No; it's pretty early in the day, but he's fairly findable at work. He manages to get them a space in the police station with enough privacy.

"Diana's alive," Sadde says as soon as they're sufficiently isolated from eavesdroppers.

"She is? We saw— are you sure?"

"Yes. I saved her. Will save her. It's confusing."

“Time travel? I heard you’ve done that before, but this sounds...different. Controlled.”

He shrugs. "It—not by me, exactly? It's already happened. Now I just need to make it happen."

“Huh. I don’t know any way to go about doing it; this is the one thing you’re never supposed to use chronomancy for. Which shouldn’t apply if it’s more contradictory to not do it, but it does mean that probably not even Laird knows how. How did you do it when you invented the money?”

"A creature, called the Charybdis. It ate me—that was actually a bootstrap paradox, too, it ate me because I was in a fight with a goblin who tripped and fell onto me and into its mouth, but the goblin only came to fight me because my future self had challenged it and then tripped it later..."

“Less of one. A goblin happening to be there to attack you doesn’t really need explanation the way spontaneously deciding to do this would.”

He shrugs. "Yeah. I still—probably wouldn't have done it if it weren't already done. I very well can't not do it now."

“There probably are safe ways not to. But yeah, if someone time-travels it should be you. 

This creature, could you use it again?”

"Unless Laird's sealed it or hidden it or something, yeah, probably. The problem is, I sealed it—in the past, but when I visited it again in the present it was already not sealed... not sealed yet... one of those. But I feel like it would be against the spirit of the Seal to threaten it or something now just because according to whatever weird relationship it has with time it hasn't yet been sealed."

“From what I’ve heard it looks like your Seal is all about whether you can technically fight something. Especially now that you’ve joined with Conquest.”

"'Fight' is a rather simplistic gloss over the meaning of 'harm'," he says, raising an eyebrow. "Regardless, the reason I came here was that I would prefer to trade with the Charybdis, or bribe it, rather than fight it, and you might know a thing or two that could help me."

“I’d be willing to try and speculate, for sure. How intelligent was it?”

"Not very. If it was capable of speech, it didn't show it, and mostly it just seemed to want to eat me and slash or send me to the past, unclear whether there's a difference there."

“We should assume there is. Otherwise it’s...still not safe, but easily repeatable and with a built-in bribe, and that’d be too easy.”

He shrugs. "No rule against that. And it's meant to be super rare and hard to find? Malcolm—that's Laird's grandfather—said he'd had an argument with some people once who were hunting cryptids and he thought they weren't real."

“It’s not impossible. But as far as going in with a plan...

Negotiating with animal Others is always hard. Food, changes in conditions, others of its kind...this one doesn’t sound domesticated enough for attention to be a good lever. Maybe these cryptid hunters would know what it eats or wants.”

"It seems to eat living things and send them to the past, at least—maybe it eats their time? Or something." Pause. "Maybe it eats time."

“Hmm. You don’t seem to have lost sixty years off your life span or anything. And judging by how far back it usually sends its meals, it could take a lot to bribe.

Actually, I could try and find out how the Jacob’s Bell people are feeding it, if they are. Laird might just tell me.”

"I... would prefer you didn't mention me asking you about it, if possible."

“That’d be easy to guess, especially if he comes here for the Lordship fight and notices we’re on the same side. I could just stick with speculating, if you’d rather risk it being wrong.”

"You can say you heard me mention I went to the past, during the Conquest debacle, and you asked me how I did it so I told you about the Charybdis, and now you're wondering how they're dealing with it."

“Sure, I can try that. He’d still guess, but maybe not too strongly. And I am also just plain curious.

We’ve been in contact a lot because of the Conquest thing, so it won’t be too unnatural.”

"Thank you. That'd help me a lot."

“I’ll call him, ask about using it for the Lordship contest, get told it’s too dangerous, and accept that. And let you know what he says about its eating habits.”

"Okay. Thank you very much."

“Good luck with whatever parts of your plan need luck.”

"There are probably some," he agrees.

He... doesn't have much to do while he waits for Duncan to contact Laird, so he'll go visit some sentimentally important places and pace around. He still has an apartment here, it's only been a day, but he's not super keen on returning to it quite yet.

It’s not very long before Duncan calls back. Laird took his interest for the other thing it was—a hope that they could use the Charybdis as a generator or a means of preparing retroactively—and shot him down as expected. But as for what it “eats,” Laird has been theorizing.

From its point of view, time is a directional force. When the Charybdis swallows something, that thing moves through time by the monster’s rules instead of the rest of the universe’s. Then it expels it, and derives its energy from its meal (or more likely its meal’s corpse or fossil) being pushed back by normal time passage. It’s much the same concept as someone who finds himself immune to gravity creating free energy by bouncing up and down a ladder and releasing heavy objects to become normal at the top.

Laird is like 80% sure this is what’s going on. Duncan notes that if true it does mean the Charybdis gets some small benefit from giving Sadde a short-term ride to the past, but has no idea whether it’d see that as enough of a bribe to be worth doing.

But what is it that it eats, then? Is it the time itself? Time "potential"?

Whatever is most like mass in this analogy. Someone carrying one of those beads of distilled time would probably generate more than someone without, yes. But there’s likely something to do with individual identity as well, unless it’s only eating people and animals instead of metamorphic rocks because it evolved from a carnivore. Not that it’s digesting anything in any normal sense. 

But sure, saying it eats time is far from wrong.

Could they try to bribe it with some more time? How does one even store time, anyway?

With chronomancy! It’s not a complicated project; Duncan set something up on his own. But then you’ve got to fill it with something, and there are only so many hours in a day. (You only get out a fraction of what you sacrifice, he doesn’t say. He doesn’t know Johannes told Sadde that long ago.) The Lord of Montreal can convert money to chronomancy as easily as any other form, though.

Yes. Yes he can.

But Sadde has another way of getting time. A way he figures Duncan would... not approve of. So he doesn't mention it to the Behaim. He will instead thank the Behaim for all his help and... probably take a bus back to Jacob's Bell.

If he spends much time on transit he’ll miss the meeting where they officially declare Toronto up for grabs. Oh well, there’s time travel on the agenda anyway. No hurry at all.

And his other self is probably on it already. He doesn't need to be as much of a nonentity as possible, since his future self is in fact the one who knows where this Sadde is gonna be and who can avoid being obviously in two places at once, but he'll still try to lay low.

...but he thinks he should go find Padraic, first.

It’s a small town. People are not hard to find.

“Welcome back!” Padraic says when he recognizes him. He’s still glamoured to look like Sadde, for a total of three Saddes in Jacob’s Bell. “Time to tip the dominoes?”

"The... what dominoes?"

“The figurative ones. It’s amazing how much of what’s so solid is so precarious, all it needs is a...

But first, I’ve made you a friend. Let me introduce you.”

"...alright, sure, why not."

The friend is, apparently, a kid. Approximately twelve, a practitioner, and already with a small yellow bird as a familiar.

"Hi Sadde!" he exclaims, then sees Padraic. "Oh, and you're the real Sadde!"

"Hi, Drake! One of us is. Do you think you can guess which one?"

Rather than participate, the canary asks "does this mean you'll tell us who you really are?"

"Padraic, a fae," real Sadde answers. "It's nice to meet you for real, I suppose."

"You can call me Patrick if it's easier to say. Some people do."

"He's dangerous!" the canary warns her practitioner. "He'll trick us somehow, probably all of it was a trick."

"Really, Yvonne, have I given you any reason to think that?"

"I think Sadde- Patrick's been nice." He looks to Sadde. "You're friends with him, right?"

"Nnnooooo, not at all. But I made him promise to only do stuff I'd approve of, and I think I'm nice, so he probably didn't do anything terrible. What's 'all of it', by the by?"

"He's been showing me all kinds of stuff. How to walk into mirrors. Boxes bigger on the inside. Making my own fireworks. He helped me turn myself into a boy."

Padraic shrugs. "She saw me as you and asked how I did it. I gave her some glamour. And all the warnings about not leaving it on too long and thinking of it as normal or it could turn permanent, but honestly I wasn't surprised at all when he decided to do just that. The fireworks are glamour too, don't worry. I'm not reckless."

"All mostly harmless, it sounds like," Yvonne admits. "But not if Padraic's involved. We're telling your mother everything, now."

"I definitely approve of people having whatever gender expressions they want," Sadde says dubiously. "—wait, mother, you're from one of the families?"

"His mother is Erica Duchamp. She was all in favor of her kid's interest in the practice, but we fae can be dangerous. Especially him."

Padraic ignores the familiar. "If we are telling her everything then I suspect I'll have to change my face first. Outing a trans kid, that's not in character."

"Do we have to tell her, Yvonne? Patrick said she'd make me be a girl again."

"I did say most parents would try. Can't say what she'd do. Must we argue this now? I thought Drake and Sadde could spend some time getting to know each other..."

"Or maybe that's the part that's the trick." Yvonne stares Sadde up and down, failing to collect any clues on whether him being here is some kind of evil plot.

"...wait a second, there."

Had he ever met a boy Duchamp before? That hadn't married into the family?

No. Why... not?

"Drake, who are your siblings and cousins?"

"My sister's Joanna, she's a baby, my cousin Lynn is about your age, and there's Chloe, Lea, and Lola. And some of my aunts and uncles are really removed cousins or something but it's easier to call them that."

"All of them are girls."

"Yeah. It's okay though. No one worries about cooties unless one of us is making them want to stay away from someone."

"What I mean is that it's statistically unlikely. Without magic." He looks at Padraic. "Isn't it?"

"There is definitely some kind of selection going on. That's far from a well-kept secret, especially around here. Like at the Court?"

"Yes..." the other fae confirms.

"What happens if they have a son?"

“Nothing at all happened last time, as far as l know. Though that was quite some time ago,” Padraic answers.

“They do,” Drake insists. “It’s me.”

”Sadde thinks Padraic might be tricking you,” his familiar says. “To break a very old deal one of your great-great-ancestors made with our people.”

“So it was with the Court, I’d wondered. But no, I don’t think that old working would bar our young friend’s expression at all.”

"I'm more wondering whether our young friend's expression might, even if indirectly, somehow damage that old working. Why is that working around, anyway, what's the point in always having female-assigned children?"

"Pattern and practice, perhaps." Padraic shrugs. "One would assume they think the one strengthens the other. Certainly the similarity to forbears helps them when dealing with my kind."

"Does it? Aren't fae supposed to be good with disguises? Surely that means that similarity isn't super important, no?"