room, out of courtesy to the dorm's other inhabitants.

Down the hall in Jasmine's room, the Elliots were having a better time together -- *without* being able to Get Romantic -- than they'd experienced in years. The seduction tape was hilarious, and even more so once Tyler realized that Jasmine (never having watched Ivan have sex, thank God) had used one of *their* more memorable encounters as the model for the figures' kinematics. ("The clown suit makes all the difference, though, don't you think?") Things only got funnier when the sounds of Ivan and Corinna's vigorous coupling (*too* vigorous to be entirely masked even by the soundproofing spell) penetrated the walls. Fortunately for Ivan, even though Corinna was several years younger than Angelyn, Tyler had already labeled his cousin's virtue a lost cause, and was not immediately driven to thoughts of homicide. And so the Elliots passed a pleasant evening, reminding themselves of what it had been like when they were actually friends. Eventually they bade each other a chaste goodnight and retired to spend their last night of existence in separate beds. Before hitting the sack, Jasmine teleported a copy of the sex tape to the headmistress' desk and added a HALF measure of her own, trapping all the school's records behind an encryption scheme that wouldn't even be invented for eight years. A program that would automatically decrypt the files was included, but was accessible only to someone who made it through the gauntlet of increasingly challenging brain teasers that was now displayed on every screen on campus.

The next morning, classes were officially called off due to the computer "problem." The HALF gang waited for the latest imperious announcement over the PA system at breakfast, but none ever came. Soon, however, the rumors began flying: the present headmistress had handed in her resignation, and her successor was strongly considering relaxing the strict security policies. While the official announcement wouldn't likely be made until the administration had had a day or so to sort things out, it seemed that HALF had accomplished its primary goal. The time-displaced folks congratulated each other, and then spent the rest of the day indulging in the second childhoods they'd been granted.

As the afternoon wore on, the threesome realized that their time was growing short, and went to their separate rooms to leave what wisdom they could for their younger selves. Ivan conjured a small wooden cube and filled it with his memories of the past two days, plus as much of his law-school training as he could stuff in. (Since he'd managed to impress a powerful local businesswoman with his legal expertise, it would behoove the younger Ivan to *have* that expertise, should he ever find himself in a situation where calling upon that reputation could prove advantageous.) He set the cube down where it would be conspicuously visible, and set it to dump its contents into young Ivan's brain when he touched it. The Elliots, meanwhile, used more traditional methods. Jasmine typed up a short letter to herself, but her primary "gift" to her younger self was a set of three image files, digitized directly from her brain. They depicted, respectively, herself in her proper adult body; her husband as *he* appeared in 2014; and their daughter. The first two were intended as encouraging reminders of the future for her nine-year-old self, who (she remembered well) was having to watch her considerably older future husband Discover Girls while being far too young to qualify for that category herself. The third picture was more of a request: Jasmine knew that the daughter she knew might never be born in the changed timeline, and she didn't intend for Lise to be forgotten by the only two people who would remember having met her. Tyler also wrote his younger self a letter, long and sternly worded, describing the many mistakes of his life and advising the young Tyler to avoid them; the overall tone of the missive basically boiled down to "For Pete's sake, boy, lighten up!"

Somewhere in the midst of all this, things snapped back to normal. Ivan came to consciousness in his room, saw the memory cube, reached for it -- and was almost knocked out again by the flood of images and information that assailed his brain. Jasmine came to in her proper young body, being shaken by her roommate, and was told that Mel had found her passed out on the floor. Those two quickly got into contact with each other, and shortly thereafter confirmed that Tyler had returned to their proper time as well. Later, discussing things in the boathouse, all three agreed that the future they had experienced must not be allowed to come to pass. Ivan wasn't quite sure how to start building bridges with his father, but at least he meant to avoid entirely destroying the relationship they did have. Tyler proposed that he and Jasmine begin an effort to keep in better touch with the younger kids that very day, rather than chance blowing their role as the Seven Stars' guardians and trainers. All three agreed to keep an eye on each other and steer each other away, as best they could, from the path of the Self-Absorbed Asshole. Tyler went to call his father, just to say hello, after which he would look up Caitlin and try to repair whatever damage his adult self's panicked flight had done to their relationship. Suppressing an attack of jealousy, Jasmine went off to drool over her picture of the adult Tyler and remind herself of her eventual victory. Ivan pondered his new legal knowledge, considered his political future, and realized that he and Corinna still hadn't managed to have sex while they were both the same age -- obviously an oversight in need of correction. . .

.And at long last, that's Session 11. Session 12 coming a lot sooner than this one did, with a new part-time PC played by Justin Wood. Yay! See you in, well, um, one.