“Only now he’s never met you in the first place,” said Daniel.

“So you’ve had one escape after another from the results of my time travelling efforts.”

“For which I’m very grateful,” said Daniel.

“Well I needed a lot more of your poetry to really satisfy the artistic fascination I acquired at the poetry slam,” said Trudi.

“I’m glad I’ve brought that into your life,” said Daniel, “I’m too small to use a pen and paper now. If you hadn’t written them all up for me while I was thinking them up and dictating them, there’d be nothing we could do about poetry.”

She lifted the acting contract papers up from a book she’d been using to press on while she had signed the contract, and put them down a little further across the seat. Then she held the book up for him to read. On the cover it said:

POETRY FOR ALL TIMES

                Daniel Blackridge

“I did the binding and made the cover myself, after I bought the materials,” she said, “I couldn’t let any professional out there in this time period read the intimate and time travel sensitive information in many of your best pieces about me. Now I’ll always be able to hold it in my hands on a couch, or a couple of pillows while sitting up in bed, and reread through all your poems.”

“Except for the new ones,” said Daniel, “I guess we’re starting a volume two.

“I think I’m happy enough with one volume,” said Trudi, “I can keep rereading that for the rest of my life. As I said, you’ve had a lot of escapes, even though you can’t remember the dire predicaments you were in. I think it’s time you faced up to the gobbling with no possibility of a reset button bailing you out afterwards. Murray had to be made to see the reality of that, but then it was undone, when I time travelled back far enough to be back here in this time with you. This time is for the last time, Daniel. I hope you enjoy the ride down as much as you can.”

She carried him out to the garden, and set him down on the grass.

“Thanks for coming back and giving me these extra two years,” he said.

“It’s matured you, even though you’ve really been an adult in your mind for a long time,” said Trudi, “I’ll be out to find and chase you shortly.”

He watched her turn and walk away, and this time he wasted no time in trying to hide in Trudi’s garden. He ran for the row of trees, ran between them and went to conceal himself in his grandmother’s garden.

Trudi couldn’t find him, and decided to time travel back. She found that she couldn’t. Her chronal immunity to being shrunken on the first long journey back through the Ring of Reversal era had kept her safe from being reduced in size. However, her full sized body had just taken a few years longer to lose the ability to time travel.