It was a hot and smoldering day on the island, and lightning ball orbs in every house, warren, and cave were running to capacity to power air conditioners, fans, and freezers. That accounted for only a small sampling of the population. Many others tried to cool off the natural way, and for Kristina ShellbyTortoise, known to most as Tina, the problem was not finding a private space on the beach, it was another matter entirely. Tina, with her shell disengaged and clad in her new neon-blue bathing suit, stood at the water’s edge with her beloved Arthur as their friend and mentor, Petalia the Neverblossom, spoke to her through telepathy. 

“You don’t have to jump in, Tina,” assured Petalia, “you can start by going in a few paces and let your feet acclimate to the water.” Trembling, Tina toddled through the sand and placed her left hoof into the water, and immediately she ran back to the sand. “Tina, just give it one more try,” gestured Petalia. Tina made it as far as her shins, and Arthur suggested that she could slice her legs through the water to strengthen herself.  With that, Tina sat on a rock two paces away, and with a heavy sigh she kicked at the water as she stared off into the distance as the waves crashed into each other. Arthur skittered to her and asked, “Are you okay, Tina?” She did not have to answer, he and Petalia both could sense what she was truly feeling, and nothing they had to say would convince her that she was wrong. She was not a disgrace to turtles and tortoises because she was terrified of the freezing water. Tina stared into her reflection in the water, and a stray tear rippled out from her cheek.

When Tina came home a few hours later, her parents, Alana Amridilla and Silas Snayle both sat on the sofa with bowls of kettle corn and chilled bottles of sarsatonic, with a video orb cued up to their favorite show Claw and Order: Special Mystics Unit, but Tina softly declined and went to bed.

“What do you think that was about, Silas?” asked Alana. “I am not sure, hon. But maybe she will open up to us in the morning.” Crestfallen, the two shelled Neverbeings hit Play All as the opening sequence began.

The next day, Tina spent the first half of the morning eating breakfast with her parents and then preparing for today’s ToxAnon meeting up at Petalia’s Hill overlooking Ritual Rock. While it did not feel right, Silas and Alana tried to get Tina to open up about her problem from the previous night. “I’m sorry, Mommy,” Tina meekly uttered, “I just don’t wanna talk about it yet.” Silas gave Tina another stack of flapjacks and nuzzled her gently, “Princess, you come to us when you are ready and we will listen. But you do not need to feel sorry for wanting to sort things out on your own.” Those were the words that Tina needed to hear, and in that very instant she began to perk right back up. 

Two hours into the afternoon, the TA meeting began, but even under the shade of Magnolia’s tree, it was still unbearably hot. Petalia and Ross decided to postpone the meeting for a couple of days and arranged for Maggie, Felidiae, Chase, and Juniper to fly the group back to their homes, but Tina’s trio decided not to waste the wing power and decided to walk home. The closest place for Tina, Arthur, and their best friend Charlotte Chameleon was his home in Hopper Hills on the other side of the forest. The shade of the forest helped a little, but the muggy air and the temperature were still unseasonably hot. As Charlotte tried to fan herself with a giant tree leaf, she morphed in and out of different colors in disgust, “It’s like a toaster oven in here! Tina, aren’t you roasting in that shell?” Tina meekly uttered, “I made a special compartment for the carapace of my shell to hold an ice pack. I’ve been doing some tinkering here and there,” she said. To her this was a rudimentary hack, but it gave Charlotte an idea. “Tina, Arthur, what say we make a detour?”

Under the lid of a hollow tree stump, the trio took a maintenance tunnel above the underground biodome that would take them west to the center of the island and to the basement stockroom of the Nevertribe PX. In the deceptively large basement sat shelves of overstock and food suspended in a time-freeze spell, and over in the furthest corner stood barrels filled to their staves with metallic and plastic junk. Scared, Tina softly whispered, “Char, are you sure it’s okay to come down here like this?” “It’s cool, Tina. Blackbird and Celestin gave me authorization to sift through their broken and recalled items for extra credit for my virtual classes.” Within the barrels were magical technology items that originated from the Neverscape Marketplace, adapted from technology readily available on modern-day Earth. 

“Charlotte, you still haven’t told us what you brought us here for,” said Arthur, confused.

Charlotte psiconned Arthur with a look of grit, “Do you know how much engineering it would take to make modifications to a tortoise shell?” While it was true that on Earth, tortoise shells were a permanent part of their bodies, being a Neverscapian species broke many biological norms, not least of which was their ability to think, talk, and perform humanoid tasks without even a thought. “Go ahead Tina, take a look through this stuff, see if it gives you an idea.” Tina was boosted up to the top of the barrel and before her lay broken electronics casings, circuit boards, insulated wires, springs, toggle switches, and metal plates with screws and bolts. It was no use, she could not think of a thing. Undismayed, Charlotte tucked a little bit of each into her book bag and brought them upstairs to the PX to treat them both to a cold cranberry juice.

When the trio left the PX, the clouds began to form a dark ceiling in the sky, drastically reducing the temperature for the entire island. According to Charlotte’s calculations, the sky would be saturated with rain clouds for a couple of hours, so they would have time to brainstorm with Tina. Just then, Felidiae Falconne landed outside the PX. “Blimey,” she said in an Australian accent, “you kids still haven’t gone home yet?” “We had a little stop to make, Liddie,” said Arthur, “but we have our psicon tags active so that our parents know where we are.” Before they could ask what Felidiae was up to, all four of them heard a psicon scream from down the mountain. “Quick, get on me back, tots. One a’ the Gladdies is in need a’ help!” Without hesitation, the three preteens climbed aboard their avian friend and zoomed down to the gladiola garden. The scream they heard was from Grassroot Gladdie, the second-oldest seedling of Elder Gertrude of the Gladiola Clan, a species of sentient florae similar to Petalia.

In a panic, Felidiae darted over to the one-eyed flower and screeched, “Grassi! What happened?”

“My anti-solar tent ripped apart! If I am not under it when the clouds disperse, my cells will burn up and my good eye will go blind!” The situation was far worse than Grassroot described. While there has been no explanation for how it happened, Grassroot was born with a deadly vulnerability to sunlight counterintuitive to any floral species, like a human allergic to air or a fish to water. The human gardener Sal Sol cast a spell within the existing soil-locking spell that synthesized ultraviolet light into nutrients, but Grassroot  could not live indoors. She was only safe under her tent during the day, or freely at night or overcast and stormy days. Grassi’s big sister Gardenia placed a psicon to Celia the Neverspider, Arthur’s cousin who crafted the tent in the first place, but it would take more time to get there with her supplies than Grassroot could hold out. Fear began to reign across the entire garden, but Tina then realized that she still had the supplies on her back, and immediately she shed her shell and began tinkering. Her brain and her heart both controlled her right- and left hooves, keeping her soul steady.

By the time Celia arrived, the Gladdie garden was covered in an artificial shade just as the clouds began to break apart above. With due haste, Celia began sewing and reinforcing a new light-reflecting tent using a treated batch of half-moon silk that was exponentially sturdier against the elements than Grassi’s old one. Celia frantically weaved and weaved as she silently berated herself for nearly costing a dear friend her life. Tina, who held the other end of the new fabric saw tears flow from six of Celia’s blue eyes and said, “Lady Celia, this was not your fault. Grassroot can attest to that. Right, Lady Grassroot?” A few feet over from them, a blissful Grassi lay in the cool shade and nodded in her most sincere of nonverbal words that her love for Lady Celia and her craft would never have diminished, nor would blame rightfully pin itself to Celia. It would have been an accident, pure and simple, but fate saw to it that a tiny, shelled guardian angel was with them. In the arboretum on the other side of Lady Sal’s garden, Charlotte and Arthur watched in amazement as Tina stood there, all her focus on fixing what nature had broken for a dear friend, and she had no idea how big of a role she played in it, at least not that they could empathically sense. Arthur saw the look on Charlotte’s face as she began sketching and scribbling on a pulp notepad. “Char, what are you doing? Is this another Frankenstein moment I need to worry about?” Charlotte did not answer. She kept on sketching as Arthur went out to give Tina and Celia each a chilled bottle of water. Charlotte saw a great potential in their shy friend, and she was determined to help Tina see it for herself. Grassroot’s view of the island around her would normally have been restricted by her old tent, and the new one needed to be just as small, but she appreciated the rare glimpse of the open sky without exposing her eye to ultraviolet light. Truly, Tina and Celia gave her an incidental gift, one that she would never forget, and she kept it hidden in her psivaults.

Up in the Nevertribe’s village, the humans were triaging a group of misplaced sailors from 17th Century Earth whose ship hit a time vortex in the Bermuda Triangle. A few of them were injured from fractured structures of their ship, others were malnourished and sick. Felidiae and her fellow NSF agent Juniper Squirrel sought out help from the furrier and feathered citizens of the island because the Tribe was stretching itself too thin to attend to everyone. Juniper had received a psicon tip that the Big Three would be able to aid the humans, so she flew them on a diagonal path from the Gladdie Garden to the mountainous Nevertribe Village’s dining hall.

Tina had successfully helped Celia finish Grassroot’s tent and withdrew the umbrella back into her bag, but in all the excitement, she never asked what she was meant to do to help the castaway humans. Juniper merely winked and said, “You’ll know when it comes to you, my precious little small-fry.” Juniper was a liaison to ToxAnon and served as a part-time mentor, but to her, all the TA children were her spiritual nieces and nephews whom she affectionately called small-fry. In the back room of the Dining Hall, Celestin donned her chef’s hat and smock and went to work on relieving the senior chefs to cook some of the time-sealed food she and Blackbird kept in the PX. Tina thought to herself what she would want if she were a starving and displaced human from Earth, and apparently her hooves started before she finished brainstorming. Displaying a speed unusual for a tortoise, she began tinkering with some of the parts that Charlotte had packed. As every station of the kitchen was being used, Tina realized she needed to supplement their efforts. In no time, the time-displaced, yet grateful, humans were tasting buttermilk waffles and toast for the first time ever, unable to even imagine that a tiny shelled animal commonplace on Earth was the architect of such a beautifully crafted cuisine. Thankfully, the Nevertribe ordained that while the humans would remember nothing of their arrival into the future, they were allowed to have a documented copy of Tina’s recipes, which some might argue was where waffles and toast originated in the time stream.

Not wanting to be the extraneous cooks that would spoil the broth, Charlotte and Arthur took the back door out to the loading dock and faced the ocean as they both snacked on the cinnamon waffles Tina made for them. “Charlotte, you have awakened an inner fire in Tina that none of us realized she had,” said Arthur in astonishment. Charlotte’s reaction was lackluster; she merely chuckled and shook her head. “Nuh-uh, Arthur. The only charge I’m guilty of is being her compass. And I can prove it.” Charlotte felt a warmth in her heart as she reached into her book bag, and with a click of her tongue, she pulled out the notepad from earlier. Arthur saw with his own blue eyes the finished sketches that Charlotte had drawn the entire afternoon, and when he saw what was on the page she was looking for, he was shocked. There, in blue and black graphite was almost an exact photo sketch of Tina at her impromptu kitchen station made only out of her shell, magical technology from the basement of the PX, a Neverhive Power Gem, and discarded parts from a simple-baking oven toy from 1980s Earth. In the image, almost as though it was a periscope into the distant soon as she sliced bread and mixed batter while her shell with ingredients Celestin brought from the PX, including a cereal-flavored pancake mix, and even the errant pumpkin pie Tina accidentally made. Arthur looked into Charlotte’s eyes with skepticism as she smiled puckishly. “No way…” uttered Arthur. Charlotte slyly replied back, “Way.” 

Arthur then snatched the pad away and feverishly looked through all of Charlotte’s intricate sketches of other alternate modes for her shell to be modified as. “Charlotte, you had to have psiconned this image to her, or planted the idea using tea leaves or something.” 

“First of all, Arthur Peggio Hopper,” Charlotte smirked, “You know better than anyone that Tina doesn’t like tea, and second, it’s all within the laws of probability. How much do you want to bet that 75 percent of these devices will be crafted by day’s end tomorrow?” Arthur shook his head and softly replied, “No wager. I have faith in Tina. It’s the cosmic nature of the universe and its cousin Fate that I question.” It was a fair answer, and Charlotte knew how deeply Arthur felt about Tina, especially since he once said to the TA group that he would never buy a single lottery ticket in his life because there was nothing worth more than his treasured Tina. Charlotte still gave him a look that said take a chance, and to that he replied, “Fine, sarsatonic and gummy worms for a month if your ominous prediction comes true.” They shook and sealed the deal.

Access Video Encyclopedia, Section T — For Toaster

The sun had set by the time Juniper flew Tina back to Alana and Silas’s log home, and with her precious daughter fast asleep in her lap as actors Moosriska Hardtosay and Barry Oakbark appeared in their video orb; fortunately it was a rerun.. Juniper explained that Tina had tuckered herself out with the projects she had been working on that day, and this was news to Alana, but then she saw that there were closed slots at the top of Tina’s shell, and the rattling of loose screws when Tina breathed. Alana disengaged Tina’s shell and placed her lacy PJs on her without stirring Tina awake. “Silas,” whispered Alana, “even in her sleep, she finds new ways to make us proud.” Silas had forgotten this, but a memory came flooding back: He would often work on model car kits in their basement, and he would always buy Tina a duplicate kit to work on so that they could bond. Not only did Tina usually finish hers a little before his, but hers was practically flawless compared to his,  but she never saw this. In her eyes, she could never match her daddy’s skills, but times like those were precious to Silas and Tina..  Alana suddenly remembered many of the times that their home furnishings needed minor repairs one day, but forgot about them, like they had fixed themselves: uneven chairs, chipped wooden surfaces, frayed blankets, and even the lightning orb connections that fed into the power grid for their whole dwelling. Alana could only beam happily at her slumbering daughter and shake her head in amazement. The things Tina could do, and the infinite potential she had, there was no adequate combination of wording in the Fae’s English to express it.

Meanwhile, back at Arthur’s house, he read baby Zimri a story about the little tinker from a human book of fractured fairy tales, and as he sat there with his mom and stepfather watching them, Zimri pointed to another book on the coffee table, The Tortoise and the Hare, an Aesop Fable. “Do you wanna hear that book instead, Zim-Zim?” asked Arthur sweetly. The purple infant shook her head and pointed to the tortoise on the cover and then to the page they were on. Arthur thought he felt a shiver down his spine, but in that same instant it vanished as Zimri’s warm stare pulled him back.