Measure for Measure

"But I don't understand, Professor." Professor of what? Of course he'd never said. "What are you going back in time to try to find?"

"The future, my dear prince," Minoth answers him - not as if it's obvious, no, but as if it's a silly question, yes. What else should one ever look into the past to find?

Exhaling, and then inhaling again as he realizes he's out of breath, Addam tries to comprehend this, somehow. What could it mean...

"Surely you mean the past?"

Minoth ignores him and paces the length of the vehicle yet again, leather jacket labcoat a stark contrast to Addam's polo shirt and slacks, so well-ordered beneath an untamed shock of bright gray hair.

The professor reaches the hood. The unwitting student follows him. The professor makes an about-face. The young man collapses over the emblem.

He's not even working on the car, hardly even observing the patterns decorating the instruments. Moreover, it seems he's muttering to himself a script, about what will happen and how once he's disembarked in wherever and whenever it is he's intending to go. How it will be, and then again how it will have been. How it was.

The past. The past. Going back in time to find the future, in the past.

Oh. Naturally. For we all are the products of our experiences, mediated in an ongoing situation wherein history was once real, present, now.

"Do you mean to say that you're going to change an event in the past, in order to make a different outcome in the future?"

Finally, Minoth stops. From behind, on a direct path of interception, his ponytail is practically invisible. There's nary a rustle of disturbance, nothing to give the hope away.

Each moment passed now serves to deal another hand back toward the house, rewriting the script for actors born anew to the very instant's fresh production.

Then Minoth turns, returns.

He's deadly serious. He's got a snake bite for a whisper.

"Precisely," he says.