Timeless Ties || Volturi Kings

18. Time Passages

Time passages
There's something back here that you left behind
Oh, time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

— Al Stewart

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In the first week her days were spent finding out everything she possibly could about her time travel without interfering in her studies.

Alessia, in fact, used her gift to have more time to study, which led her to discover something that thoroughly displeased her: her time-travel appeared to be constrained to a maximum of 24 hours.

This unexpected restriction left her perplexed, especially given her interactions with individuals from Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt — people she knew were 3000 years in the past.  ̶S̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶a̶f̶r̶a̶i̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶h̶a̶d̶ ̶s̶n̶a̶p̶p̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶c̶o̶n̶s̶i̶s̶t̶e̶n̶c̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶h̶a̶d̶ ̶a̶l̶r̶e̶a̶d̶y̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶r̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶e̶a̶r̶.̶ Even with a large number of attempts, nothing she did could alter this confounding impediment.

Alessia had explored numerous approaches, experimenting with different days, methods, and time periods. She even adjusted her diet, both increasing and decreasing her food intake. However, all her efforts proved futile. No matter what she attempted, she remained unable to journey back in time beyond 24 hours. She made several attempts to go back for shorter intervals summed up, like 4 hours seven times, to see if she could extend her range by adding hours instead of going back directly more than a day. Yet every time she approached the 24-hour mark, her time-travel ability inexplicably ceased to function.

Alessia found the limitations frustrating, but this wasn't the first aspect of her ability that failed to cooperate as expected. She simply had to accept and deal with it, especially since, when she traveled 24 hours, she became so tired and hungry that she always felt the need to eat something and sleep again — even when she had tried once immediately after waking up.

Beyond that, Alessia discovered that regardless of how far back in time she traveled, her wristwatch worked normally, consistently displaying the time it should have been before the journey. This discovery led her to plan to use the watch next time she traveled to the past to precisely measure the duration of her stay.

(Alessia couldn't help but imagine Aro's reaction to her watch — a thought that caused her lips to twitch with amusement. It almost tempted her to risk testing her electronic devices to see if they would also survive time travel. Sadly, she dreaded the potential consequences of time travel-induced damage to her phone, laptop, and smartwatch far more than she cherished the short-lived entertainment it might bring. Perhaps such ventures could be considered once she became rich. For now, she chose to persist in her experiments using more affordable items.)

On the other hand, while she tested her gift and immersed herself in studies throughout the days of her first week (Political Geography was almost making her lose her mind), at night, in her dreams featuring Aro, Caius, or Helios she concluded that the best course of action was to try to uncover precisely what they were hiding from her.

Alessia despised not knowing, and the frustration intensified because whatever they were hiding clearly involved her in some way. The fact that even Didyme knew, while she remained in the dark, left a bitter taste in her mouth. She hated the feeling that anyone could know more about her than she knew about herself.

A feeling that worsened when, by the end of the week, she still hadn't managed to find out what they were hiding from her.

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